Dear all,
Here's an article by Medianama on Wikisource in Indic languages (
http://www.medianama.com/2012/05/223-wikipedians-digitizing-out-of-copyrigh…<http://www.medianama.com/2012/05/223-wikipedians-digitizing-out-of-copyrigh…>
). There are a couple of minor misses on the article - but it does refer to
two important aspects about Wikisource:
a) It is a door through which many have entered our projects and
communities (i.e., they start with Wikisource, and indeed Wiktionary,
because it's relatively easier to contribute to, and then they move on to
contribute to other projects too, such as Wikipedia) - especially in Indic
languages.
b) The initiative run by Malayalam community (written about in the article)
to encourage school children to contribute to Wikisource is something that
could be of interest to many other communities. If anyone wants any help
to start conversations with schools in their states, Nitika and I would be
happy to help out. Please reach out to us at noopur(a)wikimedia.org or
nitika(a)wikimedia.org
--
*Wikipedians Digitizing Out-Of-Copyright Texts In Eight Indian
Languages* *-Nikhil
Pahwa
In what is a painstaking process, Wikipedians are digitizing Indian
language, out-of-copyright texts online, trying to address the comparative
paucity of Indic language texts online. Wikisource is a repository of
documents and archived material that serves as a reference source for
Wikipedia, and a means of improving access to information sources. Of the
64 languages Wikisource is available in, 8 are Indian:
Tamil<http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesWikipediaTA.htm>(
stats <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/SummaryTA.htm>),
Malayalam<http://ml.wikisource.org/>(
stats <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/SummaryML.htm>),
Telugu<http://te.wikisource.org/>(
stats <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/SummaryTE.htm>),
Kannada<http://kn.wikisource.org/>(
stats <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/SummaryKN.htm>),
Sanskrit<http://sa.wikisource.org/>(
stats <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/SummarySA.htm>),
Marathi<http://mr.wikisource.org/>(
stats <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/SummaryMR.htm>),
Bengali<http://bn.wikisource.org/>(
stats <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/SummaryBN.htm>) and
Gujarati<http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesWikipediaGU.htm>(
stats <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/SummaryGU.htm>). What’s
particularly notable about this digitization is that the texts are being
typed out by volunteers on their own time, one word at a time.*
*How It Began*
*Users were adding bhajans of Mirabai to Wikipedia, but according to
Wikipedia’s policies, recipes, poems and song lyrics belong to Wikibooks or
Wikisource, Noopur Raval, Communications Consultant (India Program) at the
Wikimedia Foundation told MediaNama. One user raised this issue, and
following discussions, it was decided to create a Wikisource for Gujarati.
The first text to be digitized, though, was Rachnatmak Karyakram, a book by
Mahatma Gandhi. The project, involving the digitization of 60 pages, took
six volunteers a week. This was followed by another project, the
digitization of Gandhi’s autobiography, with a group of 13 people typing
out the book over a month.*
*Identification & Prioritization Of Texts For Digitization*
*Selection of text for digitization is entirely community driven: they
decide what is important. Editors put up a notice for the project, and user
participation is sought. For example, the Gujarati Wikisource editors chose
a text by Mahatma Gandhi. The community has an intensive process for
checking if a book is out of copyright, either using the publication date,
and there are mailing lists which discuss when books go out of copyright.
