CIS-A2K/Events/Wiki Advanced Training/2018

Wiki Advanced Training or WAT is a residential training workshop for experienced Wikipedians from India. The theme for 2018 program is Wikipedia content creation and improvement (advanced). The training aims to groom experienced Wikipedia editors from Indic language Wikipedias to write even better quality content on Wikipedia. The program will educate them about different levels of content assessment, global best practices, exploiting information databases etc. 2018 is the first iteration of this program.

Objectives

To optimize contribution and increase skills of Indic Wikimedians
To introduce and initiate best practices across Indic Wikimedia projects with reference to Global projects
Raise awareness towards initiative such as #1Lib1Ref, TWL and use of scripts, gadgets, and Wikimedia tools.
Develop capacity across Indic Wikimedians to participate in events Global hackathon, Wikidatacon

Event details

Dates: 29 June to 1 July 2018
Venue: Le Lac Sarovar
City: Ranchi, India
Etherpad: WAT 2018
Status: Completed

Who should join

Wikimedians from India who are active contributing;
Editors who are interested to learn new skills to improve their editing.

Requirements

The applicants have to fulfill these requirements:

At least 2,000 global edits till 30 April 2018

Plus (not mandatory, but suggested)

At least 500 mainspace edits to home-Wikipedia between 1 November 2017 and 30 April 2018
Articles created or expanded (3x): between 1 November 2017 and 30 April 2018 (please mention a few articles you have created or expanded in the application form)

Participants

Agenda

28 June 2018

6:30 pm to 7:30 pm: Pre-event; Introductions

29 June 2018

Timings	Session	Resource person(s)
10:00 am to 10:15 am	Welcome and introduction to the event	Tanveer & Tito
10:15 am to 10:35 am	World Wide Web and the Wikipedia in general, covers many reading sources such as newspaper, magazine, journal, online encyclopedias; from a reader's and scholar's perspective	Tanveer & Manavpreet
10:35 am to 10:55 am	Hands-on activity	Tanveer & Manavpreet
10:55 am to 11:15 am	Wikipedia article structure	Krishna & Tito
11:15 am to 11:35 am	Hands-on activity
11:35 am to 11:50 am	Tea break
11:50 am to 12:10 pm	Neutral Point of View	Satdeep & Tanveer
12:10 pm to 12:30 pm	Hands-on activity
12:30 pm 12:50 pm	Notability	Tanveer, Tito
12:50 pm to 1:20 pm	Hand-on activity	Tanveer
1:30 pm to 2:00 pm	Lunch
2:00 pm to 2:30 pm	Advanced Google search, Hunting citations from Google books, news, scholar etc.	Tito
2:30 to 4:00 pm	Tools and tricks: Part 1	Jay, Tito & Krishna
4:00 pm to 4:15 pm	Tea break
4:15 pm to 4:30 pm	TWL: Introduction	Krishna
4:30 pm to 5:15 pm	Brainstorming activity	Tanveer & Krishna
5:15 pm to 5:45 pm	Remote call with Felix Nartey and Aaron Vasanth	Krishna
6:00 pm to 6:45 pm	Condolence meeting with User:Bhadani's family

30 June 2018

Timings	Session	Resource person(s)
10:00 am to 10:15 am	Important content creation activities such as Wikipedia Asian Month, Women in Red, Project Tiger, Punjab Edit-a-thon	Rupika & Satdeep
10:15 am to 11:10 am	Brainstorming activity	Tanveer & Tito
11:10 to 11:30 pm	Good articles and DYK	Manavpreet & Krishna
11:30 pm to 12:00 pm	Brainstorming activity	Tanveer & Tito
12:00 to 12:15 pm	Tea break
12:15 pm to 12:35 pm	Verifiability, No original research & Reliable sources	Satdeep & Krishna
12:35 pm to 1:30 pm	Hands on activity
1:30 pm to 2:00 pm	Lunch
2:00 pm to 2:30 pm	Dispute resolutions & noticeboards	Subodh, Krishna & Tito
2:30 pm to 4:00 pm	Tools and Tricks: Part 1 (contd. from Day 1)	Jay & Tito
4:00 pm 4:15 pm	Tea break
4:15 pm to 4:45 pm	Auto Wiki Browser	Jay & Tito
4:45 pm to 6:00 pm	MediaWiki & Phabricator	Jay

1 July 2018

Timings	Session	Resource person(s)
10:00 am ++	Edit-a-thon: Jharkhand people and culture Reflections and learning from previous two days

Tribute/Homage to Bhadani

User:Bhadani passed away earlier this year. He was a prolific contributor to Wikimedia Projects and was a source of inspiration to many of us. We'll pay homage to him and commemorate his contribution and achievement in an evening during the workshop.

