Wikidata workshop (South India) conducted in Bangalore

Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org) is a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database that collects structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other wikis of the Wikimedia movement, and to anyone in the world.¹ In India, in the recent years, we have seen increased enthusiasm about the project. CIS-A2K received several requests from different communities to conduct Wikidata workshops. In response to the requests, CIS-A2K organised a Wikidata workshop on 10 and 11 June 2017 at Bangalore. The workshop was a regional one, and participants were invited from 5 South Indian states: a) Andhra Pradesh, b) Karnataka, c) Kerala, d) Tamil Nadu, and e) Telangana. 11 community members from 5 Indic Wikimedia communities (Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu) participated in the workshop, 3 of the participants were women.

The workshop was a general orientation. On the first day, the following topics were discussed:

1. Introduction to Wikidata and its importance
   
2. Wikidata items
   
3. Wikidata labels, descriptions
4. Property and statement
5. Hands' on activity: Label-a-thon
   

On the second day these topics were discussed:

1. Complete structure of a Wikidata item
2. Wikidata references
3. Using Wikidata in Wikipedia, using statement, property
4. Wikidata gadgets
5. A couple of Wikimedia labs tools (note: a few tools such as Wikidata game was in the planned topics, but could not be shown as we faced server error almost all day long)
6. Hands' on activity by group: Label-a-thon, adding references

This was CIS-A2K's first attempt to conduct a Wikidata workshop in India. To keep it cost-effective, we made it a regional one (eg. no air travel was needed for any participant). This was a fledgling attempt to test the waters before we take this forward to other regions in India. This was an effort to see if the participants felt the need for such a workshop as much as we did for conducting it. It enabled us also to understand the modules and sessions to include in a manner that is tailored for teaching Wikidata

Tamil Wikimedian User:Info-farmer, who participated in the workshop gave his feedback after the event:

I was waiting for a theme-specific workshop for a long one & I liked this one. Please encourage such theme-specific workshops special interest groups.

Following this event, and based on the need-assessment CIS-A2K may conduct such workshops in other regions of India.

An event dashboard is available here. The event page on Meta Wiki may be seen here.

Footnotes

• Introduction to Wikidata
  

Acknowledgement

• Manasa Rao, for help to improve this blog post

Image credit

• File:Wikidata Workshop South India Logo.png from Wikimedia Commons, author: Saumyaa Naidu, License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International