“It’s not as if there is a shortage of texts that are out of copyright,”
Hisham Mundol, Consultant (India Program) at the Wikimedia Foundation said,
adding that “The kind of projects that the community is undertaking (at
present) involves iconic books, where you know the author and the
publisher.”*
*Overcoming Technological Challenges*
*Mundol points out that the process of digitization is brutal, compounded
by the fact that there is no reasonably functional OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) in Indic languages. Texts are thus manually typed out,
followed by a phase of correction and proofreading. In comparison, English
texts can be scanned and uploaded and OCR’ed. The lack of tools points
towards an issue which Wikipedia faces with Indic languages. “If a
MediaWiki tool comes to an English language project, the possibility of
implementing it, the kind of people using it, all of that happens very
quickly, because most of this is written English. It takes time to localize
it. For a bug to be filed for a local language project takes a lot more
time. That gap makes for a lot of difference: how many people (use it), how
easily is the work done, the kind of ease, at every step you need people
who know the language to work with people who know the technology,” says
Raval.*
*Still, the situation with Indic language fonts has improved over the past
year according to Mundol:”The font input problem is no longer the burning
issue. There’s been an increase in the volumes on Indic language scripts,
emails, mobiles. We’re seeing a doubling of readership of our Indic
languages.” One reason for the increase, according to Raval, has been the
implementation of a multiple input tool called Narayam, integrating both
Inscript and transliteration.*
*Reducing Entry Barrier & Involving Schools*
*The Wikisource project is really small in India right now, but it plays an
important role: “It allows people to enter the Wikimedia world of projects
in a much easier manner than editing a Wikipedia article. Wikisource is
much more accessible,” Mundol says.*
*In Kerala, community members involved schools in the process of
digitizing Ramchandra
Vilasam. ”As a part of the 7th or 8th standard, the school curriculum
encourages typing in Malayalam. So the community members work with the
teacher, and instead of 40 students typing out the same two pages that they
would have done in a class assignment, they split a book between them, and
each types out a separate page. It’s great because if everyone gave in the
same page, it would go to the recycle bin quite promptly,” Mundol said,
adding that “We are looking at involving more schools, and discussions are
on with Malayalam schools and colleges.”*
*The Culture Of Knowledge & The Importance Of Community For Wikimedia*
*“It’s interesting to see how a culture develops, not just editors and
technology, but the whole interaction that builds up the identity of a
community,” Raval says. “When Gujarati Wikisource or Marathi Wikisource
comes to your mind, you’re actually thinking of a bunch of people you don’t
necessarily know, and their attitudes towards knowledge, and why they would
go out of their way, spend hours, just to make sure that the knowledge that
they think is important in a language should survive and be digitized, and
they’ll go through the pain to make it available.” While each project has
an individual taking responsibility as a project manager, and a group gets
created around each project, since it is volunteer work, whenever someone
has exams or has other work, someone else compensates.*
*The focus on fostering an involved community often determines Wikimedia’s
approach: “The temptation could be to take a bunch of the 4 million
articles on the English Wikipedia, and run it through a translator. Very
quickly, you can build a huge content base (in Indic languages), but it
does nothing for that community. We’ve seen that it not only does no good,
it does a great deal of harm because they no longer feel that this is
actually their project. It’s about ‘I wrote this paragraph’, or ‘I
contributed to this article’,” Mundol says. “Anything that Wikimedia does,
we encourage the participation of an individual member as much much more
important than anything else because community members edit, contribute,
and no technology solution can get you that.”*
Best,
Noopur
--
Noopur Raval
Dear All
I wanted to share with you an update on the work that Shiju[1] is doing on Indic languages[2] as part of India Program.[3] A guiding principle for the thinking and efforts of our team is that community building should be the most essential aspect of all the work that we do. In the context of small Indic communities, Shiju has been working to try and identify the various elements that need to come together to foster community building. This update is about the Community Building pilot[4] that was run for the Assamese community. For context, community building means different things to different people and in fact there was a very interesting post[5] that Shiju put out that articulated his thinking on this and, hence, our priorities.
The results of these efforts have been outstanding
number of editors on Assamese Wikipedia has increased to 31 in April 2012 (from 18 in December 2011 and just 10 in November 2011.)
number of Wikiprojects increased to 6 (from a situation where there were no reasonably active ones in December 2011- and including 5 Wikiprojects independently conceptualised and managed by the community)
average monthly edits on Assamese Wikipedia increased to about 5000 in April 2012 from around 3000 in November 2011
There are 5 key factors that are responsible for this remarkable growth
Strong communication. This started with Shiju building personal connections with Assamese editors and then encouraging them to communicate with each other on-wiki, online and in meet--ups and outreach sessions.
Initial push. Shiju visited Assam in January where he spent time in 2 towns with 7 of the most active community members, who also conducted 2 outreach sessions. This visit has proved to be really useful because it helped to energise the community and also helped to establish a personal relationship between Shiju and these editors (and also, amongst the editors themselves.)
