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
------------------------------------------------------
I am forwarding this email since my official wikimedia india email is still
getting blocked.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yohann Thomas <yohannvt(a)wikimedia.in>
Date: Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 10:45 PM
Subject: Open letter to the community
To: Wikimedia Chapter India Google group <wmin-members(a)googlegroups.com>,
Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: EC Wikimedia India <wikimedia-in-exec(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Ravishankar
Ayyakkannu <ravidreams(a)wikimedia.in>
Dear Community
I regret to inform you that Wikimedia India has not been give periodic
updates regarding the activities of the chapter. This is in spite of the
fact that the last year, we have been doing many activities & making great
strides in reaching out to the community.Apart from that,Wikimedia India
has also not been open about the obstacles which currently our organization
is facing.
1.) No Monthly Reports were being circulated by the Office Bearer’s at
Wikimedia India. Major updates regarding to different activities were given
to the community, but a periodic update was not given to the community The
Executive Committee (EC) along with the Program Director recognize the
negligence in this regard. An assurance regarding the same has been
provided in this regard. On the first Monday of every month, we shall be
submitting our monthly report to the community.
2.) Inability to Conduct Annual General Meeting for 2014-2015: The Office
Bearers have already been apologetic in this regard. An assurance has been
provided that efforts are being undertaken to process it as soon as
possible.
3.) Current Financial obstacle faced by the Chapter: We are in Process of
renewing our FCRA license , but due to this,the Chapter at present is
facing financial challenges.
To tackle these problems ,we are taking guidance from senior community
members & founding members of the chapter. We hope to resolve these issues
soon & continue with all the good work we have been doing so far.
--
Yohann Thomas
Executive Committee Member
Wikimedia India
http://wikimedia.in/
Hi,
Join us for the next Bangalore meetup.
*Date:* : Sunday, *31-January-2015* 4:00 PM IST
*Venue:* Center for Internet and Society,
No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage,
Bangalore - 560071
Katy Love and Winifred Olliff from the WMF grants team are here. This is a
good opportunity to get familiar with the WMF grants program.
More details can be seen at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore61 .
Ravi
Dear friends,
On behalf of Wikipedia Kolkata Community, I am honoured to announce the
event "Wikipedia Takes Kolkata V" on 24th January 2016. This is an annual
event organised by Kolkata Community in the winter and this will be the
fifth consecutive time.
Please find the link here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Kolkata_V
Thank you,
---
Santanu Chandra
(User: Schwiki)
Hello one & all
We take immense pleasure at providing some briefing pertaining to the
recent developments at Wikimedia India. In an attempt to make the
organization much more structured such that it carry forwards its beliefs,
mission and practices, EC (Executive Committee) has decided to frame some
polices pertaining to Human Resource Developments.
They have been listed below.
1.) The EC with due consensus on 8th December decided to proceed ahead by
hiring an Intern having expertise in Human Resource Development Affairs.
2.) The Requirement for hiring the Intern was circulated on two major
internship portals; LetsIntern <http://www.letsintern.com/> and Internshala
<http://internshala.com/> on 18th December.
3.) A total of 44 Candidates were shortlisted based on their expertise in
the field along with their academic background. Preference was given to
candidate who had NGO experience.
4.) A series of interviews on Google Hangout were conducted 22nd December,
23rd December, 24th December & 2nd January/3rd January2016.
We are pleased to announce that Ms Ashmita Bose has been selected as the
new HR Intern.
She is currently Pursuing her MBA (HR) from IIM Ranchi.
Thank you
Yohann Thomas
yohannvt(a)gmail.com
*Why It's Essential To Grow Indian-Language Wikipedias*
On 15 January, Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia celebrated its 15th
birthday, meeting this milestone with 36 million articles in more than 290
languages (the English-language Wikipedia alone has crossed the 5-million
article mark
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/11969459/Wikipedias-5-milli…>).
But here I want to address some major questions that we need to ask as
Indians. First, what is the state of Indian-language Wikipedia projects?
What does India have to take from and give to Wikipedia?
With the growth of free and open source software in India, people are
equipped with more freedom than ever.
