WikiPatrika/2012-05/Community News/gu
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Wikipedia and other wiki projects in Gujarati have seen some great activities in recent time. Wikimedia has several projects in Gujarati; Wikipedia, wikisource, wikiquotes and wiktionary. Obviously wikipedia is the most active and prominent among all. Recently created Gujarati Wikisrot is also advancing very well.
Outreach Programs
Year 2011 has seen some of the very first out reach sessions of Gujarati wikipedia and its sister projects.
- Gujarati wiki's first ever outreach programme was held with the help of Gujarati Sahitya Parishad at the organisation's premises. Many prominent authors and literary enthusiasts attened the meet on 28th August 2011. User:Dsvyas briefed about wikipedia and how people can contribute to wiki. User:Satishchandra and User:Sushant Savla were also present. This event was covered in Local media as well.
- An outreach session was held at Botany Department, Gujarat University on 22nd November 2011 where along with Gujarati Wikipedia and other projects, presentation and hands on session was made on Wikispecies. Being it a groupg of students of Masters in Botany and research students, topic was selected as Wikipedia:Research & Education. This even was well attended and User:Dsvyas has received emails from academic staff at Botany department thanking for the presentation and informing that students have been using wikispecies since then.
Outreach session at Botany Department, Gujarat University among the students of M.Sc. Botany
- Informal wiki meetup was organised by User:Ashok Modhvadia on 25-11-2011 at Junagadh. Where wikipedians Dsvyas & Jitendrasing along with Ashok Modhvadia talked about wikipedia, shared their experiences and answered questions of the present wiki enthusiasts. One of the attendee of this meet up has now joined the wikisource and has been contributing very well. This event was also covered by local television channel news the following day.
- Recently on 24th April, there was a wikipedia workshop organised by Konarak & Harsh at LD College of Engineering, Ahmedabad. This event was well attended by students of engineering college and other Wikipedians. Anirudh Bhati and Karthik Mistry from the Wikimedia Ahmedabad community were also present at the event. Hisham from IP flew to Ahmedabad for the event. The agenda of this workshop was to acquaint the participants basics of Wikipedia editing - five pillars, notability guidelines, followed by a short editing session. Like other events, this had a media coverage as well.
- Since the begining of 2012, Gujarati wikipedians have started monthly online meet using skype. Every first Sunday of the month, these online meetups are held. This is slowly becoming popular among Gujarati Wikimedians.
Wikisource
Request for subdomain for Gujarati wikisource (Wikisrot-વિકિસ્રોત) was raised nearly 3 years back. From the begning, the request had tremendous support of Gujarati community. This movement caught momentum early this year and finally seperate Gujarati Wikisource has been created on 27th March. At the time of creation of wikisrot, it already contained 1000+ pieces of literature. Today apart from hundreds of poetic works and short stories, Wikisrot has 2 complete books Authored by Mahatma Gandhi.
Gujarati librarians took a novel approach of working together on books, and the project is named as Sahakarya, literally meaning, cooperative work. Wherein, number of users gather to work on a single book and one of them accepts a role of coordinator. This coordinator then scans the book and allocates chapters to the participants, who does the upload work. The autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, which is 500+ paged book, has recently been completed within a remakrable 4 weeks' time. Total 13 users worked with no more than 11 working at the time. Work is on for the third book, a classic Gujarati humorous novel-Bhadrambhadra. Within first week, it is more than 25 per cent completed.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has reached the mark of 22,000 articles. Number of resolutions have been made by the community jointly.
- Narayam extension is enabled.
- A new Administrator has been elected.
- File upload to commons only has been voted by community.
Wiktionary & Wikiquote
These 2 projects are also reviving with slight activity these days.
