Cross-posting to other lists. Ignore this if you have already seen it on
another mailing list.
Hi all,
Wikimania is the annual international conference of Wikimedians
, jointly hosted by the local team ( usually local chapter) and the
Wikimedia Foundation.
The previous conferences were held in Frankfurt, Germany (2005), Boston,
USA (2006), Taipei, Taiwan (2007), Alexandria, Egypt (2008), Buenos
Aires, Argentina (2009), Gdan'sk, Poland (2010), and Haifa, Israel (2011).
This year, it is to be held in Washington DC, United States of America,
on July 12-14 , 2012. http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
<http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>
I have attended the Wikimanias in Gdansk and Haifa, along with several
other Wikipedians from India.
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Wikimania2011
<http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Wikimania2011>
I highly recommend everyone to apply and attend Wikimania !
Like every year, The Wikimedia Foundation is offering a limited number
of scholarships to offset the cost of select individuals' attendance at
Wikimania.
Both full and partial scholarships are available for Wikimania 2012:
Full scholarships will award round trip travel, dorms
accommodations and registration.
Partial scholarships will subsidize up to 300EUR of travel expenses.
Scholarship recipients have to bear themselves the additional costs of
taxis, visa & travel agent charges etc.
More Information : http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships
<http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships>
Apply here : https://secure.wikidc.org/wm/schols/
<https://secure.wikidc.org/wm/schols/>
Deadline : *16 Feb 2012*
Around 30 % of the scholarship are allocated to Asia & Pacific, so there
are more chances of scholarship applications from India to be selected. :)
Please note that the selection is mostly based on the merit of the
applications.
One of the common mistakes that Wikimedians in India make is that we
aren't enough vocal of what we do. So please do write in detail about
your Wikimedia activities.
Please feel free to forward this to various language and city mailing
lists and encourage other Wikimedians to apply.
All the best wishes!
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Cross-posting to other lists. Kindly excuse if you have already received
this via another mailing list.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Head of Communications,
Wikimedia India Chapter
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Naveen Francis <naveenpf(a)wikimedia.in>
Date: Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:39 AM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimedia India Chapter : December 2011 Report
To: Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear all,
Greetings from Wikimedia India !!!
We are delighted to present the last monthly Wikimedia India report of the
year 2011, almost a year after the chapter received the formal recognition
from the Government of Karnataka on 3 January 2011. The journey so far
wasn't easy, but we appreciate your continued patronage , support and
participation.
*Organisational Updates*
*Formation of Task Forces:*
As announced earlier, with the objective of increasing the engagement and
participation of the members of the chapter actively in various
initiatives, the India chapter has come up with focused Task Forces for
coordinating and driving various chapter activities [1]. There are two
types of Task Forces - Project Task Forces and Operations Task Forces. The
Project Task Forces are focused on growing the Wikimedia projects. The
Operations Task Forces are critical functions to enable the Project Task
Forces and the Chapter in growing the movement. The operations group
consists of Administration, Fund raising, & Communications. The Projects
task force consists of City and Langugage SIGs and Special Projects. The
new task forces will be led by the following people:
- Anirudh Bhati, Head, Fundraising.
- Arun Ramarathnam, Chair, Special Projects.
- Srinivas Gunta, Head, Administration.
- Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Chair, City and Language Special Interest Groups.
- Tinu Cherian, Head, Communications, PR & Media Relations.
*Membership:*
The Chapter membership stands at 190 members as of 31 December 2011.
*Donations:*
Total donations received in Dec 2011 - INR 700
Average donations in Dec 2011 - INR 350
*FCRA:*
Our application for FCRA prior permission under the Foreign Contribution
(Regulation) Act with the Government of India is still pending. An official
from the Home Ministry has visited Arjuna Rao Chavala, President.
*Internet Relay Chat(IRCs):*
>From time to time, Wikimedia India conduct planned online IRC chat
sessions. The Dec 17, 2011 was anchored by Arun with the focus on Chapter
City & Language Special Interest Groups. [2]
*Board Meetings:*
The Chapter Executive Committee had two Tele-conference meetings in the
month of December (dated 07 Dec and 14 Dec, 2011). The Wikimedia India
chapter and Wikimedia Foundation had one joint co-ordination call on 21 Dec
2011, which was attended by Arjuna Rao Chavala, Arun Ramaratnam, Naveen
Francis, Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Tinu Cherian, Anirudh Bhati, Asaf Bartov and
Hisham Mundol. The summary of the joint coordination call was shared
earlier [3].
