Dear friends,

WikiConference India 2016 is just around the corner and all of you who are participating will already be getting ready to come to Landran.

Four community members (Vishwanath Badikana from Kannada and Tulu Wikipedia, Gopala Krishna from Kannada Wikipedia, Pankajmala Sarangi from Odia Wikisource and Muralimohan Kodihalli from Telugu Wikipedia) had reached out to us requesting to support them for their travel and stay for WCI '16. These applicants are from our focus language areas. We discussed about this internally and decided to support them based on their contribution to their respective language Wikimedia projects and the communities. This is not the wiki way of doing things and we apologise for taking this decision. But these requests came late and we did not have a clear plan well in advance to support community members to travel and participate in WCI. Two of the community members, Pankajmala and Muralimohan, have managed to have discussion in their respective language Wikipedias and have got support from their fellow community members, we appreciate. We wish we can support more Wikimedians from all the other language communities. But because of the time and budget constraint, we are being able to support only these four Wikimedians. If any of you have any issue with this please do let us know. We apologise for not being able announce the possibility of we supporting the community well in advance.

Best! Subhashish Panigrahi Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge Centre for Internet and Society @subhapa / https://cis-india.org