WikiPatrika:WikiPatrika/2011-06-06/Community News



WikiPatrika Community News
WikiPatrika Community News The Wikimedia community in India is active and diverse; owing the  size of the country, and the multiplicity of languages, cultures and  people within, Wikimedians in India often work in language communities. This is somewhat different to countries which have more uniformity; for us, it is a distinguishing feature worth celebrating. There are over 20 Indian language Wikipedias with another 20 in incubation; not all of  them are always active, but most are - as you will see in this section.

General

 * First Kolkata Meetup: The Bengali Wikipedia community of West Bengal conducted their first  Wikipedia workshop under the auspices of the Kolkata chapter of Computer Society Of India in Kolkata on 11 December 2010. This was the  first Bengali workshop in Kolkata, and it was initiated/conducted/led by  Shiju Alex, Tinu Cherian and  Jayanta Nath. About 20 participants attended, and the meeting is hopefully a stepping stone in the revival of Bengali Wikipedia after a gap of about 8 years.
 * On 15 January 2011, Bengali Wikimedians celebrated "10th  Anniversary of Wikipedia" in two big cities (Kolkata and  Dhaka) across India and Bangladesh. In Kolkata, the  event was organized with the support of Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre and Sanhita, an NGO In India that is working for  human rights, training, women issues, among other things. The celebration was  inaugurated by Bishakha Datta, a member of the Board of Trustrees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Afterwards, novelist Rimi B. Chatterjee gave a speech to cap the  celebration.
 * 11 Bengali wiki workshops and 5  outreach events were arranged during the period  2010 October to 2011  May. Four workshops in   Kolkata, 5   workshops and 4 events in   Dhaka, 1 workshop   and 1 event in  Chittagong,  and 1 workshop in   Rajshahi.
 * The Bengali Wikipedia community of Dhaka arranged workshops for Bengali bloggers on 7 January, 2011, in order to encourage them to use their skills on Wikipedia.
 * The Bangladeshi Wikipedia community also arranged around 5 outreach events: 2 photo-walks in the Dhaka  metropolitan area,a public gathering at  Ekushey Book Fair on 21  February (International Mother Language Day),  and on 14 April (the  first day of Bengali new year). Both of the events  were arranged by  Bangladesh Open Source Network.
 * Though Dhaka has been the major outreach target in Bangladesh in past years, very  recently the Chittagong Wikimedian community of Bangladesh has taken up  the initiative to arrange a wiki fest in that city. Students from around  7 universities from Chittagong joined in the fest, and the number of  participants was around 500. The Chief Editor of Daily Azad (a local  newspaper) inaugurated the fest. The fest featured a panel consisting of  the mayor of Chittagong, C. Hasan Mahmud, professor of Chittagong  University S. A. A. Parvez, and other notable persons.
 * Wikimedians in Kolkata took up the initiative to reduce the gender gap in  Wikipedia and organized the  Women's   Wiki Workshop (WWW) with the support of Indian NGO Sanhita. The wiki   meetup and workshop for women was specially arranged for Bengali   Wikimedians on 18 March 2011 at Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre.

Typing tool Integragion
On  18 December 2010, an external Bengali typing tool written by Junaid   P.V. was integrated into Bengali Wikipedia. The tool has Avro, Inscript  and Bangladesh Jatiyo Keyboard Layout. A guide to typing in Bengali  was also provided, along with a central notice to help and inform new   Wikipedians. This tool has also been integrated in two other Bengali Wikimedia projects (Bengali Wikibooks, and Bengali Wiktionary).

FAQ Booklet & Typing Help in PDF
A Wikipedia FAQ, Display & Typing Help 1.0 manual was created to provide support for frequently asked questions on Bengali Wikipedia, and to resolve display issues and provide support for the typing tool - borrowing from the FAQ created for Malayalam Wikipedia.

Bengali Wikipedia

 * To date, among Bengali Wikimedia projects, Bengali Wikipedia is the most active project. Bengali Wikipedia has 22,000+ articles as of 2011 May.
 * Bengali Wikipedia reached the milestone of 1 million edits on 21 May 2011. Bengali is the 3rd Indic language Wikipedia (after Hindi  and Malayalam) to reach this milestone. This milestone was covered in  Bangladeshi news media.
 * Bengali Wikipedia has implemented some technical facilities to guide its edits - most notably, the Flagged  revision extension to monitor highly vandalized and BLP articles.

