St Aloysius University - Wikipedia Students Association
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Introduction
[edit]About the Wiki Club
The Wiki Club – St Aloysius University, formerly known as the Wikipedia Students Association, is a student-driven initiative dedicated to fostering a culture of open knowledge, collaborative learning, digital literacy, and active participation in the global Wikimedia movement. Established in 2014, the initiative initially began with a focused effort to encourage students to contribute to Kannada Wikipedia. Over the years, it has grown into a broader Wikimedia initiative, with students actively contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects in Kannada, English, and other Indian languages.
The initiative is supported by St Aloysius (Deemed to be University), Mangaluru, with faculty members who have expertise in Wikimedia platforms guiding and mentoring students. With institutional support and collaboration with the wider Wikimedia community, the Wiki Club provides students with opportunities to not only access and consume knowledge but also actively create, improve, preserve, and share freely accessible knowledge with the world. The university's official website is St Aloysius (Deemed to be University).
The Wiki Club encourages students to develop their research, writing, editing, communication, digital, and technical skills through a wide range of activities, including edit-a-thons, workshops, training programmes, outreach initiatives, documentation projects, and Wikimedia campaigns. These activities provide students with practical opportunities to contribute to the preservation and dissemination of regional knowledge, history, culture, literature, heritage, and other areas of academic and social importance.
Students actively contribute to various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Meta-Wiki, and other Wikimedia platforms. While Kannada Wikipedia remains an important area of the Club's activities, students now contribute extensively to English Wikipedia and other Indian-language Wikimedia projects, thereby expanding the availability of reliable and freely accessible knowledge across linguistic communities.
A distinctive feature of the Wiki Club is its integration with academic learning and the university curriculum. Students are provided structured opportunities to work on Wikimedia projects within classrooms, computer laboratories, and other academic settings. Through these activities, students learn research methodology, source evaluation, content creation, copyright and free licensing, digital publishing, collaborative editing, and responsible knowledge sharing. In relevant courses, Wikimedia contributions are also incorporated into academic assessment, with students' participation and the quality of their contributions being evaluated as part of their academic work.
The Club also places particular emphasis on documenting and preserving regional and underrepresented knowledge. Students undertake projects that bring local history, culture, literature, traditions, personalities, places, biodiversity, and other forms of knowledge into the digital public domain. By documenting such subjects and making them available through Wikimedia platforms, the Wiki Club contributes to ensuring that local knowledge is preserved and made accessible to a global audience.
From its beginnings in Kannada Wikipedia in 2014, the initiative has evolved into a vibrant university-based Wikimedia community working across multiple languages and projects. Through the collective efforts of students and faculty, the Wiki Club continues to promote the principles of open knowledge, collaboration, digital literacy, academic learning, and community participation, empowering students to become responsible contributors to the global knowledge ecosystem.
Vision
To develop a vibrant student community that contributes to a free, reliable, inclusive, multilingual, and globally accessible knowledge ecosystem, while developing students' academic, research, digital, creative, and collaborative skills.
Mission
The mission of the Wiki Club is to integrate Wikimedia-based learning and knowledge creation into higher education by empowering students and faculty to collaboratively document, improve, preserve, and disseminate knowledge through open platforms.
The club particularly aims to promote the representation of Indian languages, regional history, culture, heritage, biodiversity, literature, and local knowledge on global Wikimedia platforms.
Objectives of the Wiki Club
- To promote a culture of open knowledge, collaborative learning, and knowledge sharing among students.
- To encourage students to actively contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in Kannada, English, and other Indian languages.
- To develop students' research, writing, editing, critical thinking, digital literacy, and information-evaluation skills.
- To integrate Wikimedia-based learning and knowledge creation into classroom teaching, laboratory sessions, assignments, projects, and academic activities.
- To document, preserve, and promote local history, culture, heritage, folk arts, literature, biodiversity, and traditional knowledge through open platforms.
- To provide practical training in Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Meta-Wiki, photography, digitisation, media production, and digital documentation.
- To create awareness about copyright, Creative Commons licensing, reliable sources, plagiarism, attribution, and responsible digital citizenship.
- To encourage student-led projects, edit-a-thons, workshops, competitions, outreach programmes, and interdisciplinary Wikimedia activities.
- To connect students and faculty with the Wikimedia community, educators, researchers, institutions, and open-knowledge organisations for learning and collaboration.
- To empower students to become active creators and contributors to the global knowledge ecosystem by producing accurate, reliable, inclusive, and freely accessible knowledge resources.
Presidents
[edit]Activities
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