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Summary and perspectives from Discussions with Indic language wikimedians - 2011
by Shiju Alex 16 Dec '11

16 Dec '11

Dear All, Apologies beforehand for a rather long and winding mail - but there is so much that I want to say. I want to share how my thoughts are being crystalized. I want to try and cross-pollinate ideas from some Indic language communities across to all communities. I want to reach out and ask your views and suggestions. I want to understand how best we can help each community in a manner that is most appropriate to that community. 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_Programs/Indic_…>, Hindi<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Tamil<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Telugu<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Kannada<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Nepali<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Malayalam<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Marathi<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Odia<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Sanskrit<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, Bengali<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>, and Gujarati<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>.) I haven't (yet) got any response from 7 other communities (Bhojpuri, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Urdu, Bhisnupriya Manipuri, Pali, and Sindhi). At the very outset, I want to thank all of you who took time out and shared your experiences and thinking. It has been really useful and I hope you found it is as productive and constructive as I did. The purpose behind this exercise was to hear, learn, and understand the evolution of the various communities - and to therefore suggest ideas going forward. I urge everyone to go through all the other languages (even if they are not personally involved in those specific communities) because there are learnings for everyone from everywhere. I have been reflecting on the various insights and inputs and ideas I have got from all these folks as well as subsequent discussions on mailing lists and talk pages. Here are my initial thoughts. CommunityIt sounds like a self-evident and very basic thing but the single biggest priority for all communities (even relatively bigger ones like Tamil and Malayalam) is community building. What has struck me from the various language communities is that everyone agrees that this is very much required but very few are aware of what needs to be done or how it needs to be done. I wanted to share some thoughts about this. When I consider community building, I think of 5 broad aspects: 1. Editor retention 2. Attracting newbies 3. Community communication 4. Community collaboration and 5. Community celebration I would like to detail what I mean by each of these. 1. Editor retention: Like most language wiki communities we also have an editor retention issue in all Indic language communities. This is particularly an area of concern for us considering the fact that all our Indic language communities are really tiny and community buiding efforts in Indic wikis are very less. A dramatic case in point is Kannada where active editor numbers (that is, editors who do at least 5 edits a month) have declined from 25 members to just 9 members over the past 10 months. It is essential that all of us reflect on why this is happening and what can be done to avoid it in future and to resurrect lapsed editors. Existing editors and old editors understand our projects and community and can play a huge role in community building and project quality improvement. Many times, they have become inactive because of changing personal priorities. However, sometimes, they leave because they are no longer excited by the projects. The lack of interest in a project or users not feeling proud about a project might be due to multiple reasons. Some of the reasons that old community members shared with me are poor quality of articles (driven by BOTs and Google translation project), dominance of wiki by one or two members, the huge amount of clean up and other administrative tasks required, and so on. We must reach out and welcome these editors back and we must encourage them to do what they love doing most - editing articles and making them regain their pride and ownership over their articles and projects. We must foster an environment that welcomes old editors back and gives them the space to follow their passions. 2. Attracting newbies: Attracting newbies is the only way our communities and projects can grow. I have to be honest and say that none of our language communities have achieved critical mass. According to me unless a project has 500 or more active editors, it can never be said to be in a state where organic growth is secured and momentum is ensured. Attracting newbies requires impactful outreach. By impactful, I mean outreach that is done frequently and to as a large a group of potential newbies as possible. However, it also means that we need to be much more systematic about how we do outreach. This covers everything from identification of the most appropriate target audience as well as doing outreach in a manner where we don't scare off newbies by information overload. We must make sure that our outreach sessions adequately convey the passion and love for our projects that we feel while working on them. Also, we need to critically look at how we reach out to attendees of outreach sessions (after the sessions) as well as other newcomers and see that we are providing an adequate helping hand to them. The Nepali community - though tiny - does very well in terms of posting personal talk messages to welcome new folks, having FAQs spaces and problem boxes, etc. - all with the objective of supporting newbies. All Indic languages are at a state where every single newbie should be identified and reached out to and given intensive help and warmly welcomed to the community. We must also look at both newbies to editing as well as existing English Wikipedia editors who have inclinations and abilities on Indic languages. Remember that many Indic editors initially started off in English Wikipedia and we must actively seek them out. I know some communities - like Marathi - who look for editors who have Marathi sounding names or edit Marathi/Maharashtra centric topics and quietly invite them to contribute to Marathi Wikipedia. Another aspect, and I am sure is this