VVIT WikiConnect is a student organization from Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology, located in the vicinity of Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India. It is a college-based club that has been established to promote the concept of Wikimedia movement i.e. the concept of free access to knowledge, among the students and staff of the college. Though the formation of the club was initiated in early 2017 by KCVelaga, it only formed a base after two majortraining workshops on English and Telugu Wikipedias, a photo-walk as a part of Wiki Loves Monuments 2017, a Wikidata workshop, and several on-campus meetups, in late 2017 and early 2018. At the beginning of 2018, a group of students came together to formally establish the club as a student organisation in the college. By the end of the academic year 2017–2018, the club had its first batch of coordinators—MNavya, Nivas10798, Sumanth699, and SuswethaK—elected. The academic year 2018–2019 started with a full-fledged annual plan with a series of activities involving various Wikimedia projects, focused on improving the editor base and building a sustainable model. The annual plan was supported through a rapid grant by WMF, and partly by CIS-A2K. This report speaks about the club's activities, organisation, impact achieved, lessons learnt, and relationships with various entities, during its first official academic year.
Notes for readers
For the sake of convenience and better readability, the report has been written in the first person narrative (we/us). Unless otherwise mentioned, the usage of "we" represents the club, and in the context of conducting activities—the coordinators. By "activities" we mean events and projects such as workshops, edit-a-thons, photo walks, GLAM stuff etc.
Most of the sections have descriptions, observations, and what differently we would be doing next time. Descriptions mostly contain what we did during the particular activity and relevant metrics. Observations speak about our finding why a certain thing worked out or did not work out very well, and also our learning. The last part will speak about how we would be improving in a certain area during our next annual plan. If a section only has the description part, it may be because there are no notable observations and improvements to be made.
The college and most the students (members of this club) are geographically located in the vicinity of Guntur. When it is said on-campus, it represents activities conducted on the college campus, where off-campus means activities conducted out of the college campus, in Guntur or surrounding cities.
By "this year" we mean the academic year for which the annual plan is applicable i.e. June 2018 – April 2019. When it is said next year or next plan, it means the upcoming academic year i.e. May 2019 – April 2020.
Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?
Yes, we met most of our goals, and have also exceeded in several of them. Though we were not able to do all of the activities as mentioned in our original plan, we did well at others, in addition to several activities that were not originally planned. Reasons and scenarios that led to these changes are explained in detail in the later sections of this report.
In 2017, training sessions were conducted by selecting participants using a Google form, which had some brief about Wikimedia at the beginning. Though this approach was OK, we identified that at least 50% of the participants were not having a good understanding of what they had signed up for, further leading to passive participation and poor retention.
To deal with these issues and reduce the potential risks, during this annual plan, we started off the club's activities on the college campus by conducting two mass awareness sessions about Wikimedia projects at the beginning of the academic year. They were conducted on 22 & 29 June 2018. The participants were detailed about the Wikimedia movement, various projects, and the Wiki-club in college. We engaged 100 students in these sessions and followed up with them for further activities.
Observations
This approach worked well than the previous one. Since the students got a basic understanding of how Wikimedia works, and different projects, they were in a good position to decide if they would like to participate in a workshop or not. This helped us for the workshops by attracting students who were actually interested to be a part.
Originally, we thought of conducting training to only those who took part in the awareness sessions. But we did not stick to that considering certain practical issues, such as students being on leave on that particular day, or not being able to make it during that particular hour of the day. However, while selecting students for training workshops, preference had been given to those who took part in the awareness sessions.
What would you do differently next time?
More students will be engaged during the awareness period. This will let us have a better base. To achieve this, we'll be doing extensive promotion before sessions. Previously we only used our college's student app to notify people, but during the upcoming year, social media channels, class-to-class announcement, and promotional posters will also be used.
During an awareness session, apart from explaining about Wikimedia and just about the club, we will also be explaining the whole annual plan, the activities that the club will be doing during the academic year. Also, we will ask students to register their interest in specific activities of the annual plan, rather than a general interest in Wikimedia. This will help us to reach to the right people for a certain activity.
Wikidata makes things easy to recruit new volunteers into Wikimedia projects, compared Wikipedia. As the project is relatively new, easy to understand, and has only a few policies that come in the way of beginners, we focused on Wikdata at the very beginning. After students have spent some time contributing to Wikidata, the transition to other projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other outreach activities, was easy. During this annual plan, we conducted three Wikidata workshops, and the metrics are as follows:
Wikidata provides equal opportunities for students to improve their critical thinking and collaborative skills as Wikipedia does. Especially, when the users move onto advanced stages such as importing datasets and working with bibliographic data, it greatly contributes to their skill development. However, due to the nature of the project, it doesn't add much in terms of writing skills, but it does help students to improve vocabulary in their mother tounges (largely Telugu) while working labels and descriptions of the items. Yes! Wikidata has a huge potential in Wikimedia+Education space.
In order to achieve retention and build leadership, we invited a few top contributors from a workshop to the next iterations. This worked out well. It not only helped us to have a few more helping hands during the training, but also for the invited students to learn more, and get some experience in training people. This contributes to sustainability.
All the three workshops had an almost different set of participants, apart from the few invited. Though this was intentional, and we did that to expand the community. However, this negatively affects the editor retention. While follow-up is the key to success of any outreach activity, follow-up of only certain individuals is not a very good approach. Also, all these three workshops only dealt with the basics of Wikidata. While some had a chance to participate in an advanced-level training (refer section 3.6), it was not to complete. The students were not able to unleash the real potential of Wikidata, and the power of structured+linked data.
