Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Proposal form

The Centre for Internet and Society received a funds allocation in the amount of ₹12,000,000 in 2014-2015 Round 2. This funds allocation was recommended by the Funds Dissemination Committee on 1 June 2015 and approved by the WMF Board of Trustees on 30 June 2015.


If you need to review the edit instructions you will find them in the editintro.

  • Use this form if you are eligible to submit a proposal in the current round, to request funding in the current round.
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  • This form complements your organization's annual plan, detailed budget, and strategic plan. It won't be considered complete without those documents.
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  • Please Email FDCSupport@Wikimedia.org with questions about using the form.

A few terms used in the form:

FDC proposal form terms Wikimedia terms Learning & Evaluation terms


Overview

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1. In order to support community review, please provide a brief description of your organization's work in the upcoming funding period that can be used as a summary of your proposal. (This should be about 200 words, and should be easy for anyone to understand.)

One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalysing the growth of the free and open knowledge movement in South-Asia and in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008, when Jimmy Wales visited Bangalore. From September 2012, it has been actively involved in growing the movement in India through a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for the period September 2012 to June 2014 and through the FDC Grant received for the period July 2014 to June 2015. Based on the 29-month experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed its Work Plan for July 2015 to June 2016. We have more or less followed the work plan template that we developed during the last FDC proposal, as we feel it is comprehensive and gives definitive structure to our work.
This work plan consists of 18 programs across 6 verticals. These are:

  • 8 programs in 5 Language Areas: CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts in four focus language area plans during the last year and has been successful in reaching most of its goals. In 2015-16 we will further deepen our engagement in these four language areas (Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu). Further, this experience and the lessons from it will be leveraged to work on one more large Indic language Wikipedia projects, which is Marathi. We have developed a detailed plan for each of these language areas, which can be seen here.
  • 2 Community Strengthening Initiatives: We propose the two community strengthening initiatives from the last year, that will further grow the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated community, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These initiatives, focussing on building capacity and nurturing leadership in the Indic communities, have been appreciated by the Indic communities and will ensure that growth is sustained beyond the CIS-A2K program. A detailed plan for each of these initiatives is available here.
  • 5 Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects: These stand-alone projects will have clear deliverables in a limited span of time. All the stand-alone projects are more fully described here. Some of these have continued from the last year.
  • Creating Movement Resources: Once CIS-A2K began actively working with the Indic Wikimedia communities, it soon realized that unlike in English there were not many Wikimedia related resources available in Indic languages. This was proposed during the last year's work plans and we intend to continue to work on this during this year too. For detailed plans see here.
  • Publicity, Research and Documentation: Many of the Indic Wikimedia projects, in spite of being in existence for more than 10 years, have not received adequate publicity. Also, the Wikimedia movement in India could benefit from more systematic research and documentation. CIS-A2K will put in more intensive efforts into Publicity, Research and Documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India during this year as per the plans discussed here.
  • General Support and Service to the Movement: CIS-A2K deeply believes in extending support and service to the Wikimedia volunteer community in India. This has been one of the important aspects of our work so far. We have honoured more than 150 requests of all types that we received from the Wikimedia volunteer communities across all Indic languages. This page gives more details about the proposed work during this period.

The work plan includes details of aims, objectives, program activities and expected outcomes. Most of the language area plans were put together in active consultation with the respective Wikimedia language communities. Various inputs and ideas contributed, opportunities provided, and challenges thrown at the CIS-A2K program during the last year by the Wikimedia communities in India and our institutional partners have informed our work plans.