a bit of a controversial statement, but can we get few existing Indic editors to reduce their emphasis on editing and divert their time on outreach. (I know Tamil, Odia, and Malayalam communities are already doing this. But this needs to be replicated in other languages also). It is really tough and not everyone might have the interest to do outreach but the best outreach can be done by existing community members. However, as we know, volunteer time is limited. This is a challenge because what we love doing most is editing - but the reality is that the greatest need of the hour, and the area where we can contribute maximum, is attracting and training and supporting newbies. We should also look at digital outreach - by which I mean look at the existing internet activities in Indic languages (blog, facebook, google plus, and so on) and see if we can get newbies from there. For instance, many Indic languages have very active blogging. Can we reach out to bloggers and ask them to contribute to our projects, or at least evangelise about our projects and invite their readers to read Indic projects and contribute to them? Can we similarly look at social media like facebook and twitter to promote our Indic projects? 3. Community Communication: Community communication is an area which varies by community. There is a direct co-relation between the health and growth of the community and the inclusiveness, intensity, and warmth of the communication amongst that community. Community communication takes place on mailing lists, village pumps, meetups, and so on. With the exception of Malayalam and Bengali mailing lists, and to a lesser extent, Tamil, Odia, Mumbai, and Pune mailing lists, most others are virtually non-functional. Having said that, many village pumps are active across language communities. It really doesn't make a difference whether the communication is on mailing lists or village pumps. However, it is of paramount importance that it happens somewhere. Anywhere! To that extent, I encourage everyone to be more active wherever they are more comfortable - but ideally in public spaces like village pumps or mailing lists. Reach out and ask for help or suggestions. Offer advice or inputs. Simply be friendly and accessible. Just talk! Community meetups are happening but not as frequent as one would like and with very limited attendance. Often, it is just 3 or 4 people who meet up everytime. Nothing wrong with that per se. Meetups are voluntary and the majority of wikipedians are happy to edit in the privacy of our homes and not meet up with others but even in this situation, we can and should be encouraging more people to attend meetups. People will attend meetups more regularly if they find them productive and inspiring. Too often, the feedback from community members has been that they don't find meetups useful or they find them dominated by 1 or 2 individuals. It is essential to have 1 or 2 individuals with the drive and hard work to organise meetups - but it is equally important that meetups are not centred exclusively around these 1-2 people but more about what the larger group want. How about meetups where all we do is spend an hour or two just editing a few articles? How about meetups where we plan a newbie outreach program involving everyone in the meetup? How about a meetup where that meetup is run by those folks who usually never speak up and that the entire meeting is devoted to what they are interested in? It is alarming when one looks at the situation in some Indic communities where there is virtually no communication at all amongst community members. It leads to a very cold and impersonal environment - which is not healthy to foster growth. Like plants and flowers, communities too need breeze and air and water and food and activity and earthworms and manure. 4. Community Collaboration: When I consider community collaboration, I think of 2 things. The first is ownership and the second is editing. On ownership, it is really critical that every one of us as individual community members believe and are made to believe that we own our projects. Every project is owned by all members of that community. Equally. We should all become more proactive in enforcing this ownership - whether it is in terms of coming up with initiatives or proactively participating in community discussions - whether it is about technical matters or content elements or community aspects. Every single individual counts and every single individual's voice must be encouraged. On editing, something that drives all of us is the thrill of collaborative editing. Wikipedians love it more than anything else to work together on an article and make dramatic improvements to it. Of course it happens even now, but this is something that we need to encourage much more and participate more actively in. This can be done in varied ways - but ideas like Collaboration of the Month or Editathons or whatever other idea should be organised. One can start with a handful of people working on a few articles - but one must try as hard as one can to make larger scale mini-events around this basic idea. It will help build personal relationships, project ownership, and drive community bonds. 5. Community Celebration: Lastly on the community aspect, let us bring some magic back to the community. Let us start celebrating successes - no matter how small. Let us start taking goals - no matter how seemingly unambitious. Let us spread cheer all around when we meet these objectives. Let us start publicly celebrating over the profiles of new or active editors (Tamil wiki community is already doing this)- whether because they are 12 years old or 80 years old or whether their article counts are 100 or 10,000! Let us celebrate when our wiki cross a major milestones, Let us celebrate when one our community member does some marvellous things for wiki. Let us celebrate when community able to engage in a relationship with state government... There are many reasons to celebrate. Let us celebrate all those and build the sense of pride about their projects among our community members. The most powerful fuel in our engines is passion - and we need to get more of it in our veins. ProjectsThere is a constant debate of what should come first - article count or article quality? I don't think there is an answer to this that is equally applicable across all projects and communities. I had strong convictions on this based on my past experience with Malayalam wiki projects - which have been reinforced after my initial