[Wikimediaindia-l] WikiAcademy Mumbai 1 notes

[Pradeep Mohandas]

hi,

Warning: This is a loooonggg email.

We held our first WikiAcademy in Mumbai on October 1, 2011 at the Center for
Education and Documentation, Colaba. The session was attended by 24
attendees. Roughly, the sessions were:

1. Introduction
2. Creating accounts on Wikipedia
3. Introduction to the interface
4. Rules related to Wikipedia (5 Pillars, AGF etc.)
5. Go out and edit

This was our first experience with such an Academy and hence this note is a
bit detailed.

Many of the folks who came had used Wikipedia but had hardly ever edited
Wikipedia. There was a lot of questioning around the reliability of
Wikipedia as a resource. We had the services of Vickram Crishna to answer
these questions. After the round of introductions, we got
them acquainted with accessing Wikipedia, familiarising them with the
English Wikipedia main page.

The attendees were very interested in learning how to edit Wikipedia and
wanted to learn right from the creating accounts on Wikipedia stage. This we
did, only to realise the limitation existed on creation of not more than 6
accounts per IP address. We got around this limitation by allowing people to
register with dongles that a few people carried with them. Next time,
perhaps making an upfront request to allow more account creations from a
single IP address before the Academy might be a wise thing to do. Any other
suggestions?

Even after logging in the attendees appreciated a "Get to know your Screen"
session.

Pranav then shed some light on the rules of the Wikipedia (frankly, I have
never read this until a few days before the Academy!). Kundan Amitabh also
pitched in to help with a few that Pranav didn't know about. Kundan also
urged them to not give up on Wikipedia if their articles or sections of
articles were deleted. Keep trying! was the call!

In the last go out and edit session, we allowed participants to edit what
they liked. We moved among the audience helping where help was needed. We
encouraged the users to use the various icons on the WYSIWIG editor rather
than learn the Wikisyntax. We think that working on this for a few days will
help them learn things on their own.

There was a diverse audience with requests for specific follow up sessions.
We think that we could have concluded more properly than we did.

warm regards,
Pradeep Mohandas
PS: Apologies for the delay in posting this!

-- 
Pradeep Mohandas
How Pradeep uses email - http://goo.gl/6v1I9
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