Ten/Bangalore/Key takeaways/Sessions

Event reports

 * Report by Srikanth Lakshmanan
 * Link to agenda

Indian Wikipedia Updates and plans for 2011
Wikipedians from Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Sanskrit shared the updates. There was a question answer session on expectation from chapter.
 * Shamal wanted to know about the available help from wikimedia, as a libertarian concept like wikipedia can lead to conflict with government. It is clarified that Wikipedia pillars like NPOV can be helpful in such situations, as truth is an absolute form of defence. As Internet is  not restricted in India and wikipedia is built over Internet, chances of potential conflict are expected to be lower.
 * Some members in the audience wanted to know about distribution of CD/DVDs to School and others wanted SIG for geographic themes.
 * One of the participants proposed a project to setup pages for prominent academcians in the top institutions.

City SIG sessions
As several people expressed interest in multiple topics, Barcamp like process was adopted for the afternoon session.

Languages
Apart from all the south Indian languages, there were volunteers from Urdu, Oriya, Bengali, who wanted to discuss how they can contribute to their language wikipedia. Shiju volunteered to help the same.

Kannada

 * HPN gave an introduction of the kannada wiki. Discussions were held on the use of bots and the quality of the articles. Later a live demo was given to the audience. P.srikanta 00:57, 26 January 2011 (EST)

Tamil
3 people participated. As it was a festival day, not many could attend the session.

Telugu
Arjun, Karthik, Uma kanth, Lakshmi Narasimha attended. After a round of introductions, Arjun demonstrated Telugu wikipedia and clarified questions from the participants. Uma kanth then created a news report for the event on Telugu wikipedia. The participants resolved to strengthen Telugu wikipedia in Bangalore by attending future meetups and promoting the same with their friends.--Arjunaraoc 23:44, 15 January 2011 (EST)

Photography

 * HPN introduced Wikipedia Commons. Copyright issues were discussed with some case studies. Later a live demo was provided by uploading the WP10 photo onto the commons and adding it to the Bangalore WP10 wiki page. P.srikanta 01:00, 26 January 2011 (EST)

Technology

 * Good session

Wiki overview

 * Quite useful

Namma Wikipedia & How I became a wikipedian
Several people in the audience shared their experience of becoming wikipedians. Some people shared how wikipedia helped them become better. Some shared how knowledge from wikipedia helped them to cope with health issues and how it helped when no other information source was available.

Keynote
Lawrence Liang delivered the key note on evolution of encyclopaedia. He gave an overview of how encylopaedia was born in secrecy in 18th century, while 20th century brought in an open encyclopaedia.
 * Some people said that the talk is quite abstract or technical for the wikipedia audience. Use of audio visuals would have helped.

Panel discussion on Wikipedia India: Opportunities ahead

 * Karnataka government initiative for http://Kanaja.in may not be able to offer material for reuse, as the copyright owners are reluctant to release their work in public domain/copy left licenses.--Arjunaraoc 23:56, 15 January 2011 (EST)
 * Annual awards to spread awareness about Wikimedia
 * Encourage Subject matter experts to contribute to Wikimedia. Bangalore is home to several experts with vast experience in administration, science and technology, education and defence. Prof. Sadagopan offered help in this regard.
 * Scope for voice interface to wikipedia. Achal shared an experience of Finnish researcher towards this.
 * Government wants to control information, where information authenticity is involved.
 * Wikipedia can impact all spheres of human activity in the years to comem, be it governance, education, research etc.
 * There is a need to simplify the user interface and make the user experience better (similar to social networking applications like facebook), but it should not become another facebook, as the value of the information will be lost.