[Wikimediaindia-l] Summary and perspectives from Discussions with Indic language wikimedians - 2011

[Arjuna Rao Chavala]

Hi Shiju,

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Shiju Alex <shiju at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Dear All,
>
>
> --cut--
> 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_Languages/Assamese/Discussions/2011>,
> Hindi<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Hindi/Discussions/2011>,
> Tamil<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Tamil/Discussions/2011>,
> Telugu<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Telugu/Discussions/2011>,
> Kannada<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Kannada/Discussions/2011>,
> Nepali<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Neplai/Discussions/2011>,
> Malayalam<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Malayalam/Discussions/2011>,
> Marathi<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Marathi/Discussions/2011>,
> Odia<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Odia/Discussions/2011>,
> Sanskrit<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Sanskrit/Discussions/2011>,
> Bengali<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Bengali/Discussions/2011>,
> and Gujarati<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Gujarati/Discussions/2011>
> .)
>

Thanks for the extensive work you have done in surveying the language
Wikipedias and sharing insights on key priorities.  I have browsed through
the reports and found them interesting.


> Community --cut--
>

What I found one of the key factor behind active communities particularly
Tamil and Malayalam, is the support of Government for the initiative.  This
could be a priority area for  other Wikipedias as well.

> Projects There is a constant debate of what should come first - article
> count or article quality?  I
> --cut--
>

When some of the language Wikipedias started to use the bots for creating
stub articles, they would have imagined the strengthening  of community  to
improve the same. But unfortunately, the community could not be
strengthened due to various issues like access to Internet. computing
platform, issues with rendering and input methods and we ended up with stub
articles remaining in the same state.

I agree that use of bots for example could have been limited to District/
Mandal(Taluk) headquarters  rather than covering all the villages in the
case of Telugu Wikipedia for example. If  appropriate stubs are created as
part of overall project with committed community members and a definite
time frame,  seeding of the pages with stubs could be useful.

> Readership --cut--
>
As internet penetration and mobile data access increase, we will get even
> more Indic readers.
>
 +1

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.
>

Chapter has kicked off Language SIGs  for some of the languages.  I am sure
the language SIG chairs and the active language Wikipedians will be eager
to interact with you on the  next steps.


Best wishes
Arjuna Rao Chavala
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