It is my great pleasure to introduce two new Community Fellows in the
Wikimedia Fellows Program: Tanvir Rahman and Steven Zhang.
Tanvir Rahman is a Wikimedian who serves the movement locally and
globally, both on- and off-wiki. Tanvir has been an active editor of
Bengali Wikipedia since 2009, he holds administrator rights on
multiple projects and he was elected a steward in 2011. He also
volunteers on the Small Wiki Monitoring Team, the Countervandalism
Network, as an OTRS agent, and is a translator for translatewiki.
Tanvir helped found Wikimedia Bangladesh and organizes local outreach
activities to raise awareness for Wikimedia and bring new editors to
the projects.
In his fellowship project, Tanvir will be experimenting with on-wiki
strategies to encourage and grow the editing community on small
language versions of Wikipedia, with specific focus on the Bengali
Wikipedia. Smaller projects have different needs and challenges than
the large language communities and may require different approaches to
engage with editors. By focusing on a community like Bengali
Wikipedia, which has about 50 active editors per month and sees 10 new
editors per month, Tanvir hopes to learn more about the basic editing
infrastructure needed to encourage new editors in new or small-scale
projects.
Steven Zhang is a Wikipedian with a passion for resolving on-wiki
disputes and helping others do the same. He has been contributing to
the English Wikipedia since 2008 and has been particularly active in
dispute resolution forums, including the Wikipedia Mediation Cabal.
Steven is studying a Certificate IV in Mediation at Open Colleges, and
over the past year he has made it his mission as a volunteer to
recruit more editors to join dispute resolution efforts. In 2011, he
helped create the dispute resolution notice board, an entry point for
mediating disputes on the English Wikipedia. Steven has noted that
there aren’t enough active participants to resolve all of the disputes
that arise on Wikipedia each day, and he believes that dispute
resolution processes could be streamlined to make them more accessible
and efficient to all editors who need them.
For his fellowship project, Steven will be analyzing community
feedback and dispute resolution activity in order to build a deeper
understanding of what is effective and what needs improvement in the
current systems. He will also be developing a guide for new editors
who want to get involved in resolving on-wiki disputes.
Steven and Tanvir will be documenting their work on-wiki and on the
Foundation blog. You can learn more about their projects and how to
get involved by visiting:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Fellows
Welcome, Tanvir and Steven!
--
Siko Bouterse
Head of Community Fellowships
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
sbouterse(a)wikimedia.org