2. Name, fiscal year, and funding period.
  • Legal name of organization: The Centre for Internet and Society
  • Organization's fiscal year: 04/01–03/31
  • 12-month funding period requested: 07/01/15–06/30/16
  • Currency requested: INR
  • Name of primary contact: T. Vishnu Vardhan


3. Amount requested.

Kindly use the currency exchange rates provided by the FDC staff. Also, please use the following numerical format: 1,222.04

Table 1

Currency requested US$
Total expenses for the upcoming year 56,738,247 916,890.07
APG funding requested for the upcoming year 12,908,632 208,603.49
Amount of funding received from WMF for the current year 11,998,315 193,892.77


4. Please explain your organization's rationale if your revenues or total annual expenses will change significantly this year.
  • We did not meet the anticipated revenues of Rs. 74,973,592/- during the beginning of the year and this impacted scaling up of some aspects of programs within CIS. Similarly, with regard to our work in catalysing the further growth of Wikimedia movement in India, we proposed a grant of Rs. 18,406,454/- to scale up our work. However, we received a grant support of Rs. 12,000,000/- and thus we reduced the scope of our work.


Community engagement

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This section provides the FDC an overview of your organization's work with volunteers and online contributors.

1. Which Wikimedia community or communities does your organization work with most closely, and which online Wikimedia project or projects does your organization's work support?
  • CIS-A2K as per its work plan has worked collaboratively through the last year with the following Wikimedia communities and associated projects as part of its focussed engagement with language areas.
Wikimedia Communities Wikimedia Projects
Kannada Kannada Wikipedia
Kannada Wikisource
Konkani Konkani Wikipedia
Odia Oriya Wikipedia
Oriya Wikisource
Telugu Telugu Wikipedia
Telugu Wikisource

Apart from the above mentioned focus language areas, CIS-A2K has also extended support to other Indic communities for community events upon requests and undertook stand-alone activities on some Wikimedia projects during the current plan year. These are:

Wikimedia Communities Wikimedia Projects
Bengali (West Bengal)
Hindi Hindi Wikisource
Hindi Wikipedia
Malayalam
Marathi Marathi Wikipedia
Sanskrit Sanskrit Wikisource
Sanskrit Wikipedia
Tamil Wikisource
Tulu Tulu Wikipedia
Wikimedia Commons
2. How does your organization know what community members / contributors to online projects need or want? Does your organization conduct needs assessments? How else does your organization consult the contributors and volunteers most involved with its work?
  • CIS-A2K initiated the 'needs assessment' exercise during its first work plan for 2013-14 and revisits this component of needs assessment every year, across all the focus language areas.
  • CIS-A2K also actively interacts and engages with the community members via the Village Pumps, social media channels, IRC, email, mobile, mailing lists and over Skype.
  • During most of the community events we ensure that at least one of the CIS-A2K staff member participates and interacts with the community face to face to understand and meet their needs.
  • Also, CIS-A2K, maintains an active community requests page to extend need based support to the Wikimedia communities in India.
  • Remote participation in community meet-ups, whenever in person participation is not possible.
  • Collect pro-active feedback on all the events conducted by CIS-A2K like TTT.
  • We have restarted quarterly meetings with WMIN Chapter EC


Organization planning and reports

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Please provide links to your organization’s planning documents and reports. All of these documents are required unless otherwise indicated.

Your organization's strategic planning documents, past reports, and current annual planning documents, are essential to our understanding of your organization's proposal. If you think you will have difficulty submitting any of these documents with your organization's proposal form by the proposal submission deadline, you should contact FDC staff right away. You may also provide notes to this table here, as well as links to any supplementary documents to this proposal form.

Table 2

Completed fiscal year Current year Upcoming year
Annual plan (including budget) April 2013 to June 2014 plan July 2014 to June 2015 plan July 2015 to June 2016
Community discussion around annual plan see here see here see here
Annual report (including financial report) 2013-14 Annual Report Not required. Not required.
Strategic plan April 2013 to June 2014 plan July 2014 to June 2015 plan July 2015 to June 2016


Table 2 notes:

  • The plans for the period July 2015 to June 2016 are in the draft stage and they will be finalized based on the community feedback, WMF Staff and FDC feedback by July 15, 2015.


Financials: year-to-date progress

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The purpose of this section is to give the FDC an idea of how your organization is receiving funds and spending funds against your current plan.

