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The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop

Posted by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi at Sep 27, 2012 09:55 AM |
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For those who might not be aware, Punjabi Wikipedia is one of the first Indic Wikipedias where community started editing way back in 2002. However, after the initial few edits all activities got stopped and it was inactive over the last decade. Recently we conducted a few workshops that led to the revival of Punjabi Wikipedia. This post is about the first Punjabi Wikipedia workshop held in Ludhiana, Punjab on July 28, 2012.
The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop

Given here is a picture of Punjabi Wikipedia workshop participants

Surinder Wadhawan, a Mumbai based Wikipedian played an important role in designing this workshop and introducing Punjabi Wikipedia to the Punjabi speakers. The interest and enthusiam showed by Surinder encouraged long-time Punjabi wikipedian G.S.Guglani to join this workshop.

About 25 participants came over for this workshop. The College of Computer and Information Technology (CCIT) supported in hosting this event.

Sarabjit Singh, CEO of the organization introduced the invited guests and explained briefly about the session. Surinder thereafter made a presentation explaining the basics of Wikipedia editing. Guglani, one of the old and active editors of Punjabi Wikipedia talked about the Punjabi Wikipedia and its present situation. He then invited one of the participants and helped her creating her user account and edit an article. Janmeja Singh, a Punjabi language researcher spoke about unicode standards and the importance of Wikipedia for Punjabi language. Gurjeet Singh, another new wikipedian demonstrated Punjabi typing using commonly used keyboards with Roman characters for those who were not aware of typing in Punjabi.

We then started the editing session. Out of them 15 new editors (of which 13 were female) edited various articles. We showed them the typing support page (http://bit.ly/Uw8WaV) on Punjabi Wikipedia and distributed the same in printed form (http://bit.ly/Rk9wde). Guglani, Subhashish and Surinder helped editors with basic editing and referencing. New Wikipedians were also informed about the Punjabi Wikipedia Facebook page (http://on.fb.me/Pr7tBE).

File:1st Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop-9.jpg

Above is a picture of all the participants from the Punjabi Wikipedia workshop

The workshop was covered in Signpost (http://bit.ly/SSvUYh). There was some media coverage as well:

Photos: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:First_Punjabi_Wikipedia_Workshop,_Ludhiana

Note: Although the workshop was conducted prior to the grant period, the report was written in the month of September, and hence, we are featuring this.