When 25 Years of Free Knowledge Reached Vidisha for the First Time

A community report from the Wikipedia 25 Celebration in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, India — organised by Wiki Open Learning, 7 June 2026.

For twenty-five years, Wikipedia has been the quiet companion of every student in India who ever opened a laptop the night before an assignment was due. In Vidisha — a small city in Madhya Pradesh, better known for the Sanchi Stupa and the Heliodorus Pillar than for tech meetups — Wikipedia was something people used every day, but had never met. No editor had ever stood in front of a room here and said: this encyclopedia is written by people like you, and you can be one of them.

On 7 June 2026, for the first time, someone did.

A first chapter, not a one-off

The Wikipedia 25 Celebration in Vidisha was the first community-led Wikimedia event ever held in the city. It was organised under the banner of Wiki Open Learning, a young India-based initiative focused on teaching the skills, tools and procedures that keep the Wikimedia projects running — everything around editing — and supported by a Rapid Fund grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.

We set out with a deliberately modest, honest goal: not to manufacture a hundred overnight editors, but to bring a real, local community into existence — to put Vidisha on the Wikimedia map and give a first generation of contributors their first account, their first edit, and a room full of people who care about the same thing.

The response told us the appetite was real. The call for participants drew more than 109 applications — far beyond what a first event in a tier-two city expects. Because this was a hands-on, first-timer-focused programme, we capped confirmed participation at 35, and prepared participation kits, swag and seating for all 35. On the day, around 28 people filled the hall; a handful of confirmed participants couldn’t make it for genuine last-minute emergencies, and their kits are reserved for the community going forward. We’d rather report that number plainly than round it up — the people who came are the story.

Who was in the room

The composition of the room is the part we’re proudest of, because it wasn’t engineered — it’s just who applied and showed up.

• Women were the majority. Of 26 participants, 14 were women, 11 men, and one non-binary — a gender balance that tech and open-knowledge events in India routinely fail to reach.
• Most had never been editors. 18 of 26 created their very first Wikimedia account around this event; only 8 arrived with an existing account. This was, for the overwhelming majority, day one.
• It bridged school and college. Roughly a fifth were school students (classes 10–12, ages 16–18), the rest from colleges — primarily the Samrat Ashok Technological Institute (SATI), Vidisha — spanning computer science, engineering, commerce and the sciences.
• It reached beyond Vidisha. Participants travelled in from Bina and Bhopal, not just the host city.

A full day, built like a conference — for first-timers

We designed the day to feel substantial without being intimidating. It opened with a welcome and introductions from the organising team, followed by breakfast and the first sessions.

Session one — “What is Wikipedia, really?” We started from first principles: that Wikipedia is written by ordinary volunteers, not companies and not AI; that it is free to read and free to edit; and that Hindi Wikipedia, with roughly 1.7 lakh articles against English Wikipedia’s 7+ million, is wide open for the people in that room to shape. A recurring thread ran through the morning: in the age of ChatGPT and Claude, the most compelling reason to edit Wikipedia is that these AI systems are themselves trained on it — to improve Hindi Wikipedia is to improve the source the machines learn from.

Session two — Wikimedia Commons and the sister projects. The session moved from Wikipedia outward to the wider movement: Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wiktionary and more — what each is for, what belongs on Commons and what doesn’t, how licensing works, and how a freely-licensed photograph becomes part of an article seen worldwide.

After a community lunch, the afternoon turned practical with a walkthrough of how editing actually works — account creation, article structure, references, talk pages and mobile editing — laying the foundation for first edits without rushing anyone into the deep end on day one.

The team challenge: seven tiny “knowledge startups”

The centrepiece of the afternoon was a team activity that turned the whole room into builders. Each of the seven teams — seated under playful bilingual team names printed on their table cards — became, for one afternoon, a small “knowledge startup” with a single mission: design one small, real thing that would bring more people in Vidisha to Wikipedia. Not an app to build that day — an idea on paper, with a name, an audience, and a way it works.

Each team was given a distinct lens, mapped to a real function of the movement:

• विचार वाटिका (Vichaar / Ideas) — outreach: how to bring new people in.
• मंथन मोहल्ला (Manthan / Churning) — content: which Vidisha topics are missing and worth writing.
• ज्ञान Ganga — education: how to use Wikipedia inside their own schools and colleges.
• Soch सागर — design/UX: how to make editing less frightening for a first-timer.
• तेज़ तर्रार Team — tech: one tool or feature that would help (a natural fit for the CS students).
• जिज्ञासा Junction — trust: how to keep information accurate and counter misinformation.
• सार्थक’s Syndicate — media: a plan to photograph and document Vidisha for Commons.

Giving each team a real movement-function as a “lens” meant that, by role-playing a knowledge startup, they were quietly learning how the Wikimedia ecosystem is actually structured. Teams presented their ideas, the strongest were recognised, and the friendly competition fed into the prizes.

Cake, swag, and a room that didn’t want to leave

Because it was, after all, a birthday, the day’s flagship moment was the cutting of the Wikipedia 25 cake — twenty-five years of free knowledge marked together, with the whole room gathered for the group photograph. Prizes followed for the top teams, and every participant received a kit: a Wikipedia 25 t-shirt and cap, a personalised mug, a custom portrait cut-out, a sticker set, a badge and a thank-you card — alongside snacks and high tea.

The warmth in the room afterwards was the part no metric captures. We collected eleven feedback videos from participants, and the consistent note across them was simple: they enjoyed it, they learned, and they want a next one.

What we’re leaving behind on Commons

Everything from the day has been documented openly. All event media now lives on Wikimedia Commons, under Category:Wikipedia 25 Celebration Vidisha, organised into four subcategories:

• Participant photographs — 70 files
• Event videos — 29 files (including team activities, hall walkthroughs and feedback)
• Design kit — 16 files (banners, badges, swag and brand materials)

A full edited video of the day will follow on YouTube once post-production is complete.

What this means for a small-city community

Vidisha began 7 June with zero Wikipedians at this event. It ended with around thirty — most holding a Wikimedia account they didn’t have that morning, a majority of them women, and several still in school. That is exactly the kind of small, durable beginning that the Wikimedia movement in India has always been built on: not metropolitan spectacle, but one careful node of contribution at a time.

We’re sharing our learnings openly so that other organisers in tier-two and tier-three Indian cities can run their own celebrations. If your city hasn’t met Wikipedia yet, consider this an invitation — and proof that it works.

Wiki Open Learning thanks the Wikimedia Foundation for the Rapid Fund grant that made this possible, the SATI student community, and every participant who chose to spend a Sunday building free knowledge.

— On behalf of the Wiki Open Learning organising team