Hi,

Last saturday Netha Hussain and I had an interesting experience conducting a Wikipedia workshop at Startup Village. Startup Village is a private-public not-for-profit business incubator at Ernakulam, Kerala. They wanted to help us in spreading the word about Wikipedia and editing it. The event page can be viewed here.

The workshop was an eye opener of sorts for us. It started half an hour later than planned, as most of the participants took longer to make it to the venue. We had the usual hiccups like microphones not being available and the internet connectivity being too slow. The connectivity affected the pace of the workshop. We found it difficult to demonstrate the examples we had. The biggest challenge was not technical but connecting with the audience. We had tailored our content for a crowd with a programming background. We had even conducted a mock session over phone in order to be sure of the roles the two of us should assume. However, the audience turned out to be diverse and largely not technical. Most of the participants did not have a mobile device, so the hands-on session was not as fruitful as we had anticipated it to be. We ended up lecturing more and demonstrating less.

The workshop was structured into two halves. The first half was an introduction to wikipedia and the wiki markup. The second half was a gentle introduction to the mediawiki API or how to write programs using javascript to access content from wikipedia. When we broke up for lunch after the first half of the session, around half of the audience left. The second half had too few takers, there were people who had come back but we doubt if it had any tangible impact. Our biggest learning from the exercise was that it is very important to know the audience well in advance and structure the content accordingly.

On the brighter side, we had interesting queries from a few participants who were already acquainted with editing Wikipedia. Startup Village has invited us to conduct similar workshops in future. A couple of participants and the organizers wrote to us, thanking us for volunteering.

Thanks

Jeph