[Wikimedia Education] introduction and sharing about Wikipedia for Schools and Teach for India

[Nikhil Sheth]

Hi All,

I'm an IT engineer-turned-educator based in Pune and have been working on
distributing Wikipedia for Schools Offline Edition here. Have implemented
successfully at one school only so far and then got working on getting more
softwares and trying to get around installation problems that I experienced
at the second school.

But I was able to spread awareness about it pretty well. I've delivered
talks at two colleges (SICSR in Pune and NERIST in Itanagar, on other side
of India) that were having wikipedia tracks in their annual technical events
and have had a good response. We got a mention of the project in a national
newspaper. I've shared the 2.8 GB Wikipedia for Schools portable package
(made by Kiwix) with lots of people already (you'll find them on a map link
below)

I'd like to enroll myself, if possible, to go to campuses in Pune and
interact with people to spread awareness about Wikipedia for Schools and
free educational software, once the Campus Ambassador program starts
creating opportunities. I now also know basics of editing Wikipedia thanks
to the interaction with the community and attending the sessions so can take
that also. I've added my contacts to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_Projects/Volunteer_Page

Regarding Wikipedia for Schools : If you're in India, this is useful:
Here's a wiki-page I've set up to try to co-ordinate a volunteer-based drive
to spread:
http://education.wikia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_For_Schools_Offline_Edition
(short URL: http://www.tinyurl.com/WFSOE)

I need wikipedians to take what's useful on this page and copy it to a
wikimedia wiki (I wasn't aware of any of this at the time, when I started,
only saw wikipedia is for strictly encyclopedic content so went to wikia.)

And here's a wiki-map I've set up so we can track schools and more
importantly volunteers in India who can be contacted by schools and
organizations. (Jessie created one too, but I'd started this first :P and
this one is the rough draft type that everyone can add to, and we can then
move concrete data from this map to Jessie's where only I and some others
have editing access)
http://tinyurl.com/WFSOEIndiamap

About Teach for India:
After working in the IT sector for 2.5 years, I'm now joining "Teach for
India" - a 2-yr fellowship program where I'll be a full-time teacher at an
under-resourced school in Pune. The idea is to take best practices in
education to places that need them, it's very similar to "Teach for America"
and started in 2009. I'll be part of a 400+ fellows cohort and when our
training ends this June, probably everyone will have a copy of Wikipedia for
Schools along with other educational content (so send me the links!) and
we'll be spreading out across schools in Pune, Mumbai and Delhi. So here
we'll have a network of internet and computer-literate individuals ready to
implement education projects at the ground level. One big limitation is lack
of internet connectivity and up-to-date hardware ; the latter creates
problems when you want to install educational software or operating systems.

Further developments on Wikipedia for Schools:
I used the portable version created by Kiwix.org as it's better on size.
I've been in touch with the developers on bugs and feature requests and have
enrolled as a beta tester for the new versions.
The 2008/09 edition of Wikipedia for Schools is very good, but also limited
in that it has only 5500+ articles (contrast with Wikipedia en latest
selection that has 45000+) and many times topics we need aren't there. I got
introduced to one person who was working on article selection but lost that
email somewhere. It would be great if we could set up a place to check out
all present articles in their respective categories and pool in ones that
are needed. With the OpenZim format being able to do good compression, there
is now space for many more articles in Wikipedia for Schools. Please share
any link if there is a wiki page somewhere where this is being done, or
please guide me on how to set one up.

I got Okawix and downloaded Simple Wikipedia package for offline - it's got
many articles in simpler language and can be very useful for lower-age
children. But it's uncensored and so unusable. Is it possible to start a
simple wikipedia project to collect the for-schools articles, or better yet
just filter out inappropriate ones?

Just sharing what I have at present, I'm sorry if it's disorganized, do get
in touch if you find anything useful!


Cheers,
Nikhil Sheth
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Teach For India <http://www.teachforindia.org/> Fellow, 2011-13
www.nikhilsheth.tk
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