Projects:World Sanskrit Book fair

Event details
Book fair brochure Event web site

60,000 participants from the general public are expected. 10,000 delegates from India and various countries are attending.

Exhibition dates
7th to 10th January.

Stall details

 * Stall map
 * Stall #102

Volunteers needed for Exhibition stall
Please list your name to volunteer for the Wikipedia stall.

MikeLynch - Available on 9th OR 10th, as I explained to Arun.

Learning from the event
The following are learnings from the recent exhibit stall we had at the World Sanskrit Book fair:


 * These exhibitions tend to draw lot of crowds and can be very exhausting.
 * There needs to be 4 volunteers at a given time in the stall.
 * Volunteers need to be in shifts of 2 hours to be effective and retain energy reserves.
 * Most of the questions in event like these are general awareness, what they can do as readers, how they need to do if they need to contribute (whom to contact). Discussions will not be very technical. (except in the cases of very few visitors)
 * Having pamphlets is a great help with the links to wikimedia.in, Sanskrit wikipedia and other projects, India meetup page. We struggled writing the links through the 2 days as we did not have any pamphlets.
 * We now have the banners from the W10 event in Bangalore. These will be of great use.
 * Take the wikireader, it generates a lot of interest.
 * Suggest 3-4 laptops with a data card each. This is better than using a single projector. We did not use a projector. One to one discussions are most effective.
 * Take a a few notebooks to write down contacts of people who want help to become contributors.
 * You will also run into people who would want to give away content they have created to wikipedia. This is as always a great opportunity.
 * From our past experience, the volunteers knowing wikipedia (even using is good). Key messages to communicate can be shared with the team. The general public is not very well informed on specifics of wikipedia except being aware. Many may not know about it in Indian languages.
 * The volunteers need the ability to communicate and relate to the varied audience and backgrounds. This is the most important skill than even being insightful.
 * Have at least one senior wikipedian in the stall to answer the difficult or detailed questions.
 * Overlap some volunteers across days to carry the learning and experience of earlier days across subsequent days.
 * There maybe other stalls of similar projects. It is important to have messaging to differentiate these from wikimedia projeects.