Encouraging collaboration. Wikiprojects and outreach are really useful to galvanise a community and helped build personal equations. It's wonderful to see the increase in Wikiprojects and
Building capacity & confidence. In all the work that has been done for the Assamese community, the endeavour has been to build capacity. For instance, support was given to get basic outreach material including FAQs prepared and outreach sessions were guided by Shiju. It's inspiring to see the Assamese community now take things to a whole new level and plan out an ambitious 10th anniversary.[6]
Healthy environment. This is the last - but probably the most essential point - and it is something I want to call out because it is what will help or severely hinder the abilities of individual communities realise their dreams and potential. The reason why the Assamese community is making such wonderful steps forward is because there is
a set of editors with the right level of initiative and motivation
a strong sense of co-operation and good spirit amongst the editors
an extremely welcoming approach to new editors
None of this would have been possible without the efforts of every single Assamese community members. In the early days when Shiju started off, he was interacting with Bishnu, Dipankar, Gitartha, Jyoti & Prabhakar - who helped organise the first meet-ups and outreach sessions. Thanks to their efforts, a list of thank-yous would now be 31 strong! Thank you and congratulations to all of you!
To the Assamese community, I wish you the very best for your 10th anniversary.[6] There are exciting plans including your photo contest and your article contest and the meet-up and the outreach session. I know that you are doing most of the event largely independently (with Noopur[7] providing media assistance for the 10th anniversary and an India Chapter[8] grant[9] supporting you.) This is the true signs of a community that is coming of age. There are tremendous opportunities in outreach to get new editors, initiatives like your article & photo contests to improve content and in proposed projects like offline to make transformational changes in the community.
With regard to the way forward for India Program, the pilot design page[4] on meta[3] has now been updated. The next steps are going to be to see how we can adapt or build on these experiences with other communities, and as we move to other communities, do them in a more scaleable manner.
To all community members - across languages across India - if you did want any help in any aspect of community building, please feel free to reach out to Shiju[1] at shiju(a)wikimedia.org. Please also do add comments or ideas or suggestions you might have to the Community Building Pilot's talk page.[10]
hisham[11]
Notes
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Shiju
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program
[4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Basic_Community_…
[5] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-December/005813.…
[6] http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/05/16/ten-glorious-years-of-assamese-wikipedi…
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Noopur28
[8] http://wikimedia.in/
[9] http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Grants/Photo_and_Article_Competition_and_Wiki_Work…
[10] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Basic_Commu…
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hisham
Dear all,
Greetings! Here's an update on the Social Media pilot
program<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media>.
Just a small recap before I go on to the numbers.
*Why Facebook?*
Why we decided to go with Facebook at all is because potential new editors
are more comfortable and familiar with the channel. To illustrate, after
outreach sessions, we tried staying in touch with around 100 participants
using a combination of email and talk page messages and got just 3
responses. When we sent an invite to a Facebook page where they could get
help and inputs on how to edit, we got 300 signed up in less than 3 days.
Also, social media requires relatively lower investments of time and
resources from our community and many Internet savvy people are comfortable
using it. The Social Media program was started in order to effectively
utilize platforms like Facebook and community groups there (like the Odia
Wikipedia group, Kannada Wikipedia group) in order to engage more new
editors and give them basic lessons on editing.
However, running a Facebook group is very different from using Facebook for
personal updates. That's why after observing how these groups work and
interacting with a few editors who started these groups, we developed a
systematic 19 point guide that looks at various aspects of how to do use
Facebook effectively including aspects like discipline in messaging,
structuring the interactions, tone of messaging, selecting articles, being
cautious with Wikispeak etc. (Of course, it keeps in mind WP:NOTFACEBOOK.)
Here's a sneak peek into what we've been doing on two different groups:
1) You can also write on
Wikipedia<https://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediasupport/>
This group was primarily started to give lessons in English editing.
Although all of us use social network sites, it is important to understand
that the way we interact on Wikipedia is very different from Facebook. This
is the gap we are trying to bridge through more deliberate messaging. As
mentioned in the detailed program
guide<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media#Pro…>,
we try and do regular editing sessions with fun, interesting articles that
have adequate space for improvement (therefore making it easier for new
editors to make their first edits.)
Through a series of 5 basic tasks like creating a username, correcting a
spelling mistake, adding a line of information, adding a reference and
adding an interwiki link, we try and get the user to make their first 5
edits in less than 10 minutes. Our initial experiments show promise and of
the 400+ members right now, over 30 users have participated in these
mini-editing sessions and have now edited for the very first time. (You
can see their usernames in the
doc<https://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediasupport/doc/353268748054711/>on
the group; do note that are the names of 7 existing editors also on
that
list, who are the mentors.)