Community City and Language Special Interest Groups
City and Language Special Interest Groups are a mechanism to engage the
diverse interests of members across India. The objective is to grow the
wiki projects in their areas of interest by reviewing the status, planning
and executing events of interest through growing the community involvement.
The leadership of these groups is part of the extended leadership of the
Chapter.
The Wikimedia Chapter is proud to announce the appointment of the next
batch of City and Language Special Interest Group Chairs [4] as given
below:
*City*
- Delhi SIG - Noopur Raval (noopur [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
- Bangalore SIG - RadhaKrishna (Arkrishna [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
- Mumbai SIG - Kundan Amitabh (kundan.amitabh [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
- Pune SIG - Mandar Kulkarni(mandar.kulkarni [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
- Kolkata SIG - Kalyan Sarkar (kalyan [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
*Languages*
- English SIG - Ashwin Baindur (ashlin [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
- Kannada SIG - Omshivaprakash H L (omshivaprakash [at] wikimedia [dot]
in)
- Marathi SIG - Mahitgar (mahitgar [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
- Telugu SIG - Rahimanuddin Shaik (rahimanuddin [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
The current sign-ups of Members for the SIGs are as follows:
*City Special Interest Groups*
City Members Bangalore 10 Delhi 2 Mumbai 3 Pune 6 Kolkata 2
*Language Special Interest Groups*
Language Volunteers Bengali 1 English 15 Hindi 1 Kannada 3 Marathi
4 Malayalam 8 Nepali 1 Odia 3 Sanskrit 2 Telugu 3 Events
A round-up of Wikimedia events and initatives around the nation is as
follows.
- *Wiki Academy @Jaya Engineering college * ( 10 Dec 2011) : The first
Wiki Academy in Jaya Engineering college, Chennai,[5] was organized by the
Wikimedia chapter and co-hosted by Jaya FOSS Club. Odia Wiki Chair &
Chapter member, Subhashish Panigrahi explained basics of Wikipedia, how it
is edited by millions of volunteers, how Wikipedia is exclusively
encyclopedic and kind of articles and notability of articles in Wikipedia,
how Wikipedians communicate and form community, and organization of
Wikimedia foundations and active projects. Then he took the audience
through active editing by signing up, searching for articles, choosing
articles to create. Then he demonstrated about creating an article by using
the Edit toolbar, citing the text by searching the web and uploading and
adding pictures in articles. The editing session was followed by a Q & A
session. Hisham Mundol, Consultant, Wikimedia Foundation India Programs,
connected with the audience via Google Hangout. Hisham interacted with the
audience by giving a talk about the nature of the event, few details about
Wikipedia, WMF and Chapter and foundation are trying to do in India. He
answered questions raised by the audience. Nitika Tandon , Consultant,
Wikimedia Foundation India Programs, later explained about the India
Education program (IEP), how it functions and the
student-teacher-foundation collaborations through the education program.
The photos of the event are available here [6].
- *Coimbatore 1st Meetup*( 10 Dec 2011) : The first Kovai (Coimbatore)
meetup [7] was held at KGISL Campus, Saravanampatti, Coimbatore. The Meetup
was organised by Srikanth Ramakrishnan (User:Rsrikanth05) and
User:Sodabottle.
- *Bangalore Wikimeetup 40* ( 11 Dec 2011) : Around 11 people attended
the 40th Wikimeetup in Bangalore [8]. The Bangalore SIG Chair, RadhaKrishna
presented a talk on the experiences on WikiConference India 2011 and
WikiAcademy events in IT companies. Experiences of Wiki Academy in Jaya
engineering college and way forward was shared by by Subhashish Panigrahi.
Plans regarding Wiki Eleven in January 2012 was discussed. The photos of
the event are available here [9].
- *Wikipedia Meetup1 Salem*( 11 Dec 2011) : A Wikimeetup was organised
at Salem, Tamil Nadu, [10] by Tamil Wikipedians Sodabottle and Surya
Prakash.
