[Wikimediaindia-l] Pune intro to wikipedia workshop: a short report

[Bishakha Datta]

btw, nikita, the campus ambassador in pune, is not nitika, who has joined
the foundation office in new delhi.

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Dear all,
>
> Four campus ambassadors conducted a 2-hour intro to wikipedia session as
> part of an all-day workshop I was facilitating on Gender and Technology at
> the Dept of Women's Studies, University of Pune. We had about 20
> participants - more women than men, and an even mix of Marathi and English
> speakers.
>
> The 4 CAs who conducted the session were: Abhishek Suryawanshi, Devanshi
> Tripathi, Arnav Sonara and Nikita Agarwal - between them they too
> represented a good mix of genders and languages. I had earlier invited
> Ashwin Baindur from the Pune community to conduct the workshop; the timing
> didn't work for him.
>
> The participants were introduced to both English and Marathi wikipedias,
> where they tried to locate Sharmila Rege, dalit feminist and sociologist,
> who heads the department. Since she didn't have a page on English wikipedia,
> one was created - and this process of creation was used as an opportunity to
> demonstrate key principles: references, citations, NPOV, verifiability, as
> well as how to edit. Larger conversations around reliability and
> authenticity were had, and the CAs cited their own experiences to answer the
> question: Why edit?
>
> I was particularly impressed by the way the CAs shared the workload among
> themselves and by the way they pitched wikipedia to a bunch of newcomers:
> inside out (from a newbie perspective) rather than outside in, anticipating
> what a newcomer needs to know at each step - to be motivated and to progress
> to the next step. They also suggested easy ways to edit at the start.
> Judging by the last question from participants: "How can we contact you'll
> if we need help?" it worked.
>
> This was the first time undergrads had taught postgrads in this department
> - a nice role reversal. And this was the first time the CAs had stepped
> outside the India Education Program to do a non-program workshop. The
> student-to-student thing really worked.
>
> So many thanks Abhishek, Arnav, Devanshi and Nikita. It was great!
>
> And thanks a ton, Hisham, for putting so much together at such short
> notice.
>
> Cheers
> Bishakha
>
>
>
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