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