hi,
Thanks Arun for posting it here. I was really tired when I posted this
yesterday to the Mumbai mailing list. It does seem more or less accurate. A
few additions from what I missed out yesterday night.
1. With The Museum ( Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay - CSMVS),
we spoke with the Museum Director, Chief Art Conservator and the Business
Development Executive there. After the requisite background that Liam
provided (it also helped perhaps that the British Museum Director, Neil
MacGregor visited the Museum this week) that we gave them a rough idea of
possible activities we could do together. We also explained to the
Conservator how a typical session would be conducted to help them understand
their part of the responsibilities and what will be ours.
2. At Jnanapravaha, Bishaka and Liam visited. After the usual pitch, the
feedback was that they were interested in getting students to write and
improve articles on Indian art and aesthetics on Wikipedia. They have asked
for help previous to the next semester in July on how such a thing can be
organised.
3. Ashwin Baindur asked about how to work with institutions like Maharashtra
Archives which are facing a brunt of the budget cuts (they get the money
after the song and dance shows, museums etc all get their cut) and have
trouble with up-keep of their archives. Liam replied that this would mainly
be in helping them digitise records. The trouble, Liam said, was on where to
begin and how to priorotise work. Stating the example of the National
Library, Kolkata he said that some books were not even docketed (I forget
the original word - something to do with giving the books numbers and
classifying appropriately). We agreed that Libraries and Archives also
suffered because there was no good Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
software for Indic languages. Liam suggested a French example of how an old
French cursive text made it un-OCR-able (new word - mine!) and got help from
Wikipedians to manually type in text onto WikiSource.
4. Bishaka raised the point that all of the GLAM activities could also be
simultaneously done in various languages locally. So, during a Backstage
Pass event in Mumbai, we could improve the English, Hindi and Marathi (say)
articles at once. Editors in any language are welcome to contribute.
5. There have been an influx of new people and requests from people for a
basic editing session. Perhaps it is time to interlace the meetups with
WikiAcademy.
With that, I hope I've more or less covered all Wikipedia territory from the
meetup. If I missed out on anything, feel very free to jump in and add your
notes.
warm regards,
Pradeep