SKP Engineering College located at Thiruvannamalai, Tamilnadu and Wikimedia India run a Wikipedia in Tech Education Program. This takes a unique approach to the universal Wikipedia Education Program by having a tech focus. A select set of 35 students from final year engineering courses are working on language computing and MediaWiki related topics under the guidance of an expert faculty. This will be an ongoing and self-running project with new set of students joining the program every year. Based on this pilot, the program can be scaled and extended to other institutions across the country.
We will work together to design, develop and execute collaborative projects under following three broad categories:
- Mediawiki and Wikimedia projects specific
- Pan-Indian Language tools and resources
- Long term Indian language computing research projects.
Activities are defined for every six months and the progress is reviewed in the same interval. All outputs (text, corpus, media, software code) developed under this partnership will be released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license and GPLv2+. An MoU regarding this collaboration was signed in June 2015 and the program was launched with a virtual guest lecture from WMF staff Niharika Kohli in August 2015. The focus for this semester will be to orient the students in these research areas with various guest lectures and hands-on training. We will also provide the students with access to learning materials like books and online tutorials. The students will work on individual final year projects during the next semester.