VVIT WikiConnect/Annual Report/2019-2020

Overview and learning

Coordinators orientation and training

Description	On 10 and 11 June 2019, training was conducted for the second batch of coordinators of the club, users— Asrija, Irfan, Harika and Sravanth. During the training, coordinators were introduced to various aspects of organizing workshops, outreach activities, maintaining the club, etc. During the training past coordinators and present coordinators were involved. Divided the annual plan into four different courses for the first semester. The courses are Wikidata, Telugu Wikisource, MediaWiki and Wikimedia Commons through photo walks. Wikidata Training Course was handled by Navya and Sravanth. Telugu Wikisource training course was handled by Asrija and Harika. MediaWiki was handled by Sumanth and Irfan. Photo walk was handled by Nivas. All the training courses occurred parallelly and sessions were organised by respective coordinators of the course.
Observations	As there were different coordinators for different courses more events were organized in a given time. As there were only two coordinators for a course it was difficult to handle the sessions and achieve qualitative outcomes as expected.
What would you do differently next time?	In the coming year, we incline towards sticking with only one training course i.e, Wikidata Training Course, throughout the year. This will help in providing enough time and nurture coordination between upcoming coordinators to organize events productively.

Wiki Awareness Sessions

Description

Wiki Awareness Sessions are to let the students know about Wikimedia movement and also about club. We used our college's student app, social media channels, class-to-class announcement, and promotional posters to notify people. We created a google form and shared it among students to register for the awareness sessions. During awareness sessions, apart from explaining about Wikimedia and just about the club, we also explained the whole annual plan, the activities that the club will be doing during the academic year. Also, we asked students to register their interest in specific activities of the annual plan, rather than a general interest in Wikimedia. This helped us to reach to the right people for a certain activity.

Observations

After extensive promotions reasonable number of students attended the awareness session. After the session we sent a registration from to the students to choose a course of their interest. A separate registration form was sent the students for course they were interested. The response of the forms were validated carefully and reasonable amount of students were selected to the courses.

Wikidata training course

First Online Session on 26 July 2019

Description

This session was led by Naga Sai Sravanth and Navya Muppavarapu. The session is divided into two parts. In the first half of the session, the participants were introduced to the Wikimedia movement, Wikipedia, and its sister projects in brief. In the second part of the session, the participants were introduced to Wikidata, the structure of Wikidata, and explained the differences between Wikipedia and Wikidata. During the session, they were explained about P values and Q values in Wikidata, and a hands-on exercise was done during the session. At the end of the session, they were given some tasks regarding P values and Q values. These tasks were expected to be completed before the start of the next session.

Observations

All the participants attended the first online session. The participants were very interested in editing Wikidata. During the session, the hands-on exercise regarding P and Q values went very interactive. The participants were given some tasks and all of them completed the tasks 3 days ahead of the deadline. For most of the participants, it was the first online session. So it took some time for them to adjust to the online environment.

First Offline Session on 1 August 2019

Description

This was a day-long session from 8 am to 3:30 pm. After a quick recap of the previous session, all the participants created their user pages. Participants were explained about user pages, talk pages on Wiki, and also how to respond to messages on talk pages. Later, the participants were explained about the labels section of Wikidata. They practiced editing labels with the help of the Wikidata tour on items. Later they were assigned with few labels to edit hands-on during the session. As a follow-up, participants were assigned with few wikidata items which do not have labels in the Telugu Language and were asked to fill them.

Observations

All the participants got welcome messages on their talk pages of Wikidata. We explained to participants how to respond to talk pages. We asked them to reply to the welcome messages on their talk pages. Most of them understood how to edit the label part of the section. Also, the Wikidata tour on items helped as rough work for the participants to edit the label part. The session focused on labels. Some of the participants made mistakes while adding descriptions and aliases. They added description and aliases in their point of view which are sometimes not acceptable. These errors were found and reverted back. Few participants with only minimal knowledge in non-mother tongue languages added label parts with errors. These errors were also reverted.

Second Offline session on 17 August 2019

Description

This session was a half-day long from 9 am to 1 pm. The participants were explained about statements, properties, values, and references. The participants were given a brief on sources and their types (primary, secondary, and tertiary). Participants added a few references during the session.

Observations

On the mark of 73rd Independence day, a national datathon was conducted with the objective of improving labels, descriptions, aliases in primary languages for items related to Indian topics. As a part of the national campaign, a 24-hour datathon was organized. In this session adding data to the items and adding references were explained. In this datathon, 2 editors from our club made it to the top 5 contributors, and 7 editors made it to the top 10 contributors. The session was focussed on adding statements and references. But because of the 24 hours datathon, all the participants concentrated on adding labels than adding references to the items. Few participants were unable to identify the differences between reliable and unreliable sources. Hence they added unreliable sources as references. These references were reverted back later.

