Greetings Everyone,

This is a small report about the Wikipedia Workshop at BVCOE on 14th March, 2012.

Rishab Arora (User: Spacetime29) student of BVCOE is an Open Source enthusiast and developer. Its only because of him that we were able to organize this workshop during their technical fest gCON 2012.

The main motive of the workshop was to explain participants about the basics of Wikipedia, Community participation, 5 Pillars, Anatomy of the articles followed by hands on basic editing session.
It was conducted in two sessions. About 30 participants were present for the first half. Most of the participants were from BVCOE and rest were from other engineering colleges in NCR. Before starting the session, User:Hisham asked participants about their expectations from the session. They replied with questions like: How Wikipedia works, How can they contribute, Content verifiability etc. So, he began with introducing Wikipedia, who edits Wikipedia, 5 Pillars, few Wikipedia policies, importance of providing references etc. In between, some students asked interesting questions about adding references. Then, we moved on to actual editing and taught basics of editing. User:Nitika.t also told female participants about India WikiWomen's Edit-a-Thon.

After that, we asked uninterested participants to feel free and leave the sessions and invited only the interested one's to remain present for the second half. We informed them about the session that it'll be more interactive and detailed hands on editing session where we'll make sure that everyone present should make at least an edit. So, we left with only 10 students (33%). With everyone's choice we selected the article on Chole Bhature to go with. Everyone present made their account (few had already created before coming) and edited the article. Some started with correcting spellings, adding references, creating sections and went to reorganizing content. They asked questions like what would happen if more than one person is editing the same article simultaneously. Feeling of elation can be seen on their faces after making first edit.

I'd really like to thank Rishab for helping us in organizing the session.  

Cheers,
Piyush Aggarwal