cross-posting to reach pan-community; apologies if you received it from other mailing lists already
Hi Folks,
One of the essential things that India Program needs to constantly work out is keeping the community informed of the work that we are doing - so that this work is clearer but also to help cross-pollinate ideas amongst a wider set of community members who might not have been engaged on specific village pump / talk page discussion or involved in particular activities (e.g. outreach events) or wikiprojects.
We used to have a monthly IRC with the community and India Program. (For those who are not familiar with IRC, it is an Internet messaging system similar to a regular chat room. It's very simple to use and you can join in by clicking on the following link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-office.) I have been remiss in conducting these for the past few months - and I'd like to make amends by restarting, with a couple of modifications.
a) I'd like to propose fortnightly instead of monthly. (I was wary of doing it any more frequently than monthly earlier because I didn't know if there would be enough on the plate to discuss. I have changed my mind now - because there is too much to discuss to cover in a single monthly session.) I'd like to propose that we do it in the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of every month at 9pm IST (which is GMT + 0530) - THOUGH NOT THIS MONTH - BECAUSE I HAVE MISSED THE TIMELINE. Just for March, we will do it on March 15th and March 29th (both at 9pm IST which is GMT + 0530)
b) I'd like to propose that we do it focussed on specific work streams instead of general. The reason I say this is that - as with many community meet-ups, folks will give time to attend a meet-up or participate in an IRC only if there is a topic of relevance to them. To that extent, we could do one IRC on Indic languages and one on Outreach & Communications. I'd start both the IRCs with a re-cap of India Programs activities for the fortnight (or so) prior to the IRC and forward from the IRC - and then we could talk about either Indic langauges or Outreach & Communications.
The March 15th one will be focussed on Indic Languages and the one on March 29th will be on Outreach & Communications.
Having said that, there is quite a bit of overlap on these topics - so feel free to join both. The more the merrier! Please do also invite anyone who is interested to know more about India Program or - even more importantly - interact with fellow Wikimedians interested in a particular activity to join in. (It's quite a lot of of fun {citation required} - and i've heard a rumour {citation required} that there was actually a romance that started on one of the IRCs...)
As always, the logs will be put up on meta for the benefit of those who can't attend and for the record.
I'll send a reminder on the day of the session and one 30 minutes before the session.
Thanks
hisham
Today we had a young editor quit the assessment drive on principle
that the assessment in no way added to the quality of the drive. He
opined his time was better spent on the Wikify drive for March. That
is a perfectly sensible decision which he is entitled to make and I
have nothing to say about this editor or his decision any more.
However, it does bring an important point to notice. Why bother to
assess articles? Why bother to allocate importance?
I'm sure this must be an issue which many people may not be completely
clear about.
Understanding the need for assessment comes from looking at Wikipedia
articles and their quality/importance from a perspective. That is the
perspective of improving a body of information on Wikipedia.
Let us consider articles on Medicine as an example. No one can deny
the importance of this set of articles to the people of the world. I
think it axiomatic that the best way for Wikipedia to serve the
interests of the heath of the people is to improve the articles on
medicine, health and lifestyle. The better the information and the
more the information available, the greater the likelihood of a
healthier world.
But if we had no system of assessment how would one answer the
following questions?
* What is the state of a <particular article> on Wikipedia? How do we
rate it or compare it to others?
* How do I find the articles on Medicine which need improvement the most?
* Of all the articles on Wikipedia on Medicine, how many articles are
satisfactory in quality and how many are of really high quality?
* Of all the articles in a body of knowledge, how do we know which is
most important and which should get more attention than the other?
* How do I best use my limited effort to improve the articles on Medicine?
Such questions can only be answered by having in place a system of assessment.
Historically on Wikipedia, it appears that assessment was associated
with WikiProjects. Articles are not assessed at the overall level of
Wikipedia but at the level of WikiProjects. You already know that
WikiProjects use banner templates on article talk pages of topics
pertaining to that WikiProject. In these templates, by adding
parameters in the Wikitext of the banner template, an article can
easily be classified and allocated importance and earmarked into a
Task Force/daughter WikiProject. Based on these parameters, these
banners suitably categorise the articles into various categories of
articles of the WikiProject.
An example:
{{WikiProject India|importance=top|quality=B|kerala=yes}}
Placing the above parameters in the WikiProject India template will
result in the addition of the following four additional categories to
the talk page:
* Category:B-Class Kerala articles
* Category:B-Class Kerala articles of Top-importance
* Category:Top-importance Kerala articles
* Category:WikiProject Kerala articles
In this way, should we take the trouble to assess all the articles in
a WikiProject, then they will all be neatly arranged in categories
which are extremely helpful for editors.
