Events/Wikipedia Workshop, Quark 2013 BITS Pilani Goa

This is the report page for the Wikipedia workshops organised in BITS Pilani Goa Campus during Quark 2013 by Arnav Sonara and Konarak Ratnakar.

Date
Feb 1-2, 2013

Venue
Quark 2013, BITS Pilani (Goa Campus)

Organisers

 * Konarak Ratnakar
 * Arnav Sonara

Report
On February 1st and 2nd, during Quark - the technical festival of BITS Pilani Goa campus, two workshops were jointly organized by the Wikimedia India Chapter and volunteers from the college.

We were invited to conduct a workshop about the technical aspects of Wikipedia on the WikimediaIndia-l list. The Chapter executive committee agreed to support the event and It was decided that Konarak and I will volunteer to conduct the workshop. After discussing with the organizers we decided the course content of the workshop i.e. gadget development and bot development with Pywikipediabot.

About 60 students registered for the event of which 42 turned up on the first day. First of all we gave them an overview about WMF, Wikipedia and sister projects, Wikimedia India, mailing lists, IRC channels just to show how the community collaboratively works. Many of them were surprised when we showed them different Indic language wikipedias. We gave some directions if they ever needed help with wikipedia in their language.

After lunch we focused on the technical side and showed them how to type in various indic languages and how jquery.ime works. We showed them how Gadgets are helpful and enhances the Editing experience for editors on all Wikipedias. Then we introduced gadget development and the mediawiki resource loader and had them fiddle with simple scripts. Since there were students from Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil background we introduced them to Translatewiki.net.

On the second day Konarak started with explaining the need of bots on wikipedia for automated tasks and how programmers can contribute in case editing is not their area of interest. Later on, I showed them how to run a bot, by demonstrating a task on Gujarati Wikipedia. Then he showed them how easy it is to make bots with the scripts provided with pywikipedia and its extensive documentation. He, then, gave every attendee access to a wiki that he had set up and asked them to run few minor scripts over there.

Also we did make a note of not to run the bots without the community consensus on local Wikipedia. He wrapped up the workshop by telling them about the bot policy and bot approval on English and other wikipedias. We stayed with the participants for couple of hours after the workshop and interacted with them, answered their queries. -Arnav Sonara