On Mar 12, 2012, at 11:12 PM, Deepon Saha wrote:

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..:-)

Hey, Deepon, I totally agree with you.  More below on focussing on smaller groups.

On your point on providing support and motivation, Nitika and Subha are working on something that you will hear from soon.

On Mar 12, 2012 11:04 PM, "Nitika" <ntandon@wikimedia.org> wrote:

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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.

Thanks so much Kritharth,  User:Piyush.Aggarwal and User:RajeshPandey!  These were really well organised sessions!
  • Second session on March 5th, Monday:
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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.

Three advantages.  The quality of the discussion became so much richer because you had only the most committed in the room.  The kind of attention we were able to give to everyone left  was so much more personal. Also, as a presenter, I actually felt so much more motivated because the only guys in the room were so much more involved.

During the session we edited the article on Chacha Chowdhary and one of the participants started an article on tunde ke kabab.

It's really essential to do actual editing on article - and get the participants themselves to edit.  You should have seen the look of pride on the participants with every edit. Large groups in outreach sessions become unmanageable - so we should focus on smaller groups.

hisham