  • Current funding period: This is the funding period currently progress on 31 March 2015, according to the upcoming funding period you defined in the overview section. This is a 12-month period. For organizations new to the APG process, this will be the 12 months before your upcoming funding period (e.g. 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2015).
  • Year-to-date funding period: This is the period between the start of your current funding period and 1 March 2015. This period may be less than 12 months, since its length will depend on when your current funding period begins.
  • Projected revenues and expenses: This is the entire amount you plan to receive and spend by the time your current funding period ends. Your projected year is the same as your current year, which is a 12-month period.

Table 3

Current funding period planned / budgeted Year-to-date funding period actuals Projected end of current funding period
In currency requested In $US In currency requested In $US In currency requested In $US
Revenues (from all sources) 74,973,600 1,211,573.38 41,612,673 672,460.80 41,612,673 672,460.80
Expenses 64,392,036 1,040,575.30 47,164,837 762,183.77 48,000,000 775,680.00

Table 3 notes:

  • These above figures are an estimate only as on March 25, 2015. The final audited figures might change, which will be shared in the Annual and Audit report of CIS by October, 2015.
  • It should be noted that most of the revenues are designated grants received from various donors for specific not-for-profit purposes and should not be seen as income/revenue, as per the Indian Income Tax Act.
  • There is a decrease in planned revenues as some of the grant approvals got delayed and some of the grant support received was less that what we anticipated. Accordingly the expenses have also been reduced across the programs.


Programs: upcoming year's annual plan

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This section is about your organization's programs. Please do not include information about your organization's operating activities in this section. You are welcome to provide information about activities like administration, staff and board training, fundraising, governance, and internal IT in another section of this proposal form or in a supplementary document. Please answer all four questions for each program.


Train-the-Trainer Program (TTT)

As part of CIS-A2K efforts to further strengthen Wikimedia volunteers in India, the team will organise Train the Trainer Program.

The program will help build capacity and enable community members to conduct outreach sessions independently or with minimal support to introduce Wikipedia to prospective editors in their respective Indian languages. Participants will be trained on various aspects such as presenting with impact, engaging with the audience, significance of body language, outreach follow ups etc. Program will also include groups discussions on ideas, learnings, challenges faced during outreach sessions.

Work Done so Far

 
TTT 2015 Participants at Janapada Loka on GLAM visit.
 
Senior Indic Wikimedians Bhaskaranaidu and Narayanan V.T presenting a memento to Ravishankar Ayyakkannu on behalf of the CIS-A2K team.

A four day training program was organised by CIS-A2K during 2013 and 2015, details of which can be found here and here. The TTT 2015 was successfully executed and 30 Indian Wikimedians from across 14 Indic language communities took part in this program. Based on the learning and experience of executing the project for two years CIS-A2K intends to tweak the program design further to serve the Indic Wikimedians better and will continue to conduct TTT in the coming plan year and hope to reach out to 30 active Indic Wikimedia volunteers as core trainers and further extend support to these trainers to conduct outreach activities.

As part of Train the Trainer 2015 held at Bangalore, participants from Punjab, West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamilnadu, Goa and Nepal were trained on effectively organising Wikipedia training workshops, soft skills and Wikipedia skills. Some of the highlights of the event are:

  • 28 Wikipedians across India and 1 Wikimedian from Nepal attended the TTT 2015 program.
  • Many multilingual collaborative projects between Indian language communities have taken shape during the TTT.
  • TTT 2015 provided an opportunity for peer learning from other Indic communities and assimilating the best practices.
  • A lot of buzz has been created by the participants of TTT 2015 regarding exploring new projects, and conducting GLAM activities in their language communities.

Implementation Plan

 
Celebrating Marathi Bhasha Divas (Marathi language day) at TTT 2015.
  • CIS-A2K will review the design of the TTT based on the feedback that was collected during TTT 2015.
  • We will institute a continuous mentor support to all TTT participants to maximise the impact of the TTT.
  • Mirrored learning will be explored as a strategy to further groom the TTT participants after the workshop, whereby the participants will be able to see and learn from the outreach sessions done by an experienced Wikimedian or Professional.
  • Documentation of the learning and challenges of TTT participants will be actively captured and shared with the larger community.

