Pavanaja,
Thanks for the explaining the outcome of Tulu Workshops and Christ University partnership.
While
you take a microscopic view of the recent activity and ask me to be
optimistic, I would like to be realistic after taking a macroscopic view
on past activities.
where active editors going from 20 to 20 over a period of 6 months is called 45% growth.
The real state of Assamese Wikipedia now after two years can be seen at
Here is what Asaf from WMF has to say on this:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form#Q2a
"For a tiny Wikipedia like Assamese, it's possible the temporary editing boost leading to a
doubling of its size by article count and
tripling
of its size by contents was itself the seed of future growth, as the
bootstrapping of a Wikipedia is also slow and not self-sustaining work,
until that moment when a virtuous cycle kicks in and the usefulness of
the resource begins attracting new editors "organically". We have
perhaps not reached that moment with Assamese, and as you point out, the
program is implicitly judged to be less valuable than other
opportunities and has thus been discontinued."
If this
is the case of Assamese Wikipedia which is already out of incubator and
that once had a very small but dedicated community, then what is CIS
doing working with projects in incubator?
Even after CIS working for a year on Konkani Wikipedia, it is not out of incubator.
But, it seems you have started the Tulu plan even before the FDC grant is approved.
Your FDC proposal staff assessment also notes as follows:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Staff_proposal_assessment
"CIS’s strategy for its stand-alone projects may not be the most
effective for the language communities each project is targeting, given
that projects other than Wikipedia (for example, Wikisource or
Wiktionary) may be more effective entry-points for working with language
communities like Tulu or Santali."
To quote Asaf from WMF again:
"The
sine qua non of most programs is a core of
self-motivating active editors... Where that core doesn't exist, it's very hard to deploy any other
type of program..."
For the Indian landscape, Malayalam has around 3 editors (those who make
5+ edits every month) per million and it is the highest (you need to
ignore the highly extrapolated value for Sanskrit owing to its tiny
population and institutional support). It goes down until 0.2 editors
per million for Hindi. To put it in plain words, for every 50 lakh
people speaking Hindi, we can hope to get 1 editor making 5+ edits. This
trend has been consistent over the years and I don't expect drastic
change occurring in the near future unless there is a huge change in
socio-economic scenarios.
If you look for languages similar to Tulu, Nepal Bhasa comes close.
You can check the activity for their Wikipedia at
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaNEW.htm
(to be continued.. ) :)
Ravi