We had a Wikipedia Mumbai Meetup today where the Mumbai Wikimedia community was introduced to Hisham Mundol who has taken charge "WMF Consultant for National Programs, India.".

We had a wide ranging conversation today on several things. Listed below are the meeting notes (in no particular order, to the best of my ability):

1. We had 13 attendees today at the historic Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Bandra. (Historic because the first Wikipedia Mumbai meetup took place here)

3. Hisham had brief conversation with all the attendees explaining that his work was primarily to network with the community and the chapter in India, find out best practices (what worked/what did not work) and try to see if it is duplicable on a larger scale across other Wikimedia projects. He also talked about watching these practices over timelines to understand impact etc.

4. User:AroundtheGlobe made another brief comment about his idea of getting pictures off Flickr of some of the unique situations that might not be covered in a photowalk. He showed how he had approached users on flickr, showed them how to upload images on Wikimedia Commons and also explained licenses.

5. There was Nikhil Sheth and Rekha Sankhala who spoke about working in a village in Raigad, taking instances of the English and Marathi wikipedias along with Wikipedia for Schools instance. They shared the excitement that students in Raigad had in learning about the existence of the Marathi Wikipedia and also learning about the content present there. Nagarjuna also talked about how they saw the lack of content on a certain article and expressed their desire to edit Wikipedia and improve the article!

7. We discussed the Workshop for Women in Wikipedia. I asked for help in making it happen in Mumbai. Bishaka suggested contacting a faculty member in SNDT University and Nagarjuna offered help. Nagarjuna said that many people's fear of editing Wikipedia was that they would make mistakes.

8. Hisham asked about various ways in which people could be encouraged to edit Wikipedia. We talked about small edits in places like English Wikipedia if subjects of the person's interest was saturated or if the person was afraid. These included simple stuff like categorising, making copy edits, adding templates etc. There was also suggestions of contributing pictures to Wikimedia Commons.

9. Hisham then asked if there could be one thing that we could say to a new editor what it would be. The community thought that the concept of being bold on Wikipedia should be communicated better. The question of speedy deletions arose and how these discouraged new editors. User:AroundtheGlobe suggested the use of the "under construction" template.

10. We had brief discussion on the work of the Salman Khan's Khan Foundation. Some of us (me included :) ) thought it was Salman Khan, the actor :). We stood corrected.

11. Vickram said that discussion had centred around how to get students and people in schools and universities involved. However, effort should also be made to involve adults since they had access to certain knowledge that was dying.

12. Conversation turned to making the meetups more interesting. Barry suggested mixing up the content and having topic-specific meetups like done by the folks in Bangalore. I suggested having alternate meetups with WikiAcademy. This meant that people coming for the meetup could be told something concrete about there being an academy where they could learn how to participate.