We should learn from Tamil community! :)
Kudos!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ravishankar <ravidreams(a)gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 8:05 PM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Updates from the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community
To: wikimediaindia-l <wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi,
We have some exciting updates from the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community.
We have partnered with Tamil Virtual Academy (TVA), an autonomous
institution established by the Government of Tamil Nadu. Wikimedia
Chapter, India is acting on behalf of the Global Tamil Wikimedia
Community to facilitate this partnership.
* In August 2015, The Government of Tamil Nadu made an announcement in
the State Legislative Assembly that it will be partnering with
Wikipedia and will work to release various resources under Creative
Commons licenses. Please check page 91 in the policy document
available on the web here (also attached in this mail).
* Tamil Wikipedia registered 251% increase in editors who made at
least an edit in November 2015. It jumped from 331 to 1165 in a month.
During this peak, Tamil Wikipedia became the most active Wikipedia in
the world having less than 1,00,00 articles. This was made possible
because of Wikipedia training camps in various districts for school
teachers organized by State council for Education Research and
Technology. This training was organized with zero cost for Wikimedia
resources in 32 districts of the state and 1500+ school teachers were
trained to contribute to Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons.
9 Tamil Wikipedians under the coordination of User:Parvathisri
travelled across the state to conduct these training programs.
Though we know from movement learning that new user retention will be
an issue, we have won partners like these who will continue to repeat
this training every year as part of the ICT curriculum for teachers.
Though Wikipedia in Education program runs in over 70 countries, we
believe this is the first time a systematic training program has been
organized for the teachers. We have now formed a WhatsApp group to
guide the most active teachers turned Wikipedians.
* Tamil Wikimedia also added 10,400+ articles of around 10 kb each
adding 104 megabytes of data to article namespace. User:Neechalkaran
worked on this extensively. This was made possible as the government
made its statistical records accessible on our request and we engaged
a bot with community consensus to create these articles. We see this
as a model in convincing other governments to release data in a
similar fashion so useful information like these can be added to all
language Wikipedias. This bot and data can be used to create articles
in other languages as well (especially English) and we look forward to
working together.
See also:
** October 2015 stats for Tamil Wikipedia
** November 2015 stats for Tamil Wikipedia
* State wide Tamil Computing Clubs in universities and colleges
The TN government is kick-starting Tamil Computing Clubs across all
colleges and universities in the state. Starting this September 2015,
inauguration programs for these have been conducted in Madras
University, Anna University, Madurai Kamaraj University, Salem Periyar
University, Karaikudi Alagappa University. 1000s of students and
teachers from at least 400 constituent colleges have participated in
these programs. Growing Wikimedia projects will be one of the focus
areas for these clubs. A dedicated session was allotted to Wikipedia
outreach in these events and we worked along with the Free Software
Foundation, Tami Nadu to drive home the message of Free Culture
movements.
* Wikimedian in Residence
User:Info-farmer will be working as a Wikimedia in Residence at TVA
until March 2016. Through this we expect to add more content to Tamil
Wikisource, bring policy changes and more GLAM partnerships.
* Tamil Wikipedia stall in Madurai Book fair
Tamil Wikimedians operated a stall in Madurai book fair for 10 days.
The stall was arranged free of cost and 8 different Wikipedians helped
to run it. This helped us gain widespread press coverage and
awareness. User:Srithern, User:எஸ்ஸார், User:எஸ். பி. கிருஷ்ணமூர்த்தி
and User:Dineshkumar Ponnusamy played a major role in this.
* Workshops
We ran two workshops in August 2015. One focused in creating training
resources for outreach while the other focused in encouraging writers
and media professionals to contribute to Wikipedia. User:Rsmn and
User:Selvasivagurunathan m helped coordinate these efforts.
A MoU regarding this has been written and approved by the community on
wiki. From the genesis of this partnership, all discussions (see also
the archive) and activities have been done on wiki. We recommend this
as a best practice whenever a MoU is signed as this reiterates that
the local Wikimedia community is the primary stakeholder of Wikimedia
projects and ensures full trust and cooperation from them.
User:Thamizhpparithi Maari, User:Mayooranathan, User:Natkeeran,
User:Sundar, User:சஞ்சீவி சிவகுமார், User:Rsmn, User:Shanmugamp7,
User:Neechalkaran, User:Commons sibi, User:zsenthil, User:Kanags,
User:AntanO and numerous other contributors helped to forge this
partnership and conduct the activities.
Press coverage:
* On Tamil Wikipedia stall in Madurai book fair.
** The Hindu - Into the world of books
** Dinamalar - புத்தக கண்காட்சியில் 'தமிழ் விக்கிபீடியா'
** Dinamani - தினமணியில் செய்தி
** The Hindu - Tamil Wikipedia invites articles
* On Tamil Computing Clubs
** Times of India - 1 lakh Tamil articles to come up on Wikipedia
General:
* Wikipedia on massive drive to increase Tamil content
* The Hindu - தமிழுக்குள் விக்கிப்பீடியாவை நுழையுங்கள்!
* Nakkeeran - வல்லுநர்கள் பங்களிப்பு அதிகரிக்க வேண்டும் -
விக்கிப்பீடியர்கள் வேண்டுகோள்
We thank Tamil Virtual Academy, Wikimedia India and the Wikimedia
Foundation who offered extensive support and guidance throughout these
activities.
We are excited to share these updates with the larger community. Stay
tuned for more updates and details from us.
Ravi
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