Reports/June 2016

=Membership=

Call for membership to Wikimedia India Chapter
WMIN sent Renewal reminders to all its existing members. Apart from that, Announcement for New membership has been made on all language communities’ mailing list & India mailing list. Membership can be availed at individual and at institutional level. Members get to be a part of the Wikimedia Chapter and its mission. They can participate in voting procedure and standing for the Executive Committee membership in the elections of Wikimedia Chapter.

For membership form, Please Click Here

=Events=

Wiki Loves Earth India 2016
Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) - an annual international photographic competition held during the month of June, organized worldwide by the Wikipedia community members with the help of local Wikimedia affiliates across the globe. Wikimedia India is conducting this competition in India. Participants take pictures of local natural heritage and scenic landscape in their countries, and upload them to Wikimedia Commons.

The aim of event is to highlight the conservation areas of the participating countries with the goal to encourage people to capture pictures of these sights, and to put them under a free licence which can then be re-used not only in Wikipedia but everywhere by everyone.

Currently, around 32,000+ images have been uploaded so far, which makes this program one of the highest image uploading program so far. Ranging from Van Vihar National Park to The natural beauty of Assam, participants have covered Indian Heritage Panorama.

To check image count so far, You can visit our Category page To view photos and the details of the event, Please Click here.

WikiConference India 2016 (WCI 2016)
WMIN is actively involved in the organizing the WCI 2016, including Scholarship, Finance & Sponsorship Committees.

Current Updates of the event

 * PEG request for WCI 2016 has been approved.
 * Phase 1 filtering of scholarship applications has been done. Among 450+ applications, 200+ applications have been shortlisted for final review. We are expecting to announce the results by July first week.
 * WCI 2016 has announced its Call for Participation to submit proposals for paper presentations, lightning talks, and workshops.
 * WikiConference India organizers have started the Punjab edit-a-thon. It is a gift from all Indian language communities for the Punjabi community which is hosting the conference. The community which will add most number of bytes or words will be awarded a trophy.
 * WCI organizers are taking inputs from the community for the conference Code of Conduct.

WMIN participation in TTT and MWT
EC member Abhinav Srivastava and Sanket Oswal attended Train-the-Trainer (TTT) and MediaWiki Training (MWT) as Resource attendees.

TTT (Train-the-Trainer) was held in Bangalore on 15th- 17th June 2016. It was attended by English, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Assamese, Kannada, Maithili, Marafthi , Urdu , Odia wikipedians.

MWT (MediaWiki Training) - a residential training workshop to groom technical leadership skills among the Indian Wikimedia community members. It was orgranized on 17th- 19th May 2016 in Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.

Quarterly Meetup with CIS-A2K
WMIN & CIS-A2K scheduled their quarterly meetup on 18th June in Bangalore

Wikipedia Summit Nashik 2016
Wiki Summit Nashik was organized on 26th June 2016 at IEI hall, Nashik. The event provided a common platform for all Wikimedians to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other information. The Summit was open for participation of existing editors and for students who wish to learn wikipedia editing.

This summit was funded by WMF & supported by Wikimedia India.

=Featured Wikimedian of the month=

Featured Wikimedian for June
Kartik Mistry is the most prolific Wikipedian on Gujarari Wikipedia in recent times. He has 10,000+ edits on Gujarati Wikipedia, 1,000 on English Wikipedia, 5,000+ on Wikidata. He has uploaded 100 pics on Commons. He is member of Language Team of Wikimedia Foundation. As told by his fellow community member Nizil shah, Kartik was highly instrumental in creating Language Input Tool which made editing in vernacular languages easier. Kartik is now currently working with Language Team which has created a very useful Content Translation Tool. This tool is one of the most useful tools ever created in recent times. This Content Translation Tool was used to translate more than 80,000 articles in a span of 1.5 years.

=Other Activities & News in India=

Upcoming Phone survey
Global Reach Statement by Global Reach team, WMF - "In order to better inform our projects and partnerships, we are conducting phone surveys to help understand Wikipedia’s usage in the regions we work on. We started with Ghana, followed by Mexico and Nigeria, and India is next. The survey will begin in the coming days, and 6000 people will be contacted on their mobile phones with the option of answering the survey in the most commonly used languages in their state."

WMF Completes its New Readers research in Delhi & Chennai
The WMF team has successfully completed its New Readers research in Delhi & Chennai in June.

The aim of this Research survey was to -


 * Increase engagement and retention in our current core markets of North America and Western Europe.


 * Increase our reach with New Readers in the developing countries

This initiative focuses on qualitative and quantitative research about the readers.

For more details, Please visit here for more details.

=Wikimedia India Blog= This Month's article was written by Yohann Thomas from Hyderabad
 * How a Project united the Indian community

=In the Media=

· Local youth spreads Nalgonda fame globally - Pranayraj Vangari(Telugu wp)- The Hans India, Jun 25,2016

· Wikipedia founder thinks French attempt to extend EU privacy law could stir global censorship - Reuters  Jun 10

· Wikipedia Founder Defends Wikipedia Zero - CXOtoday News Desk    Jun 01, 2016

· Women and Wikipedia (Blog) - ET Blog June 4, 2016

· 4 Easy Tips to Export Wikipedia for Offline Use - Gizbot 19 June