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

Sun Jan 16 04:32:13 UTC 2011

Awesome summary, Srikanth. And, thanks for putting so much work into our event 
in making it a grand success.
I'm sure your next stop would flourish as well.
All the best for everything you're going to do.

Kudos to all who did their best to make WikiTen Bangalore possible.

- Sundar
 "That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for 
the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

________________________________
From: Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak at gmail.com>
To: "Mailing list for Wikimedians / Wikipedians in Bangalore, India" 
<wikimedia-in-blr at lists.wikimedia.org>; Discussion list on Indian language 
projects of Wikimedia. <wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>; 
wikix-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Sun, January 16, 2011 12:33:53 AM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Bangalore Wikipedia 10th Anniversary Celebrations -- 
Summary

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.JPG 
with 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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