What would you do differently next time?
To deal with issues discussed in the previous point, instead of conducting different workshops, we'll be conducting a certificate program in collaboration with CIS-A2K. The certificate program will spread over three to four months. The course will start with the basics of Wikidata, and conclude with advanced topics such as using OpenRefine to importing datasets, Lexemes etc. Once a student completes the given tasks, they will be awarded a certificate issued by CIS-A2K. The course will include three onsite sessions and two online sessions. For the last onsite session, which will deal with advanced topics, an external resource person will be invited.
After two workshops at the beginning of the year (in July 2018), we organised an eight-day online editing campaign, with books and swag as prizes for top contributors. This was intended to serve as a follow-up to the workshops and helped to motivate newbies to contribute even after the workshop. Eventually, it helped us to push the momentum, and achieve editor retention. The metrics are as follows:
During the workshops, we forgot to explain the participants about checking notifications and talk page messages. During the campaign, few students committed mistakes while editing, and they had been warned. As they didn't pay attention to the notifications and continued to do wrong edits, they were eventually blocked on Wikidata (expiration of 48 hrs). This incident made us realise the importance of making students aware of certain basic aspects even before training them on how to edit, and later on, we made sure that these things had been dealt with priority in each and every workshop.
What would you do differently next time?
We might not be doing such a campaign next year. As mentioned above, we will be doing a certificate program instead of individual workshops. The certificate course itself has several online and offline sessions, and we are anticipating that a separate campaign won't be necessary. However, if the need exists we will definitely consider this.
If we had to do it again, we'll create lists/sets containing items and channel the participants to improve them rather than at-large editing. This will be easy to track the metrics, and also check how well the items have been qualitatively improved.
English Wikipedia training program was conducted to train students on contributing to English Wikipedia over a period of time, rather than just an edit-a-thon. We experimented a new model. Instead of a regular edit-a-thon, which generally introduces all the concepts in one go, in this program, ten to fifteen trainees were trained for about two to three months on various aspects of English Wikipedia, in several online sessions. In total, 16 people took part in the program and created eight articles—Adruti Laxmibai, Ashwathi Pillai, Buxar Fort, Clemens Mendonca, Malathi Chendur, Okowa, R. Hari Kumar, and Satish Namdeo Ghormade. Of these eight articles, five articles have been published on the main page of English Wikipedia, under the "Did you know?" section. The following people served as trainers; AshLin, KCVelaga, Lahariyaniyathi, and Titodutta.
The DYK hooks published on the main page are;
... that Adruti Laxmibai introduced free education for girls in the Indian state of Odisha?
... that 18-year-old Ashwathi Pillai is the youngest-ever winner of the Swedish Senior National Championship in badminton?
... that "Pramadaavanam", a weekly column by Malathi Chendur, was published uninterruptedly for 47 years?"
The program took longer than expected. Initially, we anticipated it to complete within three months, but it took us almost six months to complete the training and to make sure that the participants be comfortable enough to contribute to English Wikipedia later on. We've identified two major problems that caused this delay. Firstly, the program was conducted entirely online, with no offline sessions. Having a couple of offline sessions in between could have fastened the process. Secondly, English is not a native language for most of the participants. Though they had good language skills, it took quite a lot of time for them to understand the nuances of writing style on English Wikipedia i.e. the encyclopedic style of writing.
For newbies, having their articles published on the main page under DYK section gives a sense of achievement. During training programs, this can be used as a tactic to produce quality content, and also motivate the participants. Going through the entire process of DYK nomination—creating an article, meeting certain criteria, nominating for DYK, passing the review, and eventually to the main page—will let editors get a good overview of how English Wikipedia works, and how the community functions. However, the number of participants in a workshop is inversely proportional to the article quality. It is so because organisers/trainers will be able to pay more attention to each participant and their respective articles only if the count is less.
What would you do differently next time?
During the upcoming annual plan, instead of an entirely online program, we will be conducting the training in both online and offline sessions. Ideally, we are planning it to do for a very limited number of students after a rigorous screening process. We will conduct the training for 5–10 students, over two online sessions, one offline session. Post sessions, we will be following up interested participants to create articles and nominate them for DYK.
As an initial step to start GLAM activities, we 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:
Kalachakra Museum, Amaravati: The officials agreed for Wikimedians to visit the museum, and take photographs of the sculptures after January 2019. They also agreed to provide us with information regarding those sculptures. Though we planned to do an activity at this museum in March 2019, we were not able to do that due to a tight schedule and academic constraints.
Archaeological Museum, Amaravati: The talks to allow photography were not successful. However, the museum shared books published by the Archaeological Survey of India free of cost. These are books quite rare and not available for purchase in bookstores currently. We plan to use these books to develop articles on English Wikipedia (in the first place) to GA standard during the next academic year. The list of these books can be accessed at VVIT_WikiConnect/Activities/2018-2019#GLAM_meetings_in_Amaravathi.
Bapu Museum, Vijayawada: As of August 2018, the museum was under renovation, and the officials informed that the work might continue for the next one year. They also detailed the process of getting permission to photograph the artefacts, after the museum is open for public again.
