Dear Wikimedians ,
Thank you all for the overwhelming response to the 2010 Sept 18th Pune Wikimedia meetup. 17 people had attended this meet. Special thanks to HOD & staff of Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune and visiting media and open source movement fraternity for their active participation and guidance.
Mr Vijay Sirdeshpande (Mahitgar from Marathi wikipedia) and Ms Bishakha Datta (trustee, Wikimedia Foundation) jointly chaired the meet . Ms. Datta introduced herself . She talked about Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation’s plans in India, the Wikimedia India Chapter, and difficulties faced in completion of its registration process. She also talked about Bangalore wiki meet-ups. She stressed the need to conduct wikipedia academies and informed about the upcoming visits of Jimmy Wales to Mumbai at the end of October. Other Wikimedia Foundation staff visit India in December, includes Sue Gardner (executive director), Erik Moeller (deputy director) and Danese Cooper (chief technical officer).
Then wikipedians introduced themselves. Mr. Amit Yadav raised the topics of need for and lack of adequate references on Marathi wikipedia, quality of content, and outreach. He was for most of the discussions to take place online rather than offline. He stressed the need for initiative and self-learning process for making contributions on part of wiki-admiring people.On quality of content front, the success of Malayalam wikipedia was discussed. Mr. Vijay explained the difference in the initial focus, and said that now the focus is on making Marathi wikipedia reader-oriented. Everyone agreed that for bringing better quality we need more active users. Mr.Vijay also informed that Marathi wikipedians can request for various features and get various features adopted in the user interface, including page rating etc. for improvement in quality.
Mr.Amit Yadav suggested that Marathi Wikipedians wherever necessary can refer to English language wikipedia but need to do more original writing than merely translating from English wikipedia and Good number of attendees supported this idea. One atendee asked whether it is right to give references of Marathi language sources apart from the English language references.
Mr. Amit was of the opinion that those people who use old technologies for writing can share their documentation online and rest of the people can support them in uni-coding the texts for wikiprojects, whereas opinion of Mr Ajay Garg was that we can support these people technologically and we need to do so. Mr.Sudhanwa Joglekar was of the opinion that it is important to involve senior citizens. Mr.Vijay informed that we do have already good support and contribution from working professional and senior citizens categories; but academic and student categories,women and economically weaker and rural sections are under-represented in contributing and interaction with wiki projects.
On media support, Mr. Samrat Phadnis (esakal.com) and Mr. Nilesh Bane (indiatimes.com) assured support from their respective media houses. At the same time, Mr. Nilesh said that wikipedia in itself is the biggest medium. On this, Mr.Vijay stressed the need of diverting en wiki traffic using geo-location and asking for mother tongue while logging in and diverting users to their respective mother tongue wikipedias.Secondly Mr. Vijay also requested for a call center facility if possible from the foundation side (to help contributors all over India instantly).Meeting also discussed importance of inter-wikilinks in spreading awareness among English language Wikipedia’s Indian visitors aware of Marathi language Wikipedia.
Mr.Sudhanwa and Vijay highlighted that Pune would be a good location for the Foundation’s proposed India office, since it is a major educational hub.
Mr.Nilesh Bane took up the subject of Marathi language used on Marathi wikipedia - he felt it should avoid usage of new difficult Marathi words, and highlighted the importance of usability and simplicity in the user interface. Mr.Sachin Venga seconded Mr.Nilesh on his points.While agreeing with his points Mr.Samrat Phadnis (from esakal.com) suggested giving preference to the language used by people from rural and small cities, since readers across Maharashtra constitute the major share of Marathi wikipedia’s target audience. Mr.Sudhanwa Joglekar briefed on the process of language terminology standardisation through FUEL (Frequently Used Entities in Localisation) sessions. In this context, the views of Mr.Mahesh Kulkarni of CDAC and Rachna Pradhan of Bhasha Sanchalanalay were brought to notice and the need for previous(Swa.Savarkar time) debates related to Bhasha Shuddhikaran Movement and Balbharti's Dictionary becoming available online were also
discussed.
Mr.Nilesh Bane expressed his dismay over delay in (Govt.) Marathi Wishvakosh becoming available online.
