Monday, April 2, 2012

Wikipedia Outreach Session @ NIT Agartala


I was in Agartala for an outreach session of Wikipedia. Here's a quick wrap around of my visit:

My flight landed nearly at 5pm evening, a fine breeze was flowing and there was Nikhil, waiting for me outside. Nikhil & Aveek has been co-ordinating the whole event.  
The NIT campus was nearly 45-50mins journey via car (trust me its quite long, but you'll love the natural beauty you get to see even when the sun is falling down). 


The following day comprised of two events primarily, a lecture by Dr. D.Udaya Kumar, asst. Prof, IIT Guwahati (The man behind the Indian currency symbol) follwed by the Wiki workshop. I started off with the basic meaning of the term 'Wiki+pedia' then informed them about the Wikimedia Foundation & its projects. As the presentation moved forward, lots of queries started to pour in. It was nice to see that everyone did little bit of googling on Wikipedia before attending the workshop which made it easier for me to explain. 




Along with normal queries on pages created & the 'neutral point of view', the SOPA issue was also raised & I had to explain how its going to affect Wikipedia. I tried to be as clear as possible regarding the copyright vios as they have been an issue through out the India Education project. In the edit session we had lots of fun together editing, though the Wifi connection was troubling us, we managed to do quite a bit of editing. 




I have created a wikiacademy page on this (still updating the 53 participants list..) : http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Wiki_Academy/National_Institute_of_Technology_Agartala


P.S: It was an honour having Dr. D. Udaya Kumar in the Workshop, he was very much interested in Wikipedia. He promised me to help us in organising a similar workshop in IIT Guwahati..:)

Sth I like...:)