Hi Folks,
Kritharth is a student at IIT and has been actively involved in Wikipedia monthly meet-ups
in Delhi. It was through him that we got in touch with the organisers at Tryst - annual
tech fest organized by IIT-Delhi. I'd really like to thank him for helping us organise
this session and a big thank you to Noopur, Rajesh and Piyush for all their help.
Two Wikipedia sessions were conducted at IIT Delhi during their tech fest Tryst 2012. The
underlying idea was to explain the basics of Wikipedia, 5 Pillars, few policies, anatomy
of an article and provide some hands-on training on basic Wikipedia editing. Two sessions
were conducted in a slight different manner since we wanted to test effectiveness of
different methods. My mail will explain different approaches that were adopted for each of
these sessions and outcomes of the same.
First session on March 3rd, Saturday:
About 50 attendees participated in a 3 hour long session. There were IIT students,
students from other engineering colleges in NCR and some working fellows amongst the
participants. User:Hisham started the session by introducing Wikipedia, who edits
Wikipedia, 5 pillars, few Wikipedia policies. We then moved on to actual hands on editing
and taught them basic Wikipedia editing. Some students raised really intelligent questions
about referencing and NPOV. Though, we noticed that a lot of students lost interest and
focus when we spoke about Wikipedia Policies in detail which took over half an hour.
During the session we demonstrated by editing articles on Tryst - IIT Delhi and IIT Delhi.
Just the fact that the participants willingly sat through such a long session and had
several questions shows their genuine interest in learning more about Wikipedia. About 6
students (12%) created their usernames after the session and 2 (4%) have attempted to
make minor edits after the session. A big thank you to User:Piyush.Aggarwal and
User:RajeshPandey for all their help and support.
Second session on March 5th, Monday:
There were about 40 participants. Once again, there was mix of IIT and non-IIT students.
We organised the session a bit differently - after giving a brief introduction about
Wikipedia and showing some basic editing we invited the uninterested participants to feel
free to leave the session and requested only the interested lot to stay back for the
remaining session. The participants were informed that in the second half of the session
we'll be talking in greater detail about Wikipedia policies and do more hands-on
editing training hence it made sense only for those students to stay back who'd like
to get deeper knowledge about Wikipedia. Eventually we were left with 8 participants but
in my opinion that's was the beginning point of a more interactive and interesting
session. Each of these 8 participants were more involved when discussing about Wikipedia
policies, they wanted to do more hands on editing and we were also able to provide them
individual attention because of limited numbers. During the session we edited the article
on Chacha Chowdhary and one of the participants started an article on tunde ke kabab.
11 participants (27.5%) created their usernames and 2 (5%) have made few edits post the
session.
It's great that we're able to get more people involved in Wikipedia activities -
participants who were students outside of IIT also want to conduct similar Wikipedia
sessions in their campus, 4 of the participants also joined us for the Delhi 7 meet-up.
However, I want to focus on few who have shown interest in Wikipedia editing - provide
them editing support and keep them motivated. I'm also thinking of a "Buddy
System" to keep these interested participants going and providing them support. If
you haven't already guessed what I mean by the name "Buddy System" please
stay tuned, I'll soon send another mail about it - I need your ideas and thoughts
(needless to say your support too :-)
Thanks
Nitika