- '*Wikipedia Takes Kolkata /Kolkata Photo Walk* (18 Dec 2011) : A Photo
Walk was organised in Kolkata, West Bengal [11] by Kalyan Sarkar (Kolkata
SIG Chair), Jayanta Nath (Bengali SIG Chair) and Biswarup Ganguly. Around
437 images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons as a part of this
initiative.[12]
- *GLAMcamp Amsterdam * Noopur Raval ( Delhi SIG Chair and GLAM
enthusiastic) attended GLAM worskop in Amsterdam, hosted by Wikimedia
Nederland. [13]
- *Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo , 2011*: Indian Wikipedians
participated in the annual CMDA IT Expo 2011, Pune.[14] The stall were
manned by Sudhanwa Jogalekar ( EC member), Mahitgar ( Marathi SIG Chair),
Ashwin Baindur ( English SIG Chair) , Hisham Mundol and Nitika Tandon ( WMF
India Programs), and Campus Ambassador (IEP) volunteers.
- *Malayalam Wiki-Academies:* Malayalam Wiki-community organised two
Wiki-Academies in Kerala in the month of December at Alappuzha ( Dec 13)
and Kollam (Dec 31). The Alappuzha (2nd Wikiacademy) held at St.Joseph
Vanitha College was led by Adv. T.K Sujith, Adv. M.P.Manojkumar and Akhil
Krishnan. The Kollam (4th Wikiacademy) held at Govt. Higher Secondary
School, Anchal West, was led by Kiran Gopi ( User:Kiran_Gopi) , Faud A.J. (
User:Faudaj) , Kannan Shanmugam ( User:Fotokannan)and Sugeesh (
User:Sugeesh)
Other News
- A new initiative named *"Featured Wikimedian* was started on the
public wiki of Wikimedia India. Every month, one Indian wikimedian will be
featured. [15]
- * Tamil Wikimedia contest*: The Tamil Wikimedia community has
organised an international contest to get more photos, videos and audios
related to Tamil, Tamilians and Tamil culture to the Tamil Wikipedia and
Wikimedia Commons. [16] (themed “Eluthu mattum arivanru” or “Knowledge
beyond text”) . The Tamil Wikipedia Community and the Wikimedia Foundation
have jointly sponsored a prize money of $850 (with nine prizes) for
winners. (The first, second and third prizes are $200, $100 and $50. Three
prizes of $100 each are for those uploading the maximum number of quality
entries. A special prize of $150 is for media files on traditional Tamil
arts and crafts. Winners would be announced on March 15, 2012 and they
would get certificates with their entries displayed on the front pages of
Tamil Wiki projects. The contest (, November 15, 2011 to February 29, 2012)
is open to all and is on Facebook [17].
- India Wikipedians Sengai Podhuvan , Karthik Nadar and Aniruddha Kumar
joins Jimmy Wales among others in the *Wikimedia Fundraising 2011 banners
* [18].
- *New Mailing lists* are created for Gujarati Wikipedia[19], Assamese
Wikipedia [20], GLAM India [21] and India related content on English
Wikipedia & related projects. [22].
Milestones & Anniversaries
* December 2011* [23]
25
- The Tamil Wikipedia<http://internal.wikimedia.in/index.php?title=Ta:&action=edit&redlink=1>has
reached 1,000,000 page edits.
- The Urdu Wiktionary <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ur:> has reached
10,000 total pages.
21
- The Malayalam
Wikipedia<http://internal.wikimedia.in/index.php?title=Ml:&action=edit&redlink=1>has
turned 9.
18
- The Bengali Wiktionary <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bn:> has reached
2,000 entries, as a user adds over 1,300 entries for Malagasy words in 5
hours.
16
- The Bihari
Wikipedia<http://internal.wikimedia.in/index.php?title=Bh:&action=edit&redlink=1>has
reached 100,000 page edits.
9
- The Sanskrit Wiktionary <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sa:> has
reached 100 entries.
- The Urdu Wiktionary <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ur:> has reached
5,000 entries.
5
- The Marathi
Wikibooks<http://internal.wikimedia.in/index.php?title=B:mr:&action=edit&redlink=1>has
reached 1,000 registered users.
4
- The Kannada Wiktionary <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kn:> has reached
150,000 entries.
