Dear friends,
The month of January passed quietly for WikiProject India on English
Wikipedia. However elsewhere, the SOPA/PIPA discussion in the United States
was the hot topic of the month and English Wikipedia went dark on 18
January for 24 hours in protest against these proposed laws.
At this point of time, getting the few small initiatives to keep going have
been our concern.
We have had [[Premchand]] as [[WP:INCOTM]] and [[Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi]] as GA of the month. Premchand has had substantial improvement. The
GA Master Class ( a hoity-toity name I picked up as an excuse for
periodically giving a few hints on the Wikimedia-in-en list) for Gandhi has
begun and some posts made. GA of the month is a misnomer because despite
lots of edits, there is tremendous amount of work yet to be done on Gandhi.
It seems that we will be doing a GA/FA a quarter instead. :( The new
INCOTM of the month is [[Dance in India]].
The Offline Wikipedia for Schools project has been dawdling along and we
need people to recommit themselves to this Project. Recently, I realised
that the most important parts of Wikipedia which need doing are not "pop
corn and fast food". They require commitment and seem too much like work.
They are not as much fun as editing on our favourite topics. That fact
perhaps is the reason people begin working on this project and finding it
is not much fun, gradually stop editing. However, lakhs of Indian children
await our output so I'm requesting participants to return and recommit.
On the talk page, we have had a discussion since December and through
January into February about whether caste should be mentioned in
biographies. The protagonists quoting [[WP:BLP]] and [[WP:V]] took the
stand that caste should not be mentioned unless it has been self-identified
by the person concerned in a reliable source. Some Indian editors contested
it vehemently arguing that caste pervades Indian society and binding
strictures on its mention should not be placed. But when it boiled down to
a poll, the majority of editors stood up for the conservative position i.e.
no inclusion unless self-identified in a reliable source.
An earlier discussion about which should be the languages that a title of
an article should be translated into in the lead. After lots of discussion,
the discussion was closed as no consensus emerged except that IPA should
definitely be present for pronunciation. In this regard, I think common
sense and not misplaced parochialism should help us decide which all
languages the title should be transcribed into in the lead.
In this month, we saw Swaroop Rao, aka MikeLynch or Lynch7 as he
masquerades nowadays become an admin. That is great.
However, I am seeing more activity overall on English Wikipedia from the
habitual editors - which is a very good sign. Young former CAs are playing
up too but the spectre of exams had made its presence known by end January.
All in all, a fairly okay month for WikiProject India.
AshLin