VVIT WikiConnect/Activities/2018-2019

#1Lib1Ref session (Annamayya Library)

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Group photograph, #1Lib1Ref session at Annamayya Library, Guntur

On 3 June 2018, the event commenced at 8:30 am with a round of introductions among the participants and introduction to #1lib1ref by the trainer (User:KCVelaga & User:Pavan Santhosh (CIS-A2K). As the participants were a mix of both new and experienced users, they're divided into two groups. The group of experienced users comprised members from VVIT WikiConnect. This group was briefed about using Standard footnote template for citing various pages at different instances from books. The members picked up books from the library and used them to add citations + improve the content of Wikipedia articles. On a parallel track, for newly registered users started with basics. The tools, Citation Hunter and Wikipedia citation tool for Google books, were demonstrated jointly for both groups. The participants had a hands-on session for a couple of hours.

For further information, see 1Lib1Ref Guntur 2018 on P&E Dashboard.

Wiki Awareness Session(s)

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Wiki Awareness Session, Coordinators Group photo

After the club was formally launched, this was the first event in college. Instead of organizing training sessions in the first place, which we felt are not very effective from our experience in the previous academic year, it was first decided to conduct awareness sessions and then follow up with those students who were interested in continuing. Two awareness sessions were held, the first on 22 June 2018 and the second on 29 June 2018. A total of 93 students attended these sessions where they were introduced to the history of the encyclopedia, the rise of Wikipedia and its sister projects, how it works and the fact that "You can [edit]!".

Wikidata Workshop 1

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Participants group photo

The first training session on Wikidata for the academic year was conducted on 5 July 2018 following up from the Wiki Awareness Session on 22 June 2018. The participants were explained why Wikidata was developed in the first place, followed by how to edit Wikidata. Metrics: 31 participants made 1.02K edits to 247 items by adding 258K bytes.

Wikidata Workshop 2

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Wikidata Workshop 2: Participants group photo

The second Wikidata workshop was conducted on 19 July 2018 (as a followup to the awareness session on 29 June 2018). The participants were explained why Wikidata was developed in the first place, followed by how to edit Wikidata. The session was mentored by Suswetha Kolluru, Sumanth Javvaji, Nivas Ramisetty and Navya Muppavarapu. Metrics: 29 participants made 1.75K edits to 522 items by adding 448K bytes.

Wikidata Editing Campaign (July 2018)

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To induce the spirit of contributing to Wikimedia projects, an eight-day online Wikidata editing campaign was conducted to all the attendees of the two previous workshops. The campaign started at 12:00 pm on 22 July 2018 and ended at 12:00 pm on 29 July 2018. The top five contributors were given books and a few goodies as a token of appreciation. Metrics: 26 participants made 6.01K edits to 1.37K items (+creating 19 items) by adding 2.13M bytes.

Indian Independence Day 2018 Label-a-thon (Offline event)

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VIVA-VVIT Independence day Label-a-thon

On the mark of 72nd Independence Day, a national Label-a-thon was conducted from 15 to 19 August with the objective of improving labels, descriptions, and aliases in primary languages for items related to Indian topics. As a part of the national campaign, an onsite event was conducted on 16 August 2018 at VVIT. The event began at 8:30 am and concluded at 4:00 pm. Sixteen students took part in the event and improved labels primarily in Telugu and Hindi. The session was mentored by Krishna Chaitanya and Tito Dutta.

During the campaign period (15-19 Aug 2018): Participants (16) from this onsite event made 10.1K edits to 3.32K items by adding 1.15M bytes. Note: These edits are mostly to the labels of Wikidata items. User:B leelasai, User:MNavya, and User:Sumanth699, made it to lists of national wide top contributors to this label-a-thon.

English Wikipedia Training Program

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English Wikipedia Training Program is an on-going training program on English Wikipedia. We're experimenting with a new model of training newbies on English Wikipedia. Shifting from the model of a regular Edit-a-thon, which generally introduces all the concepts in one go, in this program, ten to fifteen trainees will be trained for about a month on various aspects of English Wikipedia, in several online sessions. Each session will be about 1–3 hrs, depending on the training syllabus. Sessions will be scheduled such that there is sufficient time for the trainees to work on the topics from the previous session. Sixteen people took part in this program, and the following articles were created;

Meetup at Annamayya Library

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On 9 September 2018, User:KCVelaga, User:MNavya, User:Pavan Santhosh (CIS-A2K), and User:Sumanth699, gathered 3 hrs for an informal meetup at Annammyaa Library, Guntur. During the meetup during a discussion with Annamayya Library officials, they agreed to host Wikimedia events and provide space for meetups, edit-a-thons, etc. We also discussed the possible outreach activities that can be done at VVIT and introducing students to various Wikimedia projects including Wiktionary and Wikisource. There was a brief review discussion on the activities conducted to date, and how they those can be done better.

