Hello! The first Wiki Academy in PSR Rengaswamy College of engineering for Women, Sivakasi was conducted on Jan 20th. An impressive total of 68 students, primarily consisting of 2nd and 3rd year engg students attended this workshop. The Principal of the college, Dr K Ramaswamy gave a short talk and welcomed the participants and the speaker. The session started off with a small introduction on what Wikipedia is and the core values and philosophies behind Wikipedia, how it is edited by millions of people across the world and how all the content on the site is completely free. The 5 pillars of Wikipedia i.e the fundamental principles by which Wiki operates on were also explained. The students were initially a little hesitant to interact but soon were asking pertinent and valid questions about the topic. Once the basics were covered, a short presentation on approaching Wikipedia as a reader was held. Editing of wikipedia was explained next followed by a hands-on session where the students were taught the basics of editing Wikipedia. The students were very responsive to this session. Small prizes like Wiki stickers were given out for mini-contests that were held during this session. A vast majority of the students seemed to quickly understand the intuitive UI especially considering that they were all familiar with formatting in MS Word. The students made minor edits to articles as the session drew to a close. A google group has been setup for future correspondance. The students along with the help of the faculty coordinators who were present said they will work on improving the Sivakasi wiki page. The feedback forms (i will collate the data from here and post it shortly) were collected and few photos from the event were taken. I'll post the pics on the wiki page for the academy soon as i don't have the camera with me currently. Brochures were handed out to all the participants. Judging by the feedback received and the response from the students, i'd say the event was a success. It is important to carry forward this initiative and bring out an interest in participating in contributing to Wikipedia and i will make sure that this happens. I'd like to thank Ms Nitika Tandon, Mr Naveen PF and Mr Arjuna Rao Chavala for their help. This was my first Wiki Academy and i really profited from their help. Conducting the academy solo was quite a challenging but rewarding experience. Also as a footnote i'd like to point that the session was delayed because the Wiki editor kept crashing IE 6. Sadly, the computers in the lab had no other browsers apart from IE 6. This wasn't a roadblock i expected and i think should be added to the list of preparations in this page<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nitika.t/Outreach>ch>. We managed to get an admin password for the computers and hastily installed Firefox so that the session could complete without any further hitches...and it did! Looking forward to conducting more such academies in the future. Thank you! -Sohan Maheshwar