Reports/Sep&Oct 2016

=Events=

Wiki Loves Monuments India 2016
Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest around cultural heritage monuments in September. Starting from the Netherlands in 2010 and organized on a European level in 2011 and global level in 2012. The organizers include Karthik Nadar,Kiran Ravikumar & Naveen Francis supported by Wikimedia India. Karthik, Kiran & Naveen have been past organizers of Wiki loves monuments held in previous years.

Heritage walk
Heritage walks are localized activities organized by local community members. The Heritage walk was held in 10 locations across India with almost 70 members participating. For more details, check this - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2016_in_India/Heritage_Walk

Images uploaded
Over 37,000 images were uploaded by India, making it the highest uploader amongst the other participating countries

Indian Institute of Management(IIM), Shillong + Wikimedia India : Collaboration
Wikimedia India would be expanding the outreach of Wikimedia Projects to Indian Institute of Management, Shillong (IIM-S). Wikimedia India has recently received an official invitation to hold an interactive session with IIM-S students via video calling

Representation of Indian community at Lua Workshop
Rudra Pratap Sinha will be representing the Indian community & Wikimedia India at the Lua Workshop which will take place in San Francisco, CA, on October 13–14, 2016 http://www.lua.org/wshop16.html

Resignation by Abhinav
Abhinav Srivastava who was Executive committee member from November 2016 resigned from his post 21st October 2016. Wikimedia India wishes him all the best for his future endeavors.

Co-option of Santosh as EC member
Santosh Shingare was Co-opted on 24th October 2016. He brings on board a great level of experience in organizing Wikipedia related workshops, events & hackathons.

Creation of SAARC mailing list
During WCI 2016, representatives from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) held a short meeting. One of the outcomes of the meetings was to create a SAARC mailing list. SAARC mailing is the first attempt for SAARC Wikimedians to come on a common platform for discussions and doing programs together. The interested Indian community members may subscribe to the mailing list.

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-saarc =Featured Wikimedian of the month=

Featured Wikimedian – September 2016
Ananya Modal, the unsung hero of Bengali Wikipedia who is often credited as the butterfly-wikipedian, for starting the initiative of Wiki Loves Butterfly, the first ever project in India to take photographs of butterflies. She started editing on July 2015 and in just 13 months she has more than 9,051 edits globally. With special interest on topics related to butterfly, venomous snake and biochemistry she made over 90 articles on Bengali language Wikipedia. She got the idea of doing Wiki Loves Butterfly, when she discovered that Wikimedia Commons don't have enough photographs of butterflies. Over the course of 6 months, the project helped in getting more than 602 pictures, 53 articles on butterflies. She is now interested to work on Wikispecies, to help improve the coverage on butterflies found in West Bengal.

=Other news=

WMF FDC appointments
The WMF Board of Trustees decided on appointing the following four candidates to FDC The resolution can be found below https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Funds_Dissemination_Committee_Membership_2016
 * Garfield Byrd (User:Gtbiv)
 * Anne Clin (User:Risker)
 * Bishakha Datta (User:Bishdatta)
 * Candelaria Laspeñas (User:Cande_laspe)

Kolkata Wikipedia Meetup 19
It was held on 10th September in Kolkata. It was attended by many active community members. There discussions on many topics including article expansion in Bengali Wikipedia & a doubt clearing session

New Readers Research Presentation
On September 28th, 2016 the new readers project team held a presentation to review the research findings of the New Readers project. In this presentation, there was a review of the critical research findings from Mexico, India, and Nigeria. You can find the link to the review below
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYymUXRzpU4
 * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers

Indic Wikisource Update
After the implementation of the Google OCR script to all the Indic Wikisource projects, there is an accelerated increase in the statitics.The Wikisource community has published the following updates for Indic Wikisource
 * September 2016
 * October 2016