Hi,
Here is a brief report on talk on Wikipedia and GLAM's talk by Liam Wyatt - organized by Karntaka Stae Library Association (KALA[1])/ NCSI-NET [2] on 19 Feb 2011 at 10:30AM at NCSI Conference hall, IISc, Bangalore
The session attracted 26 LIS professionals from academic/industry/students. I, Gautam John and Arun Ram were some of Bangalore Wikipedians who attended the event. Liam explained Wikipedia and how it be can used easily with presentations and live demonstrations, which thrilled the audience. There were several questions around Wikipedia policies and how it deals with controversial topics around politics, culture. Audience also showed lot of interest in the copyright policies of Wikipedia. Liam explained it nicely by illustrating the different licensing options from all rights reserved to public domain and highlighting the licenses applicable to Wikipedia. Liam shared how Oxford English Dictionary led the crowd sourcing towards creating knowledge, when it decided to publish the complete dictionary and sought inputs from public to share all the known words.
He shared his popular quote If people were passing out Knowledge on the street for free everyday, I am sure that there would be a lot more learning, based on Gregg Gillis's quote about free paints and painting.
There were questions on software for building an archive of publications and Liam suggested e-hive as a potential option.
There was an interesting questions on the number of contributors for Sanskrit Wikipedia and Arun answered the same, based on his knowledge of working with Sanskrit Community.
We also met with senior public library professionals and a member of Karnataka knowledge commission, who offered their help towards initiatives to provide free access to Wikipedia in public libraries.
Most of the audience were excited to know that Wikipedia is available in several Indian languages. I extended an invitation to the audience to take the community/chapter's help in spreading Wikipedia in their respective professional communities/users.
Here is a link to some of the photos of the event. https://picasaweb.google.com/arjunaraoc/LiamSTalkToKALANCSINET?feat=directli...
[1]http://kalaonline.com/ [2]http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/ncsi-net
Cheers Arjun