User:Nitika.t/Outreach Program Handbook

The purpose of this Outreach Program Handbook is to assist all the community members in organizing and conducting Wiki workshops, Wiki Academies or any other basic editing outreach session. The Handbook is also designed to help educators and the community at large understand the practices and expectations of Outreach Programs.

Section 1: Planning Stage
Planning an Outreach requires a number of tasks that should be implemented. These tasks could include:
 * 1) Investigate and find an appropriate organization/institute where you would want to conduct an outreach.
 * 2) Draft a mail/presentation/ pitch that you can use to reach out to the institute.
 * 3) Receive approval.
 * 4) Decide on a date, time, venue, maximum no.of participants, total time allocated to conduct the outreach.

Section 2: Communication

 * 1) You could obtain support from respected Wiki community members by mailing on India mailing list/ specific language mailing list/ city mailing list/talking to community members on their wiki talk pages etc.
 * 2) The next step is to determine different ways to get your message out to attract more participants. You can deploy the following ways:
 * Advertise the program in local media.
 * Post a mail on the mailing list of that particular institute/organisation.
 * Post a message on the Facebook page of that particular institute/organisation.
 * If possible, put banners/posters in the campus.

Section 3: Preparation Stage

 * 1) Delivery methods that will be used in the program. This could include: presentation, talk by community members etc.
 * 2) Organize reference materials - FAQs, brochures, editing handbook that can be given away to the participants.
 * 3) Make sure that every participant in the outreach session has a computer/laptop with internet access.
 * 4) Make sure that you have a projector in the room.
 * 5) If more than 7 users try to create username from the same IP that particular IP automatically gets blocked. This problem usually occurs during an outreach session where you have large number of participants trying to create a user account. To avoid blocking of IP, you can let the Wikimedia Foundation know about the IP address of the institute and they can help you release the IP from this rule for couple of hours.

Section 4: Conducting Stage
Divide the workshop in 2 Sessions. It would be a good idea to give a 10 min break between the 2 parts or else the participants might get bored, tired and loose interest attending a long workshop. 1st part of the session should focus on introduction to Wikipedia, who edits Wikipedia, how to search for an article on wikipedia etc. 2nd part of the session should focus on basic editing.


 * Session I (Introduction)
 * 1) If number of participants is less ask each participant to introduce. Other wise ask some basic questions to get an idea about the type of audience we have.
 * 2) A small presentation can be used for the 1st part.
 * 3) Focus on the following aspects:
 * What is Wikipedia? (Online encyclopedia, 5th largest website, real time, give stats about no. of readers/articles, no. of languages etc.)
 * What are the other Wiki projects? (Brief them about Wikimedia Commons, Wikinews, Wiki species, Wikibooks, Wiktionary etc.)
 * Who edits Wikipedia?
 * Question & Answer round (In this session do not take questions on wiki editing. Inform the participants wiki editing will be handled in session II after the break.

Give a 10 minute break to the participants and announce that you'll be around during the break and anyone could come up to you to talk about Wikipedia and get their doubts cleared. Participants who hesitate to raise their hands in the class and ask questions will most definitely come to you personally and would prefer to strike a conversation one-on-one.
 * 10 minute break