discussions with Indic Wikimedians from across the country. In this regard, I wish to share a provocative statement about bots. Bots can and should be used to do repetitive tasks (like adding categories) because that reduces wasting volunteer time - which is limited and precious. However, the use of bots for article creation is something that I would strongly discourage. The current state of Newari wikipedia (which has nearly 70,000 articles but zero active editors) reinforces my argument. The argument for using bots for article creation is that it provides placeholders for editors to start working on these articles. While there is some merit in this argument, the problem is that this kind of artificial intervention means that the volume of work required to improve quality far outpaces the community strength. It is like a sportsman using steroids. It is not natural or healthy. It results in large numbers of very poor quality articles - which are of such a basic nature that it might be better not to have them in the project. (For example, if the only information about a town is that "Abc town is in Abc district which is in Abc state and the population is 12345 according to the 2001 census", this article is so weak that it cannot honestly be said to exist.) If a project has thousands of these kind of articles, the whole project will be regarded as being of poor quality and will put off readers.) More fatally, if a project has thousands of such bot entries, it doesn't inspire editors to contribute - but instead makes them disillusioned because they feel that so many articles of such bad quality that they just give up on where to start! There are many who feel that, for example, Hindi wikipedia has been adversely impacted by the overusage of bots. Another very important aspect I want to address is the kind of policies we adopt for Indic projects. Too often, tiny projects and communities are adopting too many of the policies of English Wikipedia. The policies of English wikipedia have evolved over years as English Wikipedia grew in community and article size. These policies are suitable for English Wikipedia given the size and breadth of its community. My view is that many of these are not appropriate for the current state of most Indic projects and communities given that the community sizes are 60,000 for English and ~25 for the average Indic community. If English Wikipedia policies are indiscriminately adopted, results in the feedback that I am seeing from many Indic editors that they are spending too much time doing "administrative" tasks like categorisation and not getting enough time for basic core editing. Let me elaborate. Something like NPOV is central to our overall philosophy. This cannot and must not be diluted. However, even if I take the larger Indic Wikipedias, it really is not such a major issue if the categorisation is currently weak. The focus has to be to build articles quality and content, and not necessarily having all the content neatly slotted into categories. Of course, something like categorisation is good, but not at the cost of article quality. I want to make an even more provocative suggestion. Verifiability is really really really important to all our projects. However, if one looks at how English Wikipedia evolved in the early days, it started with editors just adding content. Over a period of time, other editors came in and added and improved citations. Even today, as a recent Signpost article mentioned, there are 2.5 lakh articles in English Wikipedia<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-10-31/Opinio…>that don't have references. We should encourage editors to write, write and write! References will follow. Let us not chase away editors because we want every article to be perfect in a 20,000 article project. Of course we want quality but let us take it in stages - and let us prioritise what is most important to begin with. I think many editors would find it incredibly satisfying and inspiring and motivating to start and edit new articles, and they might get it 80% right. This will attract a much bigger community within which there will emerge a new generation of editors who love to add detail and citations. ReadershipOne of my big discoveries I had was to see the total size of readership. I have often contemplated the Catch 22 situation of Indic language Wikimedians - where there is no awareness of the projects so there is no readership and even where there is readership, readers are not satisfied because of a low number articles or poor quality of articles. Conversely, editors don't find adequate motivation and satisfaction because they believe there are too few readers for their contributions. I often wondered how we would approach this problem - and which we should address first. I used to think that we should first focus on community building and article quality - and that readers will automatically follow. To that extent, I used to think that we shouldn't worry about readers because they will inevitably follow content. The fact that last month, we had more than 4 crore readers for our Indic language wikipedias<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-…>means that the dilemma of what we need to do is no longer valid. We have readers. Lakhs and lakhs and lakhs of them for each Indic language wiki! We now need to focus singlemindedly on community building and project quality. As internet penetration and mobile data access increase, we will get even more Indic readers. We don't need to do anything to attract readers. However, we need to do *everything* to keep them coming back by increasing article count while religiously maintaining and increasing article quality and size of community. I would love to hear your thoughts and views on these suggestions. The next stage of my work is going to be to speak directly with various communities in village pumps itself. I will try and make these as relevant and specific to individual communities - and also to share some ideas which have relevance across similar communities. For instance, some ideas will be similar to all communities with less than 25 active editors. 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. I will be sharing this mail on the various local language / local town mailing lists as well as the respective language village pumps. I look forward to hearing your views. I placed the content of this mail in metawiki also. It is here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_… Regards Shiju Alex India Programs Team of WMF