Media Coverage
- 28 Dec : Financial Chronicle : Wikipedians say Indian govt should ease
copyright curbs<http://www.mydigitalfc.com/knowledge/wikipedians-say-indian-govt-should-eas…>
- 27 Dec : Ahmedabad Mirror : " Ahmedabad to go Wiki with your clicks"
<http://www.ahmedabadmirror.com/article/2/2011122720111227022617405d732bc46/…>
- 24 Dec : The Economic Times : "Wikipedia enlists Indians to be the
standard-bearers for its fund-raising
efforts"<http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/wikipedia-enlists-indians…>
- 18 Dec : The Hindu : "Creative Commons: the licence to
evolve"<http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article272537…>
- 16 Dec : The Hindu : "Contest to add files to Tamil Wikipedia gathers
steam"<http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article2719118.ece?textsiz…>
- 1 Dec : Tech Marathi: मराठी विकिपीडिया संपादन – अवघड की
सोपे?<http://techmarathi.com/?p=1243>( Marathi)
We look forward to your continued support and active participation.
Best,
On behalf of Wikimedia Chapter (India)
Naveen Francis
Secretary
Notes:
- 1)
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Announcements/Call_for_participation_of_Members_in…
- 2) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Internet_Relay_Chats/Dec_17,2011
- 3)
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Announcements/Chapter-Foundation:_Co-Ordination_Ca…
- 4) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/City_and_Language_SIG_subcommittee_chair
- 5) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Wiki_Academy/Jaya_Engineering_College
- 6)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Jaya_Engineering_College_Wiki_Ac…
- 7) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore/Coimbatore1
- 8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore40
- 9)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bangalore_Meetup_December2011
- 10) http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SALEM1
- 11) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Kolkata
- 12) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Takes_Kolkata
- 13) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAMcamp_Amsterdam
- 14
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-December/006135.…
- 15) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Category:Featured_Wikimedian
- 16) http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest/en
- 17) http://www.facebook.com/tawmc
- 18)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011#A_Parade_of_Appeals.21_Dece…
- 19) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-gu
- 20) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-as
- 21) http://lists.wmnederland.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wlm-in
- 22) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-en
- 23) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Milestones_and_Anniversary
_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
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[cross-posting to reach pan-India; apologies if you have got it from some other mailing list.]
Hi Folks,
As you might be aware, the Consultant, Team Support position is to be filled as part of the India Programs team. (http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-September/004251….)
I am really pleased and excited to announce that Subhashish Panigrahi has agreed to join as Consultant, Community & Program Support.
Some of you might know Subhashish (or Subha as he's also called.) He is all of 23 and a wonderful Wikimedian from Odisha. He has a BE in Biotechnology from Sapthagiri College of Engineering, Bangalore. He has worked for about 1 1/2 years in business development and is currently based in Bangalore. He's been an active Wikimedian since a friend of his attended a Wikipedia 10th event in Bangalore in January and told Subha about Wikipedia. Subha then spent considerable time - quite a bit of it in Shiju Alex's living room apparently :-) - learning about Wikipedia. Since then, he's been on fire! He's helped the Bangalore community organise the monthly meet-ups, been a central figure in building community & momentum for Odia Wikipedia and has conducted outreach programs for Odia projects back home in Odisha as well as in Bangalore. He's also been helping out other projects and communities; a couple of weekends ago he was in Chennai conducting a WikiAcademy there. He is a fantastically inspiring example of a complete outsider being welcomed into the family, having his hand held in his growth as a newbie, charging forward taking responsibility & ownership and then spreading his skills & knowledge to others. He is also one of the sweetest human beings I have ever met. He is a perfect example of the Wikimedia Dream.
His interests (outside of Wikimedia) are cooking, graphic design and handwriting analysis. (I bet most of you who know Subha don't know that last bit about him. So the next time you see him, show him your writing and get him to reveal your deep dark secrets!) He has also been involved with campaigns for social work during the floods and cholera outbreak in Odisha and been involved with a Odisha community organisation, eOdissa.com.
Originally, the Consultant, Team Support position (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs#Team_S…) was to manage the back-end aspects of India Programs (basic accounting, basic personnel management, office administration, travel support, expense statement management, logistics support for the community, etc.) I have been looking at the actual work load involved and I do not think this is a full time role. The functions listed are essential and need to be done - but there is an opportunity to improve the richness of the position and it's value to the community. I'm therefore proposing that the Consultant, Team Support be redesignated to Consultant, Community & Program Support. I envisage this position to have about 1/3 of time spent on the back-end work listed above but 2/3 of time can be very productively utilised supporting community efforts - such as helping community building & outreach and supporting community-led initiatives. An important consideration I have for this redesignation is after looking at the specific skills that Subha brings to the table; I want to make sure that he has the required space to realise his potential and to support the community and movement.
