Hello friends,
This is a link I recommend you to bookmark.
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Geographical_distribution_of_Indian_Wikipedians
This list is useful for outreach & also whenever someone needs Wiki-Help in
a particular city. It would be great if Wikipedians could update this
list.:)
We have the following completely unrepresented states/UTs:
* Andaman & Nicobar Islands
* Arunachal Pradesh
* Assam
* Chandigarh
* Chhattisgarh
* Dadra, Nagar & Haveli
* Daman & Diu
* Goa
* Himachal Pradesh
* Jammu & Kashmir
* Jharkhand (AngPradesh is in Mumbai)
* Lakshadweep
* Manipur
* Meghalaya
* Mizoram
* Puducherry
* Punjab (oye, ye ki hoya!)
* Nagaland
* Uttar Pradesh
* Uttarakhand
Okay, all you admins, please update your status (Mikey my boy, that means
you too)!
Abroad, we dont have Indic Wikipedians listed for:
* Africa
* Australia
* Asia (other than India)
* Middle East
* North America
* South America
Unless you would like to stay off list, of course that's acceptable too.
May I also request Tinu / list admins to please forward it all the Indic
language & city Wikimedia lists. We need this resource to be as
comprehensible as possible.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
Dear friends,
You may be aware that we (my family) have released a font family earlier.
Here is some background if you are not aware of it.
On the first death Anniversary of Yogini Joglekar(my aunt), our family
released AksharYogini (Normal) Font on 1st Nov. 2006. This font is
primarily for Marathi language but can also be used for Hindi (for any
language using Devanagari). It also has English support. Later on, on the
occasion of Gudhipadwa (Chaitra Shuddha 1, 1931; that is 27th March 2009) ,
we released the additional fonts to complete the "AksharYogini font
family". This font family was/is made available on the site
http://aksharyogini.sudhanwa.com for free usage/distribution/sharing.
Today, on the occasion of Eighth Death Anniversary of Yogini Joglekar, we
are now releasing an updated "AksharYogini font". This font is also
available on the same website http://aksharyogini.sudhanwa.com
This is an updated font and has support for the new (MS Windows) operating
systems where the internal mechanism for font rendering is changed. Also,
it has additional characters for the current Unicode standard and the Rupee
Sign is also included.
Most important is the licensing. The new release is under the Open Font
License. As such, all Linux distributions will be able to freely use it in
their packaging.
Please feel free to use, share, distribute the new font. You can download
it from http://aksharyogini.sudhanwa.com .
Give us feedback on my email id or the official id for the font "
aksharyogini at sudhanwa.com " You can also comment on the guestbook on the
website.
Do share this news and also the font.
Wishing you a Very Happy Diwali !!
Thanks and regards
-Sudhanwa
--
~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!
web: www.sudhanwa.com blog: www.sudhanwa.in
Twitter: sudhanwa Check on FB, Linkedin for more.
Hello, everyone.
Wikimedia India has recently submitted its latest grant report, which we
have now reviewed. It is here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/WM_IN/Program_Grant_April_Decemb…
We are still awaiting some more concrete information on impact and outcomes
of some of the work (see talk page) before we approve the report and close
the grant, but I thought it might interest some community members to see,
as one additional piece of input, in the context of the other conversations
about the future of work in India.
Cheers,
Asaf
--
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
https://donate.wikimedia.org
Hi,
As I engaged in the discussion regarding CIS grant proposal for the last
two weeks, I had this recurring theme echoed from various corners.
"India is big. India is diverse. India is unlike other countries. So,
experiments (call it innovation) need to be done".
For the love of Wiki God, may I request all the global people to stop
experiementing with India?
*People from outside have no clue of India. And the people they hire in
India have no clue of the Wikimedia movement. *
Ultimately, it has become like few blind people describing an elephant.
Heck, all the community members know it is an elephant and know it takes
time to grow an elephant. The growth of an elephant can only be on par with
the ecosystem within which it is present.
No amount of systematic intervention is going to change a donkey into an
elephant.
I am tired of seeing experiments being done in naive and tiny Indic
communities and the "lessons learnt" being implemented in Brazil, Egypt and
Arab world. Be it Google or be it WMF or its avatars.
May I request that you do your experiments elsewhere for a change and
implement things that work for sure in India organically?
The reason why English Wikipedia community flourishes in India, Tamil /
Bengali / Malayalam communities do well relatively are complete socio
economic and political. No amount of intervention is going to change this
in other parts of the country. This is like providing rice bags to the poor
of the third world without fixing their primary socio political issues.
Wikipedia doesn't exist in isolation in a web ecosystem. It is the
culmination of scholarly activity of highest order that you can imagine.
When languages that are official languages of states and countries, have
two decades long web presence, have a thriving local print / visual media
and academic network have a problem growing their Wikipedias, I can't
understand what the h*ll is being done in Wikipedias that are not even out
of incubators, Wikipedias that don't even have a writing system in order.
