Template:WikiPatrika/2011-06/Community News/en

English News
Indians working on English Wikipedia comprise perhaps one of the most active wiki communities from India. The efforts of Indian Wikipedians on English wikipedia is coordinated through Wikiproject India. There are plans to create a new mailing list for co-ordinating the efforts of India related articles and associated Wikipedians in English Wikipedia.

Wikiproject India
A WikiProject is a project by a group of editors to manage and collaborate articles on a specific topic or family of topics within the Wikipedia. WikiProject India or WP:INDIA is one of the largest Wikiprojects on the English Wikipedia. It is a group dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to the Republic of India and the history and culture of the Indian subcontinent.

The project was originally started by veteran Wikipedian User:Ganeshk in  2006 July. There were only 35 featured articles and 2 GAs related to India at the commencement of the WikiProject.

The goals of this group are three-fold:
 * provide guidelines and recommendations for articles that describe aspects of India.
 * improve Wikipedia's coverage of India by creating, expanding, and maintaining factual articles.
 * serve as a place for discussion.

To achieve the goals, this project group has developed features to help in  managing its work. This includes Departments, which coordinate work on certain tasks, such as peer review or project-wide collaboration, and Work Groups that focus on content and articles related to India - such as cities, politics and culture.

Departments include – Assessment, Automation, Cartography, Collaboration, Outreach,  Peer review, Photography, Translation, and Anti Vandalism. Tasks entrusted to departments include authoring, maintaining the project pages, administering portals, adding articles, reviews, managing the project, and so on. Workgroups include Geography (we have wikigroups for each state and UTs), Religion, Media & communications (One each for  Cinema and Television). We have dedicated workgroups for Maps of India and Transport systems in India. We also have Indian wikipedians who contribute to various other global communities like for UN workgroups, Cricket workgroups and different scientific / technology / cultural  workgroups/wikiprojects. We now have around 48 workgroups on India-related sub-topics and ~350 active members under WP:INDIA At the time of the previous newsletter in 2010 September, the project had 78,000+ India related articles under the project scope, with 60 Featured  Articles (FA), 16 featured lists, and 132 Good articles (GA). Currently there are more than 83,000 articles under the project banner. While the Featured Articles dropped by one, the Featured lists and Good Articles  leaped to 19 and 154 respectively.


 * The Indian Barnstar of National Merit is given to Wikipedians in recognition to exemplary contribution to the project and has been awarded to more than 100 Wikipedians.


 * India Noticeboard en:WT:INB / Wikipedia talk:Noticeboard for India-related topics” is the the centre of discussion on Indian articles and other India related stuff on Wikipedia.


 * India Quiz or en:WP:PINQ is a popular forum of interaction among Indian Wikipedians. It runs as a friendly competition among Wikipedians to test  and improve the knowledge of India.


 * There are more than 61 Indian or Indian-orgin editors with more than 10,000 edits on English Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IND_EDITS) This is an increase from 45 Wikipedians during the previous newsletter in September 2010.


 * AlexNewArtBot identifies newly created articles that are potentially being within the scope of the project, based on the India ruleset.