To cite examples, User:
Zamsam<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Zamsam>(a
young new editor) came to the group and wanted to create the article
on
cricketer Ajit Chandila <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Chandila>. Once
we helped him create the article, he started contributing to Chandila's
article and moved on to another cricketer, Manvinder
Bisla's<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manvinder_Bisla>article.
Similarly,
User:10gible <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/10gible>joined
us to edit the article on Lalu
Prasad Yadav <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalu_Prasad_Yadav> while
User:Neeasmaverick<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Neeasmaverick>edited
the article on his college, Jawaharlal
Nehru University <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru_University>,
Vicky Donor <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicky_Donor> and Amul
girl<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul_girl>and
User:Saranshkataria<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Saranshkataria>edited
Aloo
Chaat <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloo_Chaat> and
Rasgulla<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasgulla>.
This could not have been possible without a group of wonderful mentors like
Debanjan, Karthik, Deepon, Sheel, Pratik and Harsh who volunteered and
constantly keep helping new editors. We had Skype calls and regular chats
just to ensure that we connect with new users in a way they find most
comfortable.
The first hurdle of getting new editors to do a set of basic tasks has been
crossed for some. The challenge going forward will always be is to sustain
the interest of these new editors and make them long term editors hopefully
by multiple editing sessions. That still needs to be figured out. Any
inputs, comments and help are welcome.
2) Odia Wikipedia group <https://www.facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki/>
This group caters to Odia Wikipedians as well as people who speak the
language and might be interested in knowing about Wikipedia. We used
similar techniques as above to expand the group conversations beyond
existing Wikipedians and encourage new editors to participate.
Once when an article on Handia <https://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handia> (a
local beverage) was posted, a new
User:Swetapadma<https://or.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%AC%AC%E0%AD%8D%E0%AD%9F%E0%A…>came
forward to contribute images. Since then, she has been contributing to
articles on Odia cuisine and adding images to articles on Tribes of Odisha.
User:Hellohappy<https://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AC%AC%E0%AD%8D%E0%AD%9F%E0%AC%AC%E0%AC%B9…>edited
the article on Capital
High School, Bhubaneswar<https://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_High_School,_Bhubaneswar>
.
So far almost 10 new users have joined in and made their first few edits in
the past month. Given the small size of Indic communities, this could be a
very effective way of encouraging newbies. This also helps because it
means that it filters in those who have Internet connectivity, are
passionate about the language and (in most cases) are familiar with typing
in Indic languages).
Again, this was done with the help of existing Odia Wikipedians like
Gorvachove, Mrutyunjay Kar, Gyanranjan Sahu, Suratha Parhi, Diptiman and
others.
*Challenges*:
Now that we've figured out a way of engaging so many new editors and
getting them to make their first 5 edits, the challenge is to integrate
them into our community and make sure they continue editing. Also, it would
be ideal to expand this initiative to other Indic and Wikipedia user
groups. (I am already working with the Kannada community and I know that
Wikipedia Club Pune has already been trying something similar). I would
like to invite all community members interested to write to me (
noopur(a)wikimedia.org) and then we can have a brief skype call and figure
how to implement it for your group.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media
[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediasupport/
[3]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media#Pro…
[4] https://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediasupport/doc/353268748054711/
[5] https://www.facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki/
Regards,
Noopur
--
Noopur Raval
--
Noopur Raval
Dear all,
I am very happy to tell you all that the third issue of Wikipatrika - the
community newsletter is finally out! You can check it here:
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiPatrika/2012-05
First things first, a humble acknowledgement to all the editors who helped
out with this issue of the newsletter. A special thanks to Gitartha (as),
Debanjan (bn), Karthik (en and mr), Pratik (en), DS Vyas and Sushant (gu),
Siddhartha (hi), Omshivaprakash (kn), Anoop, Kannan, Sreejith, Viswaprabha
and Shiju (ml), Abhishek (mr), Rajesh and Saroj (ne), Mkar and Srikant
Kedia (or), Abhiram (sa), Logicwiki and Shanmugam (ta), Arjuna and
Rahimanuddin (te). In other contributions, thanks to Srikanth R for
Commons, Logic, Santhosh, Achal for Free culture news and Tinu for Press
news.