In a small WikiProject of 200 articles or less, elaborate assessment
can be done away with but in WikiProject India, with over 96,000
articles how is it possible for WikiProject Members to even come to
grips with these articles?
It is here that assessment renders the WikiProject manageable - it
enables members to be able to take small chunks of the 96,000 articles
and work with them much more easily and conveniently than if there had
been no assessment at all.
Without assessment, it is virtually impossible to handle the
WikiProject articles and decide the best way to spend our limited
effort and time.
It is for this reason that more than 30 editors have done more than
11,000 article assessments to date in the Tag & Assess 2012 - knowing
that unless the backlog of articles are not assessed, it will not be
able to manage the WikiProject properly and improve their quality.
AshLin
I would like to inform the broad community of more glad tidings - we have
two more volunteers who have agreed to coordinate WikiProjects. These are:
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Transport in India - User:Rsrikanth05
* Volunteer coordinator for the Newsletter of WikiProject India -
User:Prad2609 (who doesn't really like titles) :).
We welcome them to their new responsibilities and they are now proud
members of a select club indeed - people who have publicly volunteered to
look after an area of responsibility on WikiProject India.
Please welcome them on their talk pages and not on the list(s).
We would like to remind readers that we are constantly looking for editors
to help with the various departments and task forces. There are more than
seventy more areas needing looking after. And if the project you are
interested in already has one, welcome to it - we need lots of dedicated
voluntees per department or task force not just one.
Warm regards,
AshLin
------------------------------------------------------
All of us have already heard that Encyclopedia Britannica, the world’s
best-known and most-reliable reference encyclopedia that was first
published more than two centuries ago, will no longer be available in
print.
The editors also announced that the online edition of Britannica,
available at britannica.com, will be “entirely free for a full week
beginning today.”
Read about it here:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/encyclopedia-britannica-online-free/21009/
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
Dear friends,
With number of editors on topics pertaining to WikiProject India increasing
rapidly, I thought it would be a good idea to give them a short account of
the history of the WikiProject India as seen through my eyes.
I joined Wikipedia in 2006 and around the time I got around to joining
WikiProject India, it was having its heydey around 2008. It had legendary
editors like Bhadani, Nichalp and many more. All its departments were
functional and it had created a large real estate on English Wikipedia.
With over 80,000 articles, it was a hustling-bustling, and happening place
to be, but sadly, it was not to last. The experienced editors retired
faster than young folks took the threads. And by early 2010, the
WikiProject was a shell of itself. Its stores of FAs and GAs began to be
depleted at an alarming rate as there was no one to respond to reviewers'
concerns. The talk page traffic dropped and by 2011, WikiProject India was
about to plunge into the semi-dormant state most WikiProjects wind down to
over time.
Parts of the present Indian community began to coalesce around the time of
Jimbo's visit to Mumbai on 31 October 2010. The event in Mumbai was
attended by 700 plus citizens of which there were a handful of wikipedians.
The nascent Mumbai and Pune communities began to meet and form up around
this time. Till then the only established English language Wikipedian
community in India was Bangalore. Wikimedian meetings in most South Indian
cities were about more about creating and establishing the strong Indic
language Wikimedia projects of Malayalam and Tamil, with Kannada and Telegu
projects racing to catch up.
2011 saw the Tenth Anniversary of Wikipedia which gave Wikipedians in
cities the excuse and opportunity to organise to celebrate the event and
this marked the birth of new communities. Organisationally, the
establishment of Wikimedia India Chapter in early 2011, though it had
hiccups in initial acceptance by the community, gave a framework to think
on a national level. The India Program followed soon after that with its
initial focus on the India Education Program for almost six months. However
with enough things happening, the mailing lists began to buzz and new
mailing lists for cities began to come up.
The bold initiative by Mumbai community, supported by Pune community to
host a national conference led to a long, arduous and argumentative
marathon effort to host India's first WikiConference 2011, supported by the
Chapter and a sizeable grant from WMF. Though there were trials and
tribulations, the event brought a lot of hardworking Wikimedians to the
fore, brought tremenduous publicity to the movement in India, increased the
number of Wikimedians in all communities and helped the language Wikimedias
to develop new capabilities, thanks to hackathons. It was clear that the
Indian Wikimedia community had arrived.
