[Wikimediaindia-l] Report-32nd Bangalore WikiMeetup

[Subhashish Panigrahi]

The 32nd Bangalore Wikimedia Meetup was organized on 2011April10 at 3 PM in
CIS, Bangalore. This meetup was headed by Subhashish Panigrahi
[[User:Psubhashish]] and attended by 7 Wikipedians. The speakers of this
meetup were Arjun Rao C, Achal Prabhala and Anirudh Bhati.

1st Talk: Arjun Rao C/ Experience in Berlin Wikimedia Conference, 2010

Arjun Rao talked about his participation in the Wikimedia conference held in
Berlin. He discussed about the new plans and ventures for Wikimedia projects
which will be the current focus for the chapters of several countries. He
also briefed the audience about the plans for the proposed projects under
Wikimedia India such as:
Knowledge kiosks in public libraries, Academies, Projects for improvements
in Indic language tools, Indic Wiki CD/DVD, improve participation of women
in Wiki communities, Wikimania for Indian Wikipedians, etc. Arjun showed
pictures of speakers from several countries who he befriended and shared
ideal structures of the the Wiki projects in those all countries.

2nd Talk: Achal Prabhala/ “Open Citation” & its perpectives

Achal introduced the audience about his ongoing project on “Oral Citation”,
its purpose, authenticity, possible issues and their solutions. He explained
the problems Malayalam Wikipedians faced when they have created well
constructed articles on several games played in villages, but there was no
proper citations as none ever tried to make literature based documentations
for them. Even he also stated the similar experiences he has with the
“Sapheri” speaking South African tribe where many traditional games were
never put under the modern documented rules and regulations but they are
great resources for the anthropologists. Many such important heritage
related articles could be cited using oral citation which is easier to
create, transform, share and cite. He also explained how credibility and
authenticity were created by interviewing the people about the dance
form/game/any such intended aspect. Most of the verbal conversation could be
translated and added to the audio file itself and later can be translated to
any other language. The source and copyright info can also be explained in
the audio file itself which would make this a very simplistic approach, but
potentially more accessible. Audio files would be more self explanatory,
easy to share in the form of podcasts and an elaborated audience could be
targeted.

3rd Talk: Anirudh Bhati/ “Outreach Campaign in North-East”

Wikimedia India member Anirudh Bhati has organized has visited to NREST
(North-Eastern Regional Institute), Arunanchal Pradesh in the festive season
of “Mopin”, a regional festival and “Srishti 2011”, NREST's institutional
function. Anirudh along with Wikipedian Nikhil Sheth introduced Wikipedia
and other WMF projects to almost 110 students and lecturers in CREST. They
demonstrated them “Editing in Wikipedia” and students themselves created
articles based on the demonstration over there. Surya Vaigunth, a final year
student and a computer enthusiast personally took initiative to teach to
masses and bring out a set of persistent contributors. Though most of them
were interested to see the opportunities of Indic Wikipedias, majority of
the critical mass was more interested for English article speculated more
about Arunanchal Pradesh and even uploading more picture than content
development. He also has demonstrated how to use Indic Wikipedias and
editing them. Srikanth added a note to uploading pictures and geotagging
them using external maps which would be useful for online searches. As a
part of the outreach program Anirudh also explained about the Offline
package developed by taking selected Wikipedia articles for school students
as a part of SOS Children's Village where Ashwin helped for creating list of
important articles. 2 major software programs OpenZIM and Kiwix are used for
compilation and running of the offline package respectively where the total
package (2.75 GB) could be burnt in a DVD. The team also had a video chat
with Portugese Wikipedian Beria Lima who had a talk about “Mirandese
language and Gender Gap”, Mirandese, being one of the dying languages needs
collaborative efforts and Wikipedia could be one solution to protect it. She
also discussed abput the low contribution of women because of several
reasons like Lack of Confidence, Lack of detailed knowledge, Male oriented
social set up , etc. Even she also connected thr same problem in the Indian
context.

Nikhil introduced Wikipedia to Kendriya Vidyalaya students. Saibal
Chatterjee, visiting prof and Chief- Coordinator of Srishti 2011 also
supported the event.

It was fun-filled and successful event with less audience but fruitful with
new ideas shared.

*
ସୁଭପାSubhashishPanigrahi
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia Odia (Oriya) mailing list
wikipedia-or at lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-or
facebook.com/OdiaWiki
Tweet @OdiaWiki
_______________________________________________
"Wikimedia India Community list
wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/attachments/20110411/c4646390/attachment.htm