This entire venture could not have been possible without Tanvir's constant
support with templates and tweaks. Forgive me if I have missed someone.
So, what has changed from last time? Since all the Wikimeetups are listed
on Wikipedia here and on the respective community pages, we've omitted the
section on events and meetups. Instead, we've added a section on* Featured
Interviews* which has a GLAM interview this time and the *EPOV* column
(Editor's point of view: INCOTM report).
The idea is to make Wikipatrika a supplement to the mailing lists and
village pumps and not replicate the same information in all places.
Hopefully, by the next issue, with more featured interviews, insightful
pieces from editors and free culture persons we will be able to achieve
that.
*The way forward: *
It's a proud moment to see the amount of activity that all our language
communities are involved in. We should definitely strive to make
Wikipatrika regular and hopefully get more editors to contribute. This is
one space where editors can express the dreams, visions and challenges that
their Wikipedia community faces. If you have projects you want to publicize
or successful projects that could be started in other communities, this is
the space to express your opinion! From next time onward, we will
coordinate Patrika on
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-newsletter *mailing
list*. I welcome you all to join right away and we can discuss ideas for
features, changing the format and more!
--
Noopur Raval
Dear all,
A quick update on Wikipatrika. Here's the current draft of the next issue
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiPatrika/2012-05/Community_News
As you can see, most of the sections have been updated with information on
events, meetups and Wikipedia news of our various language communities.
This time, we've also added an interview of a community member (Bpositive's
report on INCOTM) and an external interview (interview with a GLAM
Director) to make Patrika more informative and interesting.
Quite a few of you may already have contributed to this draft. The pages
for as, bn, gu, hi, en, kn, ne, or, sa, te and ta have already been
translated from the respective languages. There is also a Commons tab where
we can add information on various photo walks. The reason why I'm sharing
this update is for everyone else to add material that may have been left
out or any other details. Do remember that we are planning to release this
on May 10th so please do add your edits / sections by May 9th.
Also, going forward, we hope to coordinate the issue on the Wikipatrika
mailing list. So, I invite all those interested to join the Wikipatrika
mailing list here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-newsletter
Regards
--
Noopur Raval
Hey folks
The next India Program IRC (2nd for April) is scheduled for Thursday 19th
April at 9 p.m. IST. Do join us using this link:
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.
We'll be discussing Outreach, Communications and Education in this one.
Here is what we plan to discuss this time:
*Outreach*
Over the past few months we have conducted several outreach sessions and
have been able to curate outreach standard presentation decks, best
practices and tips. Now we want to assist community members in
adopting/adapting these to conduct effective outreach sessions in their
respective cities/languages. We'll be soon working on 2 aspects for
increasing the number of outreach sessions we are doing on Indic languages
but we need your help on this:
1. Start translating outreach supporting documents to Indic languages - To
start with we want Indic language community members to help us translate
outreach documents and presentations to Indic languages.
2. Create opportunities for Indic outreach - We have been mailing/calling a
lot of institutes to organize a Wikipedia session (see list
here<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Corresponden…>)[1]
in their regional language but we have not able to get as many outreach
sessions as we'd like since they feel more comfortable corresponding in
their own regional language. We want help from Indic langauge editors who
are interested to do more outreach in their regional languages/cities to
help us reach out to these institutes.
I'd request all the Indic language editors who want to help us out on
either of the two points mentioned above to show up on the IRC or write to
us offlist since we'll be discussing ways of doing effective outreach in
regional languages.
*Communications:* *Wikipatrika:*
6 communities (Assamese, Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali,Odia, Telugu ) have
already created Wikipatrika pages on their respective Wikipedias. The new
template for Wikipatrika is up
here<http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiPatrika/2012-05/Community_News>.[2]
In tomorrow's outreach, we could discuss ideas and suggestions to make
Wikipatrika more useful. We could also discuss any problems that community
members maybe facing.
*Communications:* *Odia Social Media pilot:*
As proposed earlier,
here's<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media>[3]
the social media pilot to support the Odia community members. The end
result of this pilot is to attract more newbies and introduce them to the
Wikiverse. This pilot is to try out effective messaging strategies to use a
platform like Facebook optimally and try to recruit more editors to the
Odia Wikipedia. The most important nuance is that we have built a draft
social media messaging strategy and plan to work closely with the Odia
community to implement it - through the community members. We hope to
discuss this plan and get your inputs on it.
