User:SuswethaK(CIS-A2K)/pr2020

RESEARCH(A comparative study of Wikipedia article creation campaigns in India)

What

The study aims to understand the motivation of the participants who contribute to article writing campaigns (in this case, Project Tiger and Wikipedia Asian Month), prevailing challenges and knowledge gaps in content creation and participation, and methods to address these. The study also focuses on the kind of content being created and will do a comparative analysis of both projects so that we can thoroughly explore these questions with both of them. This study aims to help in improving future article writing contests/campaigns by identifying what motivates volunteers to contribute to Wikipedia during a campaign or a contest.

Concept note

Detailed concept note can be seen here

Work done till date

• Identifying criteria to select communities and interviewees from both the contests
• Identifying 5 communities from Project Tiger and Wikipedia Asian Month
• Identifying interviewees from Project Tiger
• Rough questionnaire for Main organizers, local organizers, participants who took hardware support and participants who did not take hardware support

Wikidata Training course

What

Wikidata Training Program is a 3-month training course on Wikidata lead by VVIT WikiConnect, a college club from Andhra Pradesh, in collaboration with CIS-A2K's support. A total of 19 undergraduate students from the club are a part of this training. Certificates from A2K will be provided to those who attend all the sessions and do the work assigned by the organisers.

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Why

Previously at VVIT WikiConnect, one-day workshops on Wikidata would be conducted. But it got challenging to cover all topics related to Wikidata such as tools and SPARQL queries and also provide a hands-on learning experience in a single day. This is why the whole model was shifted from a one-day workshop to a 3-month course.

How

The course consists of 3 offline sessions and 2 online sessions. Apart from just explaining, students would also be given assignments such as adding a given number of labels in a said amount of time, adding references, categorizing given references into primary, secondary or tertiary since they are crucial aspects while editing any Wiki project. In the first online session, students would be introduced to Wikimedia and its sister projects, Five Pillars of Wikipedia, and basic Wikidata terminologies like p and q values.
When it comes to offline sessions, they are explained and also provided hands-on experience in adding Wikidata label sections, properties, and statements, references, etc. In the final offline session, a resource person would visit the club and explain about tools like the Tabernacle and also SPARQL queries.

When and Where

All the offline events are conducted at VVIT WikiConnect and dates can be seen here.

Follow up

As a follow up of the training program, an 8-day online campaign will be conducted to all the participants and the top 5 will be rewarded.

Learnings

There have been hiccups while trying to complete the course in the stipulated amount of time due to several reasons. Since students in the program range from 1st year to 3rd-year undergraduates, some of them have exams and the trainers had to conduct separate online sessions for them to explain once again.

24 hour Independence day datathon

What

24-hour Independence day data-a-thon, as the name suggests, is a 24-hour edit-a-thon on Wikidata conducted at VVIT WikiConnect club.

Why

The datathon was conducted on the eve of 73rd Independence Day of India by the members of VVIT WikiConnect club.

When and Where

Datathon took place at VVIT WikiConnect on 17 and 18 August 2019.

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How

All the members of the Wikidata training course were notified about the event and 20 of them have confirmed their participation. Apart from Wikidata training course members, 6 other Wikipedians have also joined the event and have improved labels and statements related to India for 24 hours without a break!
26 participants have made 56.1K edits to 25.9K items by adding 5.17M bytes. And, users User:Asrija1, User:Bhashyam Tharun Kumar, User:ESWAR NAGA MAHESH, User:Kundurthi0601 made it to the list of national-wide top contributors to this datathon.

Wikisource training course

What

Telugu Wikisource training is an ongoing training program on Telugu Wikisource. In this program, twenty participants from VVIT WikiConnect were being trained on various aspects of Telugu Wikisource

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Why

This training course aims at making students at the club familiar with Wikisource and it's tools.

When and Where

This is an ongoing event. More details about the event can be seen here

How

Training is done in 1 online and 4 offline sessions. Sessions were scheduled such that there is sufficient time for the trainees to work on the topics from the previous session. Online sessions were mostly conducted to clarify doubts among the course students by the organizers. Whereas offline sessions deal with topics like OCR, proofreading, templates, transclusion, etc.

Follow up

Each student is given the task of proofreading at least one book and it will be checked by another student and a coordinator/organiser to make sure the work is done correctly.