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
Hi Everyone,
Hope you are all well and safe.
As you know the Communications Department recently worked on two awareness
test in South Africa and India aimed at understanding how we could improve
our engagement numbers in the regions with the youth *(**Wikipedia
awareness ranges from 31% to 52% among internet users in Africa and from
15% to 56% among Indian internet users). *
The learnings are now ready and the team is looking forward to sharing how
they could aid in how we can engage youth to be more aware of and
contribute to the free knowledge movement.
The tests focussed on hearing, learning and capturing engagement-level
data, that could be utilized for future movement-wide activities. During
the course of both tests we monitored and gathered data in the form of
engagement
numbers (comments, sentiments, engagement ratios, replies, and mentions),
growth mapping, traffic referral on Wikipedia, sentiment analysis, media
engagement and more. And now we are happy to share the findings with you
all.
We are inviting movement members from both South Africa and India for a
call where the Communications Department from The Wikimedia Foundation will
present the learnings, followed by an open discussion + Q & A.
We look forward to having you all at the call, please add the below details
to your respective calendars and share with anyone who would be interested
in the discussion.
Date: 30th September, 2022 (Friday)
Time: 1430 UTC/1630 SAST/2000 IST (find your timezone here
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1664550005>)
Meeting Link
<https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/r/eventedit/copy/N244OW9hYjlkZWV2N…>
(please add to your calendar)
Look forward to speaking with you all,
On Behalf of the team,
--
Rachit Sharma (he/him)
Snr Global Movement Communications Specialist, South Asia
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
*Registration now OPEN for Wikimania 2022: The Festival Edition! Register
HERE <https://diff.wikimedia.org/wikimania-2022/>!*
Hello Wikimedians,
This is to remind you all that Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in India
photo-competition is coming to an end today, so if you are interested to
upload photographs of monuments for the event but haven't done yet, now is
the time.
The link to the event page is here -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2022_in_Ind…
Regards,
Bodhisattwa
Hi Wikimedians,
Greetings from the Wiki Loves Butterfly team.
As you might know, for the last 6 years, we have been documenting butterfly
taxons endemic to eastern and north-eastern part of India through the Wiki
Loves Butterfly project. Our aim has been to increase the amount of free
license materials along with enrichment of related content on different
Wikimedia sites. Our project was previously supported by 4 Rapid Grants and
currently the fifth phase is running under the Project Grants.
Since the beginning of the project in 2016, we have gained a considerable
amount of expertise, maturity and confidence to successfully plan and
execute field-documentations and expand our area of activity in remote deep
forests of north-east India. We are now applying for the Wikimedia
Community Fund so that we can expand our activities in our next phase to
bring more quantity and quality to the topic.
You can find our fund proposal here -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund/At…
Regards,
Ananya
Project Lead, Wiki Loves Butterfly team
Hello everyone,
We are happy to inform you that we have submitted the Conference & Event
Grant proposal for WikiConference India 2023[1] to the Wikimedia
Foundation. I kindly request all the community members to go through the
proposal -- including the community engagement survey report, program plan,
venue and logistics, participation and scholarships, and the budget, and
provide us with your suggestions/comments on the talk page[2]. You can
endorse the proposal in the endorsements section[3], please do add a
rationale for supporting this project.
According to the timeline of the Conference and Event Grants program, the
community can review till 23 September 2022, post that we will start
integrating all the received feedback to make modifications to the
proposal. Depending on the response of community members, an IRC may be
hosted next week, especially if there are any questions/concerns that need
to be addressed.
We reopened the survey form and if you are still interested in taking part
in the survey and want to share something in mind or become a part of the
organizing team, please fill out the form so we all can work together[4].
Let us know if you have any questions.
Regards,
User:Nitesh Gill, User:Nivas10798, User:Neechalkaran
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WikiConference_India_2023
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Conference/WikiConference_India…
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WikiConference_India_2023…
[4]
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfof80NVrf3b9x3AotDBkICe-RfL3O3EyT…