Reports/Oct-Dec 2017

Results of Wiki Loves Uniformed Services
Wiki Loves Uniformed services was a public photo competition on Wikimedia Commons to increase the count of good images of various uniformed services operating in India. The results can be seen at here.

Results of Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 in India
Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 in India was successfully concluded on 30 September 2017. The top ten photographs were selected by the organizers, and submitted to WLM International Jury Team. Complete results can be see here. The winner of WLM 2017 in India (pictured) is also the Global winner of Wiki Loves Monuments 2017.

VVIT Edit-a-thon Part 2
After the first edit-a-thon in September 2017, a follow-up workshop was conducted on 23 & 25 November 2017 at Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. As a result of the workshop, a college level Wikipedia club has been successfully formed. A total of 33 editors have been trained on English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

Hindi Wikimedians Technical Meet
Hindi Wikimedians organized a two-day technical training workshop on 11–12 November 2017 at Jaipur, to provide training to current editors for the maintenance and management of Wikipedia and technical training to existing reviewers, rollbackers, managers, administrators of Hindi Wikimedia projects. This meet was attended by approximately twenty people.

Tooryanaad 2017
Tooryanaad (तूर्यनाद) is the annual Hindi festival of the Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology organised by राजभाषा कार्यान्वन समिति. It is the biggest Hindi festival organised by any technical institute of India. This year, Wikimedians from the Hindi community organized a worshop as a part of the festival. Total of 37 participants attended this session.

SAARC Meetup at Wikimedia Diversity Conference
A SAARC meetup was organized during Wikimedia Diversity Conference on 3 November, 2017. Eight people attended the meetup and discussed about increasing diversity in SAARC context. During the meetup, all participants agreed to the need for creating and enforcing friendly space policies in Indic language Wikimedia projects. One of the suggestions was to create a diversity mailing list and a Safety team for SAARC countries. The entire discussion can be seen here.

Pilot project to support Indian language Wikipedias launched
The Wikimedia Foundation, in partnership with Google and the Centre for Internet and Society launched A pilot project to address local online knowledge content gaps in India has been launched. The project is designed to engage and support active Wikipedia volunteers to produce valuable new content in local Indian languages. The pilot will run from November 2017 to May 2018 and will collaborate with Wikimedia India chapter, Wikimedia user groups, and may involve up to ten Indian language Wikimedia communities based on their interest and participation. Complete details can be seen here.

October
User:محمد شعیب (Muhammad Shuaib) is primarily an Urdu Wikipedia editor, who has been anonymously editing since August 2012. Though the user has been reading Wikipedia since 2005, only in 2012 he started editing when he found some factual errors in an Urdu article. He counts almost 40,000 global contributions along with being a bureaucrat and sysop of Urdu Wikipedia.

The user envisions to prosper and build a unique rich online source of free knowledge in Urdu, and feels that Wikipedia is the way for it. He also contributes to Wikidata, Arabic and English Wikipedia every now and then. He says that Wikidata is a great initiative, that if used to its full potential, make the lives of editors easy. His message to newcomers is; "I would welcome them to world of free knowledge, and tell them to continue your contributions, it would be pride for you and your generations as well".

November
J. Balaji is one of the top contributors from the Tamil Wikimedia community. Though he started contributing since 2009, he was quite active after his participation in WikiConference India 2011. Initially he started contributing to Tamil Wikipedia, but was later attracted towards Tamil Wikisource, Tamil Wiktionary, and Wikidata. His global contributions count to whooping 2,50,000 edits. He is an admin on Tamil Wiktionary.

After his interaction with Mr. Loganathan ( User:Info-farmer ), Balaji was very much motivated to contribute to Wikimedia projects. He says, "When I was editing in Tamil Wikipedia, I used to translate science articles from English to Tamil. But faced problem in finding equivalent Tamil words. The English to Tamil dictionaries were inadequate. Hence I felt the need to work in the Tamil Wiktionary. After a while there was a collaboration with Tamil Wikisource and Tamil Nadu Government through Tamil Virtual University through 2000 CC0 books were uploaded".

As an active contributor to Wikidata, he says that the vision of Wikimedia movement is, "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge", but with Wikidata we can make it, "Imagine a world in which every single human being and every single machine can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Apart from regular contributions, he also created templates to Tamil Wikimedia projects, and also maintains Tamil Wikisource's official Twitter handle.

Balaji hails from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, and is a post-graduate is Physics. He currently works as a Senior Geophysicist in Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC).

December
Hrishikes Sen is one of the most active contributors from the Bengali community. Though he started editing English and Bengali Wikipedia in 2007, he had to take a long break due to professional constraints. Later he started working on Bengali Wikisource from 2012, and ever since, he has been an active contributor, and expanded to English Wikisource as well. With more than 45,000 global edits, he is an admin on English Wikisource.

As a child, Hrishikes always found reading books as a fascinating task. He says that he finds reference books as interesting as mystery novels. That interest, over years motivated him to contribute to Wikisource. The journey and motivation behind his contributions to Wikisource can be read from a post on WMF's blog, [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/07/25/why-i-wikisource/ Why I contribute to Wikisource? ]. He says that till date he's been only active online, but he plans to do outreach in the coming future. He hopes that attending the 10th Anniversary Celebratory Workshop of Bengali Wikisource in Kolkata on 10 December may be a harbinger to his future offline activities.

Hrishikes believes that Wikisource will one day emerge as of the top digital libraries in the world, and says that as a store-house for primary and secondary source materials for Wikipedia, the importance of Wikisource is steadily becoming invaluable. Much of his time, Hrishikes spends working around Indian works, with a special focus on the works of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Rabindranath Tagore. Apart from being a proofreader, he uploaded more than 750 books spreading over five languages to Wikimedia Commons.

Hrishikes hails from Kolkata, but is presently based in Lucknow. By profession, he is a doctor serving in paramilitary forces. To his Bengali friends, he welcomes them to contribute to Bengali Wikisource which has more than 676,000 that have completed Optical Character Recognition and are waiting to be proofread.

Bhubaneswar Heritage Edit-a-thon
A public writing competition around the city of Bhubaneswar's culture and history was held in October-November 2017. The goal of this first edition is to improve and translate Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items of important monuments and temples, in and around Bhubaneswar. The Edit-a-thon witnessed more than 50 participants.

Gujarati Wikisource celebrated 100 books
On 02 October 2017, Gujarati Wikisource has completed digitization of 100 books. The first book was started on 18 March 2012 and within period of 5.5 years, the feat of 100 books was achieved.

Community Outreach Coordinator (India) appointed
Wikimedia Foundation appointed a long-term Wikipedia, Satdeep Gill, as the Community Outreach Coordinator for India. Satdeep will be closely working New Readers team to bring more readers to Wikipedia in India.

Call for Wikimania Scholarships
Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2018 which is being held in Cape Town, South Africa on July 18–22, 2018 are now being accepted. Applications are open until Monday, 22 January 2018 23:59 UTC. For more information, see https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships. To apply: https://scholarships.wikimedia.org/apply.

Malayalam Wikipedia celebrates 15th Birthday
21 December 2017 marks the 15th Birthday Malayalam Wikipedia. On the occasion, Malayalam community organized meetups at various locations including New Delhi, Malappuram, Wayanad, Kattappana, Thodupuzha, Kasargod, Kuwait, Kollam, Kozhikode, Kottayam.