New subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikimedia-I] Report of 17th Wikipedia Community Meetup in Mumbai.

20 Jul 2012

Dear All,

We had the '17th Wikipedia Mumbai Community Meetup' on 14th July,Sat. at
Flarepath office in Bandra, who were generous in providing us their place
on the weekend.
It started with informal introductions since there were new members
attending Wiki-meetup for the very first time.

There were 17 attendees in all, including members from Flarepath team, an
Odia-Wiki contributor-Manoranjan Bahera (who also attended the meetup for
the first time in Mumbai !),Vikram Crishna ji, Karthik, Vikram Vincent (
from Banglore community), myself and some more new folks.

We had planned for an editing session this time followed by a brief about
Wiki Loves Monuments.The session was decided to progress depending on the
understanding and knowledge of attendees about Wikipedia, and was focussed
more on a basic level. Also the meetup was just the day after Eng.
Wikipedia crossed the milestone of 4-million articles ! Alot of people
present did not know about it, and so we made it an initiation point,
further into,

   - How Wikipedia managed to gather so many articles?
   - Who create these articles(it was not a one day task)?
   - Anyone can do it and How?

They did not have an account or had one but hardly used or edited. So, the
basic question of why you should have an account as well as how wikipedia
respects anonymity was discussed. It was interactive and people were very
enthusiastic about getting first hand insights and begin editing. Also,
there was discussion regarding how a 'company' page should be like in
wikipedia which would not be speedily deleted ! Vikram Crishna ji was
present and we got to hear from him as well !
We also created an account for a new-comer and did few edits from her
account.

Then we discussed briefly about Wikimedia commons. We categorised some of
the Mumbai Photowalk images using cat-a-lot. A brief about WLM was also
made; they are willing to volunteer/help and wanted to know more. It was
post 5pm by this time. Snacks and Coffee were sponsored by Flarepath, a Big
Thanks to them !

I want to Thank Ashwin (user:AshLin) here :)  for taking an editing sesson
in WCI-2011, which was the first session I had attended, very organised
wherein he had given each of the attendees a printout/handout explaining
the basics of editing etc. We took some more printouts of that and
distributed at the end as the summary of the past 2- 21/2 hours.
Thank you Noopur for suggesting Flarepath as well as connecting us ! Thanks
to Abhishek Suryawanshi, who was going to come to Mumbai, only for the
meetup, however owing to something urgent, he could not; However he
and Srikanth Ramakrishnan did support offline. Thanks Alot !
Few pictures of the meetup are
here<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mumbai_Meetup_July2012&g…
!
We hope to keep in touch with the newbies and make them regular editors and
have regular gatherings !

-- 

Warm Regards,
Nikita Belavate.

+91 99-20-30-9661