I was asked to present a brief summary of affairs of WikiProject India as
part of the series of presentations on each indic language project - a
State of the Wikipedias session. A quick look revealed horrendous
statistics - the most glaring of which were the tens of thousands of
unassessed articles and articles needing cleanup. The WikiProject at this
time had a very small core of dedicated editors who were valiantly keeping
the light from flickering out.
My message to the community was two-fold. Firstly, that English too was an
Indic-language being a major language in India with recognised status as
secondary Official language, and second only to Hindi in the number of
speakers, and in Wikipedia to number of articles. The subset WikiProject
India of English Wikipedia was analogous and equivalent to the Indic
language wikipedia. My second point was a succint wake up call -
WikiProject India was in bad shape and we all needed to get together to
revive it.
The Wikimedia India Chapter had laid down a framework for volunteers to
coordinate aspects for each community and each wikipedia. As someone
familiar with its problems, I was asked to coordinate WikiProject India in
December shortly after the Conference. At first the task seemed too
daunting. Then I decided to see what needed doing and do it without trying
to solve all the huge problems at once. I was joined in this task at all
times by at least one or two of the small group of English language editors
from India whom I had interacted with, and I had the good wishes of the
entire community, including the Chapter and India Programs.
There was a clamour for collaboration to begin. The Collaboration of the
Month (WP:INCOTM) was the first initiative that we took up. In the effort
to get people collaborating, a lot of messages were sent to editors both
old and new and slowly our INCOTMs started to bear fruit and new editors
started appearing in editting of India articles and on the India
Noticeboard (WP:INB). At this time some vigorous debates on India
Noticeboard on caste, the Featured Article Review and image selection of
[[India]] were notable, besides many other smaller topics discussed.
Something wonderful happened - a young user from Pune volunteered to take
over responsibility and bang! We had our first volunteer coordinator -
[[User:BPositive]] - who took charge of INCOTM.
This was followed up by the setting of [[WP:OWIS]] project - Offline
Wikipedia for Indian Schools. A framework has been made and many editors
have come and done work. Sadly, this arguably the most important of
ventures does not have its dedicated champions and is languishing. We will
soon need to canvas for this if WikiProject India is to make a REAL impact
in Indian Society and education.
In the meantime, photothons began to happen - Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad.
The WikiProject provided moral support, a little bit of help in
categorising, some advice and in the case of Ahmedabad - a set of links of
important areas/monuments in Ahmedabad. The Ahmedabad photothon brought
forth volunteers who took it upon themselves to rejuvenate both WikiProject
Gujarat and Gujarati Wikipedia. Of these, a number of young editors joined
the WikiProject India community and one youngster - User:Kondicherry opted
to look after WikiProject Gujarat.
A wide range of offline activities continue and though through them the
WikiProject articles have had some change, the overall impact is on the
number of editors growing slowly in the community. Some of these are
becoming very active quite early and the WikiProject hopes to have in the
near future. GLAM was born - the initiative is nascent and has not yet
impacted WikiProject India.
In the meantime, senior editors, Chapter, IP, city communities all strongly
support WikiProject India. Our true challenge lies in realising the synergy
between WikiProject India and other Indic language Wikimedia projects. The
gulf between them needs to be bridged and is always at the back of my mind.
Attempts at mobilising opinion for a cleanup drive during the
WikiConference 2011 were premature and had little impact though the message
was hard loud and clear. The base was just not there for any kind of drive
in WikiProject India at the time. Fortunately in February end, disturbed by
the regular incidence of unassessed articles, the community itself
clamoured for an assessment drive. All that needed to be done was to just
set up the framework and approach a number of editors when very soon we had
two dozen editors coming together to cooperate and reduce the backlog.
Another young and energetic editor, User:SSriram_mt took charge as the
drive coordinator. The drive has only completed just under two weeks and
the response of editors has been terrific - we now have thirty-seven
editors signed up and the assessments done total over 10,000!
One of the recent activities we have taken up is to search for volunteer
coordinators to take charge of WikiProject India infrastructure and build
up the departments, initiative and daughter WikiProjects - hopefully in a
similar manner as WikiProject India is attempting to develop in recent
months.
We have now added four more volunteers who have agreed to coordinate
WikiProjects. These are:
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Hinduism - User:Redtigerxyz.
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Indian cinema - User:Vensatry.
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Mumbai - User:Karthikndr.
* Welcoming Newbies to the WikiProject initiative - User:Debastein (based
on his Teahouse participation).
In addition, we now have more volunteers who have come foth and need to be
announced to the community soon. User:Prad2609 has agreed to champion the
Newsletter and we refer to him as our Newsletter Coordinator.