Mr.Ajay Garg promised to support wikipedians on technical and software special font conversion issues while Prof.Subhash Pawar was enthusiastic in supporting usage of Marathi on computers. It was agreed that there is a need to separate co-ordination by interested wikipedians team with promoting volunteers and technical support on font usage.
Mr.Kaustubh Samudra informed the meeting that media wiki software is translated to Marathi and where people deem it fit to change the usage and correction of Marathi, the correction process is very simple and interested people can help themselves. Besides wikipedia, this software as content management system can be used by the Marathi web developer fraternity since localisation of the Media Wiki software is almost complete.
Prof. Shriniwas Hemade shared his experience and the need for public awareness for utility of encyclopedias. He was enthusiastic in sharing his own write-ups with wiki projects and requested for technical support on font conversion front. He said the best benefit of the meeting is to bring together people in need of technical support like Prof Shriniwas and software experts like Mr. Ajay Garg.
On the subject of increasing contributors and contributions, Mr. Amit was of the opinion that involving post-graduate (PG) level students will ensure better quality and reliability of content. Mr. Vijay was of the opinion that wiki volunteers need to reach 10th standard onward students, journalism, law, Marathi language, Engineering, Computer hardware and software, and botany-related students on priority by way of wikimedia academies and PowerPoint presentations. Mr.Amit promised to take active part in updating PPTs while Mr.Ajay Garg promised to share his expertise in making presentations easily available. Mr.Sudhanwa Joglekar brought to notice the difficulty in approach the student community, asking what would motivate students? Mr. Amit said that a percentage of students would get awareness and factual benefits to themselves by using the same. Mr.Samrat Phadnis assured support with eSakal. Prof Shriniwas also assured support in writing article for
Marathi media .
Ms. Bishakha Datta requested support to the Women’s Studies department, University of Pune - they are very interested in contributing to Marathi wikipedia, but need handholding and technical help. Mr. Amit assured his support on this account.
Mr.Omkar Khair, Mr.Gawande, and Mr.Paresh Mhetre expressed their support to Marathi wikipedia.
On the subject of outreach to the people volunteering for presentations at colleges, Prof.Shriniwas Hemade was of the opinion that future meetings should preferably have a pre-decided agenda. Mr. Amit Yadav was of the opinion that future meetings, if any, should have three distinct teams: one for usage on Marathi plus basic training on wiki usage.Mr.Vijay suggested Marathi Usage on comp promotion and new user wiki-edit help, Content and outreach group, Techsavy and higher experience level user guidance group, And language wise group of people for non Marathi if more than 5
Thanks to Ms.Bishakha Datta for supporting in updating this writeup. Looking forward to feed back and openions about points raised during this meeting.
Thanks and Regards
-Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia
Hi Mumbai Wikimedians,
Please join the mailing list for Mumbai Wikimedians to help
co-ordinate events and organize meet ups in your city.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-mum
Yours sincerely,
Anirudh Singh Bhati
B.Com, LL.B. (Hons.), Gujarat National Law University,
Gandhinagar, India.
Handphone: +919328712208
Skype: anirudhsbh
If this email were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Hi Nadig, when you do that, would it be possible to consolidate/redirect
pages so that we don't have too many entry points floating about? I know
you've done a lot of background work in keeping these domains going on
your personal funds; still, to make them work, let's flag this as a
chapter task. Makes it easier for everyone. Cheers,
Achal
Thanks Srikanth: I have substantially added to the page. Please take a
look. And I hope some others might be interested in adding to/refining
this information too?
Once done, I'd suggest we put it out as a standard reference to anyone
interested in us, especially from the media.
The current page is:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India/Wikimedia101
Shiju's suggestion is to move this page (and any other public
non-internal information) to http://wikimedia.in/wiki/Main_Page
and it makes a lot of sense. If you agree, can you just move the whole
thing over - and then send it out for others to use/add to and see?
I think this will be quite useful going forward.
Cheers,
Achal
Further on this, I think it would make sense for someone like Shiju to
add a Wikimedia India project status: How many language Wikipedias in
India exist, and what they are, what other language projects exist, what
the stats say in terms of the number of Indians reading and editing
Wikipedia, projects in need of help (in incubator or otherwise, etc. etc.)
And finally, it will need all of us (or perhaps from the chapter) to
constantly update this page with current information as it happens.