Observations
Though we did not focus on GLAM activities much this year, we are happy of having made some initial steps in that direction. We've realised that there is a lot of potential in and around Guntur and Vijayawada for such activities. Next year we are planning to organise photo-walks and also documentation activities at heritage spots, industries, and handloom saree makers.
When we approached the museum officials for meetings or to have a conversation, they were looking for some kind of organisational affiliation. Since we are students, don't have any such affiliation, it had been a challenge for us to make the officials understand the concepts of open access, free knowledge in the first place, and then about our Wiki-club and the role it plays.
What would you do differently next time?
GLAM activities can often be interesting for students to participate in, and we see it be having great potential to achieve retention. Last year, we only looked at these activities as optional and did not focus much. From our experience over a year, we now see GLAM activities as a tactic for community building and editor retention. Next year, apart from just focusing on museums, we will be looking at a much larger and diverse set of institutions. This may include food photography at a restaurant, documentation various experiments and laboratory equipment in college etc.
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 Category:VVITWC F1H20 Photowalk 2018
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, our club, along with the support from CIS-A2K, organised a two-day advanced Wiki-training workshop on 11–12 December 2018, for 17 students editors, who have been actively contributing to Wikimedia projects for several months before the workshop.
During the two-day workshop, participants were given extensive training on various content policies of Wikipedia, and then advanced aspects of Wikidata such as building SPARQL queries, and tools such as TABernacle, Listeria, QuickStatements, and Wikipedia+Wikdiata tools on Google Sheets. Asaf also interacted with the faculty on why Wikimedia belongs in education, and how they can use it as a pedagogic tool. Post-workshop, students built and executed several queries on Wikidata, all which can be seen at VVIT WikiConnect/Wikidata Queries
Observations
This event wasn't pre-planned and was organised by the club with very short notice. After Asaf completed the Project Tiger Training, he had a spare week before the Advanced Wikidata Training. After a conversation with Tito (CIS-A2K), it was quickly decided to have Asaf to train the young Wikimedians from VVIT. Students felt happy interacting with the trainer, but we could have had more participants if it was planned at least a couple of weeks on prior hand.
Initially, we thought of arranging a lecture session by Asaf to students majoring in computer science, about how they can contribute to the technical spaces of Wikimedia, and why it does matter. However, due to unforeseen circumstances in the college, we had to cancel that. Instead, Asaf interacted with the faculty on the topic "Wikimedia and Education" during that time.
What would you do differently next time?
Such an event (an advanced training) was not part of the annual plan. However, after this workshop, we realized the importance of having advanced training for student editors who have been consistently contributing for at least six months. Such training will introduce them to several new aspects of Wikimedia projects, which can lead to better contributions, and also help to groom leaders to lead the club in future. So during our next annual plan, we will plan advanced training activity on prior hand and invite resource persons for the same.
The club, supported by CIS-A2K, organised a three-day workshop on MediaWiki and other technical spaces of Wikimedia projects. This training was conducted to have more contributors to Wikimedia technical spaces from India, especially capture the interest of students with a bit of computer programming knowledge, and also increase participation at Indic-TechCom.
The entire training program had been spread over two remote-online sessions and one three-day onsite workshop, in which ten students took part. Programming concepts such as Object-Oriented Javascript (OOjs), OOUI, PHP, and creation of a simple PHP web app, extensions on local machines, using OOUI in MediaWiki, creating widgets, HTML form, etc. were dealt with during the training.
Jayprakash12345 led the training, along with the support from Tito (CIS-A2K). SSethi (WMF) also interacted with the students via an online call. Before closing, the participants along with trainers brainstormed on taking this training forward, and how to plan further follow-ups.
In total, the participants worked on twenty-six phabricator tickets. They are;
Initially, this training event was planned to be conducted along with the students from Christ University's Wikipedia Education Program, which is being run by CIS-A2K for several years now. However, as we were not able to find common dates that work for students from both the universities, we organised an individual training for VVIT. Also, the event happened in November 2018, but eventually it was conducted in February 2019. As we kept waiting for Christ University's students, the event got delayed and leaving us no scope to conduct a followup training during this academic year.
The resource person mentioned that many of the students didn't have a working knowledge of JavaScript, which hindered in dealing with advanced topics, and that would actually enable students to work on the larger community's requests and bug reports. We spoke to the college management about organising training on JavaScript for interested students from this workshop, and also some other students who would be interested in participating in the next year's workshop.
What would you do differently next time?
We will be having a JavaScript training by the college faculty, before on-boarding to a MediaWiki training program. Also for this workshop, we only had students who have been already been editing Wikimedia projects for some time, feeling that it'll be easier for them to understand the environment. However, next year, we'll be opening up the workshop to other students who are good with programming.
Meetups are for the members to socialize and collaborate around the common goal of sharing information. These were the meetups which didn't have any goals around editing, but for the student-editors to just meet, greet, interact, and learn, from each other. During the last one year, we have conducted a few on-campus and one off-campus meetup at Annamayya Library, Guntur.
On-campus: On the campus of our college i.e. VVIT, we organise meetups during the club hours of the week. The college has several student-run clubs such as photography club, dance club, animation club etc. On every Friday, the second half of the day is dedicated to these, and students pursue extra-curricular activities they're interested in. We organise our on-campus meetups during this time of the week. Next year, we will document these meetups better.
Off-campus: On 9 September 2018, three members from our club, and Pavan Santhosh (CIS-A2K), gathered for an informal meetup at Annammyaa Library, Guntur. We 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 till then, and how could they be improvised. We also conducted talks with the library officials, and they agreed to host Wikimedia events and provide space for meetups, edit-a-thons, etc.
