IRC18: Offline, Kandbari, February 22-24, 2018

 

11. #WikiCollabKnowledge
Wiki, collaborative knowledge building and Wikimedia, and its impact in current education

Last updated on Nov 24, 2017.

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Context of the Session

Many people working in the open knowledge and open source fields, or trying to improve the free knowledge movement, don't really understand when and how "this Wikipedia" came into the scene. From a perspective of a common person: "Wikipedia is BIG. If we search on Google (or Yahoo or Bing or any search engine), Wikipedia comes as one of the first knowledge sources. However this "evolution" was not easy. Let me explain.

The first concept was a "wiki" (to be edited easily by everyone), what Ward Cunningham and team proposed and also successfully executed. Later came concepts like Nupedia, which eventually, failed. Then came the concept of Wikipedia. Currently Wikipedia is one of the most used knowledge sources. However it must be noted, the journey was not easy at all, and the current scenarios also may have some threats.

In this presentation by Tanveer Hasan and Tito Dutta, we want to present all these scenarios and also want to discuss the possible threats with the expert participants.

Depending on time-slot, we would also like to discuss: how "necessities" played very important roles towards "policy and guidelines building" on Wikipedia.

Session Plan

Tanveer and Tito would like to have around or at least 2 hours; session, with these facilities:

  • Around 20 to 30 participants
  • Basic requirement: people attending out session, must have some idea about the world wide web, copyright and copyleft movement, and platforms such as personal websites, Wordpress, Wikipedia etc.
  • Topic: Our topics will be on the evolution of the Wiki and the Wikimedia movement (as described above).
  • Sitting structure: Tanveer and Tito will make presentations, followed by the participants breaking out in smaller groups and continuing the discussions.
  • Misrepresentation of Wikipedia as only online source: Wikipedia is a world wide web or online site, however it is wrong to tag Wikipedia (and its sister projects) as only digital/source of knowledge. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement is growing with offline and similar facilities, where even web giants like Google and Facebook using it.

Session Team

Tanveer Hasan: Main presenter and planner, Program Manager, Access to Knowledge, the Centre for Internet and Society

Tito Dutta, Co-presenter, Wikipedia administrator