Hi Milos and everyone.
I just want to quickly add that in addition to the New Readers research project, the Global Reach team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Reach is also working to expand Wikimedia’s readership and awareness in India. We have contracted VotoMobile https://www.votomobile.org/, an international phone survey company to reach out to people across India on their mobile phones. We have chosen to conduct phone surveys to eliminate the internet access dependency; this way we can reach people who are not online or that are online but not using Wikipedia, Wikisource or any of our projects.
As we speak, we are surveying 6000 people across almost all regions of India (see list below). This survey is being offered in 11 local languages (Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Odia, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada) plus English in order to include as many different people and perspectives as possible.
The purpose of this survey is to to learn more about how people in India use mobile phones and the internet to access knowledge and information. During the survey, we ask questions about smartphone and network availability, whether they have ever heard of us, what barriers they experience, and how they use Wikipedia and the internet. The survey results for India will be available on our Meta page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Reach/Insights this July-August.
Last but not least, our Global Reach team has a member - Smriti Gupta - who is based in India. Smriti works to build partnerships across Asia. Currently, she is exploring different types of partnerships, including a pilot with the local government in India that would help our editing community increase the Gujarati content for Wikimedia projects.
Please feel free to reach out our team if you would like to learn more about our work in India and elsewhere.
Best regards,
Adele
List of regions targeted by the India phone survey:
Maharashtra
Gujarat
Punjab
Haryana
Himachal Pradesh
West Bengal
Assam
Madhya Pradesh
Odisha
Chhattisgarh
Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Prades
Tamil Nadu
Kerala
Karnataka
Telangana
Uttar Pradesh
Bihar
Rajasthan
Jharkhand
Uttarakhand
Jammu and Kashmir
Delhi
NE states (Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura)
On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Àlex Hinojo alexhinojo@gmail.com wrote:
I completely agree with Amir.
Wikipedia is an unachievable goal itself. And this is precisely what it takes us to do It. we have shown the world that only starting things, they move forward. Let's improve coverage, one edit at a time.
As a tip: keep in mind other people's interests while editing articles ( geographical, cultural, linguistical or event political) trying to discover and understand the others while editing is one of the greatest prices Wikipedia can give to us everyday. This could also bring some -needed- empathy to the movement itself.
Best
Àlex Hinojo Amical Wikimedia
El 28 juny 2016, a les 21:37, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> va escriure:
I am quite amused; it doesn't happen to me much that people take so much care to protect my privacy. I do appreciate it, though.
In case nobody guessed it, I am (probably) "Mr. Western Wikipedian". The language gap in Wikipedias has always concerned me since the very first
day
I tried editing Wikipedia in 2004—as a volunteer, and later as a WMF
staff
member. I exchanged a few words about this with Mr. Rancic at Wikimania because I know he cares about it. (In case you're wondering, I don't know who are the other people that Mr. Rancic is mentioning.)
The problem is fairly easy to
It is a problem that some of the most spoken languages of the world have very little information online. In Wikipedia and on other websites. I'm talking about Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Indonesian, Tagalog, and a few others. India is just the biggest of the countries in question, but certainly not the only one. There's even less information online in
smaller
languages, which is just as bad, even though they are smaller. It's a
deep
social problem that bothers me more and more as the years go by, and as I learn about these languages, about the countries in which they are spoken and about the people who speak them—especially those of them who don't speak any other language.
The WMF could solve _some of it_. I am not entirely sure how. It's a vicious circle of sociolinguistics making dominant languages even more dominant, and less demanded languages even less demanded. It has a lot to do with culture and politics, a bit of which I understand, and a lot of which I don't.
As a developer of the Content Translation tool and other related things,
I
very naïvely hope that I (not alone, of course!) am helping to resolving
a
tiny bit of it. But I cannot resolve all of it, and WMF alone cannot resolve all of it. Even though Wikimedia's famous "every single human being" motto definitely puts this problem in Wikimedia's declared scope, it's way too big and complex to be resolved with the resources the WMF currently has. It's better to acknowledge that we cannot solve all of it quickly, even though we'd love to, then to pretend that we'll save the world the next week. (Bringing other people to Wikimania will also not
save
it, certainly not by itself. That said, variety is a good thing.)
On an optimistic note, I have to reiterate that the recently started research project that Anne Gomez mentioned is probably the best step that the WMF ever made in this direction. I've been waiting for something like this to happen since 2012 or so. It's an important acknowledgement that there are a lot of things that we don't know, and that we want to try to learn them. It's only a small first step, but a truly good one, and I'm eager to see how it develops.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2016-06-28 21:43 GMT+03:00 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
My last mail for today, so Anne, just to say that I really appreciate what you've done, but I'll comment in a bit more detail tomorrow.
On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 8:01 PM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
I'll leave the "defensive" bit aside, and just reiterate that I *still*
do
not understand exactly what problem you're trying to focus discussion
on.
In the piece of text Asaf quoted, you used the words "it" and
"reports."
I
don't know what you intend by those words. Maybe for some reason you
feel
it's Asaf's job to clarify that for the rest of the list's readers;
maybe
so. I don't have more to contribute on this point.
The background goes this way...
I've been approached privately two years ago about the issues that bother significant part of Indian Wikimedian community. As I think that's in the range of quite solvable issues, my instinct was to talk with the relevant people inside of the Wikimedia movement (not just WMF). I thought it's been solved and I forgot for that. However, two years later I am listening about the same problems. So, I am pissed off enough to start talking about that on this list.
However, if I say everything I know, I would for sure harm a number of people. And I am not willing to do that no matter how pissed off or drunk I am. The situation is not good, but far from being any kind of catastrophe.
But I want to see the problem solved. So, I am giving quite enough of information about the problems (cf. my first email, then my response to Risker) and expect the beginning of communication. The responses are telling me what's safe to talk about and what's not. I also expect to be convinced that the most of Indian Wikimedians will be content at the end of this process.
So, the research is very good thing and I am again positively surprised by the attitude of WMF. However, that's not enough.
I also want to say that what I said in my first email and in my response to Risker is the core of the problem. Many particular issues are not useful (and could be harmful). I understand that many people on this list don't realize how those issues are important, but they *are* vitally important to the Indian part of our movement.
In other words, although I am not disclosing all of information I have, mostly to protect privacy of some people, I am not cryptic at all. It is just a matter of what's perceived as important to a Western and what to an Indian Wikimedian.
-- Milos
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe