On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Subhashish Panigrahi <subhashish@cis-india.org> wrote:
Quite an impressive report I must say, Ravi. Kudos to all of you in the community for everything, but especially for the policy level push.
Best,
Subha
On 12/8/2015 8:05 PM, Ravishankar wrote:
We have partnered with Tamil Virtual Academy (TVA), an autonomous institution established by the Government of Tamil Nadu. Wikimedia Chapter, India is acting on behalf of the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community to facilitate this partnership.Hi,We have some exciting updates from the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community.
* In August 2015, The Government of Tamil Nadu made an announcement in the State Legislative Assembly that it will be partnering with Wikipedia and will work to release various resources under Creative Commons licenses. Please check page 91 in the policy document available on the web here (also attached in this mail).
* Tamil Wikipedia registered 251% increase in editors who made at least an edit in November 2015. It jumped from 331 to 1165 in a month. During this peak, Tamil Wikipedia became the most active Wikipedia in the world having less than 1,00,00 articles. This was made possible because of Wikipedia training camps in various districts for school teachers organized by State council for Education Research and Technology. This training was organized with zero cost for Wikimedia resources in 32 districts of the state and 1500+ school teachers were trained to contribute to Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons. 9 Tamil Wikipedians under the coordination of User:Parvathisri travelled across the state to conduct these training programs.
Though we know from movement learning that new user retention will be an issue, we have won partners like these who will continue to repeat this training every year as part of the ICT curriculum for teachers.
Though Wikipedia in Education program runs in over 70 countries, we believe this is the first time a systematic training program has been organized for the teachers. We have now formed a WhatsApp group to guide the most active teachers turned Wikipedians.
* Tamil Wikimedia also added 10,400+ articles of around 10 kb each adding 104 megabytes of data to article namespace. User:Neechalkaran worked on this extensively. This was made possible as the government made its statistical records accessible on our request and we engaged a bot with community consensus to create these articles. We see this as a model in convincing other governments to release data in a similar fashion so useful information like these can be added to all language Wikipedias. This bot and data can be used to create articles in other languages as well (especially English) and we look forward to working together.
See also:
* State wide Tamil Computing Clubs in universities and colleges
The TN government is kick-starting Tamil Computing Clubs across all colleges and universities in the state. Starting this September 2015, inauguration programs for these have been conducted in Madras University, Anna University, Madurai Kamaraj University, Salem Periyar University, Karaikudi Alagappa University. 1000s of students and teachers from at least 400 constituent colleges have participated in these programs. Growing Wikimedia projects will be one of the focus areas for these clubs. A dedicated session was allotted to Wikipedia outreach in these events and we worked along with the Free Software Foundation, Tami Nadu to drive home the message of Free Culture movements.
* Wikimedian in Residence
User:Info-farmer will be working as a Wikimedia in Residence at TVA until March 2016. Through this we expect to add more content to Tamil Wikisource, bring policy changes and more GLAM partnerships.
* Tamil Wikipedia stall in Madurai Book fair
Tamil Wikimedians operated a stall in Madurai book fair for 10 days. The stall was arranged free of cost and 8 different Wikipedians helped to run it. This helped us gain widespread press coverage and awareness. User:Srithern, User:எஸ்ஸார், User:எஸ். பி. கிருஷ்ணமூர்த்தி and User:Dineshkumar Ponnusamy played a major role in this.
* Workshops
We ran two workshops in August 2015. One focused in creating training resources for outreach while the other focused in encouraging writers and media professionals to contribute to Wikipedia. User:Rsmn and User:Selvasivagurunathan m helped coordinate these efforts.
A MoU regarding this has been written and approved by the community on wiki. From the genesis of this partnership, all discussions (see also the archive) and activities have been done on wiki. We recommend this as a best practice whenever a MoU is signed as this reiterates that the local Wikimedia community is the primary stakeholder of Wikimedia projects and ensures full trust and cooperation from them.
User:Thamizhpparithi Maari, User:Mayooranathan, User:Natkeeran, User:Sundar, User:சஞ்சீவி சிவகுமார், User:Rsmn, User:Shanmugamp7, User:Neechalkaran, User:Commons sibi, User:zsenthil, User:Kanags, User:AntanO and numerous other contributors helped to forge this partnership and conduct the activities.
Press coverage:We thank Tamil Virtual Academy, Wikimedia India and the Wikimedia Foundation who offered extensive support and guidance throughout these activities.
* On Tamil Wikipedia stall in Madurai book fair.
** The Hindu - Into the world of books
** Dinamalar - புத்தக கண்காட்சியில் 'தமிழ் விக்கிபீடியா'
** Dinamani - தினமணியில் செய்தி
** The Hindu - Tamil Wikipedia invites articles
* On Tamil Computing Clubs
** Times of India - 1 lakh Tamil articles to come up on Wikipedia
General:
* Wikipedia on massive drive to increase Tamil content
* The Hindu - தமிழுக்குள் விக்கிப்பீடியாவை நுழையுங்கள்!
* Nakkeeran - வல்லுநர்கள் பங்களிப்பு அதிகரிக்க வேண்டும் - விக்கிப்பீடியர்கள் வேண்டுகோள்
We are excited to share these updates with the larger community. Stay tuned for more updates and details from us.
Ravi
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-- Best! Subhashish Panigrahi Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge Centre for Internet and Society @subhapa / https://cis-india.org
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