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
Hello,
Today at 22:30 IST we are organizing a hangout session to discuss the
hackathon event to be conducted during the upcoming WikIConference India
2016. You are your community members are cordially invited to join this
hangout.
Date: 6 July 2016
Time: 22:30 Indian Standard time
Channel:
https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/calendar/cmF2aXNoYW5rYXIuYXl5YWtrYW5…
Agenda: Understanding and discussing community needs, planning the
hack-a-thon
Dear All,
As you all remain aware the world's biggest sporting event 'The Olympics'
is set to knock the door, this August. At present, 111 athletes from India
have qualified, the largest ever contingent. More than 311 National
Coaching Camps have been held across India as a part of their
pre-tournament preparation. To celebrate this sporting festival we at
Wikimedia India have decided to promote a virtual-edit-a-ton.
During the primary research, It was observed that a lot many areas on
Indian Sports and 'India at Olympics' for which no article exist. Even if
they do, there presence on Indian languages remain negligible. Considering
this event would be in progression soon, we have decided to promote this
activity. A draft note could be found here
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMIN/Events/India_At_Rio_Olympics_2016_Edit…>
although this is still in the development stage.
While working on Olympics we have made attempts to promote virtual
edit-a-ton on a different theme altogether, we also decided to make the
awards different. For every 15 good articles created by an editor,
Wikimedia India would be planting trees on their behalf in their name
symbolising '*Wikipedia* *India Supports India at Olympics, tree planted by
Wikipedian......*'. Considering tree plantation involves significant time
and human labour, we have partnered with a tree plantation organisation
SankalpTaru <https://www.sankalptaru.org/>. They would be our sponsors for
this event. Pomegranate trees in Barmer, Thar Desert Rajasthan would be
planted. These trees will be planted on a rural farmer's land who would
further nurture these trees under the supervision of SankalpTaru. Once the
harvest starts, the local inhabitants would start earning livelihood by
selling fruits (based on the consent of Wikipedia who is awarded the
respective tree). A virtual forest could also be monitored online here.
<http://www.sankalptaru.org/c/642> This is a novel idea of English
Wikipedian Mr. Rudra Pratap Sinha (User:JimCarter)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jim_Carter>. Wikimedia India is
further bringing this this idea into practice, more information here </>.
Besides this, we are happy to inform, Niyogi
<http://www.niyogibooksindia.com/> Books has decided to sponsor the
biography of Mr. Prakash Padukone, 'Prakash Padukone Story' <http:///>and
Sir Sunil Gavaskar, 'Cricket's Little Master'
<http://www.niyogibooksindia.com/showcase/259/>. Every participants who
completes 15 good articles would also be awarded a book.
We plan to roll out this event between 29th July, 2016 and 25th August,
2016. In the meantime we request you all to please provide suggestions on
how to make this event effective.
*Disclaimer : This event is totally a zero-budget exercise.*
Thanks
--
Srivastava
Executive Committee Member|Wikimedia India
Ph - +91-9711739003|Skype: abhinavsrivastava619
Wiki Username - abhinav619
Hello
Greetings from WikiConference India team.
An edit-a-thon is being conducted with an aim to create or improve articles
related to Punjab. This edit-a-thon is a part of WikiConference India 2016.
You and your community are cordially invited to join this edit-a-thon as
participants or co-ordinators.
This will be our gift for the Chandigarh team which is hosting us for the
conference. The community that adds most number of words or bytes to the
articles will be awarded a trophy during the conference!
Participate or learn more here.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2016/Punjab_Edit-a-thon
Regards.
WikiConference India team
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2016)
PS. Feel free to share or forward this message