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ঘোষণা: উইকিমিটআপ ঢাকা ১১
by Tanvir Rahman 14 Dec '11

14 Dec '11

উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশ কর্তৃক আগামী শুক্রবার, ১৬ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১ তারিখ বিকাল ৩:০০টার সময় ১১তম ঢাকা উইকিমিটআপ [১] আয়োজন করা হয়েছে। এই মিটআপ সকলের জন্য উন্মুক্ত। সবাইকে সাদর আমন্ত্রণ। মিটআপ সম্পর্কে বিস্তারিত তথ্য জানতে এ সংক্রান্ত উইকিপিডিয়া পাতা [১] এবং ফেসবুকের ইভেন্ট পাতাটি [২] দেখুন। সবার জন্য মিটআপের বিস্তারিত নিচে উল্লেখ করা হলো: উইকিমিটআপ ঢাকা ১১ শুক্রবার, ১৬ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১; বিকাল ৩:০০টা স্থান: ২৭৮/৩, এলিফ্যান্ট রোড (৩য় তলা) কাটাবন, ঢাকা ১২০৫। মিটআপে যে বিষয়গুলোর প্রতি আলোকপাত করা হবে তার মধ্যে রয়েছে: ১. উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশের প্রতিষ্ঠার আনুষ্ঠানিক ঘোষণা ও পরিচিতি প্রদান ২. উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশে আগামী ১ বছরের কর্মকাণ্ড সম্পর্কে কিছুটা ধারণা প্রদান করা হবে ৩. নতুনদের উইকিপিডিয়া সম্পর্কে ধারণা দেওয়া। উক্ত মিটআপে সবাইকে আবারও যোগদানের আমন্ত্রণ জানাই। ভালো থাকুন। তানভির সাধারণ সম্পাদক উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশ

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উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশের অন্তর্বর্তীকালীন নির্বাহী পরিষদ
by Tanvir Rahman 24 Nov '11

