What I found one of the key factor behind active communities particularly Tamil and Malayalam, is the support of Government for the initiative. This could be a priority area for other Wikipedias as well.
According to my knowledge,
World Classical Tamil Conference 2010 was the only time Tamil wikipedians and Tamil Nadu Government collaborated. During the conference there was an article writing contest which attracted many people to Tamil wikipedia. Also during the same time a huge repository of tamil words were donated to Tamil wiktionary. Apart from that, according to my knowledge, there are no other Govt initiatives. But I should say at least in the case of Tamil the collaboration was a direct one.
But the case of Malayalam is slightly different. There was no direct collabration. For Malayalam, the support community received was mainly due to the personal efforts of IT@School director. IT@school supported most of the wiki workshops across kerala, sponsored ml wiki CD, and so on. There were couple of instances when community received indirect support. I have listed some of those
here. One good thing about Malayalam is the involvement of social organizations (for example
KSSP). This has directly or indirectly helped/helping Malayalam wiki projects. But even though community tried to directly interact with Kerala government multiple times (for example, to discuss about Kerala Govt website licenses) none of them fetched any positive result till now.
So even though both Tamil and Malayalam communities received limited support it became possible only because some volunteers from the community were ready do physical outreach programs, meetup, and to talk to people. In short I should say these all some of the after effects of public outreach programs. There are many other things related to the outreach of Indic wikipedias and its benefits, it is not just adding more users to wiki. I may share that at anther point of time. More important is, to grow Indic wikipedias some community members need to take some extra effort.
But unfortunately, the community could not be strengthened due to various issues like access to Internet. computing platform, issues with rendering and input methods and we ended up with stub articles remaining in the same state.
That is the case in all Indic wikis which used bots to increase the number of articles. According to me strength of the community also should grow as the number of articles grows. If we focus on community growth, articles numbers will grow as a natural outcome of that. As we already saw it will not happen the other way round for Indic wikipedias. As one editor pointed out in discussions, Users will be attached to a wiki only if they feel proud about it. So it is important that we should plan some programs to retain existing users and attract more new users to Indic wikis. We need to have some programs to bring back our old editors also.
Shiju
On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala
<arjunaraoc@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Shiju,
Dear All,
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I have now completed sharing initial, introductory, exploratory discussions with a host of community members from across Indic language communities. I have shared these for 12 languages (Assamese, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Nepali, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Sanskrit, Bengali, and Gujarati.)
Thanks for the extensive work you have done in surveying the language Wikipedias and sharing insights on key priorities. I have browsed through the reports and found them interesting.
Community
--cut--
What I found one of the key factor behind active communities particularly Tamil and Malayalam, is the support of Government for the initiative. This could be a priority area for other Wikipedias as well.
Projects
There is a constant debate of what should come first - article count or article quality? I
--cut--
When some of the language Wikipedias started to use the bots for creating stub articles, they would have imagined the strengthening of community to improve the same. But unfortunately, the community could not be strengthened due to various issues like access to Internet. computing platform, issues with rendering and input methods and we ended up with stub articles remaining in the same state.
I agree that use of bots for example could have been limited to District/ Mandal(Taluk) headquarters rather than covering all the villages in the case of Telugu Wikipedia for example. If appropriate stubs are created as part of overall project with committed community members and a definite time frame, seeding of the pages with stubs could be useful.
Readership
--cut--
As internet penetration and mobile data access increase, we will get even more Indic readers.
+1
I also want to try and identify potential areas of support that India Programs could work closely with communities on. The idea is to support community across languages. We would like to identify a very limited (1 or 2) pilots of a very controlled nature (in terms of scale) that we would like to collaboratively design with respective communities. Given the efforts that will be required in any pilot (even if it is of a relatively small scale), we believe that there needs to be a certain basic level of community size and collaboration to be able handle such pilots.
Chapter has kicked off Language SIGs for some of the languages. I am sure the language SIG chairs and the active language Wikipedians will be eager to interact with you on the next steps.
Best wishes
Arjuna Rao Chavala
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