 * Session II (Basic editing)
 * 1) There is no PPT for this session. Entire session is online and hands on.
 * 2) Show the participants how to approach wiki as a reader and how to search for the articles in English or Indic wiki. If it is Indic Wiki show them how to type the respective script using the Inbuilt typing tool. Show them the different ways of searching and reaching at an article. Also introduce them to different tabs of a wiki page.
 * 3) Request one of the participants to come on stage and help the participant to create an account while demonstrating it to rest of the audience.
 * 4) The first time you create it show them where the 'create new account' link is and brief them about the information that needs to be filled in. Don't take too long to create a new account the first time. We want to demonstrate that its really really easy to create a new account and take less than 30 seconds.
 * 5) Encourage them to ask questions pertaining to creation of new account. If needed be, ask one more participant to volunteer and create an account in front of everyone.
 * 6) Ask the participants to suggest an article of their interest that they would like to edit during the course of the session.
 * 7) Use login of one of the participants to make the edits. (may be use the account already created)
 * 8) Pretty much like creating new account we want to tell the audience that editing is really simple and doesn't take too much time. Fore this, figure out a minor mistake in the article - spelling, grammar, missing comma/full stop and correct it. Once again, the first edit should not take too long. Show them that their first minor edit has gone live as soon as you hit the Save button.
 * 9) For the in session first edit try and avoid adding long sentences, references etc. Just show them the easiest edit!
 * 10) Introduce them to different wiki syntaxes. Make sure you introduce it in the following order:
 * Bold
 * Italic
 * Heading levels (here you can show section editing)
 * bullet list
 * numbered list
 * Adding link to other wiki articles
 * Adding external links
 * adding references

Tips for Conducting stage

 * 1) It should be a fun workshop! The session should be not be long and boring. We should try and make it fun for the participants or else they might loose interest. We could start by playing an ice breaker game to engage the participants. For example, ask them to open the article on Manmohan Sigh. Then ask them to reach the article on Belly Dancing by way of clicking on internal links from one article to another. One who reaches Belly Dancing in minimum number of hits will be announced as the winner and can be awarded by giving away a t-shirt/badge/sticker. This kind of exercise will help the participants become more comfortable with the environment and become more engaged in the proceedings and will contribute more effectively towards a successful outcome.
 * 2) Engage the participants as much possible and make sure that there is a two way communication happening during the session. Don't make the session feel like a discourse. If they don't get the opportunity to be a part of the discussion they might feel disinterested. Some ideas to engage the participants would be:
 * 3) * When teaching how to create a new account, instead of creating any random account ask one of the participants to come on stage and create a live account for themselves - using their own username and password.
 * 4) * Instead of selecting an article to edit in the session yourself ask the participants to suggest an article of their interest that they would like to edit during the course of the session.
 * 5) * When editing an article use login of one of the participants and not your own. This will give ownership to the participants for editing that particular article.
 * 6) Keep it simple!
 * 7) *Introduce them only to the above syntaxes. Do not introduce tables/templates or other complex syntaxes. Just tell them there are some more syntaxes and they can learn it when they start editing in wiki.
 * 8) * As far as possible teach them syntaxes using the automated tools (eg tab for Bold, Italics, Heading etc.) and not by the codes that needs to be added. In general people are used to using these automated tools in various productivity softwares. And they'll find it easier to use these tools rather than inserting codes. For example, when teaching how to insert bullets - tell them to click on the "Bulleted list item" tab. Do not confuse the participants by telling them to add a code like (*) to insert bullets.
 * 9) *Do not mention about any complex wiki policies, wiki acronyms, disputed articles, DYK, GA, FA, Categories etc. Keep the session as simple as possible.
 * 10) Be Patient! It will take roughly 2-3 hours to complete this. But remember people will ask lot of questions during this session. So please be patient and receptive to their questions.

Section 5: Follow-up stage
It's important that we're able to follow up with the participants and provide them all the support they need to know more about Wikipedia and Wikipedia editing. And it's equally important for the participant to be able to get in touch with us if they need any assistance.
 * 1) Ways in which participants can follow up with you or with the larger Wiki community:
 * 2) * Give them your email id, username, phone number, Facebook account details where the interested participants can get in touch with you.
 * 3) * Give them details of WikimediaIndia Facebook page that they can join.
 * 4) * Ask them to join India mailing list and/or respective Indic mailing list.
 * 5) Ways in which you can follow up with the participants:
 * 6) * Circulate a form in the room and request the participants to add their email ids and usernames (if they already had or were able to create one during the session).
 * 7) * One day after the session start following up with the participants by sending them mails/writing on their talk pages.