24 Nov '11

প্রিয় সুধী, উইকিমিডিয়া ফাউন্ডেশনের অনুমোদিত চ্যাপ্টার উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশের আঞ্চলিক রেজিস্ট্রেশন সম্পন্ন করার স্বার্থে প্রতিষ্ঠানটির গঠণতন্ত্র [১] অনুযায়ী এর অন্তর্বর্তীকালীন নির্বাহী পরিষদ [২] গঠন করা হয়েছে। অন্তর্বর্তীকালীন পরিষদের সদস্যদের নাম ও ছোট বিবরণ জানতে দেখুন http://bd.wikimedia.org/wiki/ec<http://bit.ly/wmbdec>। এছাড়াও প্রাথমিকভাবে উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশের ওয়েবসাইট হিসেবে bd.wikimedia.orgসাইটটি চালু হয়েছে। এখানে আগ্রহী স্বেচ্ছাসেবকগণ অ্যাকাউন্ট খুলে সাইটটির উন্নয়নে কাজ করতে পারেন। যাঁদের বাংলা বা অন্য কোনো উইকিপিডিয়ায় অ্যাকাউন্ট রয়েছে, তাঁরা সরাসরি ঐ উইকিপিডিয়া অ্যাকাউন্ট ও পাসওয়ার্ড ব্যবহার করেই উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশের সাইটটিতে লগইন করতে পারেন। উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশের সাফল্যে আমাদের সার্বিক সহযোগিতা কাম্য। সবাইকে শুভেচ্ছা। তানভির রহমান সাধারণ সম্পাদক, উইকিমিডিয়া বাংলাদেশ [১] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Bangladesh/MoA [২] http://bd.wikimedia.org/wiki/ec <http://bit.ly/wmbdec>

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উইকিমিডিয়া ফান্ডরেইজিং ২০১১ - এখন টাকাতেও দান করা সম্ভব
by Tanvir Rahman 23 Nov '11

23 Nov '11

খবরটি আপনাদের সাথে শেয়ার করছি। উইকিমিডিয়া ফাউন্ডেশনে এখন টাকাতেও দান করা সম্ভব: https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserLandingPage?uselang=bn&… ৩৫০ টাকা থেকে এই দানের অঙ্ক শুরু হয়েছে। যদিও আন্তর্জাতিক ক্রেডিট কার্ডের মাধ্যমে দানের সুযোগ বা অনলাইন অর্থ ট্রান্সফারের সুযোগ আমাদের খুবই সীমিত, তবুও এরকম একটি অপশন থাকায় ভালো লাগছে। তবে যাঁদের ক্রেডিট কার্ড নেই, তবে পেপ্যাল অ্যাকাউন্ট আছে, তাঁরা ঐ পেজের পে-প্যাল লিংকে ক্লিক করে সেখান থেকেও দান করতে পারেন। তানভির

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Geographical distribution of Indian Wikipedians
by Jayanta Nath 22 Nov '11

22 Nov '11

Dear All, Please add your name in the below link http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Geographical_distribution_of_Indian_Wikipedians Cheers! Jayanta

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Re: [Wikimedia-BD] [Wikimediaindia-l] Recognition of Wikimedia Bangladesh
by Air Based Express 25 Oct '11

25 Oct '11

Hear all, Congratulations for the glory. S M Hemayet --- On Sat, 10/15/11, Ranadipam Basu <ranadipam(a)gmail.com> wrote: From: Ranadipam Basu <ranadipam(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-BD] [Wikimediaindia-l] Recognition of Wikimedia Bangladesh To: "Discussion list for Bangladeshi Wikimedians" <wikimedia-bd(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: "Wikimedia India" <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Date: Saturday, October 15, 2011, 10:29 AM Discussion list for Bangladeshi Wikimedians (wikimedia-bd(a)lists.wikimedia.org) is not on your Guest List | Approve sender | Approve domain

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Fwd: [cultural-partners] Scholarships Available to attend WikiConference India 2011 in Mumbai, India
by Lodewijk 21 Oct '11