<http://www.gndec.ac.in/%7Elibrarian/sveri/dbit2306009.pdf> Especially with
the recent federal policy-level changes
<https://opensource.com/government/15/6/indian-government-includes-open-sour…>,
the nation is enjoying better collaboration with people of different
cultures speaking different languages.
However, there is a huge gap in the access to knowledge on the internet
domain. Of a population of about 1.26 billion only about 15-18% people are
connected online, largely from mobile devices. A tiny fraction of this
population comprises the technical community. It would be useful to have a
metric on the percentage of this community's contribution to grow the
languages of this country and its cultural heritage.
*Wikipedia as a family*
Wikipedia is not just an encyclopaedia. It is also a "family" of several
other Open Knowledge members. Wikipedia itself is available in over 290
languages, but it also has other multilingual sister projects such as
Wikisource (an online library of many public domain and other important
texts), Wikimedia Commons (the world's largest repository of media files
and documents), Wikibooks (a free library of educational textbooks),
Wikivoyage (a free and open travel guide) and Wiktionary (a database of
various languages).
These projects don't just house millions of images, videos, documents and
texts, but allow anyone to contribute their knowledge to this ever
deepening pool of information. Four Indian languages made an early entry to
the Wiki-world back in 2002 -- Assamese <http://as.wikipedia.org/>,
Malayalam <http://ml.wikipedia.org/>, Odia <http://or.wikipedia.org/> and
Punjabi <http://pa.wikipedia.org/>.
*Language neutrality*
According to UNESCO, 197 of the total of 1652 Indian languages are dying
despite having a long literary and linguistic heritage. It's quite
shocking. In a blog post
<https://opensource.com/community/14/7/save-endangered-language-today> on
content localisation, social entrepreneur Rajesh Ranjan asks if free and
open source software can help save these dying languages. In the context of
Wikipedia, there are already 23 South Asian-language projects. Out of these
20 are languages listed in the 8th schedule of the Constitution of India.
Many might not have noticed that the "en" in the URL of Wikipedia that
denotes the language code of English could be altered with "or" for Odia
Wikipedia or "pa" for Punjabi Wikipedia.
Most Wikipedia projects in Indian language projects are relatively small
compared to their counterparts. But the Wikimedia communities are thriving
When only parts of government websites are available in Hindi, the Hindi
Wikipedia has crossed 10 million articles already. The Tamil and Malayalam
Wikipedia communities have played a central part in implementing Wikipedia
basics learning in the state-run school syllabus. Needless to say that
these communities have played a significant role in implementing several
free and open source software by pushing for policy-level change. Many
Indian languages are in the pipeline to become active Wikipedia projects
under the scope of the Wikimedia Incubator
<https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Incubator:Test_wikis/code/val…>.
Maithili Wikipedia
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/09/08/a-focused-approach-for-maithili-wikipe…>
and Goan Konkani Wikipedia
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/15/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live/> are the
two Indian-language Wikipedias that have gone live in recent years. The
world has seen how digital activism has brought a new life to the Hebrew
language. There are a fairly large number of native speakers waiting out
there to access knowledge in their own languages. Wikipedia could be a
great tool for digital activism with openness and sharing.
*Addressing gender bias in Wikipedia: Implications for India*
India tops South Asia in the gender inequality index
<http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/gender-inequality-index-in-south…>
in the entire South Asia. The female literacy rate is an alarmingly low
65.46% <http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2009/en/pdf/EN_SOWP09_ICPD.pdf> as
compared to 82.14% for men. This disparity is evident in many other sectors
as well as in politics.
But gender bias is not just a problem in India. The global free and open
source software (FOSS) community has always been worried about the low
presence of women
<https://books.google.co.in/books?id=AJpACwAAQBAJ&pg=PT49&lpg=PT49&dq=gender…>
contributors -- in the range of 2-5% range.