Projected Outcomes

 
Participants discussing their work at TTT 2015, Bangalore.
  • Provide training on presentation skills and outreach opportunities for at least 30 participants from across 10 Indic language communities.
  • Help participants infuse lessons learnt into their outreach and community activities.
  • Seed outreach leadership in at least 10 Indic Wikimedia communities that could have a long term ripple effect on the growth of the volunteer community and the associated Wikimedia projects.
  • Build on the activities of the trained community volunteers and help them create a ripple effect for better dissemination of activities.
  • Create platforms for Indic language Wikimedia volunteers to interact and to provide a idea exchange opportunity that could lead to the development of multilingual collaborative projects on Wikimedia platforms.


Telugu Wikipedia

Senior Wikimedian Nageswara Rao shares his expriences of being a Telugu Wikipedian.

CIS-A2K has had a productive year with fruitful community engagements and sustainable institutional partnerships emerging during the last plan year. Since February 2013, CIS-A2K has been working closely with the Telugu Wikipedia community towards productively channelizing the efforts to plan and execute collaborative projects on Telugu Wikipedia and Wikisource and in bringing a good ratio of new editors on board. It has been a huge learning experience for the CIS-A2K program to work with the Telugu Wikimedia community and we are constantly looking to replicate the learning in other language areas.

One of the senior Telugu Wikimedians, Mr. Arjuna Rao, in his blog post (in Telugu), reviews the growth of Telugu Wikipedia over the past five years (2009-14) and notes that the growth in the last two years has been spectacular! The blog post explains how Telugu Wikipedia activity has increased by 163.40% in the past 2 years and acknowledges the catalytic role of the CIS-A2K program. We believe that the significant credit goes to the Telugu Wikimedians who have productively leveraged the CIS-A2K program's support. It puts an even greater responsibility on us to keep improving our contribution towards the further growth of free and open knowledge movement in Telugu and other Indian languages. We have many more miles to go. Based on the lessons and challenges in implementing the work plan for two consecutive years, the current plan intends to further deepen our work in growing the Telugu Wikipedia project and the associated community. The plan starts with a critical overview of the CIS-A2K’s work since March 2013 and presents the plan of activities for the year starting July 2015 to June 2016.

 
Viswanadh, Senior Telugu Wikipedian and current IEG grantee at Tewiki11, he was also part of core organising committee of Tewiki11. Also seen is Sriramamurthy, an active Wikipedian and Wikilibrarian.
 
T. Sujatha one of the most active Telugu Wikipedians addressing a gathering in a meet-up.

Journey so far

 
Telugu Wikipedians discussing on future plans at Tewiki11. This discussion was co-ordinated by Palagiri Ramakrishna Reddy garu and te:user:Rajasekhar1961, among participants are Malladi Kameswara Rao.

CIS-A2K has modelled the previous Telugu annual work plans based on the needs of the community and would like to follow the same principle for this plan as well. CIS-A2K team has, as stated in previous workplan as well, realised that institutional partnerships is one of the key activities that should be taken up to strengthen the content generation process in Telugu Wikipedia community. Institutional partnership with Hyderabad Central University has continued and is providing support to Hyderabad-based meetups and events. The Andhra Loyola College partnership has resulted in immense contribution in terms of quality articles on Wikipedia and Wikisource, with about 260 new editors coming on board and 12 becoming very active editors. About 150 thematic quality articles in the fields of Physics and Telugu literature were created as part of this partnership. Annamayya Library from Guntur has contributed their library catalogue and publications as part of the institutional collaboration. CIS-A2K believes that this will be a potential GLAM institution as it has access to more than 15,000 keertanas of Saint Annamacharya and is willing to donate the content as a Open and free Knowledge Resource. The library also serves as an excellent archive with its collection of more than 80,000 books on various topics like religion, culture, anthropology and humanities. CIS-A2K intends to transform Annamacharya Library into an open and digital archive that will help not only local researchers and students but will have a greater impact all over the world.

