Dear All,
We had the '17th Wikipedia Mumbai Community Meetup' on 14th July,Sat. at Flarepath office in Bandra, who were generous in providing us their place on the weekend. It started with informal introductions since there were new members attending Wiki-meetup for the very first time.
There were 17 attendees in all, including members from Flarepath team, an Odia-Wiki contributor-Manoranjan Bahera (who also attended the meetup for the first time in Mumbai !),Vikram Crishna ji, Karthik, Vikram Vincent ( from Banglore community), myself and some more new folks.
We had planned for an editing session this time followed by a brief about Wiki Loves Monuments.The session was decided to progress depending on the understanding and knowledge of attendees about Wikipedia, and was focussed more on a basic level. Also the meetup was just the day after Eng. Wikipedia crossed the milestone of 4-million articles ! Alot of people present did not know about it, and so we made it an initiation point, further into,
- How Wikipedia managed to gather so many articles? - Who create these articles(it was not a one day task)? - Anyone can do it and How?
They did not have an account or had one but hardly used or edited. So, the basic question of why you should have an account as well as how wikipedia respects anonymity was discussed. It was interactive and people were very enthusiastic about getting first hand insights and begin editing. Also, there was discussion regarding how a 'company' page should be like in wikipedia which would not be speedily deleted ! Vikram Crishna ji was present and we got to hear from him as well ! We also created an account for a new-comer and did few edits from her account.
Then we discussed briefly about Wikimedia commons. We categorised some of the Mumbai Photowalk images using cat-a-lot. A brief about WLM was also made; they are willing to volunteer/help and wanted to know more. It was post 5pm by this time. Snacks and Coffee were sponsored by Flarepath, a Big Thanks to them !
I want to Thank Ashwin (user:AshLin) here :) for taking an editing sesson in WCI-2011, which was the first session I had attended, very organised wherein he had given each of the attendees a printout/handout explaining the basics of editing etc. We took some more printouts of that and distributed at the end as the summary of the past 2- 21/2 hours. Thank you Noopur for suggesting Flarepath as well as connecting us ! Thanks to Abhishek Suryawanshi, who was going to come to Mumbai, only for the meetup, however owing to something urgent, he could not; However he and Srikanth Ramakrishnan did support offline. Thanks Alot ! Few pictures of the meetup are herehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mumbai_Meetup_July2012 ! We hope to keep in touch with the newbies and make them regular editors and have regular gatherings !