GLAM meetings in Amaravathi

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As an initial step to start GLAM activities in and around Guntur, User:KCVelaga, User:Nivas10798, and User:Sumanth699, visited and conducted discussions with the officials of three museums in and around Vijayawada and Guntur, on 20 September 2018. Summaries of the three meetings are as follows:

WWWW 2018 Edit-a-thon (Onsite event)

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VVIT WikiConnect students editing articles on Telugu Wikipedia

As part of the Wiki Women for Women Wellbeing's month-long edit-a-thon conducted by women from different parts India and Maithili communities of Nepal, 13 students from VVIT participated in a two-day onsite edit-a-thon held on 19–20 October 2018. The event began at 9:00 am and ended at 6:00 pm on both the days. On the first day, the event was conducted at Annamayya Library, and the second day at Teas & Trees, both in Guntur. Students were introduced to editing in Telugu. Sixteen articles were created and edited related to women and health on Telugu Wikipedia. The event was organized by Navya Muppavarapu and Suswetha Kolluru.

For further information, see WWWWW 2018 (Telugu) on P&E Dashboard.

Hockey World Cup Edit-a-thon (Onsite event)

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Participants Group Photograph

Hockey World Cup 2018 Edit-a-thon was a group of series of on-site edit-a-thons planned in collaboration with the Sports Department of Government of Odisha, The Centre for Internet and Society and Odia Wikimedians User Group with a goal to improve and create articles on the sports of hockey in Indian languages. VVIT WikiConnect organized a Hockey World Cup 2018 Edit-a-thon onsite edit-a-thon on 15 November 2018 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm in Guntur. It was focused on improving Wikidata items related to Hockey, primarily associated with India and its players. The event was organized by User:Nivas10798.

For further information, see VVIT HCUP Edit-a-thon 2018 on P&E Dashboard.

F1H20 Photo-walk (Vijayawada)

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Formula 1 Powerboat World Championship is an international motorboat racing competition for powerboats organised by the Union Internationale Motonautique. As a part of the international championship, GrandPrix of India was held in Amaravathi, the de facto capital city of Andhra Pradesh, from 16 to 18 November 2019. The club collaborated with Andhra Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation (APTDC), who was in charge of the event, to organise a photo-walk. KCVelaga and Sumanth699 held initial discussions with APTDC officials on 12 November 2018, and following that a photo walk was conducted during the main event days. Sixty images and three videos have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons as a part of the photo-walk, all of which can be seen at c:Category:VVITWC F1H20 Photowalk 2018.

Wiki Advanced Training

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Group photograph of participants with Asaf Bartov

Asaf Bartov's visited India in December 2018, for several Wikimedia activities across India, including Project Tiger Training 2018 in Amritsar and Advanced Wikidata Training 2018 in Mumbai. During his visit, VVIT WikiConnect, along with the support from CIS-A2K, organised a two-day advanced Wiki-training workshop on 11–12 December 2018, for its students editors at VVIT, who have been contributing to Wikimedia projects for the past one year. The first day of the workshop kicked off with a discussion around the Neutral Point Of View (NPOV), where Asaf mentioned some key points to remember with regards to NPOV. This was followed by a hands-on session, where the participants were provided to various instances to decide check for neutrality and other guidelines. Before that, there was a talk on the use of Wikidata beyond Wikimedia projects. Post-lunch, the entire day was dedicated to learning the basics of using SPARQL to query Wikidata. Following that, some of the participants build some queries which may be seen on this page. On the second day, some issues from the practice queries were discussed and rectified. Following that, Asaf demonstrated several tools that help Wikidata editors. These are TABernacle, Listeria, QuickStatements, and Wikipedia+Wikdiata tools on Google Sheets. Before concluding the two-day workshop, Asaf delivered a talk on Wikimedia and Education to the faculty and college management. It was attended by more than 25 staff members from various departments. Asaf also interacted with the college's chairman.

#1Lib1Ref session

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On 26 January 2019, #1Lib1Ref session was organised in Guntur as a part of the global campaign. The event commenced at 9:30 am with an introduction to #1lib1ref by User:KCVelaga. As the participants were already experienced Wikimedians, the event started off quickly. Citation Hunt and various categories from English Wikipedia related to problematic references were used. The event continued till 4:30 pm in the event. An additional hashtag (#vvitwc) in addition to (#1lib1ref) was used to specifically track edits to citations from this event. Eight participants fixed/added 158 citations from 106 pages on English Wikipedia.

For further information, see #vvitwc on Wikimedia hashtag search

Wikidata Workshop 3

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The third Wikidata workshop conducted on 25th January 2019. The participants were explained why Wikidata was developed in the first place, followed by how to edit Wikidata. The session was mentored by Nivas Ramisetty, Sumanth Javvaji, Suswetha Kolluru and Navya Muppavarapu. Metrics: 23 participants made 901 edits to 146 items by adding 296K bytes.

