Aafi
Aaqib Anjum Aafi is an alumnus of Jamia Millia Islamia, a premier university in New Delhi. He is the founder of the Deoband Community Wikimedia (DCW), a thematic user-group affiliate of Wikimedia Foundation. He has been contributing to Wikimedia movement since 2019 and is an admin on Wikimedia Commons and the Urdu Wikipedia. He is a seasoned leader in the Indian Wikimedia ecosystem.
At DCW, Aafi has helped establish Wiki Club Jamia, Wiki Club AMU, and Wiki Club Deoband - to help introduce Wikimedia movement in educational institutions, alongside leading all of its programs. There, he also introduced DCW Conversation Hour, an open conversation hour for everyone, which has had 19 editions until now. Aafi has been to WikiConference India 2023, Wikimania 2023 and Wikimedia Summit 2024. In July 2023, he was awarded by Bayt al-Hikmah Deoband for his contributions to Digital Empowerment.
Session
Education is one of the fields where Wikimedia can have its biggest impact as we work to make the sum of all human knowledge. Many Wikimedians integrate Wikimedia in their curriculum, teachers' training programs and so on but the practice of ECWOs is not yet well explored. Running Extracurricular Wikimedia organizations (ECWO) in educational institutions offers more flexibility than traditional Wikimedia practices as part of the curriculum itself. It allows training the students as open knowledge activists going beyond rigidly pushing Wikimedia to their coursework. This session covers the structure, activities and experiences of the ECWOs from around the world.