[Wikimediaindia-l] Bangalore Wikipedia 10th Anniversary Celebrations -- Summary

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

Hi all,

I am posting a detailed summary of the Bangalore celebrations, apologies for
making it long to read, but hey it was 12 hours of celebration!

It was a great start to the day with overwhelming response to see 10
volunteers 8 am at the venue willing to help and with that, the number of
people coming in very slowly but steadily increasing. Around 9:30 AM we
began the days proceedings at Lecture hall with Arunram welcoming the people
with an Introduction of the event and we had informal round of introductions
of people who were there(50 already!). We then had different Indic language
wiki communities presenting reports with Bellayat joining over Skype from
Dhaka being the first to provide an update on Bengali Wikipedia. Arjuna
followed it with Telugu Wikipedia update.HP Nadig followed with update on
Kannada Wikipedia. Sundar followed it with Tamil Wikipedia report and
audience were very receptive so much that we needed to cut short the Q&A for
time constraints.Kiran Gopi provided the Malayalam Wikipedia report followed
by myself giving an update of WP:INDIA Project of English Wikipedia.We also
had a small discussion on Five pillars,policies etc.  We broke for tea
around 11:30 AM and the crowd was 75 by then. Arunram continued with
Sanskrit Wikipedia report and then there was an open discussion on way
forward,future which was lively. The final number of people who attended
morning session was close to around 100 people. Each language report
contained information on stats, community, challanges, outreach activities
and way forward.

Just before breaking for lunch we took this picture
http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-10-celebrations-Bangalore-2011.JPGwith
showing ten as theme.

We regrouped for Segment 2(Special Interest groups) around 2:15 PM and
Arjuna quickly gave the format of the event.(Collaboration with Special
Interest Groups). There was a Birds track lead by Shyamal and the bird
watching community in Bangalore. The photography track was handled by HP
Nadig covering commons. The technology track had myself presenting overview
of technology / hacks possible with Wikipedia and then Kiran providing a
hands on demo on mwclient and wiki-analysis project. Sundar joined in to
give a brief session on Bots and pywikipediabot framework. The different
language groups had discussions at the foyer area with Arjuna leading
Telugu, Shiju / Kiran leading Malayalam, Sundar leading Tamil and HP Nadig
leading Kannada Wikipedias respectively. The number of people who attended
Segment 2 was around 150 people.

We broke for a tea around 4:30 PM and regrouped ourselves at the main
auditorium around 5:20 when we had a sudden change in the agenda after Jimmy
wanted to have the Skype call earlier. It helped us in a better way with
Jimmy addressing the audience and kickstarting the Segment 3 around 5:40 PM.
Thanks a lot Jimmy :) . We then had Manish explained about how Wikipedia
works, community, Foundation, Statistics, India specific stats and gave an
overall Introductory talk on Wikipedia to the larger audience(Around 200 .
We then played some videos from the WikimediaFoundation youtube channel with
editors sharing their experiences. HP Nadig then formally announced the
formation of the Chapter and did an interactive Session ''Namma Wikipedia''
with audience on How they used Wikipedia. Around 6:30 PM there was a talk by
Lawrence Liang. We had a small break and at 7:10 PM Sundar anchored the
audience session on "How I became a Wikipedian" with editors sharing their
stories on how they became Wikipedians. Then we had a very interactive panel
discussion with renowned people like Prof.Sadagopan - Founder Director
IIIT-B, Writer Madanmohan Rao, Achal Prabhala - Wikimedia foundation
advisory and Sunil Abraham - Executive Director Centre for Internet and
Society, speaking on Wikipedia and its role moderated by Arunram. We called
it a day by 8:15 PM and it was quite a day! [PS: I couldnt update evening
session in detail since i was doing some running around]

230+ people attending the event on a festive day(Sankaranti) was quite an
accomplishment and shows the amount of love people have for Wikipedia :). I
would like to thank each one of them for making this event a success.

I would like to thank Jimmy, Lawrence Liang and the panelists for making it
to the event with their busy schedules.

On behalf of Bangalore Wikipedians, I would like to thank our sponsors,
National Institute of Advanced Sciences (NIAS) for providing an absolutely
wonderful venue for the event free of cost, Microsoft Research India for
sponsoring food,refreshments, Discovery India for sponsoring the publicity
materials, Centre for Internet & Society for providing Wifi,sponsoring
Videography at the event in a very short notice, being always there for
Wikipedian community in Bangalore. [Yes most of the event is recorded and
would be up on commons in a few days!] and Wikimedia Foundation for all
those tees and nice goodies :)

Last but the least the volunteers without which the day wouldnt have been
what it was. Abu,Anoop,Arjuna Rao Chawla, Arunram, Arunganesh, Gautham,
Harsha,HP Nadig, Kiran Gopi, Kiran Jonnalagadda, Manish, Melvin, Philip
Tiju, Sundar, Suma, Srikanta, Sathyamurthy, Swaroop Rao, Tinucherian, Vishal
Gayakvad, Vimal, Srinivas Gunta,
Royson[CIS],Sunil,Ramesh[NIAS],Sashidharan[NIAS]. Sincere apologies if i had
missed anyone on the list.

Since i didnt have camera, there are no pictures from me, expect them from
others soon on commons :)

Let this be a new larger wave of community in Bangalore and hope our monthly
meetup participation increases folds and more importantly more people join
the movement and "edit the world".

Regards
Srikanth.L
(User:Logicwiki)

PS : This also happened to be my farewell wiki-meetup at Bangalore since am
relocating, will miss Bangalore meetups :( :(
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