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Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014

Posted by Rahmanuddin Shaikh at Jan 31, 2015 05:10 PM |
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Telugu Wikimedia (including their projects Telugu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikisource etc.) is one of the largest and most powerful Indian language Wikimedia projects, and it is growing and expanding everyday. In the last half of 2014, Telugu Wikimedia community members contacted CIS-A2K team with a request to organize a MediaWiki tutorial workshop for them. Following their request, on 28 December 2014, CIS-A2K team organized a MediaWiki hackathon event for Telugu Wikimedia community members to enhance their skills and understanding of technical matters related to MediaWiki usage. The theme of the workshop was “Mediawiki, its extensions and tools to work around” and it aimed at allowing Wikipedians to use MediaWiki tools more effectively.
Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014

Participants clearing their doubts from Veeven, Telugu Wikipedian sysop

Telugu Wikimedia (including their projects Telugu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikisource etc.) is one of the largest and most powerful Indian language Wikimedia projects, and it is growing and expanding everyday. In the last half of 2014, Telugu Wikimedia community members contacted CIS-A2K team with a request to organize a MediaWiki tutorial workshop for them. Following their request, on 28 December 2014, CIS-A2K team organized a MediaWiki hackathon event for Telugu Wikimedia community members to enhance their skills and understanding of technical matters related to MediaWiki usage. The theme of the workshop was “Mediawiki, its extensions and tools to work around” and it aimed at allowing Wikipedians to use MediaWiki tools more effectively.

Participants at Tewiki hackathon 2014

This one day workshop was organized at Golden Threshold, Hyderabad.  25 Telugu Wikimedia community members participated in this workshop. In the Hackathon, there were knowledge transferring sessions on various MediaWiki related technicalities and the participants got an opportunity to engage and communicate with each other and some of the MediaWiki expert users. Advanced MediaWiki users Rahmanuddin Shaik, Veeven and Kasyap were the speakers who gave short but eloquent speeches.

Discussion topics of this Hackathon event included:

  • Understanding of MediaWiki software
  • Basic understanding of MediaWiki extensions
  • Typing Telugu in English keyboard
  • Creating, using and managing templates
  • Adding and managing references, reference formats, tables, images, audios and videos following Wikipedia format
  • Using Wikidata
  • Categorization process
  • Geo-tagging

Some of these topics are comparatively more difficult than others. Wikidata is an addition to the Wikimedia projects that replaced Interwiki linking procedure.Typing Telugu in an English keyboard has been confusing to some users too. Using, specially creating and managing templates, categories, infoboxes, scripts require some training. In this workshop CIS-A2K attempted to teach and discuss all these topics. There was a doubt-clearing session as well, where participants were allowed to ask their questions and discuss their doubts.

CIS-A2K believes that the participants were benefited from this workshop and they will use and apply their learnings in editing and improving Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

See also