Hello,
Wikipedia Education programme at CHRIST (Deemed to be University) began in
2013 with a goal of piloting Wikipedia as a pedagogic tool for the
undergraduate students. Both the educators of the WEP and of the university
were new to one such approach. But inside an institution that sees over 20K
new faces every year, educating students on creating Wikipedia articles and
enhancing the same was very exciting. Students of five Indian
languages--Hindi, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu--were chosen as these
languages were taught as second languages for many students. During the
first and second year, almost all the students created new Wikipedia
articles where the majority of the articles were below accepted standard.
The difficulty in making students learn about input tools in their
languages, Wikipedia basics, and wiki markup pushed for creating "how-to"
video tutorials in Hindi and Kannada. Working with Urdu was discontinued
after the second year because of program staff exit. Slowly, the program
was reoriented in a manner that new students learned native language input
and markup for the first two semesters by digitizing books on Wikisource
and later by editing Wikipedia articles during the next two semesters. This
helped better the output by increasing the quality of articles by nearly
30%. From 2015 the program was further improved by helping students get
more hands-on training of input, wiki markup by intensive typing during the
first semester, a few advanced options like interacting with each other on
user talk page during the second semester, moving to Wikipedia editing and
developing articles on Wikipedia sandbox during third semester, and finally
moving the articles by peer-review from fellow batchmates, faculty and the
larger Wikipedia community. The faculty is involved in the development and
on-wiki review process ensuring quality.
The program so far has gone to the level of producing about 70% very good
quality articles where nearly 0.6% of the articles are of really poor
quality. The female to male ratio is surprisingly equal and at times, there
are more female students as compared to the male ones. However, there is
little concern in integrating the student-Wikimedians to the larger
Wikimedia community.
Also, there is little exchange of learning and best practices between
cross-language outreach programs across India across several different
languages. One of the ways to better this process is making program leaders
talk to each other.
To know more about us follow on
*Twitter- https://twitter.com/wepchrist <https://twitter.com/wepchrist>*
*Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/ChristWEP/
<https://www.facebook.com/ChristWEP/>*
Thanks and Regards,
*ANANTH SUBRAY P V(ಅನಂತ್)*
Programme Associate
Access to Knowledge program
The Centre for Internet & Society
+91-9739811664