A workshop to improve Telugu Wikipedia articles on Nobel laureates

Spanned for three days—from August 16 through 18—54 students from the department of Telugu, Botany, Statistics and Physics edited articles related to Nobel laureates, improved the content quality and inserted images that were already there in Wikimedia Commons. There was a great balance of equal participation in the number of female and male students. During this sprint 124 existing articles on Telugu Wikipedia were improved and 118 of them saw images being added. Though it was challenging for me to manage so many participants, I was partly successful in mentoring some of the students who in turn helped their friends with basic editing.

Apart from educating the students about editing Wikipedia, I demonstrated about digitising “Kavitvatattva Vicharam”, a book authored by by Kattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy in 1913 and is considered as the first modern literary criticism in Telugu literature, on Telugu Wikisource. Some of the students tried to proof-read the book for the first time.

There is a plan laid out to work with a small subset of these participating students again for different kind of academic-centric projects like the QRpedia project. To keep the activity more regular, the students are are creating the missing Botany-related articles. We are hoping to work with remaining students at least once in every quarter.A few recommendations for bettering the students’ understanding of Wikipedia and the community that Telugu Wikipedian User:Chaduvari had shared earlier came quite useful during this event. Based on his inputs I did my best elaborating the [Wikipedia] project structure and community dynamics to the new editors. Another long time Wikimedian Rajasekhar followed up on the Wikisource activity remotely. B. Manikantha, a students from the Arts department shares, “Until now I always had a notion that Wikipedia might be some sort of entertainment website where we can listen to music and play games. But after attending this workshop I could understand how great it is as a learning platform. Also I learnt about one of our professors Dr. Gumma Sambashivarao who is a noted author, and how the articles about more such authors could be made available online in our language.” “It was fun translating articles in my favourite subject—war. I’m hoping to continue my contributions further”, he adds.

More details in the event page on Telugu Wikipedia.