Template:WikiPatrika/2012-05/Community News/kn

Community Out Reach through Meetups & Social Media
Kannada wikipedia community members now have regular meetups happening. Physical meetups are now common here in Bangalore and the Wikipedians staying outside bangalore are not kept away. We now use IRC channel to keep in touch. #wikipedia-kn is now an official Kannada Wikipedia IRC Channel on http://irc.freenode.net.

Kannada Wiki community meets every month from the beginning of this year. These meetups are called "Sammilana kn:ಸಮ್ಮಿಲನ" in Kannada. Here is the list of meetups conducted


 * Sammilana 1: Bangalore - Jan 12, 2012
 * Sammilana 2: Bangalore - Feb 16, 2012 (IRC)
 * Sammilana 3: Bangalore - Mar 07, 2012 (IRC)
 * Sammilana 4: Bangalore - Mar 24, 2012

In April

 * Kannada wiki members have also made use of Bangalore Wiki meetups to meet with other community members and share experience and concerns. In 44th Bangalore wiki meetup, we met with Srikanth from Kannada wiktionary community to hear the story of days when there were only 50+ words. Today we have more than 2 lac words on Kannada wiktionary - and it wouldn't have been possible without the commitment the wiktionary community has shown.


 * In Bangalore Wiki Meetup 45, we again met to share our stories, challenges, ideas around Kannada Wikipedia in presence of Barry from Wikimedia Foundation.

We are on Facebook and we could see people answering to queries of newbies even from the basics and there is more work happening in background to make it easy to edit Wikipedia.

Find us on Social Media
Kannada Wikipedia Group is now on Facebook. Reasons to choose Facebook are many. Mainly, and the list never ends... Facebook Kannada wikipedia group is now have 1900+ members and its generating interest in many more Kannadiga's to learn about "The Free Encyclopedia".
 * Reach out to computer, internet and social savvy Kannadiga's
 * To spread the word 'You too can edit Wikipedia'
 * To spread the word 'Your language is also there on wikipedia'
 * To teach 'Its not quite hard to share knowledge'

http://www.facebook.com/groups/kannadawikipedia | kannadawikipedia@groups.facebook.com

IRC : Official Kannada wikipedia IRC Channel #wikipedia-kn on http://irc.freenode.net

Wikipatrika Is available in Kannada
Why not tell the story about Kannada Wikipedia & Its community in its own language. Here we make it easy for every one to record the activities happening around Kn:wiki live. | ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪತ್ರಿಕೆ

Special Interest Projects Around Kannada Wikipedia
It is always a pleasure to work as a community on a specific task or a project. It is always fun. Here is one such initiative which helped us identified the wikipedian's who are around Kannada wikipedia on regular basis with wide spread skill sets. Editing to Scripting, community building to Project Management.

Google Translated Articles Enhancement Project
A Call to Kannada Wikipedians

Dear Kannada Wikipedians,

This mail is about starting an important wiki project to enhance the quality of articles in Kannada wikipedia.

During 2010 - 2011, a project was run in few Indic wikipedias (at least in Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu) by Google to build translation memory for their Google translate tool kit by translating number of articles from English Wikipedia to the respective languages. Few users had raised concerns about this project. One of the the biggest concern was that it generated content without building the community. Also, while there was quite a bit of content added to Kannada Wikipedia, there were also problems regarding the translation and formatting. However, there is also a big opportunity here because there is a lot of good content is generated through this project.

Initially, it was thought that there were 1200 articles - but it now appears that there are closer to 2,000 articles. That means that nearly 20% of Kannada wikipedia has been impacted by this project.

A few of us Kannada Wikipedians have been working on how we can help to improve the quality of Kannada Wikipedia by exploiting the potential of these articles - and we are pleased to announce the launch of WikiProject:Translated Articles Enhancement Project.

We have been having a series of discussions on the project page and we just had an IRC discussion regarding this project last week. Here are the points we have broadly agreed based on discussion in project page and IRC.


 * We have broken up the project into 14 sub-tasks so that there is a proper structure to our work.
 * We have agreed to not remove the red-links in the articles for now (unlike other clean-up projects) - because we want to encourage editors to start these articles. If required we will review this at a later stage.
 * We have concluded that our priority is to improve the introduction sections of these articles and not to bother about expanding sections for now. There is too much work to do just on the clean-up and we would like to keep article expansion for a later day.
 * We went through the list of all articles affected by translation and selected around 150 article for the start of the project.
 * Some of the tasks that are time consuming for users can be automated (like removing extra blank spaces / lines.)
 * We need to publicize this project on social networks and within the Kannada online and offline community to attract new users. The real value of this project will not just be the improvement of articles but also to build the community.
 * The project page always list the articles that community members currently concentrating on. In case any one want to work on any other article, all the articles that are part of this project are listed here.

Please refer to the project page and add your name to the Members section.

Please do join us and please invite anyone else who is interested.

Laudable Achievement
Kannada Wiktionary crosses 200000 words mark

Upcoming Events
Kannada Wikipedia to celebrate its 9th Anniversary on June 9th 2012.

In Media

 * The struggles of keeping Kannada Wikipedia afloat - The Hindu Report