Coordinators:Coordinators of the club had exclusive meetings once at least in every three months. During these meetings, we discussed the current state in meeting the goals of the annual plan goals, a retrospect on activities done so far, and make necessary planning for upcoming activities.
As it can be observed, all of our thematic edit-a-thons were conducted as a part of ongoing national and regional edit-a-thons and campaigns. We found this as a great way for students from the club to network with Wikimedians from the larger community. In one such event, MNavya and SuswethaK collaborated with the national organisers of WWWW 2018, and not only conducted an onsite edit-a-thon in Guntur but also organised the contest for the entire Telugu-language community. It can be seen at te:వికీపీడియా:మహిళా శ్రేయస్సు కోసం వికీ మహిళలు 2018.
What would you do differently next time?
During the next annual plan, we will not just host events as a part of national campaigns, but also proactively look for opportunities to conduct thematic edit-a-thons. Every month has several important days such as National Science Day, Armed Forces Flag Day, World Heritage Day, Teacher's Day etc. On some of these days, we'll conduct theme specific edit-a-thons, to improve the content on Wikipedia, Wikidata or Wikimedia Commons.
The club organised two #1lib1ref sessions, one during the May/June 2018 campaign, and the second one during the January/February 2019 campaign.
Session 1 (3 June 2018, Annamayya Library): The event commenced with a round of introductions among the participants, followed by an introduction to #1lib1ref by the trainers. As the participants were a mix of both new and experienced users, they were divided into two groups. The group of experienced users was briefed about using Standard footnote template for citing various pages from a book at different instances in an article. The members picked up books from the library and used them to add citations + improve the content of Wikipedia articles. On a parallel track, newly registered users started with basics. The tools, Citation Hunter and Wikipedia citation tool for Google books, were demonstrated jointly to both the groups. Participants had a hands-on session for a couple of hours. Around 12 people took part in this session, which included students, faculty, and librarian
Session 2 (26 January 2019, Vega Accounting): The event commenced at 9:30 am with an introduction to #1lib1ref. 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 edits to citations from this event. Eight participants fixed/added 158 citations from 106 pages on English Wikipedia.[1]
On the mark of 72nd Independence Day of India, a national Label-a-thon was conducted from 15 to 19 August with the objective of improving labels, descriptions, and aliases in Indic 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. [2]
Seventeen students took part in the event and improved labels primarily in Telugu and Hindi. Tito (CIS-A2K) was invited to mentor the sessions. Post this event, the participants continued to actively participate in the national campaign. Also three editors, MNavya, Sumanth699, and B leelasai, secured third, fifth, and seventh positions in the lists of national wide top editors for absolute edits made.[3]
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 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. The metrics are;
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. We organized a 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.
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 2019. 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.[5]
As a part of the New ReadersInspire campaign, Wikilover90produced an animation video to increase awareness about Punjabi Wikipedia. We took up a project to dub this into the 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 the video. In the third phase, we completed the rehearsal and documentation. MNavya led the project, while technical support was provided by Gnana Sreekar.
The Wiki-club started forming an edit-a-thon in college in September 2017. Though we are working and based in an educational institute, and have conducted 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. The club functions as an extra-curricular aspect and 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 editors. MNavya and Nivas10798 led the project, and took the support of Esh77 to design the survey.
Here are a few infographics from the survey responses
Highlights of the survey are
65% of the survey respondents spend less than four hours a week contributing to Wikimedia projects, and the rest spend more than four hours.
More than 85% responded that their collaborative skills highly improve after being involved in Wikimedia projects (rating 4 and above).
More than 68% of respondents were happy to notice a lot of improvement in their skills (rating 4 and above), while 8.3% felt that they had only improved their skills very little.
25% of respondents agreed to the statement that participating in Wikimedia projects had a positive effect on them. About 58% of volunteers rated above 4.
50% of respondents claimed that they were highly motivated to edit Wikimedia projects (rating 4 and above).
There weren't any notable reasons that lower motivation or inhibit from contributing to Wikimedia projects.
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 the academic year 2018–2019. While we discussing, we discussed why did we do a certain activity, the lesson learnt, what different would we be 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.
Observations
Though we intended to complete the annual report by the time of the annual meeting, we were not able to do so due to lack of time, and our intention to create a comprehensive report. Though we did explain the activities, and our future plans, having the report ready, would have let us clearly analyse the learning, collaboratively, and plan in a better way. Also, we were not able to discuss the practices of the club, such as management of the club, how we follow up to achieve editor retention, groom leadership etc, as explained in the later sections of this report.
What would you do differently next time?
We will try our best to complete the annual report by the time of the annual meet. Also, next time we will invite one or two experienced Wikimedian(s) to the annual meet. This will help us to showcase our activities to community members at national members, and it'll be an opportunity for the student editors to interact with seasoned Wikimedians and learn from them.
Currently, we are having two types of members, active and inactive members. Active members are defined as those who are taking part in the club's activities and are editing online on Wikimedia project, regularly. However, we don't have much differentiation in terms of voting rights and involvement in the club's activities for active and inactive members. We maintain these lists to identify and groom leadership among those are being actively involved, and train them to lead the club in future.