I agree that the press coverage is (and always tends to be) a bit
whacked when it comes to Wikipedia, Wikimedia and India. And it doesn't
help that the explanation is pretty clear but complicated. In a few
months, we will have the Wikimedia Foundation India office, the
Wikimedia India chapter, and of course - as always - the Wikimedia
community in India, not to mention various sub-community groupings. I
can only see more confusion unfortunately.
Perhaps you can set up something on India-meta? An explanation such as
the one just offered (who does what) + something about the difference
between Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects would be very useful for
the press, if kept simple. Then we could point them to this page every
time there's interest - or print it out and distribute it for subsequent
press interactions as well. I'll help, and others will too - I'm sure -
if you get it going.
I'm pleased to inform you all that Tamil Wikipedia has crossed the 25,000
article milestone now. :-)
- Sundar
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for
the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
I agree that the press coverage is (and always tends to be) skewed when
it comes to Wikipedia, Wikimedia and India. And it doesn't help that the
explanation is pretty clear but complicated. In a few months, we will
have the Wikimedia Foundation India office, the Wikimedia India chapter,
and of course - as always - the Wikimedia community in India. I can only
see more confusion!
Perhaps you - or others - can set up something on India-meta? An
explanation such as the one just offered (who does what) + something
about the difference between Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
would be very useful for the press, if kept simple. Then we could point
them to this page every time there's interest - or print it out and
distribute it for subsequent press interactions as well. I'll help, and
others will too - I'm sure - if you get it going.
To add to the recent discussion on this list, perhaps a few
clarifications are in order.
All of you are familiar with yourselves - i.e. us - the community;
people who edit, organise and otherwise help Wikimedia projects move
ahead in interesting and productive ways. Many of those interesting and
productive things happening here are captured in this first edition of
the Wikimedia India Community Newsletter:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_India_Community_Newsletter…
Then there is the chapter. Chapters are "independent organizations
founded to support and promote the Wikimedia projects within a specified
country." (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters). Chapters
are approved by the Chapters Committee, constituted by folks whose
mission is to further Wikimedia, and while affiliated to and recognised
by the Wikimedia Foundation, are yet independent entities which plot
their own course. Chapter efforts in India started up as early as 2004
and critical momentum was achieved from 2008 onwards, the result of
which is that we now have an approved Wikimedia India chapter - awaiting
registration in India as a non-profit organisation (for more see:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India). The Wikimedia India
chapter is currently being registered as a 'society' in Karnataka and
will function as a national organisation. As a 'society' it is required
to have founding 'members' - and in our case, those members are Arun
(President), Sundar (Secretary), Hari (Treasurer), Gautam, Srinivas and
Arjuna. (See:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India/MoA-PostChapComVer).
Once the chapter is recognised as a legal entity within India, these
members will serve as the Executive Committee of the organisation.
Contrary to earlier discussions, the Wikimedia India chapter has never
had 'Directors' or 'Directors (designate)' - it's a society, and
societies have members. On operation, it will, of course, extend
membership widely to anyone who wishes to join. Chapters have a wide
variety of functions, all of which are evolving - for now, a crude
summary of their purpose would be that they allow individuals from
within the community to do more than they could normally do alone,
besides providing the benefits of a formal, organisational setup to
utilise when necessary.
Then we have the Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation based in San
Francisco that is the legal home of all Wikimedia projects. Over the
last few years, the Wikimedia Foundation has grown in staff strength and
capacity, and works to facilitate everything we do as volunteers from
around the world. In the last few months, and on the basis of a
strategic planning exercise
(http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy) the Wikimedia Foundation
decided to actively help a few geographies grow, one of which is India.
The National Country Director job that Barry Newstead (Chief Global
Development Officer) talked about on this list
(http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-August/000850.ht…)
is a position that will report to him, which is to say, the staff
employed at the Wikimedia Foundation office in India are exactly that,
and not to be confused with the India chapter - they are a separate
entity, an off-shoot of the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco,
though they will obviously be working closely with both the community
and the chapter. Further clarifications on the Wikimedia Foundation's
office plans in India are available in this email from Barry
(http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-August/000849.ht…).
I trust this helps somewhat in understanding the landscape.
Cheers,
Achal