Online Session 2 on 22 September 2019

Description

This was an hour-long session. As most of the participants were unable to differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources this session was held to help them. The participants were explained about reliable sources and explained in detail about primary, secondary and tertiary sources, and how to use them as references.

Observations

This session was a follow up to the offline session 2. References in detail were explained to the participants and Tasks were given to the participants. We made the task as “REFERENCE HUNT” where each participant needs to collect 50 reliable sources. This session was actually delayed because of exams and Youth Strategy Salon organized by the club. Participants were not comfortable with the topic. Only two participants submitted the assignments given to them. Even after the session, there were exams till mid-November and it became difficult to follow up.

Overall observation on the course

The Wikidata Training Course started with good participation from the students. First online and offline sessions were successful. The second offline session failed to produce the output that was intended. The next online session was delayed and because of exams and further follow became difficult. For future sessions, we needed help from a resource person. We tried to contact a few resource persons and they were not able to attend the physical offline event and the sessions got canceled because of too much delay. We tried for an online session, but because of some technical issues, the online session was canceled. At the end, we were done only with 2 offline and 2 online sessions without providing the participants with complete knowledge of wikidata.

Telugu Wikisource training course

First online session on 20 July 2019

Description	In this session, different Wikimedia projects were introduced, and participants were made aware of the basics and different tools of Telugu Wikisource. Participants were made aware of the course plan and were asked to create their accounts. This session had 20 participants and was led by Harika and Asrija on 20 July 2019 from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm.
Observations	All the participants attended the session and were interested in undergoing the course. Some of the participants asked queries and expressed their interest regarding the course and the session went interactive. Few participants were not able to clear their doubts on the course plan due to their network connectivity issues. But their doubts were solved later on through one on one discussion.

First offline session on 22 and 23 July 2019

Description

The first offline Session was taken over by External resource person, Pavan Santhosh User:Pavan santhosh.s from CIS-A2K which went for two days 22, 23 July 2019 from 8:30 am to 3:30 pm conducted at VVIT college with 20 participants. On day 1, Pavan discussed the introduction for Wikisource, brief copyrights, overall view of Wikisource and examples, the process of editing Wikisource, OCR, and Proofreading. On Day 2, Pavan discussed uploading books to Wikimedia Commons, Distributing index pages, and adding basic templates.

Observations

The session was very interactive. Showing examples while explaining each topic and clarifying doubts immediately made participants participate actively. After an explanation of each topic, participants worked on practicing the topic, hence providing hands-on experience for them. The voice of the trainer was not audible to all the students which created some time lag in the session. The venue chosen was not so comfortable for the participants.

Second offline session on 21 August 2019

Description

The second offline session is a follow-up session conducted at Annamayya Library, Guntur with 15 participants led by Harika and Asrija on 21 August 2019 from 10:30 am to 4:30 pm. In this session, participants are made to work on tasks assigned to them, and verification of the tasks is done. In this session, each participant was allotted a book of a particular author (Adivi Bapiraju) and was made to upload their respective books into Wikimedia commons. The topics discussed in the previous session were revised to make participants comfortable. Participants were taught how to respond to talk page messages.

Observations

All participants in the session were completely interactive and everyone cleared their doubts on topics discussed. Each participant was able to upload a book into Wikimedia Commons and work on the book on Telugu Wikisource. Few participants were not able to attend the session as it was planned a day before. Few participants made mistakes and they were corrected later.

Third offline session on 9 September 2019

Description

The third offline session was taken over by External resource person, Pavan Santhosh (Username: Pavan santhosh.s) from CIS-A2K on 9 September 2019 from 10:30 am to 4:30 pm at Annamayya Library, Guntur with 17 participants. In this session, Pavan discussed adding complex templates, annotations, and preparing index pages for the book. Participants were made to add complex templates and annotations on pages they are editing from the start. Participants also prepared index pages for their allotted books in the previous session.

Observations

Participants were very active and interactive in the session as they got hands-on experience to work on their respective books. All the participants were able to clear their doubts on advanced tools in Telugu Wikisource.

MediaWiki training course

First online session on 11 September 2019

Description

The first online session was conducted on 11 Sep 2019. In which the participants were briefly explained about Wikimedia Movement, Wikimedia Foundation, and all its projects, during which several areas and concepts related to Wikimedia tech were discussed. Vasanth addressed the 1st online session. These included an overview of technical areas for contribution, developer account, introduction to Phabricator, Gerrit, and MediaWiki.

Observations

All the 16 participants attended the session with great enthusiasm. They were quite interactive and were interested to know things. There was a lot of trouble with network connectivity issues. Due to which participants were unable to concentrate on the session. They were unable to understand the working of Phabricator, gerrit, and MediaWiki totally, which of course were cleared in the next session.