User:Rsrikanth05 has agreed to look after WikiProject:Transport in India.
This is a biased POV view :) - mine, based mostly on my experiences and
limited knowledge and is not meant to deprive anyone from the great merits
of their actions which I may have overlooked or under-represented. My
apologies if I have left anyone out of this small recanting. Its just to
give editors a feeling that they are working as part of a larger team, a
greater cause and hopefully to motivate them to do even more and to make
themselves proud.
AshLin
Hey All,
I am writing to invite each one of you to India WikiWomen's
Edit-a-Thon<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/India_WikiWomen%27s_Edit-a-Th…>that
has been scheduled for 25th March 2012, Sunday from 12:00pm to 2:00pm.
It's probably not possible for all of us to meet physically to celebrate
Women's Month but we all meet virtually - online!
During the two hour time slot we all will be editing an article which will
be pre-selected by way of nomination and votes. Depending on the number of
members joining in we can also organise an IRC meet to meet each other
before and during the event.
Everyone is welcome to come edit Wikipedia with us at this event. Women,
new editors, all those who relate to women's history or women's issues,
those who want to learn how to edit or can teach others how, and anyone
with an interest in women's history are particularly encouraged to attend.
Please sign Up here<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/India_WikiWomen%27s_Edit-a-Th…>and
suggest and vote for articles
here<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/India_WikiWomen%27s_Edit-a-Th…>.
Nomination for articles will be closed by 22nd of March and the voting will
be closed by 24th March. Hurry! :)
Thanks Nitika <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nitika.t>, for bringing up
this idea!
I welcome all of you to participate by editing subjects about women's
history and more. Everyone is welcome!
Thanks
--
Netha Hussain
User : Netha Hussain <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Netha_Hussain> on
Wikiprojects
Student of Medicine and Surgery
Govt. Medical College, Kozhikode
Blogs : *nethahussain.blogspot.com
swethaambari.wordpress.com*
I would like to inform the broad community of glad tidings - we have a
number of volunteers who have agreed to coordinate WikiProjects. These are:
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Hinduism - Redtigerxyz.
* Wikipedia:WikiProject Indian Cinema - Vensatry.
* Wikipedia WikiProject Mumbai - Karthikndr.
* Introducing Newbies to WikiProject India initiative - Debastein (based on
his Teahouse participation).
We welcome them to their new responsibilities and they are now proud
members of a select club indeed - people who have publicly volunteered to
look after an area of responsibility on WikiProject India.
Please welcome them on their talk pages and not on the list(s).
They join Bpositive (INCOTM), Kondicherry (WikiProject Gujarat) &
ssriram_mt (Tag & Assess 2012).
Redtigerxyz has asked for fellow co-coordinators for WikiProject Hinduism,
if any one is willing and forthcoming.
We would like to intimate readers that we are constantly looking for
editors to help with the various departments and task forces. There are
more than seventy more areas needing looking after. And if the project you
are interested in already has one, welcome to it - we need lots of
dedicated voluntees per department or task force not just one.
Warm regards,
AshLin
------------------------------------------------------
hi,
I am happy to see signs of activity and renewed interest in WP:India
post-WCI. One of the aspects that I would like to revive is the newsletter,
the last edition of which came out in November 2010.
Here's the link to that edition -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_India/Outreach/Newslette…
I hope that working with others on this list and on the project page, we
can bring out the next newsletter in May 2012.
warm regards,
Pradeep
--
Pradeep Mohandas
How Pradeep uses email - http://goo.gl/6v1I9
Dear all,
This is one of the highlights of the WMF's Feb 2012 report, which is at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_February_2012
Posting here as more food for thought since there's so much talk and
excitement about reaching out to new editors.
Cheers
Bishakha
=== Teahouse project kicks off ===
<Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WP_teahouse_logo.png
Logo of the "Teahouse">
On February 27th we launched the Teahouse
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse>, a peer support space
designed specifically for new editors on the English Wikipedia. This
pilot project is testing various social approaches to new editor
support, to see if these methods improve our ability to retain more new
editors and more female editors in particular. The project organizes a
group of Wikipedians called “hosts” to reach out to new good-faith
editors and invite them to a place where they can meet other new editors
and experienced Wikipedians, build community relationships, find
projects to participate in, and ask questions about Wikipedia. The pilot
is scheduled to run with 25 trained hosts for 3 months. During this time
we'll be working with the community and new editors to refine the
experience and measure the project's impact.
