Dear Friends,
I would like to start the mail with a word of love. I hope everyone of us are doing well during this difficult times. I believe that we will get through this situation and collectively world will outlive this pandemic. What we are contributing to this world become enormously important during this difficult times than any time ever before. Several volunteers around the world contributing to create, improve, and update content about the Covid-19 and pandemic which in many ways is service to the world.
During 3rd week of March, I created and worked on a WikiProject to co-ordinate efforts (prioritize, list-out articles and resources, organize workflow, etc.,) to create, improve and update content about Covid-19 in Telugu Wikipedia. After that, on March 22, I started doing the same for Indian languages by creating page for WikiProject Covid-19 in Indic languages in meta. Unfortunately, due to a personal loss, I couldn't do much about it for few weeks. Later I started coordinating people and improving the Project page which finally took a shape:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiproject:Covid-19_in_Indic_languages.
What is Wikiproject Covid-19 in Indic languages? Why is this required?
Wikiproject Covid-19 in Indian languages is a meta-wiki project dedicated to co-ordinate efforts to coverage about topics related in Indian language Wikipedias. Although there are several efforts going on in various Indian languages, there needs a central co-ordination project to ensure more collaboration and better outcomes.
Some of the things that we can do together:
- Co-ordinating efforts to create, share, and localise materials and media needed to improve the articles.
- Collaborating with other projects like Wikidata taskforce (ex: finding ways to integrate Wikidata and Wikipedia, so that no one needs to update figures in every Wikipedia separately), Wikigraphists from India (ex: can take help to localize several graphs, pictures, etc.,), and other projects.
- Bringing several ideas and best practices across the world together and making use of it.
- Ex: From my personal experience, Very long articles in English Wikipedia makes translators life difficult. There is a good effort popped up in English Wikipedia by Netha Hussain to create short form of important articles which helps translation of those articles into our languages. We can co-ordinate with them, get help from Indian English Wikipedians to create several short form articles and medium-long from articles to make translation easy.
- Encouraging various language communities to run quality assessment of the articles and also equip them useful criteria to do so. As these articles have high visibility and usability, we can ensure quality by doing so.
- Conduct webinars and IRCs to learn from each other (like a session from Wikidata experts to help others learn integration of Wikidata and Wikipedia in this regard), celebrate some achievements, and to share our camaraderie during these tough times.
These are some of the efforts we can take up if we collaborate and coordinate, there can be many such things I couldn't imagine right now. I would like to request everyone who is interested to join here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiproject:Covid-19_in_Indic_languages. You can either start a discussion thread about this in your language Wikipedia village pumps and let everyone know in the talk page of project or anyway, I can go ahead & inform this in English in all the Wikipedia Village pumps.
With love,