Hi Shiju,<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Shiju Alex <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:shiju@wikimedia.org">shiju@wikimedia.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Times;font-size:medium"><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Dear All,</span></div>
<div style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Times;font-size:medium"><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"><br>
</span></div><div><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><br>
<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span>--cut--<br>
<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">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 (<a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Assamese/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Assamese</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Hindi/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Hindi</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Tamil/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Tamil</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Telugu/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Telugu</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Kannada/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Kannada</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Neplai/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Nepali</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Malayalam/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Malayalam</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Marathi/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Marathi</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Odia/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Odia</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Sanskrit/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Sanskrit</a>, <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Bengali/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Bengali</a>, and <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Gujarati/Discussions/2011" target="_blank">Gujarati</a>.)</span><br>
</div></blockquote><div><br>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. <br></div>
<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Times;font-size:medium">
<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><br>
<h3 dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:19px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Community</span></h3>
<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">--cut--</span></div>
</blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Times;font-size:medium"><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><span style="font-size:19px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Projects</span>
<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">There is a constant debate of what should come first - article count or article quality? I </span><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"> </span><br>
<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span>--cut--<br>
</div></blockquote><div><br>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. <br>
<br>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.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Times;font-size:medium">
<h3 dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:19px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:underline;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Readership</span></h3>
<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">--cut-- </span></div>
</blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Times;font-size:medium"><span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">As internet penetration and mobile data access increase, we will get even more Indic readers. </span></div>
</blockquote><div> +1<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Times;font-size:medium">
<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:transparent;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">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.</span><br>
</div></blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
<br><br>Best wishes<br>Arjuna Rao Chavala<br> <br></div></div><br>