Subha will of course continue to pursue his personal voluntary work for and as part of the Wikimedia community. The one question that he emphasized during the selection process was whether he would retain the flexibility to continue to pursue his personal passions on Wikimedia; the answer he got was a loud Y-E-S!!! :-) I'm delighted to have another community member joining the team.
He'll formally start in Delhi on January 9th 2012.
Do join me in welcoming him.
Warmest Regards,
hisham
Dear All,
Apologies beforehand for a rather long and winding mail - but there is so
much that I want to say. I want to share how my thoughts are being
crystalized. I want to try and cross-pollinate ideas from some Indic
language communities across to all communities. I want to reach out and
ask your views and suggestions. I want to understand how best we can help
each community in a manner that is most appropriate to that community.
I have now completed sharing initial, introductory, exploratory discussions
with a host of community members from across Indic language communities. I
have shared these for 12 languages
(Assamese<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Hindi<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Tamil<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Telugu<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Kannada<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Nepali<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Malayalam<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Marathi<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Odia<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Sanskrit<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
Bengali<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
and Gujarati<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>.)
I haven't (yet) got any response from 7 other communities (Bhojpuri,
Kashmiri, Punjabi, Urdu, Bhisnupriya Manipuri, Pali, and Sindhi).
At the very outset, I want to thank all of you who took time out and shared
your experiences and thinking. It has been really useful and I hope you
found it is as productive and constructive as I did. The purpose behind
this exercise was to hear, learn, and understand the evolution of the
various communities - and to therefore suggest ideas going forward. I urge
everyone to go through all the other languages (even if they are not
personally involved in those specific communities) because there are
learnings for everyone from everywhere.
I have been reflecting on the various insights and inputs and ideas I have
got from all these folks as well as subsequent discussions on mailing lists
and talk pages. Here are my initial thoughts.
CommunityIt sounds like a self-evident and very basic thing but the single
biggest priority for all communities (even relatively bigger ones like
Tamil and Malayalam) is community building. What has struck me from the
various language communities is that everyone agrees that this is very much
required but very few are aware of what needs to be done or how it needs to
be done. I wanted to share some thoughts about this.
When I consider community building, I think of 5 broad aspects:
1. Editor retention
2. Attracting newbies
3. Community communication
4. Community collaboration and
5. Community celebration
I would like to detail what I mean by each of these.
1. Editor retention: Like most language wiki communities we also have an
editor retention issue in all Indic language communities. This is
particularly an area of concern for us considering the fact that all our
Indic language communities are really tiny and community buiding efforts in
Indic wikis are very less. A dramatic case in point is Kannada where active
editor numbers (that is, editors who do at least 5 edits a month) have
declined from 25 members to just 9 members over the past 10 months. It is
essential that all of us reflect on why this is happening and what can be
done to avoid it in future and to resurrect lapsed editors. Existing
editors and old editors understand our projects and community and can play
a huge role in community building and project quality improvement. Many
times, they have become inactive because of changing personal priorities.
However, sometimes, they leave because they are no longer excited by the
projects. The lack of interest in a project or users not feeling proud
about a project might be due to multiple reasons. Some of the reasons that
old community members shared with me are poor quality of articles (driven
by BOTs and Google translation project), dominance of wiki by one or two
members, the huge amount of clean up and other administrative tasks
required, and so on. We must reach out and welcome these editors back and
we must encourage them to do what they love doing most - editing articles
and making them regain their pride and ownership over their articles and
projects. We must foster an environment that welcomes old editors back and
gives them the space to follow their passions.
2. Attracting newbies: Attracting newbies is the only way our communities
and projects can grow. I have to be honest and say that none of our
language communities have achieved critical mass. According to me unless a
project has 500 or more active editors, it can never be said to be in a
state where organic growth is secured and momentum is ensured. Attracting
newbies requires impactful outreach. By impactful, I mean outreach that is
done frequently and to as a large a group of potential newbies as possible.