21 Oct '11

Not sure if this made it here already. Best, Lodewijk ---------- Mensagem encaminhada ---------- **Please Cross Post this on your Country List. This has been Cross Posted on various mailing lists so apologies if you have received it more than once** Hiya, We are please to announce that WMF has granted a few scholarships (maximum of 5) for persons outside of India to attend WikiConference India 2011 (WCI 2011 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/WikiConference_India_2011<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011> **). WCI 2011 will take place in Mumbai, India between 18-20 November 2011. WCI 2011 is the first conference of its kind being held in India and is intended to become an annual national flagship event for Wikipedia/Wikimedia in the country. It is meant to provide a common platform for all Indian Wikimedians to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other information. Anyone residing outside of India is eligible to apply, but since this is an India specific conference they would need to demonstrate how by being present at the conference they can help the movement in India or improvement of indic languages. It is also necessary that those receiving the scholarship present something at WCI 2011. The scholarships will cover Travel to and Fro Mumbai (economy), Accommodation (similar to what is being offered to Indian Scholars) and Visa fees (if you need one). Please do make your application as strong as possible given that there are few scholarships and we expect a huge number of applications: http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/WikiConference_India_** 2011/Call_for_Participation<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participa…> Kindly note given that there is less than a month to go and that Visa applications etc. will take time, we have set an *application deadline of 23:59 IST on Saturday 22nd October 2011*. Only applications received before the deadline will be considered. Looking forward to hosting five of you at WCI 2011! -- Kind Regards, Pranav Curumsey Chairperson - Organising Committee WikiConference India 2011 _______________________________________________ cultural-partners mailing list cultural-partners(a)wikimedia.ch http://lists.wikimedia.ch/listinfo/cultural-partners

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Re: [Wikimedia-BD] [Wikimediaindia-l] Recognition of Wikimedia Bangladesh
by CherianTinu Abraham 16 Oct '11

16 Oct '11

Congratulations and best wishes to the newly approved Wikimedia Bangladesh. Very glad to see the formation of the second national chapter from the Indian Subcontinent. Hoping to see more from this part of the world. Warms regards from India chapter and hoping to collaborate and work together for the growth of Wikimedia movement in the Indian Subcontinent. Thanks Tinu Cherian P.S. Do include wikimedia-BD(a)lists.wikimedia.org mail id too for your appreciation mails, as not all BD wikipedians are on India list. On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 12:25 AM, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta(a)gmail.com>wrote: > Cross-posting since it may be of interest to this list. > > Cheers > Bishakha > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> > Date: Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 8:16 PM > Subject: [Internal-l] Recognition of Wikimedia Bangladesh > To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed subscription)" > <internal-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > > > Dear friends, > > Congratulations to Wikimedia Bangladesh, our newest chapter! > > http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Recognition_of_Wikimedia_Ban… > > -- Phoebe > Board Secretary, 2011-12 > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimediaindia-l mailing list > Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l > >

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Congratulations!
by Asaf Bartov 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

Dear Wikimedia Bangladesh founders and supporters. Congratulations on getting recognized by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation as our newest Wikimedia chapter! My name is Asaf, and I work for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. I am in charge of the Wikimedia Grants program, as well as growing Wikimedia in the developing world. I would like to invite you to start planning your activities as a chapter, and to consider how you can make use of the help offered by the Wikimedia Foundation and the rest of the movement. The Wikimedia Grants program <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index>[1] is a way for you to fund mission-aligned activities, and you can submit a request for a grant, according to the guidelines in the Grants page linked below. Grants can help you start chapter programs such as outreach (recruiting new editors, educating Wikipedia readers, educating the press, changing attitudes toward Wikipedia among teachers and professors), partnerships (with educational organizations, including the government, with libraries, archives and museums [GLAM], with like-minded organizations [e.g. Free Software NGOs, Mozilla, Creative Commons]), events, and community meetups. In addition to giving you funding, the Foundation can send you some Wikipedia merchandise (pins, stickers, etc.) to give away in public talks and events. Finally, the Foundation is well-connected to Wikimedians around the world, and can most probably connect you with Wikimedians who share your interests, or have experienced challenges similar to yours, so I would like to personally encourage you to turn to us (and to me, specifically) for advice or help in any problem you come across. We look forward to seeing the Bangladeshi community grow and prosper, and would like to hear your thoughts on what it would take to achieve that, and how the Foundation can help. If you prefer, I am happy to have a voice conversation with a representative from your group. Please let me know what days and times are good for you, or contact me via one of the following: Skype: asafbartov Office phone: +1-415-8396885 ext. 6767 Mobile phone: +1-415-515-2092 I am in timezone GMT-7. I look forward to working with you, Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation

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"Re: Contents of Wikimedia-BD digest..."
by Taslim 14 Oct '11

14 Oct '11

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