Second online session on 21 September 2019

Description	The Second online session was on 21 September 2019. This session included the installation of MediaWiki on a local machine, which involves the creation of a developer account, generation of SSH key, linking SSH key to Gerrit account, cloning MediaWiki core to the local system. Rammanoj addressed the second online session.
Observations	Participants cleared doubts from the last session. Some were able to complete the installation of MediaWiki on their local machines. All the participants attended the session. Similar to the first online session, this session also had severe network connectivity issues, which again disturbed the concentration of participants. Some were unable to follow this process of installing MediaWiki.

Offline sessions on 25-27 September 2019

Description

The main workshop (on-site) was conducted for three days, from 25th to 27th September 2019. Vasanth and Rammanoj led the training. Day1 of the training included follow up of two online sessions, doubts clarification, hands-on MediaWiki Bug tracker phabricator and later adding skins, adding a logo, adding extensions to MediaWiki on the local machine. Day 2 of the workshop started with userscripts, later creating gadgets after adding Gadgets extension. Participants are made to create userscripts, and then later the same user scripts are made as gadgets and are added in Gadgets. A brief explanation about Maintenance scripts. Later that day the participants had a hands-on session OOUIs and OOJs and after that Vasanth explained how to use gerrit and how to submit a patch. On Day 3, Vasanth again revised on how to submit patches. After that participants were thought to create a Basic Extension, they were introduced to internationalization and localization. Later that day Rammanoj explained MediaWiki Action API and also introduced to MediaWiki cloud services Tool Forge and how to deploy tools in cloud services. Before closing the session, participants were also told about Indic-TechCom.

Observations

In the offline sessions, participants interacted with the resource persons quite well and clarified their doubts, completed the installation of MediaWiki, and were able to follow along quite well. They were interested in taking things forward. Participants were not so good with JavaScript and PHP so they had a hard time understanding some topics. This also affected their interest a little bit.

Overall observation on the course

Having a course plan, dividing syllabus and planning sessions according to it worked out quite well. There was a considerable amount of time for the trainers to look into each topic. Awareness campaign helped in gathering participants in this newly introduced course in our college by VVIT WikiConnect. During online sessions, there was a lot of trouble with network connectivity issues. Participants felt a lot of disturbance and were not able to totally concentrate on the session. This happened during both online sessions. When it comes to offline sessions, they have been at a quite rough time during internal lab examinations in our college, leading 3 of our participants to drop. As it was a busy time in our college then, we even had issues with lab availability and projector sometimes. Due to the unavailability of resource persons for a while and thereafter starting the course a bit later than we planned affected the interest of participants a little bit. Participants were not so good with JavaScript and PHP so they had a hard time understanding some topics.

What can be done better?

Pre-Training on JavaScript and PHP would have helped them a lot. Check the availability of resource persons and make sure we plan sessions earlier rather than at crucial times in college academics. To conclude, it all started well with participants showing so much interest. But eventually, be it due to conducting sessions lately, or participants having no prior knowledge in PHP and js, or for any other reason, it did not go as planned.

Project Tiger 2.0 edit-a-thons

Event on 28 November 2019

Description

These edit-a-thons were conducted as part of Project Tiger 2.0, an online writing contest organized by WMF. Project Tiger 2.0 is aimed to create and improve new articles in Indic language Wikipedias. In order to participate in the contest and improve the content on Telugu Wikipedia, few members from the club joined together on 28 November 2019 for a one-day edit-a-thon. The event began at 10.00 AM and concluded at 5.00 PM with 7 participants. Each participant created 1-2 articles and submitted them to the contest’s fountain tool.

Observations

The event went on smoothly as the objective was clear and the majority of the participants were familiar about the contest and editing Wikipedia. 1-2 participants who weren’t familiar with the Telugu Wikipedia writing style ended up submitting articles that later got rejected.

Event on 7 December 2019

Description

A second edit-a-thon as part of Project Tiger 2.0 was conducted on 7 December in the college. This was a 24-hour edit-a-thon with 45 participants that started at 11.00 AM on 7 December and ended at 11.00 AM on 8 December. Participants were explained about Telugu Wikipedia, references, article writing style, translations, and about the contest on the whole before the edit-a-thon started. Few participants in this edit-a-thon belong to Wikidata training course and Telugu Wikisource training course. There were more editors who were new to Wiki.

Observations

Though the participants were asked to make sure of the quality of articles before publishing the translated articles, no one paid heed to it as they took it as a competition. This happened because most of the editors were new to Telugu Wikipedia. Hence, even if the number of articles created is more, 90% of them ended up being deleted.