VVIT WikiConnect/Activities/2019-2020

Coordinators Orientation and Training

On 10-11 June 2019, training has been conducted to the second batch of coordinators of the club, users— Asrija, Irfan, Harika & Sravanth. During the training, coordinators were introduced to various aspects of organizing workshops, outreach activities, maintaining the club, etc.

Wiki Awareness Session(s)

Participants during Wiki Awareness Session 1

Awareness sessions are the kick-starters of the VVIT WikiConnect activities every year. Similarly, it was the first event for the academic year 2019-2020. A total of 37 students attended the first awareness session and 43 students attended the second awareness session that took place on 28 June 2019. In the sessions, they were introduced to the history of the encyclopedia, the rise of Wikipedia and its sister projects, how Wikimedia works and the fact that "You can [edit]!".
Participants were also explained about the activities that are to be conducted in the academic year 2019-2020. Students were interested in different projects and they submitted their interests via google form they were sent for follow up. This data was used to take participants in activities that they were interested in.
The sessionS was mentored by Asrija, Irfan, Harika, Navya, Nivas, Suswetha & Sumanth

Wikidata Training Course

Participants during session 2 of Wikidata Training Program on the day of 24 hours datathon

Wikidata Training Program is an on-going training program on Wikidata. Shifting from the model of a one-day regular workshop, which generally introduces all the concepts in one go, in this program, twenty to twenty-five participants will be trained for three months on various aspects of Wikidata in three offline and three online sessions. Sessions were scheduled such that there is sufficient time for the trainees to work on the topics from the previous session.
To keep the participants in the loop, they were also given assignments such as adding a set number of labels, a set number of references, etc. Once the participants attend all the online/offline sessions, complete the tasks given by the course co-ordinators, they will be recieving certificates from CIS-A2K The training involves coordinators User:MNavya, User:Naga sai sravanth and also resource persons when necessary.

te Wikisource Training Course

Group photo of participants during Session 2 of Telugu Wikisource Training Course

te Wikisource Training Course is an ongoing training program on Telugu Wikisource. In this program, twenty participants were being trained on various aspects of Telugu Wikisource in one online and four offline sessions. Sessions were scheduled such that there is sufficient time for the trainees to work on the topics from the previous session.

24 hour Independence Day datathon

participants during datathon

On the mark of 73rd Independence Day, a national datathon was conducted from 15 to 22 August with the objective of improving labels, descriptions, aliases in primary languages for items related to Indian topics. As a part of the national campaign, a 24-hour datathon was conducted on 17-18 August 2019. The datathon began at 9.00 am on 17 August and concluded at 9.00 am on 18 August 2019. Twenty-six students took part in the event and improved labels primarily in Telugu and also added references to the items related to Indian topics. The session was mentored by Irfan, Sravanth, Nivas & Sumanth.

During the Campaign period(15-22 Aug 2019): Participants(26) from this datathon event made 56.1K edits to 25.9K items by adding 5.17M bytes. User:Asrija1, User:Bhashyam Tharun Kumar, User:ESWAR NAGA MAHESH, User:Kundurthi0601 made it to lists of national-wide top contributors to this datathon.

For further information, see Wikidata Datathon.

2030 Strategy Youth Salon

Group photo of participants at Youth Salon

On 8 September 2019, VVIT WikiConnect on behalf of Wikipedia & Education User Group organised a “Youth Salon”, as a part of the community conversations for Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy, in Guntur titled “Let us discuss Capacity Building - The Wikimedia’s Perspective”. Participants represented different capacity-building organisations working with youth, along with the student editors from VVIT WikiConnect.

For further information, see Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/2019 Community Conversations/Strategy Salons/Reports/VVIT WikiConnect Youth Salon.

MediaWiki Training

VVIT WikiConnect with the support from CIS-A2K organized a certification course on MediaWiki. Unlike last time the participants are newcomers to Wiki World and students of Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology. This training was conducted to groom more contributors to Wikimedia technical spaces from India, especially capture the interest of students with a bit of coding knowledge.

The entire training program had been spread over two remote-online sessions and one onsite workshop for three days, in which eleven students took part. The first online session was conducted on 11 Sep 2019. In which the participants were briefly explained about Wikimedia Movement, Wikimedia Foundation and all its projects, during which several areas and concepts related to Wikimedia tech were discussed. Gopa Vasanth addressed the 1st online session. These included an overview of technical areas for contribution, developer account, introduction to Phabricator, Gerrit and MediaWiki. The Second online session was on 21 September 2019. This session included the installation of MediaWiki on the local machine, which involves the creation of a developer account, generation of SSH key, linking SSH key to Gerrit account, cloning MediaWiki core to the local system. Rammanojpotla addressed the second online session.

The main workshop (on-site) was conducted for three days, from 25th to 27th September 2019. Gopa Vasanth and RamManoj led the training. Day1 of the training included follow up of two online sessions, doubts clarification, hands-on MediaWiki Bug tracker phabricator and later adding skins, adding logo, adding extensions to MediaWiki on the local machine. Day 2 of the workshop kick-started with userscripts, later creating gadgets after adding Gadgets extension. Participants are made to create userscripts, and then later the same user scripts are made as gadgets and are added in Gadgets. A brief explanation about Maintenance scripts. Later that day the participants had a hands-on session OOUIs and OOJs and after that Vasanth explained how to use Gerrit and how to submit a patch. On Day 3, Vasanth again revised on how to submit a patch. After that, participants were thought to create a Basic Extension, they were introduced to internationalization and localization. Later that day Rammanoj explained MediaWiki Action API and also introduction to MediaWiki cloud services Tool Forge and how to deploy tools in cloud services. Before closing the session, participants were also told about Indic-TechCom.

Photo walk 1

VVIT WikiConnect with the support from CIS-A2K organized a photowalk on 21 August. The number of participants for this event is 4. The initial idea of this photowalk was to take photographs of sculptures and monuments of Kaalachakra museum, Amaravathi. Due to renovation and other building improvement works this idea was dropped. Instead, the participants visited few villages in the vicinity of Amaravathi city, which is the present capital of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh and took photographs of basic infrastructures and amenities like bank, school, post office, etc. Around 7 villages were visited and 41 images were taken and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The images taken as a part of this photowalk can be found at WikiConnect_Photowalk-1_2019

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Project Tiger 2.0 edit-a-thons

Google and Wikimedia Foundation collaborated to drive a project in India in 2018 called Project Tiger. Project Tiger is an article writing contest that aims at improving local language content in Indic language Wikipedias. In addition to the 3-month article writing contest, 50 Wikimedians get laptop support and 100 Wikimedians get internet stipend for 6 months. The second iteration of Project Tiger known as Project Tiger 2.0 or GLOW(Growing Local language content on Wikipedia) runs between 10 October 2019 and 10 January 2020. As part of the article writing contest, students at VVIT WikiConnect are participating in offline edit-a-thons to increase article content both quality and quantity-wise in Telugu Wikipedia. Two edit-a-thons have been conducted as part of Project Tiger 2.0 so far.

• Edit-a-thon 1
• Edit-a-thon 2(24 hour edit-a-thon)