[Wikimediaindia-l] Report on Liam Wyatt's talk "Wikipedia and GLAM's" - Organized by KALA/ NCSI-NET

[Arjuna Rao Chavala]

Hi,

Here is a brief report on talk on  Wikipedia and GLAM's talk  by Liam
Wyatt - organized by Karntaka Stae Library Association (KALA[1])/
NCSI-NET [2] on 19 Feb 2011 at 10:30AM at NCSI Conference hall, IISc,
Bangalore

The session attracted 26  LIS professionals from
academic/industry/students. I, Gautam John and Arun Ram were some of
Bangalore Wikipedians who  attended the event.  Liam explained
Wikipedia and how  it be can used easily with presentations and live
demonstrations, which thrilled the audience. There were several
questions around Wikipedia policies and how it deals with
controversial topics around politics, culture. Audience also showed
lot of interest  in the copyright policies of Wikipedia.  Liam
explained it nicely  by illustrating the different licensing options
from all rights reserved to public domain  and highlighting the
licenses applicable to Wikipedia. Liam shared how Oxford English
Dictionary  led the  crowd sourcing towards creating knowledge, when
it decided to publish the complete dictionary and sought inputs from
public to share all the known words.

He shared his popular quote
If people were passing out Knowledge on the street for free everyday,
I am sure that there would be  a lot more  learning, based on Gregg
Gillis's quote about free paints and painting.

There were questions on software for building an archive of
publications and  Liam suggested e-hive as a potential option.

There was an interesting questions on the number of contributors for
Sanskrit Wikipedia and Arun answered the same, based on his knowledge
of working with Sanskrit Community.

We also met with senior public library professionals and a member of
Karnataka knowledge commission, who offered their  help towards
initiatives to provide  free access to Wikipedia in public libraries.

Most of the audience were excited  to know that Wikipedia is available
in several Indian languages. I extended an invitation to the audience
to  take the community/chapter's help in spreading Wikipedia in their
respective professional communities/users.

Here is a link to some of the photos of the event.
https://picasaweb.google.com/arjunaraoc/LiamSTalkToKALANCSINET?feat=directlink

[1]http://kalaonline.com/
[2]http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/ncsi-net

Cheers
Arjun