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What?

The Indian National Trust for Art & Heritage Pune Chapter is working with various organisations to preserve the natural heritage places like rivers in Pune district of Maharashtra, India. To sustain the efforts to build knowledge on rivers, INTACH has decided to collaborate with CIS-A2K to develop long-term plan. This was the first workshop to develop structure of the project, decide the stakeholders and follow-up action plan for the future.

Why?

As the state of rivers is worsening day by day, the active citizens and organisations have realised the urgent need to document the rivers in details. This also generates the awareness among the readers.

When & Where?

The two day workshop was conducted on 29 & 30 July at INTACH office in Pune. Total 20 participants from seven organisations actively contributed to Wikimedia projects.

How?

Day one started with introductions by members of organisations - Jeevitnadi (Living River Foundation), Sajag Nagrik Manch, Parisar, Centre for Environment & Education, Jnana Prabodhini, Ecological Society and INTACH. The concept of 'Project Jalbodh' was elaborated. The keynote address by Prof. Madhav Gadgil focused on the integration of citizen science and Wikimedia projects. Introduction to major Wikimedia projects was given in next session. The examples of river and water related content were taken for understanding the context. Then various members with their vast experience collaboratively evolved the structure of article on river in Marathi Wikipedia. According to local context, relevant sections and sub-sections were designed. Separate project page defining this structure was created on Marathi Wikipedia under the Wiki Project Jalbodh. This was the crucial activity for the project. After this session, the organisations conducted the analysis of the content developed by them which is to be contributed in Wikimedia projects.

On the second day, the activity started with uploading images on Commons. Along with this, the encyclopedic content available with the organisations was discussed for giving references. The articles were created in the sandboxes by groups on similar themes. Various skills like advanced search options for finding online references, archiving of url's on Wayback machine of Internet Archive were also acquired by the participants. The category tree for the rivers was also designed. The detailed discussions on building databases, maps and media with community involvement was conducted.

Learnings

Like minded experienced organisations working on one theme have high-level enthusiasm towards free knowledge creation. It is difficult to organise the content prepared by activists previously for awareness generation or reporting purpose. Multiple sessions are required to train them for encyclopedic writing.

Follow-up

Two follow-up workshops are planned till June 2020. These will be hosted by different organisations.