Few years back Google dumped paid translated articles done with the aid
machine translation tools in many Indic language communities and sermoned
us that these will bring us a community. Now, WMF's programs are sermoning
us that their attempt at seeding communities will bring articles for us. I
am 100% sure that both approaches are futile.
I really miss the once thriving Indian Wiki community that organized the
world's biggest Wiki conference.
I really miss the cross-wiki activism like
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Tinucherian_and_Shijualex/Wiki_C…
I really miss the spirit of the Wiki community getting replaced by
confusions brought because of top-down paid interventions.
The only hope I have is that at least few mature communities will take
stock of the situation, stay autonomous and self-sustaining as they were
and continue to enjoy the pleasure of Wiki activity instead of getting
drowned in numbers, goals, targets and dream targets.
Ravi
Hi,
CIS-A2K has officially stated that it won't fix their erratic salary
structure.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/…
Why should Wikimedia donors pay for the mistakes of the WMF?
I am thinking if we should start campaigning asking people not to donate to
WMF citing wasteful expenditures like these.
Please point if any such campaign already exists.
Ravi
Hoi Gerard,
( Context for others:
Please see
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_J…
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/…
*
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2014-April/011104.html)
//If something new has to start and Wikidata is new, then it needs more
than just a video or a conference call.//
100s of Wikimedia projects, including many in India, didn't need any kind
of intervention.
//I gave a presentation to professionals who work in data. It took me an
hour to set up the environment with them and for them so that they could
start.. We had a meeting for three hours and we scratched the surface
enough to make a difference. The fact that we were together ensured good
faith and enough understanding.//
Are they Wikimedians? It is enough if Wikimedians can make sense of it.
If Wikimedians are not able to make sense of it, then we need to improve
Wiki Data for the global community too.
//I have seen some of the agenda and if only a fifth of what is started
pays of it is well worth the investment.//
Is it?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Narrowing_Focus_presentation_to_the…
talks about reducing focus on events.
WMIN's FDC proposal was heavily criticized for a focus on events and its
impact was questioned.
And yet, we have an event for Wiki Data with a proposed budget as follows:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_J…
This is 29.7% of the annual budget of WMIN !
To give a context this is almost 40% of the 2011 Wikimedia India conference
!!
The single biggest expense in this Wiki Data Marathon program is the cost
for resource person which is 4,50,000 INR.
So much cost for a resource person for a month hints that this could be
someone visiting India from abroad.
Any idea who this is ? :)
Even University faculties don't understand Wikipedia editor and our markup.
So, what do we do? Run marathons like this for all Wikipedia projects?
//Just consider what a challenge it is to bring Wikidata to India in a way
where it actually makes a difference.//
Please provide evidence that this is an India specific problem. When
communities don't even get the decade long Wikipedia project, it is only
expected that they won't get Wiki Data too.
How good is Wiki Data adoption in similar parts of the word and how do you
address it?
Thanks,
Ravi
Hi Asaf, Ravi, All,
Please see below replies received from Muzammil on queries raised by you. I
did not notice that Muzammil is part of CIS. It looks like the Urdu content
generation is a task carried out by CIS A2K program under wikimedia grant.
Do you (WMF) have any specific budget for such tasks? Gujarati wiki
community will love to get paid for content generation.
Thanks,
Dhaval
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "muzammil" <muzammil(a)cis-india.org>
Date: 25 Apr 2014 10:09
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-gu] Urdu Wikipedia crosses the 50,000 mark
To: "Dhaval S. Vyas" <dsvyas(a)gmail.com>
Cc: "Wikipedia Gujarati" <wikipedia-gu(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear Vyas,
>
> Good News Muzammil,
>
> But I have seen questions raised for you regarding this number. People
> have found out that till mid February there were only around 27 thousand
> pages, how did Urdu wikipedia reach 50,000 mark in 2 months?
>
> I will have to examine the extent of bot activity. However, a high level
of bot activity was also seen on Hindi Wikipedia in the past.
>
> Someone also found that most of the recent activity is due to Bot
> operation and 90% of pages are less than 20kb in size, which means they are
> nearly substubs.
>
> I would rate most as "stubs". But even these can be forerunners for good
articles of the future.
Regards,
Muzammil
Dear All,
CIS-A2K had a two day meeting with WMF & FDC visiting team in its Bangalore office on 11th & 12th Feb 2014. The main agenda of the meeting was:
Understanding current state of A2K -- basic facts (finance snapshot, organizational context within CIS)
Financial review of CIS-A2K, per grant agreement
Reflection on past year - successes and challenges in activities
Reflection on past year - spending vs. plan
Discussion of the preparation for funding via the FDC process; Q&A
Reflection on relationship with various communities - successes; obstacles; gaps
Discussion of A2K's current resources: staff, funds, engaged volunteers; discuss actual plans; discuss path according to roadmap
Meeting minutes can be found here.[1]
Thanks
Nitika
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O7MkN-h1lQC9oRLwX51Q2wusqBCR19e3i6jI6IW…