I too think we should conc. more on quality than quantity. If we get 4/5
interested students from a session (be it only 5% or 10%) then we should
take good care to support them & keep them motivated.. Good point..:-)
Deepon
On Mar 12, 2012 11:04 PM, "Nitika" <ntandon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Folks,
Kritharth is a student at IIT and has been actively involved in Wikipedia
monthly meet-ups in Delhi. It was through him that we got in touch with the
organisers at Tryst - annual tech fest organized by IIT-Delhi. I'd really
like to thank him for helping us organise this session and a big thank you
to Noopur, Rajesh and Piyush for all their help.
Two Wikipedia
sessions<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Workshop/Delhi_Workshop_… were
conducted at IIT Delhi during their tech fest Tryst 2012. The underlying
idea was to explain the basics of Wikipedia, 5 Pillars, few policies,
anatomy of an article and provide some hands-on training on basic Wikipedia
editing. Two sessions were conducted in a slight different manner since we
wanted to test effectiveness of different methods. My mail will explain
different approaches that were adopted for each of these sessions and
outcomes of the same.
- First session on March 3rd, Saturday:
About 50 attendees participated in a 3 hour long session. There were IIT
students, students from other engineering colleges in NCR and some working
fellows amongst the participants.
User:Hisham<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hisham> started
the session by introducing Wikipedia, who edits Wikipedia, 5 pillars, few
Wikipedia policies. We then moved on to actual hands on editing and taught
them basic Wikipedia editing. Some students raised really intelligent
questions about referencing and NPOV. Though, we noticed that a lot of
students lost interest and focus when we spoke about Wikipedia Policies in
detail which took over half an hour. During the session we demonstrated by
editing articles on Tryst - IIT
Delhi<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryst,_IIT_Delhi>
and IIT
Delhi<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institute_of_Technology_Delhi&…
.
Just the fact that the participants willingly sat through such a long
session and had several questions shows their genuine interest in learning
more about Wikipedia. About 6 students (12%) created their usernames after
the session and 2 (4%) have attempted to make minor edits after the
session. A big thank you to
User:Piyush.Aggarwal<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piyush.Aggarwal&g…
and User:RajeshPandey <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RajeshPandey> for
all their help and support.
- Second session on March 5th, Monday:
There were about 40 participants. Once again, there was mix of IIT and
non-IIT students. We organised the session a bit differently - after giving
a brief introduction about Wikipedia and showing some basic editing we
invited the uninterested participants to feel free to leave the session and
requested only the interested lot to stay back for the remaining session.
The participants were informed that in the second half of the session we'll
be talking in greater detail about Wikipedia policies and do more hands-on
editing training hence it made sense only for those students to stay back
who'd like to get deeper knowledge about Wikipedia. Eventually we were left
with 8 participants but in my opinion that's was the beginning point of a
more interactive and interesting session. Each of these 8 participants were
more involved when discussing about Wikipedia policies, they wanted to do
more hands on editing and we were also able to provide them individual
attention because of limited numbers. During the session we edited the
article on Chacha
Chowdhary<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chacha_Chowdhary> and
one of the participants started an article on tunde ke
kabab<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunde_ke_Kabab>
.
11 participants (27.5%) created their usernames and 2 (5%) have made few
edits post the session.
It's great that we're able to get more people involved in Wikipedia
activities - participants who were students outside of IIT also want to
conduct similar Wikipedia sessions in their campus, 4 of the participants
also joined us for the Delhi 7 meet-up. However, I want to focus on few who
have shown interest in Wikipedia editing - provide them editing support and
keep them motivated. I'm also thinking of a "Buddy System" to keep these
interested participants going and providing them support. If you haven't
already guessed what I mean by the name "Buddy System" please stay tuned,
I'll soon send another mail about it - I need your ideas and thoughts
(needless to say your support too :-)
Thanks
Nitika
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