 
Member of Annamayya library donating his own books to CIS-A2K Team.

Telugu community members, during this year have participated in several inter-Indic community meetings and have also actively participated in community activities with support extended by CIS-A2K.
CIS-A2K has played a catalytic role in supporting the community by engaging with the community at many different levels such as: Institutional partnerships, new editors coming on board, existing editors contributing with rejuvenated enthusiasm, many collaborative projects were started with sizeable creation of new articles, improvement in the quality of existing articles, regular community meet-ups and community celebrations - all of these led to a steady and holistic growth of the Telugu Wikipedia during the previous annual plan. CIS-A2K supported the TeWiki11 organized in consultation with key Telugu Wikipedians Rajasekhar, T. Sujatha, Sultan Khadar, Malladi Kameswara Rao, Palagiri played a key role in rejuvenating enthusiasm among members and have also brought in a significant improvement in building collaborative wiki spirit. It also gave an opportunity for the community and CIS-A2K to begin critical introspection on the growth of Telugu Wikipedia and to collaboratively plan and execute projects. The collaborative spirit amongst the Telugu Wikimedia community and CIS-A2K towards critical introspection is the biggest factor for the growth of Telugu Wikipedia in the last two years.

 
Telugu Wikimedia community participants at Tewiki11.
 
Telugu Wikipedians lead by Kasyap organised a stall at Hyderabad Bookfair, also in the pic are Veeven and Bhaskaranaidu.
 
Telugu Wikipedians Ahmed Nisar and Rajasekhar with Kasyapat TeWiki 10 at Vijayawada.

CIS-A2K played an instrumental role in creating a monthly meeting space for Telugu Wikipedians in Hyderabad and offered its own premises for Bangalore Telugu WP meet-ups. 10 monthly meet-ups were organized since July 2014 which enabled better collaboration among community members and this resulted in effective execution of projects. The below table gives a quick glimpse of the status of each activity that was part of the last year’s plan.

{{
Key Activity Sub Activity Status Update
Cultivating New Editors Institutional Partnerships: To partner with an educational institution or a thematic group or individuals and train them into Wikipedians Developed partnerships with Andhra Loyola College and worked on existing partnership with EFLU and Theatre Outreach Unit (TOU) (HCU). CIS-A2K expects to formalize partnerships with two more institutions in the coming months. Though other partnerships were explored success was limited due to the political uncertainty in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
Small City Outreach: CIS-A2K will identify small cities across AP and Telangana where internet penetration is high and use the connectivity factor to actively spread awareness about Telugu Wikipedia This activity has been actively taken up by Pavan santhosh in Tadepalli Gudem and Viswanadh in Rajahmundry. The other cities where such possibility has seen partial success are Vijayawada, Guntur and Tirupati.
User Interest Groups: Target and enroll at least 4 existing collectives or groups and motivate them to contribute to Telugu Wikipedia Limited success. Brought on board 10 new editors and 2 active editors in the field of literature and poetry. Around 40 biographical articles, 10 poetry related articles were created.
Strengthening Existing Community Capacity Building Meet-ups: To facilitate interactions among community members to create new project ideas, mitigate issues and review periodic growth of Telugu Wikipedia Highly successful. In addition to the monthly meet-ups, three large community meet-ups were organised.
Advanced User Training: 2-3 advanced training programs Successfully organized 2 advanced user trainings. Also CIS-A2K's Train the Trainer program helped four Wikipedians from Telugu Wikipedia Community to enhance their skills who in turn played a key role in organising various events at Tewiki
Content Generation Making Telugu Content in Public Domain Accessible Survey of books has been done against the plan. An IEG grantee from Telugu has applied for a project that will make DLI book catalogue accessible in Unicode.
Content Donation About 50 books are release under CC license by 8 authors.
}}
 
Telugu Wikipedian Pavan Santosh interacting with new Telugu Wikipedian.