Mini-MediaWiki Training

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VVIT WikiConnect with the support from CIS-A2K organised a three-day workshop on MediaWiki and other technical spaces of Wikimedia projects. The participante were active members of the Wiki-club, 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, and also increase participation at Indic-TechCom.

 
Srishti Sethi's remote presentation on Wikimedia technical spaces

The entire training program had been spread over two remote-online sessions and one onsite workshop for three days, in which ten students took part. The first online session was conducted on 6 January 2019, during which several areas and concepts related to Wikimedia tech were discussed. These included an overview of technical areas for contribution, developer account, introduction to Phabricator, and MediaWiki, alongwith its installation on a local machine. On 19 January, the second online included discussion around Object-Oriented Javascript (OOjs), OOUI, PHP, and creation of a simple PHP web app.

The main workshop (on site) was conducted for three days, from 21 to 23 February. Jayprakash12345 led the training, along with the support from Tito (CIS-A2K). Day 1 of the training was largely spent on revising the points discussed during the two online sessions. Day 2 of the workshop was kicked off by a remote-talk by SSethi (WMF). It was followed by a demonstration and hands-on session on creating manual extensions on local machines, using OOUI in MediaWiki, creating widgets, HTML form. Before closing, the participants along with trainers brainstormed on taking this training forward, and how further follow-ups should be planned. On Day 3, the participants were introduced to Gerrit, and took up various pre-created tasks on Phabricator and worked on them. Before the closing, each participant worked on at least one task. All of these have been listed in the following table;

 
Group photograph
User name Task Number User name Task Number
Asrija1 Nivas10798
Harika Mekala Sumanth699
B leelasai Sri Lekha Pathakamuri
Naga sai sravanth SuswethaK
MNavya Ananth subray

Wikipedia Tales dubbing project (into Telugu)

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As a part of the New Readers Inspire campaign, Wikilover90 produced an animation video to increase awareness about Punjabi Wikipedia. We took up a project to dub this into Telugu language, thereby promoting Wikipedia among Telugu speakers. The dubbing had been done in three phases. In the first phase, we translated the subtitles from English to Telugu. In the second phase, we learnt about recording techniques for refining the voice, using equipment and software to integrate that into a video. In the third phase, we completed the rehearsal and documentation. MNavya led the project, while technical support was provided by Gnana Sreekar. The video published on Wikimedia Commons on 20 April 2019 and can be seen at c:File:Wikipedia Tales (Telugu version).webm.

Experience Survey

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The Wiki-club started forming with the first ever edit-a-thon in college in September 2017. Though we are working and based in an educational system, have several workshops and skill-building activities for students, the work and our plan are not the regular Wikipedia Education Program, which has definite learning objectives. Though club functions as an extra-curricular aspect, it has produced several editors who are actively contributing to various Wikimedia projects. Following the suggestion from Tito (CIS-A2K), we have launched and completed to survey to understand how the entire experience of being involved with Wikimedia has been to these active editors. MNavya and Nivas10798 led the project, and took the support of Esh77 to design the survey. Twelve students participated in the survey—Asrija1, B leelasai, Eswar Prabhat, Mekala Harika, MNavya, Naga sai sravanth, Nivas10798, Sreemanognyan, Sri Lekha Pathakamuri, Sriram ishnudatta, Sumanth699, and SuswethaK. Though the list of respondents was made public, the responses will be kept anonymous. Binary responses were ignored. Read the full report at VVIT WikiConnect/Activities/Wikimedia Experience Survey 2019.

SVG Translation Campaign 2019 in India (Onsite event)

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SVG Translation Campaign 2019 in India is a 38-day long campaign to translate the SVG files into Indian languages for use of regional language Wikipedias. As a part of the campaign, we organised an onsite event on 31 March. During the event, we discussed about vector graphics and SVG files, how to use Inkscape to translate the files, uploading the files to Wikimedia Commons, and participating in the campaign. Eleven students participated in the event, and translated thirty-eight SVG files on that day.

For further information, see https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/VVIT_WIkiConnect/STC19_Onsite_(March_2019)

Annual Meeting

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Annual Meeting of the club was conducted on 31 March 2019. The objective of the meeting was to bring as many members of the club together to discuss the activities that were conducted during this annual plan. The event kicked off with a general introduction and followed by a review of activities conducted in 2018–2019. While we discussed these, we discussed why did we do a certain activity, the lesson learnt, what different would we be during next year. During these conversations, members were introduced to several programs and projects of the large Wikimedia movement, such as GLAM, TWL, gender gap initiatives etc. Before concluding elections for the next batch of coordinators for the academic year 2019–2020 were held. In the elections, six nominations were received in total, and finally four users—User:Naga sai sravanth, User:Asrija1, User:I'm Irfan, User:Mekala Harika, have been elected and appointed as the coordinators for upcoming academic year.

 
Annual Meeting 2019 Group Photograph