Hi All,
New editors across Indic Wikipedias often face problems while editing for which need they help. However, most don't know where they can ask questions or get clarifications as they are usually unfamiliar with village pumps or mailing lists or even talk pages on basic editing. Many existing editors want to help new editors and could appreciate a central place where they can meet and help new editors. India Program has started a pilot to support the Odia community's help desk, Chatasabhahttp://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AC%89%E0%AC%87%E0%AC%95%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%AA%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%A1%E0%AC%BC%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%86:%E0%AC%9A%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%9F%E0%AC%B8%E0%AC%AD%E0%AC%BE. (Incidentally, "Chata" means student and "Sabha" means community, in Odia.) This pilot will build on the community's existing efforts - and seeks to provide a structured way of designing and running a Help Desk. It takes learning from English Wikipedia's Tea Househttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Teahouseas well as other experiences on Help Desk and similar services.
The Help Desk that is being piloted is user friendly, has guidelines to provide simple answers to new editors and tries to manage the work load of existing community members by providing ready answers to frequently asked questions. The user friendliness of the Help Desk is in the form of being able to ask questions without getting stuck on Wiki markups as well as illustrated answers to some questions.
I have put a page on meta which has the pilot designhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Community_building_using_help_desks. Eventually, we would like to help other Indic languages build similar Help Desks. Please do provide your feedback on the talk pagehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Community_building_using_help_desks .
Best
Subha,
I am keeping my fingers crossed for the next pilot from India programs :)
These are normal things which the community can do by itself even if it is very small. We did this in Tamil Wikipedia 7 years before.
1. Create help pages in "Help" namespaces. This is time consuming and ongoing. Creating video tutorials will be best.
2. Create a Wikipedia:Help desk page and link it from site notice. If the community is OK, they can also share few chat / mail / phone IDs there.
That should be all and both can only be done by the community.
The elaborate planning at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Pilot_Designs/Community_buildin...
is unnecessary and will only increase the work load of an already small community.
I hope the money we donate goes in to doing bigger things and not for every single thing done in the name of "Pilot".
Ravi
I agree with Ravi. The India Programs team should focus on what the community cannot do.
On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 7:18 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan parakara.ghoda@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with Ravi. The India Programs team should focus on what the community cannot do.
Me too. The IEP must scale beyond and interact at levels beyond the reach of the community. Just a few success stories at that level, where the community cannot reach, are more than enough to justify IEP and its large budget but a lot of success in things that the community should/can/could do is a serious waste of money and reduces community space for involvement.
Sincerely,
Ashwin
Me too. The IEP must scale beyond and interact at levels beyond the
reach of the community. Just a few success stories at that level, where the community cannot reach, are more than enough to justify IEP and its large budget but a lot of success in things that the community should/can/could do is a serious waste of money and reduces community space for involvement.
I echo in what Ashwin said above. These things are managed by communities anyways, what's the special need of making individual communities handicapped by unnecessary involvement of IP, and on the same hand its waste of budget and expertise (if any) of India programme professionals.
wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org