FAQ

Will travel and accommodation be taken care of?

Answer: Yes

Can I join for 1-2 days, instead of all 3 days?

Partial participation is not possible.

Please feel free to ask question(s) on the talk page.

Report

Day 0

Day 0 began with an introduction round, followed by an icebreaker activity. During the introduction round, the participants briefly shared about their Wiki-work and their area of interest. During the icebreaker round, participants were given random questions written by some random participant, and some specific questions as well. This helped the participants to get to know each other well.

Day 1

The first day of the event began with an introduction to the program by CIS-A2K team – objectives, background, motivation and expected outcomes. Later the relation between World Wide Web/Internet and Wikipedia was discussed, which included a group activity. During the activity, the participants prepared a list of various sources information that they regularly read to get information. Post activity, there was a discussion on reliability of various sources of information such as blogs, interviews, news articles, press releases etc. It was followed by a session on article structure, during which various components of an article were discussed. This included points on layout of an article, writing an effective lead, sectioning and paragraphing, using links, media files best practices and common mistakes by users. This session went very interactive – participants shared how things work in their communities and their plans adopt best practices. The hands-on activity for this session had the participants to identify structural errors from top viewed pages of their Wikipedias. Some of the most commonly reported errors were untranslated infobox parameters from English, inadequate lead, red links, referencing errors and consistency.

Towards evening tea, there was a session on The Wikipedia Library. The participants were introduced to various program it has and features to offer. Following that a remote call with Felix Nartey and Aaron Vasanth (Global Coordinators; TWL) was conducted. They gave a deeper insight about the objective and vision of TWL, and also suggested various ways to improve TWL activity in India.

The day concluded with a homage ceremony in the memory of User:Bhadani. The family members of Bhadani were invited and felicitated. Wikimedians present cherished his achievements and several of them also their shared experience with him. Two senior Wikimedians who were present as participants for the event were also felicitated to honour their contributions to the movement.

Day 2

The second day began with a session on important content creation activities such as Wikipedia Asian Month

Women in Red
Project Tiger
Punjab Edit-a-thon,

and their best practices. It was followed up by a remote call with Addis Wang (Main organizer of WAM) who explained how huge content improvement campaigns are organised and also welcomed the participants to take part in WAM this year.
Post call, advanced Google search techniques such as using double quotes, site, filetype, intitle, inurl etc, were demonstrated. This was followed by a hands-on session for participants, which also helped to understand how these code-words work for Indic scripts.
After morning tea, tools – Earwig's Copyvio Detector and Duplink – were demonstrated. Participants were also shown stats.wikimedia.org (also v2) and how it can be used to find out statistics for their Wikis. Following that, the good article criteria was discussed. During this good article system on English Wikipedia is shown, and also it was discussed on how it can adopted by Indic Wikipedias. Post evening tea, it was a session on MediaWiki basics with a gentle introduction to phabricator, user scripts, bot, gadgets and enabling extensions on local Wikis.

Day 3

The third day started off with a discussion on reliability of sources; how various types of sources – primary, secondary, tertiary – can be relied upon in various contexts. In the group activity, participants listed the sources they use to write articles in various themes – biographies, science & technology, current affairs (sports & politics), art & literature, history, and discussed their reliability among themselves.

Before lunch brainstorming session about the future roadmap was conducted. It was discussed how the learning from previous two days can be taken forward to improve Indic-language Wikipedias. Some of the ideas include creating ten good articles and build the criteria based on them, mentoring new users on one to one basis, cross-Indic languages collaboration platform (village pump model; like Quora) and a technical (MediaWiki) help desk.