As always, the first 45 minutes will be focused on these and the last 15
minutes will be open to any other topic.
Hope you all can join us.
(For those who can't join, the logs will be put up the next morning at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/IRC_meeting_2012-04-19
Thanks
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Corresponden…
[2] http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiPatrika/2012-05/Community_News
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Social_Media
--
Noopur Raval
*FYI. Sorry for Cross posting. *
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Noopur Raval <nraval(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:57 AM
Subject: [Blog]: Postcard from the Tamil Community
To: Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hey folks,
The Tamil Wikimedia Contest organized by User: Sodabottle and other members
of the Tamil community recently got over. As you are all aware, it
generated over 15,000 media files and got over 250 new contributors to
Commons. A detailed report was published at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Tamil_Wikimedians/TamilWiki_Media_Con…
There's also a blog post that we've been working on that takes a peek at
TWMC behind the scenes with inputs from the organizing team. It might be
really useful to any community planning to conduct a similar events in
future. You can read the post here:
http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/04/17/postcard-from-the-tamil-community/.
It's a great story of how an off-the-cuff conversation between 2 editors
resulted in a massive community wide initiative - with participation of the
Tamil community (and other communities) from across the world, the kind of
intense efforts, the use of technology enablers and last - and most
certainly not the least - some fantastic images (a sample of which can be
seen at http://www.tawp.in/r/33zx) - which have now been used to create or
improve articles (6122 on Tamil Wiktionary, 1659 on Tamil Wikipedia and
more).
Do go through the story and add comments. Please also share it with
others. Don't forget to use the images to improve articles on your
Wikipedia! (They are all available on Commons at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:TamilWiki_Media_Contest)
I am thankful to Natkeeran for the wonderful story idea and to Sodabottle,
Logicwiki and others for your inputs, insights and times!
Regards
Noopur
--
Noopur Raval
--
Noopur Raval
Hi Folks
Reminder about the IRC today (9pm IST on Thursday April 5th) Do join us using this link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.
Here is what we would like to discuss today - which we shall do for the first 45 minutes and then throw it open for 15 minutes for any other topics that anyone wants to discuss related to India Program.
You may have noticed that we are increasing our emphasis on Wikisource. Please see Shiju's post on using simple technology to support digitazation (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Digitization_o…) and Noopur's story of the Gujarati Wikisource (http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/04/04/realizing-the-dreams-of-communities-3-y…)
In addition, Shiju has been engaged with other communities on how to start or accelerate their respective language Wikisources.
Wikisource has some very important characteristics that make it attractive.
It's a (relatively) easier way for newbies to start contributing than the respective Wikipedia
It's a great way to reach out to language lovers - and love for a language is an important motivator for contribution (on this and other projects)
There is a much lower gender gap on Wikisource, and it's easy for a wider age group to contribute
It's more "accessible" as an entry point to newbies because it has less policies than other projects
It's can act as a gateway to other projects
In today's IRC, we'd like to talk through the work that's happening on Wikisource by many communities, discuss best practices and provide a channel of support for anyone interested in joining the project from any language.
Speak soon.
hisham
Cross posting. FYI.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Noopur Raval <nraval(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:29 PM
Subject: [Blog]: The source of Gujarati Wikisource
To: Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear all,
As you might have read earlier, the Gujarati Wikisource was launched
recently on March 27th and is now active with 1000 articles and 1 book
already. As part of the story telling series, here is the wonderful
story<http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/04/04/realizing-the-dreams-of-communities-3-y…>of
a a journey that started with one member who filed the request to
create Wikisource, 2 members who joined in for their love of Bhajans, and
gradually a group of 6 members who helped reach the 1000 article mark.
The passion and enthusiasm of the Gujarati community members for their
language is very motivating, especially to all Indic Wikipedians who strive
for the same cause. This story will also interest those communities
interested in starting a Wikisource of their own. Most importantly, it
shows the power of individual community members and how community
collaboration is so magical and constructive!
Thank you,
Regards
Noopur
[1]
http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/04/04/realizing-the-dreams-of-communities-3-y…
--
Noopur Raval
--
Noopur Raval