Pavanaja,

Thanks for the explaining the outcome of Tulu Workshops and Christ University partnership.

While you take a microscopic view of the recent activity and ask me to be optimistic, I would like to be realistic after taking a macroscopic view on past activities.

Please see

http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/launch-of-assamese-wikipedia-education-program

where active editors going from 20 to 20 over a period of 6 months is called 45% growth.

The real state of Assamese Wikipedia now after two years can be seen at

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaAS.htm

Here is what Asaf from WMF has to say on this:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form#Q2a

"For a tiny Wikipedia like Assamese, it's possible the temporary editing boost leading to a doubling of its size by article count and tripling of its size by contents was itself the seed of future growth, as the bootstrapping of a Wikipedia is also slow and not self-sustaining work, until that moment when a virtuous cycle kicks in and the usefulness of the resource begins attracting new editors "organically". We have perhaps not reached that moment with Assamese, and as you point out, the program is implicitly judged to be less valuable than other opportunities and has thus been discontinued."

If this is the case of Assamese Wikipedia which is already out of incubator and that once had a very small but dedicated community, then what is CIS doing working with projects in incubator?

Even after CIS working for a year on Konkani Wikipedia, it is not out of incubator.

But, it seems you have started the Tulu plan even before the FDC grant is approved.

Your FDC proposal staff assessment also notes as follows:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Staff_proposal_assessment

"CIS’s strategy for its stand-alone projects may not be the most effective for the language communities each project is targeting, given that projects other than Wikipedia (for example, Wikisource or Wiktionary) may be more effective entry-points for working with language communities like Tulu or Santali."


"The sine qua non of most programs is a core of self-motivating active editors... Where that core doesn't exist, it's very hard to deploy any other type of program..."

Tulu has a population around 2 million speakers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulu_language

You can find a realistic estimate of Editors per million speakers here:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

For the Indian landscape, Malayalam has around 3 editors (those who make 5+ edits every month) per million and it is the highest (you need to ignore the highly extrapolated value for Sanskrit owing to its tiny population and institutional support). It goes down until 0.2 editors per million for Hindi. To put it in plain words, for every 50 lakh people speaking Hindi, we can hope to get 1 editor making 5+ edits. This trend has been consistent over the years and I don't expect drastic change occurring in the near future unless there is a huge change in socio-economic scenarios.

If you look for languages similar to Tulu, Nepal Bhasa comes close.