Hi Shiju,
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Shiju Alex <shiju(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dear All,
--cut--
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<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Pro…11>,
Hindi<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Progra…11>,
Tamil<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Progra…11>,
Telugu<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Progr…11>,
Kannada<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Prog…11>,
Nepali<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Progr…11>,
Malayalam<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Pr…11>,
Marathi<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Prog…11>,
Odia<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Program…11>,
Sanskrit<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Pro…11>,
Bengali<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Prog…11>,
and
Gujarati<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Pro…
.)
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