However, it also means that we need to be much more systematic about how we
do outreach. This covers everything from identification of the most
appropriate target audience as well as doing outreach in a manner where we
don't scare off newbies by information overload. We must make sure that
our outreach sessions adequately convey the passion and love for our
projects that we feel while working on them. Also, we need to critically
look at how we reach out to attendees of outreach sessions (after the
sessions) as well as other newcomers and see that we are providing an
adequate helping hand to them. The Nepali community - though tiny - does
very well in terms of posting personal talk messages to welcome new folks,
having FAQs spaces and problem boxes, etc. - all with the objective of
supporting newbies. All Indic languages are at a state where every single
newbie should be identified and reached out to and given intensive help and
warmly welcomed to the community. We must also look at both newbies to
editing as well as existing English Wikipedia editors who have inclinations
and abilities on Indic languages. Remember that many Indic editors
initially started off in English Wikipedia and we must actively seek them
out. I know some communities - like Marathi - who look for editors who
have Marathi sounding names or edit Marathi/Maharashtra centric topics and
quietly invite them to contribute to Marathi Wikipedia. Another aspect,
and I am sure is this a bit of a controversial statement, but can we get
few existing Indic editors to reduce their emphasis on editing and divert
their time on outreach. (I know Tamil, Odia, and Malayalam communities are
already doing this. But this needs to be replicated in other languages
also). It is really tough and not everyone might have the interest to do
outreach but the best outreach can be done by existing community members.
However, as we know, volunteer time is limited. This is a challenge
because what we love doing most is editing - but the reality is that the
greatest need of the hour, and the area where we can contribute maximum, is
attracting and training and supporting newbies. We should also look at
digital outreach - by which I mean look at the existing internet activities
in Indic languages (blog, facebook, google plus, and so on) and see if we
can get newbies from there. For instance, many Indic languages have very
active blogging. Can we reach out to bloggers and ask them to contribute to
our projects, or at least evangelise about our projects and invite their
readers to read Indic projects and contribute to them? Can we similarly
look at social media like facebook and twitter to promote our Indic
projects?
3. Community Communication: Community communication is an area which varies
by community. There is a direct co-relation between the health and growth
of the community and the inclusiveness, intensity, and warmth of the
communication amongst that community. Community communication takes place
on mailing lists, village pumps, meetups, and so on. With the exception of
Malayalam and Bengali mailing lists, and to a lesser extent, Tamil, Odia,
Mumbai, and Pune mailing lists, most others are virtually non-functional.
Having said that, many village pumps are active across language
communities. It really doesn't make a difference whether the communication
is on mailing lists or village pumps. However, it is of paramount
importance that it happens somewhere. Anywhere! To that extent, I
encourage everyone to be more active wherever they are more comfortable -
but ideally in public spaces like village pumps or mailing lists. Reach
out and ask for help or suggestions. Offer advice or inputs. Simply be
friendly and accessible. Just talk! Community meetups are happening but
not as frequent as one would like and with very limited attendance. Often,
it is just 3 or 4 people who meet up everytime. Nothing wrong with that
per se. Meetups are voluntary and the majority of wikipedians are happy to
edit in the privacy of our homes and not meet up with others but even in
this situation, we can and should be encouraging more people to attend
meetups. People will attend meetups more regularly if they find them
productive and inspiring. Too often, the feedback from community members
has been that they don't find meetups useful or they find them dominated by
1 or 2 individuals. It is essential to have 1 or 2 individuals with the
drive and hard work to organise meetups - but it is equally important that
meetups are not centred exclusively around these 1-2 people but more about
what the larger group want. How about meetups where all we do is spend an
hour or two just editing a few articles? How about meetups where we plan a
newbie outreach program involving everyone in the meetup? How about a
meetup where that meetup is run by those folks who usually never speak up
and that the entire meeting is devoted to what they are interested in? It
is alarming when one looks at the situation in some Indic communities where
there is virtually no communication at all amongst community members. It
leads to a very cold and impersonal environment - which is not healthy to
foster growth. Like plants and flowers, communities too need breeze and
air and water and food and activity and earthworms and manure.
4. Community Collaboration: When I consider community collaboration, I
think of 2 things. The first is ownership and the second is editing. On
ownership, it is really critical that every one of us as individual
community members believe and are made to believe that we own our projects.
