Thank you all for the overwhelming response to the 2010 Sept 18th Pune Wikimedia meetup. 17 people had attended this meet. Special thanks to HOD & staff of Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune and visiting media and open source movement fraternity for their active participation and guidance.
Mr Vijay Sirdeshpande (Mahitgar from Marathi wikipedia) and Ms Bishakha Datta (trustee, Wikimedia Foundation) jointly chaired the meet . Ms. Datta introduced herself . She talked about Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation’s plans in India, the Wikimedia India Chapter, and difficulties faced in completion of its registration process. She also talked about Bangalore wiki meet-ups. She stressed the need to conduct wikipedia academies and informed about the upcoming visits of Jimmy Wales to Mumbai at the end of October. Other Wikimedia Foundation staff visit India in December, includes Sue Gardner (executive director), Erik Moeller (deputy director) and Danese Cooper (chief technical officer).
Then wikipedians introduced themselves. Mr. Amit Yadav raised the topics of need for and lack of adequate references on Marathi wikipedia, quality of content, and outreach. He was for most of the discussions to take place online rather than offline. He stressed the need for initiative and self-learning process for making contributions on part of wiki-admiring people.On quality of content front, the success of Malayalam wikipedia was discussed. Mr. Vijay explained the difference in the initial focus, and said that now the focus is on making Marathi wikipedia reader-oriented. Everyone agreed that for bringing better quality we need more active users. Mr.Vijay also informed that Marathi wikipedians can request for various features and get various features adopted in the user interface, including page rating etc. for improvement in quality.