In addition to this, CIS-A2K has also undertaken the following activities that helped in the growth of Telugu Wikipedia and the associated community. Organized 12 Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshops :

  1. Telugu Sahityam Project (about 1000 articles were created and quality improved)
  2. Monthly tracking of stub article creation and improvement
  3. Telugu Wikimedians had set for themselves a target of 61000 articles before TeWiki 11 celebrations. It must be noted that special emphasis was given on the quality of articles to be created.
  4. Significant media publicity in electronic and print media.
  5. Social media campaign for Telugu Wikipedia.
  6. Supported the planning and execution of Tewiki11 in consultation with Telugu Wikipedia Community.
  7. Brought Telugu Wikipedians actively in touch using social media.
  8. Created a page with freely available digital resources, which could be used by Telugu Wikipedians.
  9. Created Telugu typing tutorial.
  10. Periodic one-on-one interactions with active Telugu Wikipedians.
 
A community driven workshop at Govt Degree college Khairatabad, Hyderabad. Seen in photo are Veeven and Nageswara Rao Gullapalli.

There were two significant challenges we faced during the previous work plan:

  1. Institutional partnership can result in quality content as well as editors.
  2. Small city outreach can lead to both content donation and enrich the community.
 
Senior Wikipedian Dr. Rajasekhar felicitating a guest at Tewiki11.

CIS-A2K has been able to derive key learnings out of these challenges: Institutional partnerships could be used for diverse purposes and not just for growing new editors - this was made clear by our association with ALC, Vijayawada. When CIS-A2K began implementation of its plan, it was mostly looking to partner with educational institutions to bring on board new editors and to harness the student time in producing knowledge in Telugu under the guidance of the faculty. If we strictly assess the results on these parameters, the proposed institutional partnership resulted beyond our expectations. Andhra Loyola College has offered its guest house for stay for CIS-A2K staff and Telugu Wikipedians while they were doing outreach in and around Vijayawada, and the faculty of ALC have re-licensed about 30 books into CC-BY-SA. This learning will inform our work across other languages too.

The other key activity that did not go as per plan is the small city outreach program. A key reason for this is the political uncertainty in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. CIS-A2K is contemplating on a strategy to work with the projected plan despite the political roadblocks. Another significant challenge is the lack of suitable number of Telugu Wikipedians that can do effective outreach. This prompted CIS-A2K to realize the importance of investing in training a set of enthusiastic Telugu Wikipedians to do successful outreach programs. Towards this CIS-A2K has already executed the Wikipedia Train the Trainer program as part of which four Telugu Wikipedians got trained and are already actively scouting for opportunities to conduct Telugu Wikipedia training programs. CIS-A2K will continue to invest in building a cadre of community leadership that will have a more long term and sustained impact in growing the Telugu Wikipedia. We hope to successfully implement the small city outreach program during the coming year.

Impact

In discussing the CIS-A2K program’s impact we have presented below both the tangible and intangible aspects of our efforts in growing the Telugu Wikipedia. It is important to note that while showing this impact, CIS-A2K is not taking away the importance of the Telugu Wikipedia community. In fact a major part of the credit goes to the Telugu Wikipedia community that has welcomed CIS-A2K, engaged with the plans, understood the program’s limitations and optimally utilized the movement resources. However, we believe that we have been a significant catalyst in impacting the growth of the Telugu Wikipedia and to an extent Telugu Wikisource.

Tangible Impact

There are two ways CIS-A2K is looking at the tangible growth. First, is to compare the growth against planned targets that we had set out last year. The other is to do a year-on-year comparison of the growth against some key metrics across Telugu Wikimedia projects.

