There
have been a number of meetings and conversations with the Director of
the Crafts Museum and the museum staff over the past few weeks to plan
out the project. In these meetings, we have explained what is
Wikipedia, how it is used, how it can be useful to the Museum, how can
staff members benefit if they edit and how can Indian handicrafts &
handlooms benefit by more and better content on Wikipedia.
A few
things became clear very early on. The language of the project needs
to be primarily in Hindi because the staff members are most comfortable
in Hindi. Another point is that since they are all starting from the
very basics, we should set realistic targets like taking things 5
articles at a time to begin with.
Two outreach workshops for the
museum staff have now been conducted in Hindi. These covered
approximately 8-9 staff members - out of which 6 have created usernames
and
started editing. It gives an immense sense of satisfaction and
inspiration to see that so many of them are excited by this project and
they edit voluntarily even after the workshop is over! (In fact, the
clear message sent by the Director was that it was not a compulsory task
- so all the folks editing are doing so out of choice!) Check out the
article on Crafts Museum (शिल्प संग्रहालय,_दिल्ली) in Hindi Wikipedia! [2]
The
Hindi aspect is an important point to note because English would have
been the preferred language because it gives greatest audience and is
the most convenient for other language community (Indic and beyond) to
use as a foundation if they want to create / improve the respective
articles on their respective Wikipedias. In this case, I visualize
articles primarily starting off in Hindi, and then moving to English -
and then onwards to other languages. In fact,
the project page has now been created here on Hindi Wikipedia! [3]
The MoU has been signed with Wikimedia India Chapter - for which I'd like to thank Arun and the EC. The
MoU was also important because it formalizes the taking of pictures of
objects and their uploading to Commons. User:Yann has already done a
wonderful job as you can see on the Crafts Museum project page
here at the GLAM project page for Craft Museum. [1] User:Arag0n also came in last week and took some wonderful images that we hope to see soon.
I
am currently working with the Director to see how Craft Museum can
improve the infrastructure for its' staff and to figure out how best to
free up time for the museum staff to support this initiative.
There
is an innovation that I have tried which I wanted to share because many
community members might find it useful - and it's got nothing to do
with GLAM! There have been a number of meetups and outreach sessions in
Delhi - after a long time. One challenge I was facing was how to keep
engaged with participants of meetups and outreach sessions - and to
constantly encourage them to edit. What I did was shift the meetup up
venue to Crafts Museum itself! Its fun to see new editors and museum
staff get surprised that many people are editing one article at the same
time. That's when they really experience the magic of Wikipedia. This
is working well and I will continue to work on it. The next step is to
invite existing Hindi community members to Crafts Museum - which should
happen in the next couple of weeks.
The next event that we are planning - which is also why I'm writing is to invite you to an
edit-a-thon on April 21st at 14:00 hrs (IST) (08:30 hrs GMT).
This week, instead of the Delhi meetup, we plan to have an editing
session at the Museum itself. You can sign up here. [4] You can be
anywhere in India or the world(!) to join in - and you can choose to
edit in any language - including Hindi, English, any other languages
(Indic or otherwise!) We'll also be active on the
#wikimedia-in IRC channel, tweet about it from @crafts_glam and have started a
Facebook group.
The museum staff and Delhi community members will be editing at the
Museum - but the museum staff will also be available to help out giving
insights and references for articles.
Really hoping to see all of you participate and make this a big success across languages! :)