Outreach Wiki

Education/Countries/India/Christ University

< Education | Countries | India

Contact person

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  • Ananth Subray (On-field Instructor): Ananth Subray, Programme Associate at CIS-A2K, served as the primary point of contact and on-field instructor for the Wikimedia Education. In addition to taking orientation classes, he has conducted sessions on basics of editing Wikipedia and contributing to the various Wikimedia projects. He has coordinated the planning and scheduling of the Wikimedia Education academic calendar along with holding consultations with faculty members. For interested students, he led a certificate course and followed it up with internships for the students at The Centre for Internet and Society. He has also served as Technical Advisor for this program, He has also overseen the creation of policy pages and their adherence to Wikipedia standards. Upon request, he has also conducted sessions on Wikipedia policies.
  • Tito Dutta (Primary Co-ordinator): Tito Dutta, Program Manager at CIS-A2K, was the overall supervisor for the Wikipedia Education Program. In addition to maintaining the health of the institutional partnership with Christ University, he has served as the point person for grievance redressal. He has also conducted sessions on Wikimedia and its sister projects along with providing an introduction to the ethos of the movement.
 
Nichole and A2K team with Christ Vice Chancellor
  • Kannappilly Sebastian and Joseph George, M.T. Rathi and Y.S. Shivaprasad, S. Nagalakshmi are Hindi, Kannada and Sanskrit faculty members respectively at Christ University, serving as coordinators for the program. They have helped students with the language and grammar of the articles. They have also played a major role in motivating the students to continue contributing to Wikipedia.

Program description

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Wikipedia in undergraduate (UG) programmes

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Wikipedia workshop for second language students

The Institution entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India (CIS) to make article writing on Wikipedia a core exercise for the continuous internal assessment of its 1600 undergraduate students in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Sanskrit and Urdu. The state-of-the-art university which also has a recording studio, produced the first of its kind Wikipedia video tutorials in two languages – Hindi and Kannada. The Hindi and Kannada articles may be found at collection of Hindi articles and collection of Kannada articles.

Wikipedia in postgraduate (PG) programmes

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Mathematics

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Under the guidance of Fr. Joseph Varghese, who is a Professor in Mathematics at Christ University and a Wikipedia editor since 2007, the students of the PG programme in Mathematics were given tasks to create and improve content in the area of Graph Theory.

Education

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Vikram Vincent who is a Educational Technology Consultant, a research scholar in the Educational Technology inter-disciplinary program at IIT-Bombay and a Wikipedia editor since 2006, has assigned tasks to students of the B.Ed. programme to create and improve pages in the field of Educational Technology. The list of student contributors and the list of articles are collated here.

Main projects

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Certificate course

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As an active step towards enabling the spread of content editing and contributing skills on Wikipedia in vernacular languages, Christ (Deemed to be University), in collaboration with the CIS-A2K, began certificate courses on using and editing in Wikipedia in 2016 for students. This year, the courses, conducted after normal working hours, have lasted for a total of 45 hours, carried 2 credits to be added to students’ academic records and enrolled 30 to 45 students per batch.

The courses’ objective is to enable more students to help other students acquire skills in using and working with Wikipedia as well as attempts to be both technically equipping and holistic through its instruction. They consist of three major components. The first is an introduction to what the concept of Wikipedia is, which incorporates the history of online encyclopedias and Wikipedia itself, using sources, choosing and drafting articles and moving articles to the main space. The second teaches how to edit and publish articles. Here, common templates, editing and wikificating articles, adding content such as tables and references, legal aspects, policies and guidelines, tackling vandalism and tools for producing illustrations are dealt with. The third component discusses Wikipedia’s reliability and social significance. Under this component, Wikipedia is discussed in a critical and evaluative manner, where matters such as its ethics, existence as a social community, existence as a democratic project, use by students, teachers librarians and journalists, criticisms and measures to improve its quality come under the purview.

Internships

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Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru has started offering internships. Interested students are guided by the facilitators at CUWEP, Domlur, Bengaluru. It provides help to students who want to contribute to Wikipedia by creation of articles in several languages. This internship aims to bring in the spirit of a collaboration and builds a larger dedicated team as a work force to keep articles on a live track throughout the year on Wikipedia. It is conducted in two batches in December and April- May respectively. Students who have taken Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Sanskrit and Urdu as their second language are given this opportunity which is very limited and hard to find. This has been a fruitful venture.

 
Nichole Interacting with Students

CIA’s

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Continuous Internal Assessment (CIA) assigned to its 1600+ undergraduate students in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Sanskrit and Urdu. This initiative bridges inequality and brings in a greater contribution from various languages. This platform creates and builds student’s skills of editing and typing. The first of its kind Wikipedia video tutorials in two languages – Hindi and Kannada are given to the faculty, facilitators, campus ambassadors, and students. This initiative included in the academic curriculum not only makes one learn from it but also provides various perspectives making it possible for one to voice out one’s opinion to the world by using the powerful tool of Wikipedia. The CUWEP follows a structure to deal with a large number of students which is not an easy-going task at any time. It comes into action by the active support from the community through the CIS-A2K members who assign the these and give them to the faculty. The faculty intern gives assignments and details to the campus ambassadors who finally spread the word to the students. All of the bodies are of constant help to each other and are approachable at any time. The curriculum is divided into odd and even semester which consists of two CIA’s for the first and second-year students pursuing an undergraduate degree. They are as follows:

 
Editing Tutorial file in Local language

CIA 1(Odd semester)

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  • I Semester Students – Type and digitize given text on Wikisource.
  • III Semester Students – Write an article on Wikipedia related to Culture and Language.

CIA 3(Odd semester)

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  • I Semester Students – Type and proofread texts on Wikisource
  • III Semester Students – Add images to the articles (from commons) which were written for CIA 1.

CIA 1(Even semester)

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  • II Semester Students – Write an article about themself on Wikipedia, which they will later use for creating their user page on Wikipedia.
  • IV Semester Students – Creation of articles related to their core subjects.

CIA 3(Even semester)

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  • II Semester Students – Create their user page on Wikipedia.
  • IV Semester Students – Add relevant images to the articles which were written for CIA 1.

This activity is very comprehensive in nature and is an encouraged move in Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru.

Timeline

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Odd Semester

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Month 1st Semester 3rdst Semester
June Orientation on Wikidata, allotment of the Q numbers and students doing the activity Orientation and Writing the text about women achievers in 20 lines ( work done in Sandbox)
July Language correction and grading from the faculty Language correction and grading from the faculty
August - -
September Proofreading of text on Wikisource Wikification of the article written earlier and adding image
October Language correction and grading from the faculty Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty
November Verification of the work done by the students from community members or CIS-A2K Verification of the work done by the students from community members or CIS-A2K
December Moving qualitative articles to the main namespace and updating it to community members Moving qualitative articles to the main namespace and updating it to community members

Even Semester

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Month 2nd Semester 4th Semester
November Orientation and Writing the text on their user page Orientation and Writing the text about their core subjects in 20 lines ( work done in Sandbox)
December Language correction and grading from the faculty Language correction and grading from the faculty
January Internship activity for the students Internship activity for the students
February Wikification of their user page and adding an Image Wikification of the article written earlier and adding image
March Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty
April and May Internship activity for the students Internship activity for the students
June Analysis of the work done by the students in this year and reporting to community members Analysis of the work done by the students in this year and reporting to community members

Reports

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Learning patterns

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Resources

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Introduction to Wikipedia

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Editing

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Policies

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Pete Forsyth’s YouTube Channel

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Feedback

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Students

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Faculty

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References

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