Every project is owned by all members of that community. Equally. We
should all become more proactive in enforcing this ownership - whether it
is in terms of coming up with initiatives or proactively participating in
community discussions - whether it is about technical matters or content
elements or community aspects. Every single individual counts and every
single individual's voice must be encouraged. On editing, something that
drives all of us is the thrill of collaborative editing. Wikipedians love
it more than anything else to work together on an article and make dramatic
improvements to it. Of course it happens even now, but this is something
that we need to encourage much more and participate more actively in. This
can be done in varied ways - but ideas like Collaboration of the Month or
Editathons or whatever other idea should be organised. One can start with
a handful of people working on a few articles - but one must try as hard as
one can to make larger scale mini-events around this basic idea. It will
help build personal relationships, project ownership, and drive community
bonds.
5. Community Celebration: Lastly on the community aspect, let us bring some
magic back to the community. Let us start celebrating successes - no
matter how small. Let us start taking goals - no matter how seemingly
unambitious. Let us spread cheer all around when we meet these objectives.
Let us start publicly celebrating over the profiles of new or active
editors (Tamil wiki community is already doing this)- whether because they
are 12 years old or 80 years old or whether their article counts are 100 or
10,000! Let us celebrate when our wiki cross a major milestones, Let us
celebrate when one our community member does some marvellous things for
wiki. Let us celebrate when community able to engage in a relationship with
state government... There are many reasons to celebrate. Let us celebrate
all those and build the sense of pride about their projects among our
community members. The most powerful fuel in our engines is passion - and
we need to get more of it in our veins.
ProjectsThere is a constant debate of what should come first - article
count or article quality? I don't think there is an answer to this that is
equally applicable across all projects and communities. I had strong
convictions on this based on my past experience with Malayalam wiki
projects - which have been reinforced after my initial discussions with
Indic Wikimedians from across the country. In this regard, I wish to share
a provocative statement about bots. Bots can and should be used to do
repetitive tasks (like adding categories) because that reduces wasting
volunteer time - which is limited and precious. However, the use of bots
for article creation is something that I would strongly discourage. The
current state of Newari wikipedia (which has nearly 70,000 articles but
zero active editors) reinforces my argument.
The argument for using bots for article creation is that it provides
placeholders for editors to start working on these articles. While there
is some merit in this argument, the problem is that this kind of artificial
intervention means that the volume of work required to improve quality far
outpaces the community strength. It is like a sportsman using steroids.
It is not natural or healthy. It results in large numbers of very poor
quality articles - which are of such a basic nature that it might be better
not to have them in the project. (For example, if the only information
about a town is that "Abc town is in Abc district which is in Abc state and
the population is 12345 according to the 2001 census", this article is so
weak that it cannot honestly be said to exist.) If a project has thousands
of these kind of articles, the whole project will be regarded as being of
poor quality and will put off readers.) More fatally, if a project has
thousands of such bot entries, it doesn't inspire editors to contribute -
but instead makes them disillusioned because they feel that so many
articles of such bad quality that they just give up on where to start! There
are many who feel that, for example, Hindi wikipedia has been adversely
impacted by the overusage of bots.
Another very important aspect I want to address is the kind of policies we
adopt for Indic projects. Too often, tiny projects and communities are
adopting too many of the policies of English Wikipedia. The policies of
English wikipedia have evolved over years as English Wikipedia grew in
community and article size. These policies are suitable for English
Wikipedia given the size and breadth of its community. My view is that
many of these are not appropriate for the current state of most Indic
projects and communities given that the community sizes are 60,000 for
English and ~25 for the average Indic community. If English Wikipedia
policies are indiscriminately adopted, results in the feedback that I am
seeing from many Indic editors that they are spending too much time doing
"administrative" tasks like categorisation and not getting enough time for
basic core editing. Let me elaborate. Something like NPOV is central to
our overall philosophy. This cannot and must not be diluted. However, even
if I take the larger Indic Wikipedias, it really is not such a major issue
if the categorisation is currently weak. The focus has to be to build
articles quality and content, and not necessarily having all the content
neatly slotted into categories. Of course, something like categorisation
is good, but not at the cost of article quality. I want to make an even
more provocative suggestion. Verifiability is really really really
important to all our projects. However, if one looks at how English
Wikipedia evolved in the early days, it started with editors just adding
content. Over a period of time, other editors came in and added and
improved citations. Even today, as a recent Signpost article mentioned,
there are 2.5 lakh articles in English
Wikipedia<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-10-31/Opinio…>that
don't have references. We should encourage editors to write, write
and write! References will follow. Let us not chase away editors because
we want every article to be perfect in a 20,000 article project. Of course
we want quality but let us take it in stages - and let us prioritise what
is most important to begin with. I think many editors would find it
incredibly satisfying and inspiring and motivating to start and edit new
articles, and they might get it 80% right. This will attract a much bigger
community within which there will emerge a new generation of editors who
love to add detail and citations.