Update against the Goals set last year
{{
Parameters Expected Target
(by June 30, 2015)
Dream Target
(by June 30, 2015)
Actual figure
(As of Feb 2015)
No. of Editors 950 1100 863
No. of New editors 220 370 136
No. of Active editors 90 120 64
No. of Articles 65,000 68,000 61,106
% age of Articles
above 2KB size
50% 55% 78%
No. of Outreach Events 15 20 15
}}

As it can be noted from the above table the growth of the Telugu Wikipedia and the associated community is on course and will meet all expected targets that were set out in the last year. While we may see the active editors hit the 90 mark during couple of months we are not certain about retaining it for long time. We are now looking at consolidating the monthly active editor base around 70 in the coming months. It is important to note that the conversion ratio of new editors into active editors has significantly improved compared to the previous years. However, we have no way of assessing if these editors will continue to contribute over a longer term.
It is important to note that during this year some of the active Telugu Wikimedians took leadership in conducting successful outreach events and community events. CIS-A2K is certain that this leadreship will sustain the growth achieved during the last two years and will build further on this. This also gives us a sense that CIS-A2K can exit the Telugu Wikipedia after this year. However, an exit strategy has to be put in place with active consultation with the Telugu Wikimedia community.

Growth of all Telugu Wikimedia projects
{{
Wikimedia Project No. of Editors No. of Active Editors No. of Articles/entries
Jan 2014 Jan 2015 Jan 2014 Jan 2015 Jan 2014 Jan 2015
Te Wikipedia 657 858 72 83 56000 61000
Te Wiktionary 57 61 4 3 88000 98274
Te Wiki Source 49 97 1 11 9000 11000
Te Wiki Quote 12 14 1 1 345 354
}}

The above table is shared to put the growth on Telugu Wikipedia within the larger context of the growth of all the Telugu Wikimedia projects. It can be clearly noted that the catalytic efforts put in by CIS-A2K in Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu Wikisource have definitely had an impact in terms of the growth of the content and the community.

Charts
 
Total No. of Articles on Telugu Wikipedia comparing progress across 2013 and 2014.
 
Total Users on Telugu Wikipedia comparing progress across 2013 and 2014.
 
New Articles created per day on Telugu Wikipedia comparing progress across 2013 and 2014.
 
Editors Per Month on Telugu WP. Its very important to sustain this growth.
 
Active Editors Per Month on Telugu WP. Efforts to increase and sustain the growth would be taken up.
 
Very Active Editors Per Month on Telugu WP.

The above charts give a comparative picture of the growth of Telugu Wikipedia across various metrics during the two calender years 2013 and 2014. It should be noted that CIS-A2K started focussing on Telugu Wikipedia since the beginning of 2013. The above charts clearly demonstrate that the growth trajectories of all the metrics in 2014 is much better than 2013. This could be seen as an indication of the results of various activities that we (Telugu Wiki in collaboration with CIS-A2K) initiated during the beginning of 2013. The challenge, however, for the Telugu Wikimedia community and CIS-A2K is to not only sustain this momentum but to better it in the coming year. CIS-A2K is positive that this will be achieved with the continued engagement and collaboration with the Telugu Wikipedia community.

Intangible Impact
 
Some of the Women participants at Tewiki11. From just three, 2 years ago, we have more than fifteen women Telugu Wikipedians today.

The various publicity efforts in print (more than 20 news items) and electronic media (one television) during this year had helped to increase the awareness about Telugu Wikipedia. Some of the active Telugu Wikipedians also got showcased in the media, which resulted in renewed community enthusiasm. One of the new active editors Pavan Santhosh has taken proactive role in getting media publicity for Telugu Wikimedia. Further, efforts put into utilizing social media (especially Facebook) did have a positive impact in bringing some new editors on board of which one has become an active Telugu Wikipedian. Telugu Wiki Facebook group started by CIS-A2K is now run collaboratively with some Telugu Wikimedians. The size of the group has increased from 250 members to 1300+ over the last one year. Social media is also acting as an interactive medium among the Telugu Wikimedia community and in building community spirit among the Telugu Wikimedians. There is considerable increase in interactions among Telugu Wikimedians due to various subtle efforts such as providing a venue for monthly meet ups put in by CIS-A2K. Also the diversity of the editors on Telugu Wikipedia has improved considerably during the last year. There is a good mix of active editors across all ages. The gender diversity has significantly improved in comparison to the past. From one woman editor, we now have more than 10 women editors on Telugu Wikipedia. There is an increased awareness among authors and writers to publish their works under CC-BY-SA licenses. This is proved by the number of books donated to Telugu Wikisource in the last one year.

