Dear Wikimedians,
We hope you are as excited as we are about The WikiConference India, 2023.
The theme for this iteration of WikiConference India is Strengthening the
bonds. We believe this conference will open opportunities for community
members in the South Asian region to reconnect, share their ideas or
experiences with each other, and collaborate for the development of their
communities. The WCI Core Organizing Team is thrilled to announce the
opening of the Applications for the Scholarships and Program submissions
are live now! Please find them on the Conference Meta page. The link to the
conference Meta page can be found here[1]. The applications will be open
from 11 November 2022, 00:00 IST, and the last date to submit is 27
November 2022, 23:59 IST.
For regular updates, please watch the conference meta page or keep a watch
on the mailing list, with emails having the tag [WikiConference India 2023]
or [WCI 2023].
Let us know if you have any queries or concerns!
Best,
WCI 2023 Core organizing team.
Links:
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2023
Greetings Wikimedians,
We are delighted to announce that the grant proposal submitted for
organizing WikiConference India 2023
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WikiConference_India_2023>[1]
has been *approved* by the grants committee of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Thank you for all your support. We will be soon releasing information
regarding Session submission, Scholarship applications, and more related to
the conference. Please keep a watch on the mailing list, with emails having
the tag *[WikiConference India 2023]* for regular updates.
Thank you once again for all your efforts and support!
Regards,
WCI 2023 Core Organizing team.
Links:
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WikiConference_India_2023
Dear community members,
During the 2022 Wikimedia Summit, the Movement Charter Drafting Committee
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Drafting_Committee> (MCDC)
presented the first outline of the Movement Charter, giving a glimpse on
the direction of its future work, and the Charter itself. The MCDC then
integrated the initial feedback collected during the Summit. Before
proceeding with writing the Charter for the whole movement, the MCDC wants
to interact with community members and gather feedback on the drafts of the
three sections: *Preamble*, *Values & Principles*, and *Roles &
Responsibilities* (intentions statement). The Movement Charter drafts will
be available on the Meta page here
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Content> on 14 November
2022. Community wide consultation period on Movement Charter will take
place from 20 November to 18 December 2022. Learn more about it here
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Community_Consultation>.
With the goal of ensuring that people are well informed to fully
participate in the conversations and are empowered to equitably contribute
their perspective on the Movement Charter, three *“Ask Me Anything about
Movement Charter"* sessions have been scheduled for different timezones.
Everyone is invited to attend these conversations. The aim is to learn
about Movement Charter - its goal, purpose, why it matters, and how it
impacts your community. MCDC members will attend these sessions to answer
your questions and hear community feedback.
The “Ask Me Anything” sessions accommodate communities from different
timezones. Only the presentation will be recorded and shared afterwards,
conversation will not be recorded. Below is the list of planned sessions:
- *Asia/Pacific*: 4 November 2022 at 09:00 UTC (your local time
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1667552400>). Interpretation is
available in Chinese and Japanese.
- *Europe/MENA/Sub Saharan Africa*: 12 November 2022 at 15:00 UTC (your
local time <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1668265257>). Interpretation
is available in Arabic, French and Russian.
- *Latin America/North America/ Western Europe*: 12 November 2022 at
15:00 UTC (your local time <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1668265257>).
Interpretation is available in Spanish and Portuguese.
You will find more details on the Meta page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Community_Consultation>;
Zoom links will be shared 48 hours before the session.
*Call for Movement Charter Ambassadors*
Individuals or groups from all communities who wish to help include and
start conversations in their communities on the Movement Charter are
encouraged to become Movement Charter Ambassadors
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy_and_Governance/Movement_C…>
(MC
Ambassadors). MC Ambassadors will carry out their own activities and get
financial support for enabling conversations in their own languages. Regional
facilitators
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy_and_Governance/Team> from
the Movement Strategy and Governance team are available to support
applicants with MC Ambassadors grantmaking. If you are interested, please sign
up
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy_and_Governance/Movement_C…>
.
If you have specific questions, you can reach out to me (
csinha-ctr(a)wikimedia.org), write to the MSG team (strategy2030(a)wikimedia.org),
or write on the MS Forum <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/>.
