[Wikimediaindia-l] Some issues about Wikipedia

[Ashwin Baindur]

Hi Anay,

I saw your email to Jimbo on the Wikimedia-India email group, forwarded by
Bishakha for info of all. I recall meeting your reps in the lecture, one of
whom was a lady. I had mentioned some issues to them. These are the same
issues that are not addressed/appear not to be understood in your email.

Firstly, Wikipedia, whether English or Marathi, is an encyclopaedia. For
uploading complete texts, the correct Wikimedia project is Marathi
WikiSource not Marathi Wikipedia.

Secondly, if the desire is to introduce this material into Marathi
Wikipedia, the large amount of material you offer to make available has to
be sifted and converted and integrated, fact by fact with Neutral Point of
View, and proper citation. The material can be converted into new articles
or added to existing articles, but will have to conform to the writing style
of an encyclopaedia, as per the format indicated in the Manual of Style for
Marathi Wikipedia. En masse copying is not possible, even for copyright-free
or public domain material. At the very least, editing to fit into the
existing article and citation is a must, even if you want to copy-paste
small chunks of text.  All content creation work in Wikipedia/Wikimedia
projects is done by volunteers without renumeration. Thus, the uploading,
article-creation, editing, etc will have to be done by your people or by
volunteers whom you can get to agree to help you. This is not at all a
trivial task.

Thirdly, the government has to explicitly state that the material provided
has been released into public domain, or under a free license, else the
material cannot be uploaded to Wikisource, Wikimedia projects use the Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
License<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License>.
No restrictions in use,  such as "No commercial use"or "No derivatives" etc,
are permitted in Creative Commons licenses used in the Wikipedia world. The
only restrictions permitted are that the reused Wikipedia material
(article/book/material etc) must be offered under the same or similar free
license as Wikipedia downstream to other users and that the use must be
attributed.

Lastly, I strongly recommend your team who will be handling the project
become Wikipedia editors as there are a large number of domain knowledge
issues, which will affect your progress and success.

I hope this email is helpful in helping you understand the larger picture. I
wish you all the very best in this and other noble ventures that the
Observer Research Foundation Mumbai is involved in.

Happy Editing,

Warm regards,

Ashwin Baindur or User:AshLIn on English Wikipedia.
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