Equipment Lending and Community Support/Report/2016/Bodhisattwa

Draft Report

Wikimedia India chapter recharged Vodafone 3G Internet from January 2016 to September 2016 upon my request. I whole heartedly thank former WMIN staff Ravishankar A., and WMIN President Yohann Thomas for providing the support on a regular basis. I would also like to thank Bengali Wikipedia community for the endorsements for my request.

Pre-support days
I started editing Wikipedia from 2012 but it was only from June, 2013 I became an active editor in Bengali Wikipedia. At the end of 2015, I had created 1400 articles in Bengali Wikipedia, mostly on Tibetan Buddhism and History of India. I was given the administrative rights also in Bengali Wikipedia in 2015. I was an irregular contributor in Bengali Wikisource until 2015 where I had completed proofreading of 8 books. By the end of 2015, I had almost 50,000 global edits in different projects.

From Day 1, I have been contributing in Wikimedia using 2G Internet connection. From 2012 to 2014, it was the only option in my locality, which is situated in one of the backward districts of West Bengal. There is still no broadband connection or cable Internet connection. 3G Internet connection arrived in my locality sometime in early 2015, but higher tariff compelled me to use low-cost Aircel 2G.

It really needed a lot of motivation to work with 2G service. One of the reason, I didnt work much in Wikisource is because it took a lot of time to open a single scanned page. Uploading images in Commons was also a real headache. Sometimes simply saving an edit wasted a lot of time. So, exploring different nooks and corners of Wikimedia was completely impossible for me.

Bengali Wikisource
I started getting interested in Bengali Wikisource since October, 2015 when after a long wait, Google released OCR support for Indic languages. Before that, there was no other option but to proofread books manually, which took a lot of man-power and time to complete a book. I initiated and coordinated for the automation script/tool to integrate Google OCR ans Wikisource and advocated for it in Wikisource Conference, Vienna and on January 2016, Tamil Wikimedian T. Shrinivasan created a wonderful OCR4Wikisource python script which changed the momentum of Bengali and Tamil Wikisource drastically.

So, I started uploading public domain Bengali books in Commons to meet up the demand and until May 2016, I had uploaded 696 Bengali books not only in Commons but also kept copies in Internet Archive. I have also uploaded 52 public domain English books, most of them are related to India and Bengal. I stopped uploading books when Jayanta Nath took the responsibility of mass-upload them.

From then on, I concentrated solely on proofreading and validating books and until noe, I have completed proofreading on 23 books and validated 3 books, out of which 5 books have been selected as Featured texts.

From January to the end of August 2016, I have done around 8000 edits in Bengali Wikisource.