Regards,
Chitraparna Sinha (she/her) (Meta
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CSinha_(WMF)>)
Facilitator, South Asia, Movement Strategy and Governance
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy_and_Governance> (MSG)
Hello Wikimedians,
The West Bengal Wikimedians User Group is organizing a month long public photo competition on Indian cuisines entitled as Wiki Loves Food 2022 in India has started from tomorrow and will continue till 30th November 2022.
Wiki Loves Food 2022 in India is a public photo competition on Wikimedia Commons. It shall aim at developing and improving the quality and quantity of pictures of various cuisines found from all over India and thus highlighting and celebrating the profusion, diversity and ethnicity of Indian cuisines.
Participants are requested to upload images of Indian food to Wikimedia Commons and get a chance to win exciting prizes! We will be very delighted to see you!
Event page link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Food_2022_in_India
Best wishes
Ananya
(on behalf of Wiki Loves Food 2022 in India team)
Dear all,
Hope you are well and safe.
I am thrilled to reach out to you on behalf of the Communications
Department at The Wikimedia Foundation to share information about a new
short-term test campaign through which we hope to learn more about engaging
Indian digital audiences, primarily the youth.
Emerging from the Medium Term Plan
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019>,
this test is aimed at strengthening the awareness levels of Wikimedia, our
free knowledge mission, and growing affinity with our readers in India,
especially the youth.
Firstly, let us introduce ourselves- The Communications Department.
Communications <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications> is a Wikimedia
Foundation
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation>
department. The Communications Department performs a variety of functions
for the Foundation, such as building awareness of Wikimedia and its
projects, maintaining relationships with the media, producing content for
the Wikimedia Foundation website
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_web…>,
managing the community blog Diff <https://diff.wikimedia.org/> and
Wikimedia social media
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Social_media>
platforms, facilitating communications with Wikimedia communities,
informing research into emerging global audiences, developing creative
materials, and coordinating campaigns to engage new audiences for Wikimedia
projects like Project Rewrite
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Project_Rewrite>and Wiki
Unseen. <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wiki_Unseen>
What is #KnowWithWiki all about?
This is a truly integrated effort where members of various teams within the
Foundation came together to develop a plan to engage young readers in India
in a manner that demonstrates the value of Wikipedia, highlighting the role
it already plays in helping them know their world better and promoting free
knowledge.
The problem: Wikipedia readership in India is high. It is currently ranked
#4 in website traffic in India with an average of approximately 2 pages a
visit. Unfortunately, according to a market research
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QHwaKUKJqxuzmfNx55KFlA-CBYPAKzMWmYP5heu…>
carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2020, only 31% of the Indian
internet users have heard of Wikipedia, and strikingly, only 26% of
internet users aged 18-24 years were aware of Wikipedia. The gap between
usage and awareness indicates that there is a large number of young people
who use Wikipedia and are not aware of us and therefore have no affinity or
value for it.
Why India?
Engaging young internet users and unaware Wikipedia readers to increase
affinity and perceived value is key to the sustained growth of Wikipedia
and all our projects. The Indian youth may be viewing or using our content
through different platforms e.g. seeing Wikipedia content through search
engines, but there is a lack of awareness among this audience that this
information comes from the efforts of our diverse volunteer community that
spends time and effort in curating relevant and reliable information on
Wikipedia and its sister projects.
We wish to engage with this very audience by providing them more relatable
examples on how Wikipedia plays/can play an active role in their efforts to
gather fact-based, researched information around worldly topics.
Furthermore, by capturing and studying data emerging from this test, we
will be able to learn, assess and improve our future engagements in the
country
Our Plan
Starting May 2022, we will be engaging Indian influencers under a
campaign #KnowWithWiki
& “Know Your World Better”
For this activity, we are collaborating with selected popular GenZ
influencers to showcase the relevance of Wikipedia among the younger Indian
audience in their daily lives. The primary platform of activation will be
on Instagram, which is a platform that has the highest number of users from
India, and has emerged as the most preferred social media platform2 among
Indian youth according to a 2020 study3. Instagram influencers will
highlight use of Wikipedia in their posts on topical content and social
awareness topics.
These influencers will release their own content on their Instagram handles
covering topics relevant to our target audience, while seeding references
of Wikipedia and the vast knowledge available on the online encyclopedia.
This will be complemented with our own social media channels sharing
content around the experiment, focussed towards the Indian audience. The
general public would be encouraged to follow and participate in the
campaign online using #KnowWithWiki.
