Reports/December 2011 Report

Dear all,

The Wikimedia India Chapter wishes everyone a very happy new year !!!

We are delighted to present the last monthly Wikimedia India report of the year 2011, almost a year after the chapter received the formal recognition from the Government of Karnataka on 3 January 2011. The journey so far wasn't easy, but we appreciate your continued patronage, support and participation.

Organisational Updates
Formation of Task Forces:

As announced earlier, with the objective of increasing the engagement and participation of the members of the chapter actively in various initiatives, the India chapter has come up with focused Task Forces for coordinating and driving various chapter activities [1]. There are two types of Task Forces - Project Task Forces and Operations Task Forces. The Project Task Forces are focused on growing the Wikimedia projects. The Operations Task Forces are critical functions to enable the Project Task Forces and the Chapter in growing the movement. The operations group consists of Administration, Fund raising, & Communications. The Projects task force consists of City and Langugage SIGs and Special Projects. The new task forces will be led by the following people:


 * Anirudh Bhati, Head, Fundraising.
 * Arun Ramarathnam, Chair, Special Projects.
 * Srinivas Gunta, Head, Administration.
 * Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Chair, City and Language Special Interest Groups.
 * Tinu Cherian, Head, Communications, PR & Media Relations.

Membership: The Chapter membership stands at 190 members as of 31 December 2011.

Donations: Total donations received in Dec 2011 - INR 700 Average donations in Dec 2011 - INR 350

FCRA: Our application for FCRA prior permission under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act with the Government of India is still pending. An official from the Home Ministry has visited Arjuna Rao Chavala, President.

Internet Relay Chat(IRCs): From time to time, Wikimedia India conduct planned online IRC chat sessions. The Dec 17, 2011 was anchored by Arun with the focus on Chapter City & Language Special Interest Groups. [2]

Board Meetings: The Chapter Executive Committee had two Tele-conference meetings in the month of December (dated 07 Dec and 14 Dec, 2011). The Wikimedia India chapter and Wikimedia Foundation had one joint co-ordination call on 21 Dec 2011, which was attended by Arjuna Rao Chavala, Arun Ramaratnam, Naveen Francis, Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Tinu Cherian, Anirudh Bhati, Asaf Bartov and Hisham Mundol. The summary of the joint coordination call was shared earlier [3].

City and Language Special Interest Groups
City and Language Special Interest Groups are a mechanism to engage the diverse interests of members across India. The objective is to grow the wiki projects in their areas of interest by reviewing the status, planning and executing events of interest through growing the community involvement. The leadership of these groups is part of the extended leadership of the Chapter.

The Wikimedia Chapter is proud to announce the appointment of the next batch of City and Language Special Interest Group Chairs [4] as given below: City
 * Delhi SIG - Noopur Raval (noopur [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
 * Bangalore SIG - RadhaKrishna (Arkrishna [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
 * Mumbai SIG - Kundan Amitabh (kundan.amitabh [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
 * Pune SIG - Mandar Kulkarni(mandar.kulkarni [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
 * Kolkata SIG - Kalyan Sarkar (kalyan [at] wikimedia [dot] in)

Languages
 * English SIG - Ashwin Baindur (ashlin [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
 * Kannada SIG - Omshivaprakash H L (omshivaprakash [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
 * Marathi SIG - Mahitgar (mahitgar [at] wikimedia [dot] in)
 * Telugu SIG - Rahimanuddin Shaik (rahimanuddin [at] wikimedia [dot] in)

The current sign-ups of Members for the SIGs are as follows:

City Special Interest Groups

Language Special Interest Groups

Events
A round-up of Wikimedia events and initatives around the nation is as follows.


 * Wiki Academy @Jaya Engineering college  ( 10 Dec 2011) : The first Wiki Academy in Jaya Engineering college, Chennai,[5] was organized by the Wikimedia chapter and co-hosted by Jaya FOSS Club. Odia Wiki Chair & Chapter member, Subhashish Panigrahi explained basics of Wikipedia, how it is edited by millions of volunteers, how Wikipedia is exclusively encyclopedic and kind of articles and notability of articles in Wikipedia, how Wikipedians communicate and form community, and organization of Wikimedia foundations and active projects. Then he took the audience through active editing by signing up, searching for articles, choosing articles to create. Then he demonstrated about creating an article by using the Edit toolbar, citing the text by searching the web and uploading and adding pictures in articles. The editing session was followed by a Q & A session. Hisham Mundol, Consultant, Wikimedia Foundation India Programs, connected with the audience via Google Hangout. Hisham interacted with the audience by giving a talk about the nature of the event, few details about Wikipedia, WMF and Chapter and foundation are trying to do in India. He answered questions raised by the audience. Nitika Tandon, Consultant, Wikimedia Foundation India Programs, later explained about the India Education program (IEP), how it functions and the student-teacher-foundation collaborations through the education program. The photos of the event are available here [6].
 * Coimbatore 1st Meetup( 10 Dec 2011) : The first Kovai (Coimbatore) meetup [7] was held at KGISL Campus, Saravanampatti, Coimbatore. The Meetup was organised by Srikanth Ramakrishnan (User:Rsrikanth05) and User:Sodabottle.
 * Bangalore Wikimeetup 40 ( 11 Dec 2011) : Around 11 people attended the 40th Wikimeetup in Bangalore [8]. The Bangalore SIG Chair, RadhaKrishna presented a talk on the experiences on WikiConference India 2011 and WikiAcademy events in IT companies. Experiences of Wiki Academy in Jaya engineering college and way forward was shared by by Subhashish Panigrahi. Plans regarding Wiki Eleven in January 2012 was discussed. The photos of the event are available here [9].
 * Wikipedia Meetup1 Salem( 11 Dec 2011) : A Wikimeetup was organised at Salem, Tamil Nadu, [10] by Tamil Wikipedians Sodabottle and Surya Prakash.
 * 'Wikipedia Takes Kolkata /Kolkata Photo Walk (18 Dec 2011) : A Photo Walk was organised in Kolkata, West Bengal [11] by Kalyan Sarkar (Kolkata SIG Chair), Jayanta Nath (Bengali SIG Chair) and Biswarup Ganguly. Around 437 images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons as a part of this initiative.[12]
 * GLAMcamp Amsterdam  Noopur Raval ( Delhi SIG Chair and GLAM enthusiastic) attended GLAM worskop in Amsterdam, hosted by Wikimedia Nederland. [13]
 * Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011: Indian Wikipedians participated in the annual CMDA IT Expo 2011, Pune.[14] The stall were manned by Sudhanwa Jogalekar ( EC member), Mahitgar ( Marathi SIG Chair), Ashwin Baindur ( English SIG Chair) , Hisham Mundol and Nitika Tandon ( WMF India Programs), and Campus Ambassador (IEP) volunteers.
 * Malayalam Wiki-Academies: Malayalam Wiki-community organised two Wiki-Academies in Kerala in the month of December at Alappuzha ( Dec 13) and Kollam (Dec 31). The Alappuzha (2nd Wikiacademy) held at St.Joseph Vanitha College was led by Adv. T.K Sujith, Adv. M.P.Manojkumar and Akhil Krishnan. The Kollam (4th Wikiacademy) held at Govt. Higher Secondary School, Anchal West, was led by Kiran Gopi ( User:Kiran_Gopi), Faud A.J. ( User:Faudaj) , Kannan Shanmugam ( User:Fotokannan)and Sugeesh ( User:Sugeesh)

