Hope you are all doing well, and keeping safe.

I am happy to share with you all an update about the Small wiki toolkits initiative in India, and the larger South Asian region. As part of the Small wiki toolkits initiative, in the second half of 2020, Indic-TechCom, in collaboration with WMF's Developer Advocacy team, designed and conducted a technical workshop series: "Small wiki toolkits - Indic workshop series 2020.” A report of the same can be seen at https://w.wiki/Yqf.

There has been positive response from community members, as the workshops have been helpful in understanding basic to intermediate level technical processes on wikis. Two more workshops have been conducted towards the end of last year. So, we are now planning to continue to run these workshops (one per month on average) and expand them to the Wikimedia communities in the South Asian region. The objective is to impart basic to intermediate level technical skills for volunteers working on Wikimedia projects of languages in the South Asian region. More information can be found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SWT_South_Asia/Overview, and we have also applied for rapid grant to support this initiative through 2021, the proposal for the same can be seen at https://w.wiki/tWE.

The first session will be a brainstorming session on technical challenges faced by contributions on their wikis, from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm (BST) on 24 January 2021. It will be facilitated by Birgit Müller (Director of Technical Engagement at WMF). If you are interested, please register at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SWT_South_Asia/Registration. This discussion will be crucial to decide topics for future workshops. Community members are also welcome to suggest topics for future workshops anytime at https://w.wiki/t8Q.

These workshops are being organized with the help of a handful of volunteers from India, Nepal and Bangladesh, and if anyone is interested to help in organizing, please let us know. 

Regards,

Krishna Chaitanya

on behalf of SWT South Asia organizers