<https://people.cs.umass.edu/%7Ewallach/talks/2011-04-05_JHU.pdf> Wikimedia
Foundation's former executive director admitted that Wikipedia, like many
other collaborative and open projects, does not have a conducive
environment for women. But the Wikimedia community and Wikimedia Foundation
are both working on improving this state of affairs. Indian-language
Wikipedia projects are directly impacted by this global drive, be it the
Women's History Month edit-a-thon where Wikipedia content largely related
to women are improved every year or the Lilavati's Daughters project
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lilavati%27s_Daughters_Edit-a-thon>where
biographies of Indian women scientists were created and enriched in
Wikipedia projects.
*Complementing Digital India*
With a population of over 354 million
<http://dazeinfo.com/2015/09/05/internet-users-in-india-number-mobile-iamai/>
netizens India still has a long way to go in increasing Indian language
content on the web
<http://tdil.mit.gov.in/wsi/papers/Issues_&_Challenges_for_Enabling_Mobile_w…>.
The Government of India's new campaign Digital India
<http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/content/vision-and-vision-areas> aims
at digital
literacy and availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages
<http://www.cmai.asia/digitalindia/>. This is closely aligned with the
Wikimedia movement's goal to provide free access to the sum of all human
knowledge. In addition to Wikipedia, many other open educational resources
and free knowledge projects that are not already a part of the Digital
India campaign signal the need for the federal-run campaign to be more
collaborative and open. Community-government collaborations like the NROER
project
<https://blog.creativecommons.org/2013/08/14/india-launches-national-reposit…>
to make NCERT books under Creative Commons licenses and IT@School project
<https://www.itschool.gov.in/glance.php> in the state of Kerala to provide
education using free and open tools have gained massive traction and helped
more Indian language content come online.
by Subhashish Panigrahi (original text under CC-BY-SA 4.0 by author and
editions copyrighted by the editor of the Huffington Post India, available
online at
http://www.huffingtonpost.in/subhashish-panigrahi-/when-wikipedia-is-turnin…
)
Best!
Subhashish Panigrahi
Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge
Centre for Internet and Society
@subhapa / https://cis-india.org
Hi,
Wikimedia India offers internships for students and budding professionals
who would like to have an experience with the Wikimedia movement.
We hope this program will help us engage more talent in the Indian
Wikimedia community proactively.
We welcome User:Jim Carter as our first intern.
More details can be seen here <http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Internship>.
Ravi
As my colleague Quim says, this is a significant important to affect WMF's
strategic priorities in the coming two years, and you can make a difference
with less than 20 minutes of your time.
Please do participate. I think concerns from the various Indian
communities need more visibility at the WMF leadership level.
Cheers,
A.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 11:53 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Launch of Community Consultation
on strategic approaches
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
The Wikimedia Foundation has started a consultation about strategic
priorities.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Strategy
There is a survey with one question and several possibilities for each of
the main themes: Reach, Community, Knowledge. It is a good chance to
influence the WMF strategy with your individual voice. I really mean it!
Taking the survey took me about 15 minutes and I found the exercise
interesting.
This survey is being promoted across all Wikimedia projects. I'm forwarding
the announcement to this list in order to help assuring that our technical
communities are well represented. Please take the survey, and feel free
forwarding this message to whoever might be interested as well.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lila Tretikov <lila(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 2:37 AM
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Launch of Community Consultation on strategic
approaches
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear Wikimedians,
We are excited to have you participate in an important Community Engagement
regarding our strategic approaches. This is a major step to help us
prioritize the work of the Foundation beginning in July 2016 and running
for the next 12 to 24 months thereafter into a strategic plan.
Throughout 2015 the Foundation has been exploring how to prioritize its
work to best support the movement's goals, set forth, but not yet reached,
in the 2010-15 strategic plan.
The strategic approaches presented here are based on our vision, strategy
consultations in 2010 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2010-2015>
and 2015
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Strategy/Community_consultation>,
research on external impacts, and input from staff and a few small
community think groups on key challenges and potential solutions.
Timeline: These are our target dates for this process.
-
January 11: Put up pages for translation (done)
-
January 18: Launch of community consultation on key questions
-
February 15: Close of consultation
-
By February 26: Release synthesis of consultation
-
By March 4: Publish first draft strategy for comment
We appreciate your time and efforts to help guide the Foundation in its
work to support the movement.
Warm regards,
Lila
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
--
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
