Such a nice report, sounds like a fantastic event....certainly, that is
one fantastic cake!
Cheers,
Achal
On Monday 21 February 2011 09:34 PM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote:
*The NIT-Trichy Pragyan Workshop report:*
Just got back from an awesome two days at NIT Trichy. This is only my
second evangelism/outreach event. I have been uncomfortable shedding
my semi-anonymity and showing up in public for a long time, but these
two days have taught me what i have been missing. The following report
is written in an anecdotal first person perspective and naturally
feature me prominently :-).
*Day 1:*
On day 1 we (Tinu and me) opened the Wikipedia stall at around 11.30
AM. Srikanth joined us sometime later. We had been allotted a 12X10 Ft
stall. Students started trickling in soon after. The first day we made
our pitch to around 100 students or so. We also met four or five guest
speakers / panelists like Ajay Agarwal, CMD of Maxx group, Narendra
Shenoy, director at Unimold, Vice Admiral SKK Krishnan and Stefan
Engeseth of Detective Marketing. The response was overwhelmingly
positive with students saying that they will edit in the future. Most
of the students we met claim they a) know they can edit wikipedia and
b) have made some minor edits. Some admitted they didnt know they
could edit and some believed they contribute only to articles on
academic subjects etc. We gave them the standard - give back your
knowledge to the world + participate in an exciting world wide project
pitch. Except one wikiskeptic who cribbed about the 16 million dollar
budget, rest were appreciative of Wikipedia and its work. We also
distributed a flier (attached as an odt file - commons doesnt support
office office documents) to the people visiting the stalls. The flier
was designed by me and Srikanth and. I believe it will work well for
other indic wikis ( a small customisation effort is required to
replace Tamil with the relevant language).
The day wound down and we were thinking about packing up around 6,
when we met the guy who made our day. We saw this bespectacled kid
staring at us curiously and pointing out our banner excitedly to the
adult who accompanied him. We beckoned him to come over and asked him
patronisingly has he heard of wikipedia. The kid says yes. Have you
edited wikipedia, we ask. He says yes for that too. We look at each
other meaningfully and say.. "what did you do? correct spelling
mistakes?". "No", he replies seriously, "i correct wrong
facts". He
is an eighth standard student from Coimbatore and has been editing
wikipedia for a couple of years now. It took some time to get over our
shock and get his user ID. He says he does not use it much and edits
logged out most of the time. He was also not aware of that a talk page
exists for each user id and people can communicate with him. We showed
him how talk pages can be used and asked him to edit logged-in in the
future.
And thats the story of our run-in with [[en:User:Bvajresh]] and the
youngest (serious) Indian wikipedian, i have come across. Here's
picture of us with him
(
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trichy_Wikimeetup1_2060.jpg)
There was one more surprise on day 1. While we were having dinner at
the hotel, a father and son pair wandered up to our table and
introduced themselves. They had seen our T-shirts and said they liked
wikipedia very much. (Brand appeal!) We invited them to next day's
workshop, but they were leaving Trichy the very night and couldnt
accept the offer.
Day 1 had definitely ended on a high.
*Day 2:*
Day 2 began at 10 with the workshop/presentation in the NIT computer
lab. It had a seating capacity of around 100 and was filled up
completely. Apart from NIT students who had registered and were
selected to attend the session (yes they had more people registering
than there were seats!), there were also students from other colleges
around Trichy who showed up for the session. Three middle aged wiki
enthusiasts also attended to hear about Tamil wikipedia. One of them
was a HOD of the Computer science department at an arts and science
college near Trichy. He was impressed with our workshop and said from
now on he will encourage his students to edit wikipedia.
Tinu started the presentation with a general introduction to
Wikipedia, the foundation, its history, the various projects languages
etc. In the Q&A session that followed, someone asked how someone
without paypal/credit cards can donate money to the foundation. We
explained the cheque mailing method and assured him that there will be
more options in the future.
I did the second session. We went through how a typical wikipedia page
looks like, what is a talk page, how to view revision history and
practised editing in the sandbox. I took up the Sachin Tendulkar page
in en wiki and showed them how the content is sourced and how a page
gets updated when facts change. There were the usual doubts about
reliability, who will monitor disruptive activities and who will
ensure the accuracy of the content. Next i switched over to Tamil
wikipedia and explained how easy it is to contribute using the typing
tool. (A big thanks to Junaid, Shiju and our other ml wiki friends).
Here we took up the example of the 2011 assembly election article and
learnt how to write neutrally without our prejudices getting in the
way. There was again a brief question session, which featured some
insightful questions about our external links policy, handling
regional language variations (srilankan Tamil vs Tamil Nadu Tamil),
using Wiktionary, the difference between Wikibooks, wikisource and
wikipedia. Srikanth took over next and the third session was about
wikipedia hacking - bots, mediawiki, programming tools, databases,
scripts, software - stuff that usually frightens me. This was again
followed by a brief question-answer session.
While Srikanth was answering the questions, i discovered that someone
from the room had edited the ta wiki article i used as an
illustration to correct a grammar mistake. And also someone from the
crowd had done what he termed later as a test edit (something cluebot
in enwiki would label as "vandalism?"). The second edit had been
reverted 12 minutes later by ta wiki Admin Kanags (editing from
Australia). We were able to use this as a sort of real time demo how
edits are monitored and accuracy/integrity maintained in wiki
projects. (We got lucky with that :-)). There was an loud gasp of
surprise from the audience when we showed how the vandalism was
reverted within minutes. The session ended with Wiki 10 celebrations -
cake cutting and photographs. Unfortunately the T-shirts from the
foundation have not reached the organisers and they weren't able to
give them out - we had to make do with chocolates, pins and laptop
stickers. The entire workshop lasted from 10 to 12.30 and was well
received. (I have an invite from Amrita University, Coimbatore to do a
similar workshop there :-)) Microsoft Wikibasha's Saravanan attended
the session and we all had a long and deep discussion with him about
how important it is for the corporates/outside orgs to speak to the
community and get involved at the project level to avoid
misunderstandings and getting better results. After the presentation
was over, it was back to the stalls. This time we shifted to a open
air stall near the food court to be nearer to the crowd thronging the
food court. The stall remained open till 3.30 PM and had another 50
more visitors.
Another good thing that came out the stall was we were able to
convince the members of the NIT photography club to CC/SA licence
their work and upload it to flickr/commons. There was an exhibition of
their works in the same area where our stall was situated and featured
several high quality images, that can be used to illustrate articles
on Indian subjects. They have promised to set up flickr stream for
their works with appropriate licensing.
So there ends the long story of my visit to Trichy. A special thanks
to Tinu and Srikanth for egging me on come out and face the crowd and
enlightening me about the necessity for outreach work. And another
special thanks for student organiser Nivash and his team for their
outstanding hospitality and giving us a chance to connect with such an
enthusiastic audience.
Here are some photos from the event -
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tiruchirappalli_Meetup_Feb2011
regards
Bala Jeyaraman
[[en:User:Sodabottle]]
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