On 15 January 2026, Wikipedia turned 25. Across India, WikiClub Tech chapters at 6 engineering colleges marked the occasion not with a single centralised event but with 6 separate campus celebrations, each organised and run by students.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiclub_tech/Community_Bulletin
Supported by Wikipedia 25 Birthday Fund grant, this initiative succeeded because of our 18 months of groundwork. By leveraging our pre-existing network of active campus chapters that we built over time and trained student leaders, we bypassed the “setup” phase and immediately activated a federated execution model. We provided the toolkit, and our local chapters independently drove the localized, on-the-ground celebrations.
How we set it up
WikiClub Tech India has student-led chapters at colleges across the country, each managed by trained Wiki Envoys. These are student Leaders who went throughTrain-the-Trainer program and onboarding process, where they learned not just the Wikimedia technical stack but also event planning, community management, and reporting discipline. By the time the birthday celebrations were announced, these Envoys had already run kickoff sessions, technical workshops, and mentorship calls on their campuses. They were not learning how to organise. They had been doing it for months.
For the birthday celebrations, each Envoy had an opportunity for organising their campus event, handling outreach, coordinating with faculty, and reporting back. Every event had a clear chain: Envoy leads execution, Mentor provides guidance, Faculty provides institutional support. This three-layer structure is how WikiClub Tech operates for every program, not just the birthday. It is the same structure that runs the Road to Wiki cohorts, the Developer Circles, and the campus chapter activities throughout the year.
We created a standardised event structure so that every celebration would include the same core elements: a short video looking back at Wikipedia’s 25-year journey, an introduction to the Wikimedia ecosystem for students who were new to it, a segment celebrating Indic language Wikimedians and local culture, and a call to action inviting students to join the and contribute to Wiki Ecosystem. Beyond that, each campus was free to add their own programming based on what worked for their audience.
A coordinated social media campaign ran alongside the events, with all chapters posting on the same day using official Wikipedia 25 assets and hashtags.
What happened on the ground
Manipal University, Jaipur was one of the first to celebrate. Envoy Jaspreet Singh worked with mentor Abhinav Upadhyay and faculty contact Dr. Bagesh Kumar to put together an event that drew students from multiple departments. The celebration included a Wikipedia history walkthrough, an open source introduction session, and cake cutting ceremony and meeting with co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, calling it a meaningful step in connecting students to global knowledge projects.
United Institute of Technology (UIT), Prayagraj hosted what became one of the more documented celebrations. Envoys Reeti Singh and Sarthak Singh, mentored by Hridyesh Gupta, organised a full program that combined the birthday celebration with a technical session. The event was covered in a standalone Diff blog post and generated strong engagement, said Faculty advisor Dr. Amit Tiwari who supported the event from the institution side.
United University, Prayagraj held its event with Envoy Mohd. Shadab and Mentor Sanskar Dubey organised the celebration. Faculty member Naveen Kumar provided institutional backing. The event included birthday festivities plus a recruitment pitch for upcoming WikiClub Tech activities.
SHUATS, Prayagraj celebrated on 3 February 2026. Envoy and mentor Aditya Kumar, along with Ebenezer Rao, organised the event with strong faculty support from Er. Dileep Kumar. The celebration included a Women in Tech session led by Sakshi Rai, a reflection on Wikipedia’s journey by Ankit Kumar Verma, and a dedicated segment on Indic language contributions. This event was also covered in a standalone Diff blog post.
Garden City University (GCU), Bangalore was a newer addition to the network. Ebenezer Rao organised an event that doubled as an introduction to open source for a campus that was encountering WikiClub Tech for the first time.
Nitte Mahalinga Adyanthaya Memorial Institute Of Technology (NITTE), Karnataka celebrated on 31 January 2026. It started with an introductory talk by Shyama Sundra who had explained the vision of the Wikimedia movement, the role of volunteers, and the importance of Wikipedia as a freely accessible, community-driven knowledge platform. Vishwas Sharma took a Wikipedia editing session which was then followed by Why I Wiki Session by the envoy Nihar Chakravarti and Women in Tech Session by Shreya G Amin and Deekshitha.
Our Collective Impact
Across all 6 campus celebrations, the events collectively reached hundreds of students and developers . Multiple events were registered on the Wikimedia Events Calendar and used the official Event Registration tool. Photos and videos from the celebrations were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Several chapters published blogs and social posts documenting their events, and Diff blog posts.
Each event was Documented through a post-event reporting form, activities reporting Mechanism, and outcomes. This is not something we set up just for the birthday. WikiClub Tech runs a centralised tracking and reporting system for all chapter activities. That level of operational discipline across a volunteer student network is what allowed 6 events to run in parallel without any of them falling through the cracks.
Why it worked
Three things made this possible.
First, the infrastructure already existed. WikiClub Tech had spent the previous year and a half building campus chapters, training Envoys, and establishing faculty relationships through the Road to Wiki program. The birthday celebrations did not require building anything new. They ran on the community that was already there.
Second, the Envoy model distributed the work. Instead of one team trying to organise 6 events in different cities, 6 student leaders each organised one event in their own college. They knew their campus, their audience, and their faculty. The central team provided the toolkit, the grant funding, and coordination support. The Envoys did the rest.thirdly the grant from the Wikimedia Foundation through the India Rapid Project made the logistics possible. Printing Wikipedia 25 banners, arranging refreshments, covering event materials, these are small costs that make a real difference when you are a student trying to run an event on campus.
What comes next
The birthday celebrations were not isolated events. These events served as a key catalyst for the Road to Wiki program, successfully introducing new students to Wiki and the open source ecosystem across all participating campuses. Attendees of the anniversary celebrations gained a solid understanding of the broader Wiki ecosystem, which was further reinforced by the dedicated technical sessions hosted during the Wiki Birthday event.
WikiClub Tech is part of the Open Knowledge Initiatives (OKI) at IIIT Hyderabad. Learn more at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiclub_Tech or contact us at wikitech@indicwiki.org.
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