Bengali Wikisource

 * Bengali Wikisource is among the most enriched indic Wikisources. There are 6 active users of this project, and it has 5300+ content pages. It is also the second most active Bengali Wikimedia project in terms of content.

Bengali Wiktionary

 * Bengali Wiktionary is not as active as other Bengali projects. Bengali  Wiktionary has 670 entries as of 2011 May, and the present number of  active users is 4.

Bengali Wikibooks

 * Bengali Wikibooks is also not so active; as of May 2011, Bengali Wikibooks has 128 books. Present number of active users is 11.

News reports about Bengali wiki community and wiki projects

 * Hindustan Times : "Making Wikipedia popular in Bengali", 2010 Dec 15, Kolkata edition.
 * Wikipedia enhances its Bong connection December 16, 2010 news.oneindia.in
 * Birthday bash for Wikipedians-Sudeshna Banerjee - The Telegraph
 * The Hindustan Times ( Kolkata edition) : "Wiki wants Women"
 * Telegraph (Kolkata): "Regional Wiki"
 * Wiki learns a lesson in Bengali
 * News on Bangladeshi newspaper mentioning the 1 million edits milestone of Bengali Wikipedia
 * News covering the public gathering in 21 February at Ekushey Book Fair,  Dhaka
 * News about Chittagong Wiki-fest

English Wiki Community News
Indians working on English Wikipedia comprise perhaps one  of the most active wiki communities from  India. The efforts of Indian Wikipedians on English wikipedia is  coordinated through Wikiproject India. There are plans to create a new mailing list for co-ordinating the efforts of India related articles and  associated Wikipedians in English  Wikipedia.

Wikiproject India
A WikiProject is a project by a group of editors to manage and collaborate articles on a specific topic or family of topics within the Wikipedia. WikiProject India or WP:INDIA is one of the largest Wikiprojects on the English Wikipedia. It is a group dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to the Republic of India and the history and culture of the Indian subcontinent.

The  project was originally started by veteran Wikipedian User:Ganeshk in   2006 July. There were only 35 featured articles and 2 GAs related to  India at the commencement of the WikiProject.

The goals of this group are three-fold:
 * provide guidelines and recommendations for articles that describe aspects of India.
 * improve Wikipedia's coverage of India by creating, expanding, and maintaining factual articles.
 * serve as a place for discussion.

To  achieve the goals, this project group has developed features to help  in  managing its work. This includes Departments, which coordinate work  on certain tasks, such as peer review or project-wide collaboration,  and Work Groups that focus on content and articles related to India -  such as cities, politics and culture.

Departments  include – Assessment, Automation, Cartography, Collaboration, Outreach,   Peer review, Photography, Translation, and Anti Vandalism. Tasks entrusted to departments include authoring, maintaining the project  pages, administering portals, adding articles, reviews, managing the  project, and so on. Workgroups include Geography (we have wikigroups for each  state and UTs), Religion, Media & communications (One each  for  Cinema and Television). We have dedicated workgroups for Maps of India  and Transport systems in India. We also have Indian wikipedians who  contribute to various other global communities like for UN  workgroups, Cricket workgroups and different scientific / technology /  cultural  workgroups/wikiprojects. We now have around 48 workgroups on India-related sub-topics and ~350 active members under WP:INDIA At the time of the previous newsletter in 2010 September, the project had  78,000+  India related articles under the project scope, with 60  Featured  Articles (FA), 16 featured lists, and 132 Good articles (GA). Currently there are more than 83,000 articles under the project banner. While the Featured Articles dropped by one, the Featured lists and  Good Articles  leaped to 19 and 154 respectively.


 * The Indian Barnstar of National Merit is given to Wikipedians in  recognition to exemplary contribution to the project and has been  awarded to more than 100 Wikipedians.


 * India Noticeboard  en:WT:INB  / Wikipedia talk:Noticeboard for India-related topics” is the the  centre of discussion on Indian articles and other India related stuff on  Wikipedia.


 * India Quiz or en:WP:PINQ  is a popular forum of interaction among Indian Wikipedians. It runs as a  friendly competition among Wikipedians to test  and improve the  knowledge of India.


 * There are more than 61 Indian or Indian-orgin editors with more than 10,000 edits on English Wikipedia (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IND_EDITS) This is an increase  from 45 Wikipedians during the previous newsletter in September 2010.


 * AlexNewArtBot identifies newly created articles that are potentially being within the scope of the project, based on the India ruleset.