Why are we doing this?
This activity follows the the successful completion of a similar activity
in South Africa- #WikipediabyUs, where we collaborated with South Africa’s
young creative community by giving them a platform to create informative
content based on Wikipedia articles. #WikipediabyUs, demonstrated young
creatives using Wikipedia to expand a topic of interest with their
audiences.
It is a part of our sustained endeavor to make deeper strides in learning
from different contexts on improving understanding of the Wikimedia
movement and its projects. We want to raise awareness about how Wikipedia
and the free knowledge movement is present in the daily lives of Indian
audiences.
This test would also enable us to tackle some of the misconceptions around
Wikipedia in the Indian digital space, via explaining how the Wikipedia
volunteer community creates and improves content on the platform based on
up-to-date, relevant and verifiable sources.
By engaging the 18-24 age group we aim to-
-
GET GenZ adults aged 18-24
-
WHO read Wikipedia
-
TO see Wikipedia as relevant
-
BY showing them how often they call on us to know and do more
How can you get involved?
You can create your own content on social media to describe how you use
Wikipedia in your everyday life to know your world and the things that
interest you better. Make sure you use #KnowWithWiki and #Wikipedia to add
to the campaign impact!
If you would like to know more and get involved or share any suggestions,
please reach out to me by email.
Thank you warmly for your time and interest.
On behalf of the Core Team- Khanyi, Mathoto, Olga, Rachit and Vidhu.
--
Khanyi Mpumlwana (they/she)
Creative Director
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
**Please excuse any brevity or typos, messages are often sent in a hurry*
Hello Indic Wikisource proofreaders,
We are happy to announce that the Indic Wikisource proofread-a-thon
November 2022 [1] will start tomorrow 14 November 2022 and will continue up
to 30th November 2022.
We are also expecting higher participation than in the previous contest. We
welcome new Wikimedians from various parts of the country to work on
restoring our literary heritage to the digital era. Just like the last
contest held in March 2022, we again promise to wrap up everything within
the expected timeline after the competition ends. We are going to keep our
promise again. :-)
Welcome you all to the contest.
1)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Indic_Wikisource_proofread-a-thon_November_…
Regards,
Jayanta Nath
Wikisource Officer
Centre for Internet and Society
Shubho Maha Saptami!
Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in India has ended. We are happy to announce that
we have 5862 uploads from 413 photographers, among which 73% were newly
registered users. Till now, 4% images have been used in different 65
Wikimedia projects gaining 951,525 views. Highest number of uploads by a
single photographer was 842. We think all these numbers are pretty decent
for us. This year too, we have got photographs from all over the country,
but most photographs came for monuments located in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu,
Maharashtra, Delhi, Haryana, Gujarat and so on.
In the background, we are rearranging the list of monuments
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_in_India/Up…>
district-wise as we are getting feedback from different participants that
our current lists are somewhat difficult for amateur photographers to
navigate as currently the tables are arranged according to heritage
designation. which not everyone tracks well enough. This rearrangement will
lead us to create around 750 tables of monuments, which will look something
like this one
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_in_India/We…>,
where we will keep all designated and non-designated monuments located in a
single district under one table. Hopefully, these tables will be ready
before next year's competition. The tables for Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh,
Goa and West Bengal are already live.
We are now entering into the primary sorting process of the submitted
photographs to be done by the organizer team, where those with obvious
issues will be filtered out by 14 October, 2022 and the rest of the images
will be forwarded to the jury team
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2022_in_Ind…>,
who will have 3 rounds and rest of October to finish the judging process.
If everything goes well, we will declare the results by the start of
November like previous years.
Thanks for all your contributions and uploads to the competition. Be ready
with your camera for the Wiki Loves Food competition, which will be
announced very soon!!
Regards,
Bodhisattwa
(On behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in India team
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2022_in_Ind…>
)
West Bengal Wikimedians User Group
Hello fellow Wikisource enthusiasts!
I shall be organizing the 2nd Indic Wikiource Proofread-a-thon 2022 in the
coming week of November/December and I need your help to decide on a time
and date that works best for the most number of people. Kindly share your
opinion at the wudele link below:
https://wudele.toolforge.org/wsp2022
Regards
Jayanta
.jpg){kind=link}
