Draft Recommendation #2: Wikipedia Academies across the country
Draft Recommendation #2: Wikipedia Academies across the country
A Wikipedia Academy [[1]] is at its simplest, an event that gathers a group of people with some common purpose together, who are then taken through the basic building blocks of a Wikipedia entry. In general, people have no difficulty reading Wikipedia, but several people seem to benefit from some understanding of how to edit.
In India, there are several ways by which Wikipedia Academies can be staged. Informal discussion suggests that there are yet several gaps that internet users have as to how exactly a Wikipedia entry is created and modified. Wikipedia Academies can help answer those questions, as also, spur people to edit. Groups of people who may be interested include: (a) employees of organisations in the public and private sectors - for e.g. as part of a 'club' activity, or in the course of professional training, (b) specific citizen groups, such as retired people, residents of a particular locality, members of an existing club or social community, (c) open Wikipedia Academies, where the event is set up in a particular location and anyone is welcome to join, etc.
What obstacles do people who would like to stage a Wikipedia Academy in India currently face? 1) The lack of official authority, i.e. "who are you exactly?" - which a Wikimedia India chapter could help erase 2) The lack of money to cover costs - while Wikipedians might be happy to donate their time, it is hard to stage a Wikipedia Academy without a suitable venue and the requisite hardware (several internet ready computers). An India chapter could help with this in terms of contributing to costs. 3) The lack of a central organisation/ mailing list whereby volunteers can send on information about Wikipedia Academies to people who may be interested, which is to say, Wikipedians might be hesitant about setting up an academy without knowing who to invite to it. The Wikimedia India mailing list and chapter can be of help here; simply as places to disseminate information and connect enthusiasts to each other. - Achal Prabhala
India chapter need to focus more on different Indic language wiki communities rather than on English Wikipedia. Many Indian wikipedia advocates are talking about going to international schools/convent schools to introduce wikpedia (read English Wikipedia). But how many of these Wikipedia advocates are actually interested to go to a Kannada/Tamil/Hindi medium school (for example) to introduce wikipedia or other sister wikis. The India chapter needs to take initiatives to setup Wikipedia community in each Indian state to promote WikiMedia Foundation's different Wikis.
The wiki for IT@Schools (Kerala/Malayalam) is a laudable initiative, which can mould young people towards sharing through Wiki. We should promote similar initiative in each of our states.
Lot of Professional colleges offering B.E/B.Tech/MCA with Internet/computing infrastructure are available in the country. Wiki academies can be introduced to these college students as a first step. See a report on such a event (in Telugu)
http://schoolwiki.in is fantastic: since I don't read Malayalam, can you tell us if the 1000 articles created are usable on Malayalam Wikipedia? The license they're using is the GFDL, so there can't be a legal reason not to use them, but it's not clear immediately if the project is designed to create it's own Wiki-based knowledge pages or if it's to create things that would work on Wikipedia.
No. School Wiki is not started as a competitor to Malayalam Wikipedia,
School Wiki is started to develop the culture of collaborative learning among school childeren of Kerala state. It is launched under the aegis of IT@School project of Kerala Goverenment.
It is not a competitor to Malayalam Wikipedia. In fact, some Malayalam Wikipedians (including me) have assisted the government officials to setup the wiki and I am a Sysop in schoolwiki. Still School Wiki officials are taking advice from us to enhance the school wiki experience.
Basically, school wiki is a database of schools in Kerala.
The school student of each school in Kerala are editing the school wiki to enter information about the school, statistics, alumini association, teachers, images, and so on. It also has some projects associated with each school page. Some of the projetcs are School newsletter (പ്രാദെശിക പത്രം), Local encyclopedia (നാടോടി വിജ്ഞാനകൊശം), My Village page (എന്റെ ഗ്രാമം), under the guidance of teachers. These project pages are created as sub page for each school. So the content as a whole is not useful for Wikipedia. But the information from the project pages associated with each school will be useful to Malayalam wikipedia in future.
I have some other related information to share with you.
- In 2008 December (One year back), Kerala Government has donated the entire content of its prestigious encyclopedic project (Sarvavijnjanakosam - http://www.sarvavijnanakosam.gov.in/about-us.htm) to Malayalam Wiki community (link). They have released the content of Sarvavijnjanakosam in GFDL license. Kerala government is even helping us by digitizing the content. We are exploring different ways to use that content effectively in Malayalam Wikipedia and Malayalam Wikisource. When the content from sarvavijnjankosam is used wisely the quality of our wikis will go up. We will do it soon.
- In 2008 June/July Kerala government has decided to move to Unicode. It has started using Unicode Malayalam in all the Kerala Government websites. I do not know whether any other Indian state did that.
As I already said, school wiki is not a competitor of Malayalam Wikipedia. In fact Kerala Government is indirectly creating future wikians for Malayalam Wiki projects.