Many of the participants from every training event signup to be members of the club. However, not many continue editing after the workshop is over. After a certain period of time, users who are not participating at all, are moved to the inactive list. This is the reason for the inactive list to be larger than the active list. As of April 2019, we have fifteen active members, close enough to some of the language communites in India.
By laws have played a crucial in shaping the functioning of the club, and also regulating several processes. They have laid procedures to maintain the club and activities from day to day, and for its members to work towards achieving its goals. We've adopted our first draft of by-laws from the former bylaws of Punjabi Wikimedians User Group. Thereafter, we've revised it several times before settling at the current version. The revisions introduced several changes to fit with the context of a Wiki-club in an educational institute. Currently, we've twenty sections spread over seven chapters, which speak about membership, meetings, management, coordinators, and amendment.
Observations
We are neither a user group nor registered entity, but we adopted bylaws though it was not mandatory to do. We felt that having a set of bylaws will ensure smooth functioning of the club, and make it sustainable. Having said that, we sometimes respect the fifth pillar of Wikipedia, and go beyond these bylaws or bypass (upon collective agreement) them depending on the context and situation, for the better.
What would you do differently next time?
Though we have as many as twenty sections, we feel that several practices that we learnt from our first year still need to be formalised by including them in the bylaws. At the same time, we would also like to simplify them for brevity and easy understanding of future members and coordinators of the club.
Coordinators of the club manage all the affairs of the club, including managing members, executing and making sure that goals of the annual plan are met, handling finances of the club, and identifying and grooming potential members to become coordinators for the following years. For ease of management and an effective system, the club coordinators should be available on campus during their term. Coordinators for a given term are guided by the immediate past coordinators, and the Chief Organiser, who is generally a former coordinator and also receives the grant for the annual plan on behalf of the club. The person will also serve the single point of contact for the club.
To groom leadership and make the club sustainable, we have taken up several initiatives. One of the key aspects of leadership building at our club is connecting the active members and coordinators with the larger Wikimedia community. Last year, we took up several activities and practices for the same, and they are explained below;
Rotational leadership: Our academic year has two semesters. Of the four coordinators, one of them serves as a lead coordinator to streamline the work of all the coordinators and guide them as necessary. Serving a lead coordinator gives better chances to develop leadership traits compared to others. While the set of coordinators remain the same for an entire year, the lead changes for each semester. This practice will let more members have the opportunity.
Inviting experienced Wikimedians as resource persons: Instances of this include, inviting Pavan Santhosh (CIS-A2K) for the 1lib1ref session in 2018 and a meetup, Tito (CIS-A2K) for Indian Independence Day 2018 Label-a-thon, Asaf (WMF) for Wiki Advanced Training, and Jayprakash12345, Tito (CIS-A2K), Ananth (CIS-A2K), for Mini-MediaWiki Training. This helped the members to not only hear from experts about a specific topic [of the training], but also interact and learn from them about how things work in the movement, and seek help if required in future. Also, during the academic year of 2017–2018, when we worked with individual rapid grants, NSaad (WMF), Pavan Santosh, Suyash.dwivedi, Tanveer Hasan,Yohannvt, and రహ్మానుద్దీన్, had visited and interacted with the club members.
Proactive participation of members in campaigns/projects: By proactive participation, we mean actively organising stuff apart from online editing. Instances of this include MNavya and SuswethaK organised WWWW 2018 for the entire Telugu language community, Nivas10798 organised an onsite event for Hockey World Cup 2018 Edit-a-thon, and MNavya led the project for dubbing the Wikipedia Tales video in Telugu.
Participation of members in external Wikimedia events: By external we mean events apart from ones organised by the club. Instances of this include Sumanth699 participated in TWLCon satellite event in Hyderabad, and SuswethaK was selected and participated in Women TTT 2019. Reports of these participations can be seen here and here respectively.
Observations
The primary reason for having coordinators to the club is to give a sense of responsibility to members, and in turn developing their leadership skills. All these activities have immensely helped to groom leadership among student editors, which contributes to editor retention and making the club + the community in the college sustainable for years to come. While inviting external resource persons may be costly, it is always an added advantage to receive external expertise.
What would you do differently next time?
Most of the activities organised last year are by coordinators of the club. It mostly happened because the coordinators are themselves budding editors and fairly new to the community. Since we have expanded our editor base this year, we will encourage members outside the coord-fold to take up initiatives and organise stuff when needed.
During the next annual plan, we will not only invite experienced Wikimedians as resource persons for training events but also for meetups and other activities as guests. Through this, we intend to provide better learning for the members. Also, encourage more active participation of club members in national events, campaigns and projects.
For internal communication among the members and coordinators; we have a WhatsApp group, where most of our active members are present and is often used quick messaging channel. Apart from that, we also have an exclusive mailing list [vvitwikiconnectarchive - options - send] to notify subscribers via email. We use these channels to communicate about the club's upcoming activities, and also important announcements from the movement. We have an email wikiconnect@vvit.net, which operates under the college's official domain. This email is listed as our contact email, and we also use that notify details to events' participants, such a venue, timings, requirements etc.
Observations
Though mailing list has been established to formalise the discussions, especially announcements of the club's activities, it was not used to the level it was expected to be, during the last year. As the WhatsApp group is quickly accessible to people on their mobiles, every announcement is made on it, and members discuss things there itself.
What would you do differently next time?
We will proactively promote the use of the mailing list for announcements and also for discussions. As a first step, we will make sure that participants of workshops are made aware about the mailing list, and interested ones are subscribed to it. We will also stress the importance and benefits of communication via mailing list to active members.
