Wikipedia Education programme at CHRIST (Deemed to be
University) began in 2013 with a goal of piloting Wikipedia as a
pedagogic tool for the undergraduate students. Both the educators of the
WEP and of the university were new to one such approach. But inside an
institution that sees over 20K new faces every year, educating students
on creating Wikipedia articles and enhancing the same was very exciting.
Students of five Indian languages--Hindi, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, and
Urdu--were chosen as these languages were taught as second languages
for many students. During the first and second year, almost all the
students created new Wikipedia articles where the majority of the
articles were below accepted standard. The difficulty in making students
learn about input tools in their languages, Wikipedia basics, and wiki
markup pushed for creating "how-to" video tutorials in Hindi and
Kannada. Working with Urdu was discontinued after the second year
because of program staff exit. Slowly, the program was reoriented in a
manner that new students learned native language input and markup for
the first two semesters by digitizing books on Wikisource and later by
editing Wikipedia articles during the next two semesters. This helped
better the output by increasing the quality of articles by nearly 30%.
>From 2015 the program was further improved by helping students get more
hands-on training of input, wiki markup by intensive typing during the
first semester, a few advanced options like interacting with each other
on user talk page during the second semester, moving to Wikipedia
editing and developing articles on Wikipedia sandbox during third
semester, and finally moving the articles by peer-review from fellow
batchmates, faculty and the larger Wikipedia community. The faculty is
involved in the development and on-wiki review process ensuring quality.
The
program so far has gone to the level of producing about 70% very good
quality articles where nearly 0.6% of the articles are of really poor
quality. The female to male ratio is surprisingly equal and at times,
there are more female students as compared to the male ones. However,
there is little concern in integrating the student-Wikimedians to the
larger Wikimedia community.
Also, there is little exchange of
learning and best practices between cross-language outreach programs
across India across several different languages. One of the ways to
better this process is making program leaders talk to each other. To know more about us follow on