Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] A Wikimedia Foundation Fellow from India

See below for reply: In line ............ Thanks Nadig, Gautam, Srikeit, Tinu, Mahesh, all...I will shortly set up a public discussion around the scope of the project and am interested in hearing from you. No specific languages set HPN, I've had initial discussions with a number of people including Shiju, Sundar and Mohau (a Wikipedian from South Africa) and I'm hoping to figure out exactly how to proceed after a more thorough set of discussions with anyone interested in the subject. I think we can increase the number of languages slightly, but the point overall is to set feasible targets within a limited time-frame and assemble compelling evidence and action. In that sense, it matters less as to which language is used in the process than whether the results overall are useful to Wikipedians in India and South Africa at large. In general, the idea is to focus on instances of a citation gap: either an already created article whose basis has been established but for which there are no citations available, or a situation where citations cover a topic only partially, or an article that should be created but can't be because of a lack of supporting scholarly evidence. Until I set up a more formal space for discussion, maybe we can begin discussion here. Have you ever faced a situation as described? Good wishes, Achal .................. Dear Mr.Achal and all Compliments to Mr.Achal for much needed study fellowship. I am not sure whether your study will include following points , but this is just an attempt to begin a discussion 1) For most people, certain areas and certain phase of life they come across certain valuable written info but afterward one tend to remember info to some extant and try to include the info on a wiki but does not remember exact name of the books etc On Marathi Language wikipedia I get some flexibility to write since many of the fellow Marathi people are aware of same fact so they do not insist on citation immediately but that does not mean that citation is not needed. But in the same case if I try to include the same info on en wiki might get rejected because they may insist for the citation 2) Another problem is in India we did not have good enough of tradition to note down things which can be used for reference , about previous generation Indian people had big enough tradition to shy away from any sort of publicity , such cases may be eve about many prominent people so people are aware of the facts but written material is hard to find 3) Problems are coming from information coming from rural areas information may be genuine but hard to find reference to support the same. 4) Info coming from rural area problem becomes more acute with personalities and rural institutions and NGOs working in rural areas , for want of proper documentation and what to accept on encyclopedia and what not to accept becomes really challenging. I am keenly interested in knowing how other indic language wikipedias are handling such info being uploaded Regards Mahitgar On Monday 17 January 2011 10:40 AM, Hari Prasad Nadig wrote: ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:45:15 -0800 (PST) From: BalaSundaraRaman <sundarbecse(a)yahoo.com> Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] A Wikimedia Foundation Fellow from India To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia." <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Achal Prabhala <aprabhala(a)gmail.com> Message-ID: <975070.14839.qm(a)web59910.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Congrats, Achal. Your area of research is very interesting and has a huge potential fallout. - 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