Also, the coordinators have used their personal email IDs for communication internally and externally. This can be risky at times, especially if anyone is having privacy concerns. To avoid such issues, we will use the official email under the college domain for all kinds of email communication.
In addition to the above-mentioned channels, we would also like to consider setting up a Slack channel. Though we are not clear whether we will be doing this, as of April 2019, we are seeing if there is a need and how will it improve the way we communicate.
To promote our club's activities to the public, we have established a Facebook page long back in November 2017. However, we have actually started using it regularly from May&nsbp;2018. The page is available at https://www.facebook.com/pg/VVITWikiConnect/, and can be contacted at https://www.messenger.com/t/VVITWikiConnect. As of 10 April 2017, we've 207 followers to the page. We have been using the "Events" feature on Facebook to tell people about our off-campus activities. Some of these are:
To keep in touch with the broader EduWiki community, we have started regularly write articles about our major activities/projects in the monthly Education Newsletter: This Month in Education. As of March 2019, we've published two articles;
We observed that Facebook events and articles in the Education Newsletter are a great way to tell about our stories to the public and stay connected with EduWiki community respectively. However, we have realised and adopted these practices lately and were only able to do little in that area.
What would you do differently next time?
We would like to exponentially increase follower base to our Facebook page by regularly posting updates about events, announcements, news from Wikimedia, and reports. We will also adopt effective social media practices such as hashtags. Also, we will regularly write for "This Month in Education" and "This Month in GLAM" newsletters whenever possible.
The home of this club remains our college, Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology (VVIT). It is an institute of higher education, largely of engineering sciences. The campus is situated around 12.5 km (7.7 miles) from Guntur, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, located in the southern part of India. The college educates more two-thousand students across eight various departments. All management activities are administered under "Social Educational Trust", which also runs an international school, VIVA.
Though the college also has a few postgraduate courses, most of the club's activity surrounds around the undergraduate students. This is mainly due to the number of students—98% of the total students are in undergrad courses. Our relationship with the college has been quite cordial to date and is often based on mutual understanding. We've been receiving proactive support to all of our activities; often in form of in-kind donations such as computer labs for workshops, meeting spaces, permissions for daily classwork exemption to workshop participants etc. Many of the external Wikimedians who visited the college in the past, have interacted with the college authorities and discussed matters of mutual interest.
CIS-A2K, a WMF (FDC) funded team at the Centre for Internet and Society has been a major source of support to our activities in several ways—financially, programmatically, and logistically—during the last year, largely to activities involving external resource persons. We actively collaborated with several staff members of the team to receive advise on our activities and planning our future trajectory to make the club sustainable. Members of the team also presided upon on major events as resource persons to share their knowledge and expertise, such as—Independence Day 2018 Label-a-thon & English Wikipedia Training, and also were of help in connecting us with resource persons from across the country to our training events, such as—Wiki Advanced Training & Mini-MediaWiki Training.
Observations
Train-the-Trainer is an annual flagship program conducted annually by CIS-A2K. It is a residential training workshop to groom leadership skills among the Indian Wikimedia community members. The program was started in 2013, and 2019 edition is the sixth iteration of the program. To encourage community building, CIS-A2K has this time invited bids from Indian communities to host the event, similar to the former Wikimania bidding process. Utilizing this opportunity, we proposed a bid on behalf of the club to host the event in the largest city of our state, Visakhapatnam. Fortunately, we've wonthe bid, and the club will be hosting this year's TTT. We consider this as an excellent opportunity to build leadership among the club's first batch of coordinators, and also to showcase ourselves to the pan-Indian Wikimedia community.
What would you do differently next time?
Last year, we mostly collaborated with CIS-A2K for events involving external resource persons, where expenses wouldn't fit our grant budget. In addition to that support, next year we will be actively working with them in several activities at programmatic level such as certificate programs. We will be doing the on-ground work, the coordinators and the members, and will seek for support whenever required.
Annamayya Library is a private-run public library in the city of Guntur. The library has three spaces, two reading spaces and one meeting space. As the library is geographically located in the heart of the city, it is quite convenient for us to organise events at this place. We have been able to partner with them through a personal contact one of our club members had, and also partly through CIS-A2K's work with them in the past. We've organised several events at this place. Since it is a library, it adds more context to 1lib1ref sessions. Last year, we did a 1lib1ref session, a meetup, and Day 1 of the WWWW onsite edit-a-thon at the library.
Observations
Though the ambience of a library adds a lot of sense for Wikip(m)edia edit-a-thons and meetups, we were not able to do many activities here. The reason for this is that the library management requires someone to physically inform them at least a week before the event. This had been a problem for us in the past. Though we would be happy to send an email or make a phone call, informing in-person could be difficult at times, especially considering the fact some of us are based in nearby cities, out of Guntur. This kind of communication had been a problematic to us.
What would you do differently next time?
This library is one of our key aides. So we would like to improve our communication with authorities, and try to host more activities at the library, and also include them in our Wikisource and GLAM activities, wherever possible.
Teas and Trees is café in Guntur. Over the last year, we've built a good working relationship with them and have hosted several edit-a-thons at this place. The venue is offered as in-kind support to us. We have been able to partner with them through personal contact, one of our club members had. We organised following activities at this place; Day 2 of WWWW edit-a-thon, Hockey World Cup onsite edit-a-thon, 1Lib1Ref (2019 session), STC19 onsite event and the Annual Meeting.