ReadershipOne of my big discoveries I had was to see the total size of
readership. I have often contemplated the Catch 22 situation of Indic
language Wikimedians - where there is no awareness of the projects so there
is no readership and even where there is readership, readers are not
satisfied because of a low number articles or poor quality of articles.
Conversely, editors don't find adequate motivation and satisfaction because
they believe there are too few readers for their contributions. I often
wondered how we would approach this problem - and which we should address
first. I used to think that we should first focus on community building
and article quality - and that readers will automatically follow. To that
extent, I used to think that we shouldn't worry about readers because they
will inevitably follow content. The fact that last month, we had more than
4 crore readers for our Indic language
wikipedias<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-…>means
that the dilemma of what we need to do is no longer valid. We have
readers. Lakhs and lakhs and lakhs of them for each Indic language wiki!
We now need to focus singlemindedly on community building and project
quality. As internet penetration and mobile data access increase, we will
get even more Indic readers. We don't need to do anything to attract
readers. However, we need to do *everything* to keep them coming back by
increasing article count while religiously maintaining and increasing
article quality and size of community.
I would love to hear your thoughts and views on these suggestions.
The next stage of my work is going to be to speak directly with various
communities in village pumps itself. I will try and make these as relevant
and specific to individual communities - and also to share some ideas which
have relevance across similar communities. For instance, some ideas will
be similar to all communities with less than 25 active editors. I also
want to try and identify potential areas of support that India Programs
could work closely with communities on. The idea is to support community
across languages. We would like to identify a very limited (1 or 2) pilots
of a very controlled nature (in terms of scale) that we would like to
collaboratively design with respective communities. Given the efforts that
will be required in any pilot (even if it is of a relatively small scale),
we believe that there needs to be a certain basic level of community size
and collaboration to be able handle such pilots.
I will be sharing this mail on the various local language / local town
mailing lists as well as the respective language village pumps. I look
forward to hearing your views.
I placed the content of this mail in metawiki also. It is here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…
Regards
Shiju Alex
India Programs Team of WMF
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Naveen Francis <naveenpf(a)gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 9:53 PM
Subject: [WMIN-Members] Wikimedia India chapter IRC meetup
To: wmin-members(a)googlegroups.com
Cc: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi friends,
We will have our IRC meetup on Dec 17, 2011, from 9:00 pm to 10:00 pm
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Internet_Relay_Chats/Dec_17,2011
We from Wikimedia India Chapter invites you all to take part in the IRC
meetup.
On behalf of Wikimedia Chapter (India)
Thanks,
Naveen Francis
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Rahimanuddin Shaik
నాని
॥రామానుజార్య దివ్యాజ్ఞాం వర్ధతామభివర్ధతాం॥
A new address for ebooks : http://kinige.com
Dear All,
I am sharing the statistical report of Indian language wiki projects for
the month of 2011 October. It is available here.
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-…
Some interesting facts that I discovered this month are:
- Nearly *4.3 crore* readers are there for all Indic language
wikipedias! This number is huge and increased by nearly 1/3 in just 1
month! So Indic wikis has huge reader base.
- Marathi wiki community has increased its active editor base by nearly
33% in just 1 month.
- Sanskrit wikipedia has been amongst the shining stars of *all* Indic
language wikipedias in terms of adding new articles (12 new articles every
day in October) and edits per article (nearly 18 edits across all articles,
old and new.)
You can find more interesting facts from the report at
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-…
Shiju
A quick note that, thanks to the sysadmins/listadmins and Gmane admins,
this list has just been added to Gmane and should appear in their
listings when this message is sent, with archives imported (if not, they
will be very soon).
See http://gmane.org/about.php and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Overview for info on Gmane
and Wikimedia lists, and please add/update yours if missing.
Sorry for crossposting.
Nemo