Dear friends,
With number of editors on topics pertaining to WikiProject India increasing
rapidly, I thought it would be a good idea to give them a short account of
the history of the WikiProject India as seen through my eyes.
I joined Wikipedia in 2006 and around the time I got around to joining
WikiProject India, it was having its heydey around 2008. It had legendary
editors like Bhadani, Nichalp and many more. All its departments were
functional and it had created a large real estate on English Wikipedia.
With over 80,000 articles, it was a hustling-bustling, and happening place
to be, but sadly, it was not to last. The experienced editors retired
faster than young folks took the threads. And by early 2010, the
WikiProject was a shell of itself. Its stores of FAs and GAs began to be
depleted at an alarming rate as there was no one to respond to reviewers'
concerns. The talk page traffic dropped and by 2011, WikiProject India was
about to plunge into the semi-dormant state most WikiProjects wind down to
over time.
Parts of the present Indian community began to coalesce around the time of
Jimbo's visit to Mumbai on 31 October 2010. The event in Mumbai was
attended by 700 plus citizens of which there were a handful of wikipedians.
The nascent Mumbai and Pune communities began to meet and form up around
this time. Till then the only established English language Wikipedian
community in India was Bangalore. Wikimedian meetings in most South Indian
cities were about more about creating and establishing the strong Indic
language Wikimedia projects of Malayalam and Tamil, with Kannada and Telegu
projects racing to catch up.
2011 saw the Tenth Anniversary of Wikipedia which gave Wikipedians in
cities the excuse and opportunity to organise to celebrate the event and
this marked the birth of new communities. Organisationally, the
establishment of Wikimedia India Chapter in early 2011, though it had
hiccups in initial acceptance by the community, gave a framework to think
on a national level. The India Program followed soon after that with its
initial focus on the India Education Program for almost six months. However
with enough things happening, the mailing lists began to buzz and new
mailing lists for cities began to come up.
The bold initiative by Mumbai community, supported by Pune community to
host a national conference led to a long, arduous and argumentative
marathon effort to host India's first WikiConference 2011, supported by the
Chapter and a sizeable grant from WMF. Though there were trials and
tribulations, the event brought a lot of hardworking Wikimedians to the
fore, brought tremenduous publicity to the movement in India, increased the
number of Wikimedians in all communities and helped the language Wikimedias
to develop new capabilities, thanks to hackathons. It was clear that the
Indian Wikimedia community had arrived.
I was asked to present a brief summary of affairs of WikiProject India as
part of the series of presentations on each indic language project - a
State of the Wikipedias session. A quick look revealed horrendous
statistics - the most glaring of which were the tens of thousands of
unassessed articles and articles needing cleanup. The WikiProject at this
time had a very small core of dedicated editors who were valiantly keeping
the light from flickering out.
My message to the community was two-fold. Firstly, that English too was an
Indic-language being a major language in India with recognised status as
secondary Official language, and second only to Hindi in the number of
speakers, and in Wikipedia to number of articles. The subset WikiProject
India of English Wikipedia was analogous and equivalent to the Indic
language wikipedia. My second point was a succint wake up call -
WikiProject India was in bad shape and we all needed to get together to
revive it.
The Wikimedia India Chapter had laid down a framework for volunteers to
coordinate aspects for each community and each wikipedia. As someone
familiar with its problems, I was asked to coordinate WikiProject India in
December shortly after the Conference. At first the task seemed too
daunting. Then I decided to see what needed doing and do it without trying
to solve all the huge problems at once. I was joined in this task at all
times by at least one or two of the small group of English language editors
from India whom I had interacted with, and I had the good wishes of the
entire community, including the Chapter and India Programs.
There was a clamour for collaboration to begin. The Collaboration of the
Month (WP:INCOTM) was the first initiative that we took up. In the effort
to get people collaborating, a lot of messages were sent to editors both
old and new and slowly our INCOTMs started to bear fruit and new editors
started appearing in editting of India articles and on the India
Noticeboard (WP:INB). At this time some vigorous debates on India
Noticeboard on caste, the Featured Article Review and image selection of
[[India]] were notable, besides many other smaller topics discussed.
Something wonderful happened - a young user from Pune volunteered to take
over responsibility and bang! We had our first volunteer coordinator -
[[User:BPositive]] - who took charge of INCOTM.
This was followed up by the setting of [[WP:OWIS]] project - Offline
Wikipedia for Indian Schools. A framework has been made and many editors
have come and done work. Sadly, this arguably the most important of
ventures does not have its dedicated champions and is languishing. We will
soon need to canvas for this if WikiProject India is to make a REAL impact
in Indian Society and education.
In the meantime, photothons began to happen - Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad.
The WikiProject provided moral support, a little bit of help in
categorising, some advice and in the case of Ahmedabad - a set of links of
important areas/monuments in Ahmedabad. The Ahmedabad photothon brought
forth volunteers who took it upon themselves to rejuvenate both WikiProject
Gujarat and Gujarati Wikipedia. Of these, a number of young editors joined
the WikiProject India community and one youngster - User:Kondicherry opted
to look after WikiProject Gujarat.
A wide range of offline activities continue and though through them the
WikiProject articles have had some change, the overall impact is on the
number of editors growing slowly in the community. Some of these are
becoming very active quite early and the WikiProject hopes to have in the
near future. GLAM was born - the initiative is nascent and has not yet
impacted WikiProject India.
In the meantime, senior editors, Chapter, IP, city communities all strongly
support WikiProject India. Our true challenge lies in realising the synergy
between WikiProject India and other Indic language Wikimedia projects. The
gulf between them needs to be bridged and is always at the back of my mind.
Attempts at mobilising opinion for a cleanup drive during the
WikiConference 2011 were premature and had little impact though the message
was hard loud and clear. The base was just not there for any kind of drive
in WikiProject India at the time. Fortunately in February end, disturbed by
the regular incidence of unassessed articles, the community itself
clamoured for an assessment drive. All that needed to be done was to just
set up the framework and approach a number of editors when very soon we had
two dozen editors coming together to cooperate and reduce the backlog.
Another young and energetic editor, User:SSriram_mt took charge as the
drive coordinator. The drive has only completed just under two weeks and
the response of editors has been terrific - we now have thirty-seven
editors signed up and the assessments done total over 10,000!
One of the recent activities we have taken up is to search for volunteer
coordinators to take charge of WikiProject India infrastructure and build
up the departments, initiative and daughter WikiProjects - hopefully in a
similar manner as WikiProject India is attempting to develop in recent
months.
We have now added four more volunteers who have agreed to coordinate
WikiProjects. These are:
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Hinduism - User:Redtigerxyz.
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Indian cinema - User:Vensatry.
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Mumbai - User:Karthikndr.
* Welcoming Newbies to the WikiProject initiative - User:Debastein (based
on his Teahouse participation).
In addition, we now have more volunteers who have come foth and need to be
announced to the community soon. User:Prad2609 has agreed to champion the
Newsletter and we refer to him as our Newsletter Coordinator.
User:Rsrikanth05 has agreed to look after WikiProject:Transport in India.
This is a biased POV view :) - mine, based mostly on my experiences and
limited knowledge and is not meant to deprive anyone from the great merits
of their actions which I may have overlooked or under-represented. My
apologies if I have left anyone out of this small recanting. Its just to
give editors a feeling that they are working as part of a larger team, a
greater cause and hopefully to motivate them to do even more and to make
themselves proud.
AshLin