The only disadvantage at this place that is doesn't have the feasibility to set up a projector, which makes it unusable for training events. Next year, in addition to improving our relationship, we are planning to conduct a photo-walk kind of activity of various food items served, and possibly talk to them about releasing the images present on their website under a Wikimedia Commons acceptable license.
Vega Accounting Solutions is a private accounting firm in Guntur. We were able to partner with them through personal contact, and they provided their office space for our events. The space available for us here is very limited; not more than twelve people can comfortably sit. This becomes complicated when the number of participants for an event is more. Though we have advantages such as a pre-installed projector and air conditioning, next year, we will be preferring other options over this. The primary reason is the space issue. As our club is constantly growing, and we expect to have more active members next year, this may not fit our needs.
We haven't collaborated much with other Wikimedia users/entities outside CIS-A2K. But during the next annual plan, we will actively look for opportunities to collaborate with experienced Wikimedians from across the country–such as for designing a training course, and with groups such as Wikipedia & Education User Group, and user groups based in India. We mainly intend to collaborate to have their expert advice for our programs and improve based on suggestions.
After completing this report, we have consulted Wiki Education Foundation for their review on our report, as part of their consultation service, and sought their review+suggestions our plan. LiAnna (Wiki Ed) has posted a review on the talk page here. We will be using the feedback to improve our plan next year.
While we working our annual plan and planning our activities, editor/user retention is our top priority. Though content contributions are equally important, we believe that if we are able to retain a user and make them an active Wikimedian, who consistently contributes even after a workshop/edit-a-thon/meetup, we would have achieved greater impact than just addition of content in just one or two events. This has been our top priority throughout the year and will be the same during the next year as well. Simultaneously, we are making sure that users are well trained to decent to sustain on a Wikimedia project, and possibly train others in future.
As mentioned above, most of our activity surrounds the undergrad students, who generally be on the campus for at least four years. While we should ideally be starting with freshmen, we were only able to start off with sophomores. This is due to the rigorous academic schedule first years have. For a student who starts engaging with us in their second year, they will have an opportunity to continue along for the next three years. This gives a good opportunity for the students to explore many areas of contributing to Wikimedia. As explained in detail in the above sections, we have several practices in place for follow-up, to groom leadership, and achieve editor retention. By the time a student graduates, they will have good knowledge about Wikimedia, and editing on various projects. This will let them continue from thereupon, keep contributing, and be a part of the global community.
Observations
By the end of this annual plan, we have fifteen active members in the club i.e. fifteen users are actively contributing to Wikimedia projects, even after an event/campaign ends. This count is close to some of the language communities in India. From our observation, retention and leadership grooming go hand in hand. While we take up activities to groom leadership, they also significantly in retaining users. Though the results of this may not be instant, this will definitely be impactful in the long term.
The major flaw we observed in the plan last year is that we brought in a new set of participants for each workshop or a project. For example, we conducted three Wikidata workshops. The participants for each workshop were completely different. Though this can be a good approach to expand the community, it adversely affects editor retention. This is because such an approach gives little chance for followup in the same context. Though we can always follow up with general edit-a-thons and other training activities, it isn't quite the same.
What would you do differently next time?
We will improve our processes to expand the community and more importantly retain editors to become seasoned Wikimedians. In regards to this, we will work on training courses spread over a 2–3 months for selected students, instead of individual workshops. Also, we wish to encourage members apart from the coordinators to take lead in organising activities, and also be a part of managing the club. This will ensure that the club is sustainable in future.
Gender gap is one of the most pressing issues in the Wikimedia movement. We often see several initiatives across the globe to bridge gender gap. Though we didn't specifically take up acitivities focused on bridging gender gap, we did try our best to encourage participation of women in our activities and practicies. From our records, we engaged a total of 247 students through our activiites during the academic year, and of them 130 were women, which 52.63% of the total participation. Percentages of female representation at each activity is shown in the following infographic;
Observations
Apart from that of our activites, female participation was good at management of the club. Of the club's active members, 53% are females. In the coord fold, 50% are females—both for the 2018–2019 academic year, and also newly elected coordinators for 2019–2020. This esentially brings in more women contributors and leaders into the movement and helps us contribute to the efforts of bridging the gender gap.
During the English Wikipedia training program, participants were proactively encouraged to work on articles related to women. As a result, 50% of all the articles created, and 75% of the articles that were published on the main page are biographies of women of India-origin.
What would you do differently next time?
Though we were able to produce some good stats in terms of female participation, we did not take any conscious approach to ensure the same. Apart from encouraging having increased participation by women, we would like to take care of the diversity. In one of the Wikidata workshops, all the attendees were females i.e. 0% males. But when we speak about diversity, there should be a reasonable amount of representation from all the groups. So while listing participants for workshops, we will try to ensure that there is enough diversity.
In terms of activities, we would like to organise atleast women-focused edit-a-thon that specifically focuses on biographies of women, such as Art+Feminism or WikiGap, and also have some goals around content for the same. If time permits, we will plan a campaign on those lines.
