Wikimedia-in-en March 2012

wikimedia-in-en@lists.wikimedia.org

21 participants
26 discussions

An Innovative Outreach effort
by Debanjan Bandyopadhyay 10 Mar '12

10 Mar '12

Hello all, I am sending this mail, as I am soon going to be leaving for Kolkata and as such a particular incident reminded me how we can do a free of cost basic outreach, to spread the word about Wikipedia. The incident occurred when I was traveling from Mumbai to Kolkata, just after the conference, and not having time to change, I boarded the Duronto with my conference t-shirt on. The passengers in the compartment I was in, though initially kept to themselves, started speaking to each other as often happens on long (28hr) train journeys. Very soon the focus shifted to my t-shirt and the resultant was that I ended up explaining the world of Wikipedia to them for hours. I should mention, it was a very varied crowd and maybe that is why it happened. There was a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a scientist, an engineer, and a couple others whose occupations were unknown to me. I won't say it was very fruitful, or that I showed them any live demo or ppt. Rather I focused on a few crucial question which were on their minds: - What is Wikipedia? - Who runs Wikipedia? - Is Wikimedia a sub-project of Wikipedia? - Who edits Wikipedia? - How many employees are there and how many volunteers? - Is it really free? If so, how does it earn money? - Reliability of Wikipedia - If anyone can edit, is it reliable? - Who monitors info? - Copyvio and reliable sources - What do I get out of it, if not money? - Role of a Campus Ambassador - How to edit? - Why edit? - Edit what? - Presence of Indic language wikis - How to edit Indic language wikis - Sister projects like Commons, Wikibooks - Entry of Foundation in India and creation of India Chapter However, as it was my first journey, I did not note down their emails to follow them up. The number was also limited, only 6. But hey, it was free and killed a lot of time, while at least telling people that Wikipedia can be edited and it has indic languages as well as sister projects. Hence, a sincere request to all Wikimedians. If you are traveling in a long distance train journey, try wearing a Wiki t-shirt if you have one. If you don't but the audience seems interested go over, say hello and ask where they work. When they ask you back, say, "WIKIPEDIA" and see the reaction. That should get you started. You can always try it. If it fails, then the only thing is you have to wash your Wiki tee at most. But at least you spread the awareness. I am not saying that this will retain people and inspire them to start editing, but at least they might go back and try and look at Wikipedia in a different way, or seek out new info. Am again going to wear a Wiki tee on my journey, will tell you if i have a similar experience. -- Regards, Debanjan* - Lets make this world a better and more informative place*

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Announcing Noopur Raval as Consultant, Wikimedia Foundation (India Program, Communications)
by Hisham 05 Mar '12

05 Mar '12

cross-posting to reach pan-community; apologies if you have already read this from another list. Dear All, I am pleased to announce that Noopur Raval ([User:Noopur28] has been selected as Consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation, and will support Communications for India Program. This position will perform 4 key functions. Firstly, it will support communications with our community. This involves a regular set of updates (such as newsletters) as well as specific communication projects such as story-telling of local community initiatives (to document experiences, celebrate successes and cross-pollinate ideas.) This is not for day-to-day program communications - which is a core part of each of our responsibilities in the India Program team. Second will be to support media & PR for local community initiatives. The single biggest challenge here will to be get more Indic language media coverage to support community building efforts. This will be done directly with community members and also in co-ordination with the India Chapter's Communications Media & PR team. The third aspect is to build and expand existing community social networks (such as WikimediaIndia on facebook) and to help with the use of social networks to support community building. Lastly, there is untapped potential of using digital outreach - to augment existing physical outreach efforts. We need to (very, very carefully) explore if we can reach out to our large and growing reader base and inform, encourage and enable them to become editors using online channels and resources. Noopur is a community member and has supported outreach activities (in Ahmedabad & Delhi), is a member of Delhi SIG of the Chapter, has participated in community collaborations like Collaboration of the Month and has been actively trying to start GLAM in India. Noopur is from Gandhinagar and is graduating from JNU with a Master's in Arts & Aesthetics. She has a triple honors Bachelor's in Media Studies, Literature and Psychology from Christ College, Bangalore. She has interned with Radio Mirchi, Times of India and the Centre for Internet & Society (amongst others) - as well as done some teaching assignments. She is an active blogger (including for the India Art Summit, 2011.) She has published a novella and co-authored an anthology of poems, plays & short stories and has co-presented a paper on "Wikiwars" with [User:Srikeit.] She is also an amateur photographer and has contributed to Commons as well as other platforms. The Communications position has taken a long time to fill. The initial call for selection was in September. I reported back to the community in December that I had failed to find the right candidate and hence the delay. There were a number of deserving candidates and this selection has taken time because of the need to find the most suitable profile for a complex role. This role requires the right mix of an academic foundation in communications, domain expertise as well as adequate familiarity with our community. It also requires adaptability and strong learning skills - because so much of what we are trying to do is pioneering. I am confident that she brings the right level of experience and competencies - and I'm very excited by the opportunity of making a step jump in the impact of communications for our community. Do join me in welcoming Noopur. She will start on March 12 and will be based in New Delhi. Best hisham

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INCOTM - February 2012 report
by Pratik Lahoti 03 Mar '12