Other News

 * A new initiative named "Featured Wikimedian was started on the public wiki of Wikimedia India. Every month, one Indian wikimedian will be featured. [15]
 *  Tamil Wikimedia contest: The Tamil Wikimedia community has organised an international contest to get more photos, videos and audios related to Tamil, Tamilians and Tamil culture to the Tamil Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. [16] (themed “Eluthu mattum arivanru” or “Knowledge beyond text”) . The Tamil Wikipedia Community and the Wikimedia Foundation have jointly sponsored a prize money of $850 (with nine prizes) for winners. (The first, second and third prizes are $200, $100 and $50. Three prizes of $100 each are for those uploading the maximum number of quality entries. A special prize of $150 is for media files on traditional Tamil arts and crafts. Winners would be announced on March 15, 2012 and they would get certificates with their entries displayed on the front pages of Tamil Wiki projects. The contest (, November 15, 2011 to February 29, 2012) is open to all and is on Facebook [17].
 * India Wikipedians Sengai Podhuvan, Karthik Nadar and Aniruddha Kumar joins Jimmy Wales among others in the Wikimedia Fundraising 2011 banners [18].
 * New Mailing lists are created for Gujarati Wikipedia[19], Assamese Wikipedia [20], GLAM India [21] and India related content on English Wikipedia & related projects. [22].

Milestones & Anniversaries
 December 2011 [23]
 * 25
 * The Tamil Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 page edits.
 * The Urdu Wiktionary has reached 10,000 total pages.
 * 21
 * The Malayalam Wikipedia has turned 9.
 * 18
 * The Bengali Wiktionary has reached 2,000 entries, as a user adds over 1,300 entries for Malagasy words in 5 hours.
 * 16
 * The Bihari Wikipedia has reached 100,000 page edits.
 * 9
 * The Sanskrit Wiktionary has reached 100 entries.
 * The Urdu Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.
 * 5
 * The Marathi Wikibooks has reached 1,000 registered users.
 * 4
 * The Kannada Wiktionary has reached 150,000 entries.

Media Coverage

 * 28 Dec : Financial Chronicle : Wikipedians say Indian govt should ease copyright curbs
 * 27 Dec : Ahmedabad Mirror : " Ahmedabad to go Wiki with your clicks"
 * 24 Dec : The Economic Times : "Wikipedia enlists Indians to be the standard-bearers for its fund-raising efforts"
 * 18 Dec : The Hindu : "Creative Commons: the licence to evolve"
 * 16 Dec : The Hindu : "Contest to add files to Tamil Wikipedia gathers steam"
 * 1 Dec : Tech Marathi: मराठी विकिपीडिया संपादन – अवघड की सोपे? ( Marathi)

We look forward to your continued support and active participation.

Best,

On behalf of Wikimedia Chapter (India) Naveen Francis Secretary

Notes:
 * 1) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Announcements/Call_for_participation_of_Members_in_Chapter_Task_Forces
 * 2) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Internet_Relay_Chats/Dec_17,2011
 * 3) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Announcements/Chapter-Foundation:_Co-Ordination_Call-December_2011_Update
 * 4) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/City_and_Language_SIG_subcommittee_chair
 * 5) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Wiki_Academy/Jaya_Engineering_College
 * 6) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Jaya_Engineering_College_Wiki_Academy1,_December_2011
 * 7) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore/Coimbatore1
 * 8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore40
 * 9) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bangalore_Meetup_December2011
 * 10) http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SALEM1
 * 11) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Kolkata
 * 12) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Takes_Kolkata
 * 13) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAMcamp_Amsterdam
 * 14 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-December/006135.html
 * 15) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Category:Featured_Wikimedian
 * 16) http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest/en
 * 17) http://www.facebook.com/tawmc
 * 18) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011#A_Parade_of_Appeals.21_December_22.2C_2011
 * 19) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-gu
 * 20) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-as
 * 21) http://lists.wmnederland.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wlm-in
 * 22) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-en
 * 23) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Milestones_and_Anniversary