We maintain a public record of the equipment in possession witht the club. The public listing is at VVIT WikiConnect/Equipment. Currently, we have a Canon IXUS 285 HS Digital Camera (Point & Shoot type) and a Seagate External Hard Drive. The former was purchased for use in photowalks and our general events, whereas the latter was specifically purchased to support the Wikisource work. But unfortunately, we were not able to do any Wikisource workshop. However, the hard drive was used by Indrajitdas to process the recordings of Wikigraphists Bootcamp (2018 India). As it was a lot of data and need large storage, this hard drive was used, and we were able to good set of tutorial videos on creating vector graphics using Inkscape. They are listed at Wikigraphists Bootcamp (2018 India)/Videos.
Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:
We were able to successfully execute most of the activities planned in the annual plan. Through our activities, we were able to train many students in the college to contribute to various Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and MediaWiki. Also, we have been successful in achieving decent editor retention by the end of the year. Two of our active members—Sumanth699 and MNavya—have more than 10,000 global contributions, and another two of them—Mekala Harika and SuswethaK—have more than 5,000 global contributions. Also, several other members have more than 1,000 global contributions. In addition to the planned ones, we also conducted a lot of events on the go, as part of national campaigns. This helped to student editors from the club to get connected with several other Wikimedians from across the country, and vice versa.
We are running this club as an extracurricular activity, students completely invest time voluntarily, and aren't receiving any scores for their work (unlike most of the other EduWiki activities). All of the student editors contribute because they believe and appreciate the vision of the Wikimedia movement. This approach is intentional and will greatly help us to bring out students who will contribute like any Wikimedian, out of their own interest and volunteer time.
Note: Of the twenty activities conducted, only ten were recorded. This is because of metrics of events such as Wiki Advanced Training, MediaWiki training, meetups etc. cannot be tracked by using the dashboard.
Our major disappointment for this annual plan was that we were not able to do any kind of activity around Wikisource. Given its ease of onboarding students and the value it brings in terms surfacing the underrepresented knowledge, it had been one of our top priorities. Though we had made plans for this twice, we eventually called them off—once due to unforeseen academic constraints and the second time to due to another event which we had to do on priority.
Academic constraints have been a major setback for us while we are executing the plan, especially considering the fact that this whole thing being an extracurricular activity. It can be quite challenging at times. While in college, students need to take time to out of their regular classwork to participate in workshops. Though we get required permissions from the college authorities for exemption, a limit is strictly observed. This often hinders our chances to conduct more workshops and bring in more students into this. At the same time, some of the faculty members strongly support us, while being comfortable with the idea of Wikipedia, which is expected from a typical academician or researcher.
What differently would we be doing for each activity has been explained in detail in the earlier sections, specifically for each activity. But at large we would like to chalk out a detailed plan i.e. including the timeline of the activities, at the beginning of the year itself. Also, make sure to include some contingency dates in between planned activities such that a particular event happens even if we missed the planned date. At the same time, we would like to develop practices in such a way that this whole system is enjoyable to everyone participating, and eventually, it benefits them in some manner or the other.
To keep a track on our annual plan, and a regular check on our progress, we would like to use Phabricator project workboard to manage our annual plan. We previously used for organising Mini MediaWiki training. The project profile can be seen at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/3790/. We found it as a great tool to manage projects, and it can be of great help while we are working on our annual plan.
To reduce the workload at the end of the year, we will improve our reporting processes by documenting things from time to time. As mentioned in one of the above sections, we were not able to complete this report by the time of our annual meet. During our next annual, we write our observations immediately after an event and also write down notable points from time to time. This would help to stay updated, and also make things smooth.
With all the learning and reflections, we would like to do better next year with a much better plan. We have applied for a rapid grant to support our activities. The grant proposal has been moved to draft as the new funding guidelines are due for the next fiscal year. We will be taking the support from CIS-A2K to continue our activities and consider reapplying after the new guidelines have been published. Our priorities for the upcoming academic year would be expanding our community (especially the number of active members), create awareness about Wikimedia projects to more students, and formalise our plans and procedure to form a sustainable model. However, our basic approach would remain the same i.e. keeping the club out of regular academics, at least largely.
One major challenge that we are anticipating is that the user who established the club and led its first annual plan, will be graduating and leaving the college. We will be trying to fill this gap by constantly being touch and be advised from time to time. As mentioned in earlier sections, we've elected our next batch of coordinators to execute the next year's plan with the guidance from Immediate Past Coordinators. Our immediate priority to make sure that the experience of an entire year and the learning is unreservedly transferred to the next batch of coordinators.
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![First batch of coordinators [2018–2019]— (l to r); Nivas10798, Sumanth699, MNavya, and SuswethaK.](//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/VVITWikiConnect_Wiki_Awareness_Session_1%28June_2018%29Coordinators_Group_photo.jpg/450px-VVITWikiConnect_Wiki_Awareness_Session_1%28June_2018%29Coordinators_Group_photo.jpg)
1lib1ref at Annamayya Library
Wiki Awareness Session
Wikidata Workshop 1
Independence Day Label-a-thon
WWWW 2018 Edit-a-thon
Hockey World Cup Edit-a-thon
Group photograph of Wiki Advanced Training
Asaf Bartov being felicitated by college's Chairman and Principal
Srishti Sethi's remote session during MWT
Group photograph of MediaWiki Training
Annual Meeting![First batch of coordinators [2018–2019]— (l to r); Nivas10798, Sumanth699, MNavya, and SuswethaK.](/wiki/File:VVITWikiConnect_Wiki_Awareness_Session_1(June_2018)Coordinators_Group_photo.jpg)
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Media related to VVIT WikiConnect at Wikimedia Commons.