03 Mar '12

Hello Everyone! It's time to review the WP:INCOTM<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:INCOTM>for the month of February 2012. Last month, Dance in India <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_in_India>was the only article chosen for the INCOTM. During the period under question, Dance in India had 208 edits from 20 contributors. This is quite good compared to the last month's COTM - Premchand <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premchand> which had 133 edits from 17 contributors. This months COTM was a success in my eyes as the following improvements were seen- - Lede was improved and expanded. - Size - increased from 1256 words to 1566 words (although this appears less it is still significant, see the reason below). - The article was restructured and visually appears better now. - Origin of dance, folk and tribal dance forms & contemporary dance were the new sections added. - Referencing improved from 2 to 38 (very good progress indeed in this aspect). - Images went up from one to five. - Sub-sections were made for the classical dance section. - Linking, grammar and other minor things were also improved. However, - There was no drastic increase in the size of article as it increased just by 1.25 times. This was because while new sections were added, old sections like Ottan Tullal, Dasi Assam and Modern day television shows were removed under WP:UNDUE <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:UNDUE>. That reduced the article length substantially. - More sections need to be added to the classical dance - one para per each of the main classical dance forms. - Although the referencing has been improved to a great extent, there are still some *citation needed* tags present. The top four editors of Dance in India<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_in_India>for the month of February 2012 were: 1. Hisham <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hisham> - 51 edits 2. Nitika.t <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nitika.t> - 46 edits 3. Noopur28 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Noopur28> - 29 edits 4. Karthikndr <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Karthikndr> - 11 edits To encourage contribution, they have been awarded a Barnstar for taking time and effort to participate. Special thanks to Karthikndr for adding the references and helping in removing the *refimprove* tag just a day before the COTM was about to terminate. Also, thanks to AroundTheGlobe<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AroundTheGlobe>for adding images to the article. Wikilove was sent to AroundTheGlobe for the same. We still need more work to be done on Dance in India<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_in_India>as it is one of the highest visibility articles of the WikiProject - it gets 500 to 600 pageviews per day! *GA/FA of the month* As far as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi>goes, there were 213 edits with the major contributors being AshLin <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AshLin>, Hisham<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hisham>, Rjensen <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rjensen> and Dav subrajathan.357<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Dav_subrajathan.357&action=e…>. Wikilove has been sent to motivate them to continue the long struggle. The referencing is still being carefully weeded. It has been completely moved to cite templates now. A lot of dud references have been detected and replaced. In some cases what the reference was saying had no bearing to the text and was replaced. Preference was given to references which are verifiable online. Referencing continues because the article is a mixture of cite & Harvard referencing styles. It was suggested we go in for one of three models of referencing - - Direct referencing with Footnotes section & no bibliography - Shortened references with Bibliography at the end. - Harvard referencing. It has been decided to move it to shortened urls/Bibliography model as the bibliography already exists and the Harvard referencing was in minority. Hopefully that once this ends, the GA proper can begin. The time taken for all this underlines the great importance of accurate referencing and choosing reliable sources. Thank you all for contributing to this month’s INCOTM. Hoping for an even better response for the next COTM - APJ Abdul Kalam<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APJ_Abdul_Kalam> . Cheers, Pratik Lahoti. User:BPositive

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Mess uncovered during assessment drive
by wheredevelsdare＠hotmail.com 03 Mar '12

03 Mar '12

Iv been taking part in the ongoing Assessment Drive @ WP:India during the last couple of days and have found quite a few anomalies. Yesterday, I found a few talk pages tagged WP:India, but the pages were redirects to the same topic with a slightly different name. At first, I thought it was extremely rare, however I have come across more examples today [1] and [2]. This is easy to miss out if one is not careful (i.e. if ones checks the article and goes back, your going to assess the redirect when the article talk is somewhere else!). Apart from this, Im quite appalled at the level at which WP:India currently is at on en.wiki, I would not be surprised to find WP:India in better shape on indic wikis. Some interesting statistics:1. About 94k articles tagged WP:India 2. more than 50% of our articles are stubs (50k of 94k roughly)3. about 250 articles are GA or above in quality (thats about 0.25% of 94k) 4. then there are 8k categories - not actually articles I have a feeling that we might need a good rejuvenation plan to look at quality and not just expansion. Some of the articles Iv come across are IMO not really noteworthy and have been prodded (lists of people, companies and even actual trees in different cities (i.e. tree outside x building on x road in x city)!).

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Use of importance scale when participating in Assessment Drive
by wheredevelsdare＠hotmail.com 02 Mar '12

02 Mar '12

Hi, Earlier today, someone mentioned that while assessing articles, the person accorded "high importance" to a regional film list. For those who are new to this, I would like to point out that "high" on the importance scale is extremely rare and reserved for articles of national importance (i.e. very important from India point of view). A film list for example, should come under "low importance" as its not that important from the India pov, there are other matters that would take precedence (for WP Films, this may be different, the same article may have higher importance). This is extremely important to note as otherwise the whole exercise will not only be futile, we will be creating more work than solving. Ashwin is coming up with a very good guide, if you feel that your unsure, wait for the guide and refer to it before assessment (he says its almost ready). Kind Regards,

2 1

Unassessed WP India articles
by wheredevelsdare＠hotmail.com 01 Mar '12

01 Mar '12

Hiya, The number of unassessed articles on WikiProject India currently stands at more than 18,000! Im wondering if there is an active task force or even a single member of the project that is dealing with these assessments? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unassessed-Class_India_articles_of_Un…) A similar note has been left on the India noticeboard, as it seems no one has assessed articles for some time for there to be such a massive build up of backlog. Kind Regards,

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Wikimedia-in-en March 2012