A month into basic course introduced by online 'people's' encyclopedia, students of engineering college already editing, uploading matter on various topics on website

A month after 700 from the College of Engineering Pune (CoEP) were selected for a basic course by Wikipedia, the students have already started editing and uploading matter on various topics on the website. The programme to train students was started on July 11. Dr Anil Sahastrabuddhe, director of CoEP, had visited Boston, USA, two months ago and finalised the details with Wikipedia.u00a0

Before making a formal announcement, Sahastrabuddhe decided to start the course in the campus. "About 10 CoEP faculty members are also taking courses with Wikipedia. I am also coordinating with Symbiosis Institute and Modern College," he said. "The six-month Wikimedia courses are divided into semesters with mid-term and term-end examinations, including theory and practical papers."

Sahastrabuddhe said the students' assignment work would be viewed by all readers. He said a deal was made with Wikipedia and no money was involved as it was to benefit both CoEP and Wikipedia.

Students passionate
Hisham Mundal, director of Wikipedia for India and based in Delhi, is also quite excited about the students response. Dr Jagannath Aghav, the course coordinator in CoEP and professor at Department of Computer Engineering and IT, said: "Our students are more passionate than the teachers to contribute for Wikipedia.

About 700 students are already studying for 10 different Wikipedia courses in the campus. "We have already started giving them assignments and a separate session was organised to teach them how to upload and edit the information on Wikipedia website," he said. "The topics are decided by teachers and students. The most exciting part is due credit shall be given to each student who upload and edit the matter on various topics," Aghav said.

Other initiatives Preeti Mule, who is coordinating the Wikipedia basic course in Modern College has short listed 81 students for the course and awaiting the final approval from the University of Pune. One hundred and twenty-seven students from Symbiosis are also taking the Wikipedia basic courses. They are from MSC home science, communication, development economics and microeconomics. SNTD College is also starting the Wikipedia basic course soon.

Some topics
Some of the topics selected by CoEP students are artificial intelligence, oriental modeling design, computational methods in engineering, data structural algorism, engineering mathematics, solid state devices, engineering mathematics, machine drawing and engineering graphics.