Revisiting the Needs Assessment

In last years’ plan, a detailed analysis of Telugu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia Community and their needs and requirements were analysed and a section on needs assessment was part of the plan. Looking back after one year we can say that many of the needs are met and some are met partially. Some needs are permanent in nature. Based on the experience and interactions with the community (especially during the Telugu Wikipedia 10th anniversary celebrations), CIS-A2K has revisited the needs of Telugu Wikipedia and the community.

{{
Need Identified (as on March 2014) Status as on June 2015 Further course of action for (July 2015-June 2016)
To diversify the community through sustained Outreach programs and double the number of active editors Successfully met Will be a work-in-progress. More efforts will be required in the coming year.
Catalyze a better conversion rate of new editors to active editors. Successfully met. Should be sustained through this year.
Help the community evolve a cohesive policy in effectively discouraging creation of stub articles Partly met through practice than at a policy level. Should be a focus for this year.
Recognition of the efforts put in by committed and veteran Telugu Wikipedians Successfully met. Newer models to be explored during this year
Lack of Open-Source culture Not met To be taken up during this year.
Technical Support Most requests were met. One request is pending as the commit is due from language engineering team. Ongoing
}}

In addition to the above the following emerge as new needs

  • Sustaining the growth achieved so far.
  • Building content, outreach and technological leadership within the community such that the growth will be long term without building dependency on a catalyst program like CIS-A2K.
  • Improve Telugu Wikisource as a content repository for the growth of Telugu Wikipedia
  • Creating resources that could be used by Telugu Wikimedians in growing the community. Ex : Video tutorials for editing Telugu Wikipedia, etc.

Implementation Plan

Cultivating New Editors

Outreach sessions have shown a fairly good number of new editors. The following activities have been planned for the period July 2015-June 2016

Institutional Partnerships (Higher Education)

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)
Based on the previous year’s experience of approaching the various higher education institutions the following list is put together. CIS-A2K will focus its energies in building institutional partnerships with the following institutions in developing thematic projects.

{{
Name of the Institution Status
Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada MoU signed
Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University, Hyderabad Ongoing discussions with faculty
RGUKT (Idupulapaya, Basara, Nuzvid) VC changed, fresh discussions to start
JNTU, Anantapuram Two training sessions done. VC changed, fresh discussions to start
English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (Formally CIEFL) Discussions through. Formal Agreement to be signed
Hyderabad Central University (HCU), Hyderabad Informal agreement and support continues. To approach Department of Telugu.
TISS, Hyderabad MoU signed
Dravidian University, Kuppam To be explored
SVU, Tirupati To be explored
SPMVV, Tirupati To be explored
}}
Plan

To partner at least 2-3 of the above institutions in developing thematic projects and create a network of academicians that will actively use Telugu Wikipedia as part of their pedagogy. To reach out to 5 other higher education institutions to conduct Telugu Wikipedia Workshops mainly with an intention to spread awareness and to arrive at possibilities for long-term partnerships.

Execution
  1. Come up with a calendar of events/schedule for each of the institution in consultation with the anchor faculty/s.
  2. Enter into formal agreements with institutions wherever possible.
  3. Introduce and involve key Telugu Wikipedians in advanced conversations.
  4. In collaboration with key Telugu Wikipedians, design and roll-out Workshops and Training programs.
  5. Continuous mentoring, monitoring and evaluation of the new users created under the project with the help of Telugu Wikipedians (i.e. Editor Engagement)
  6. Create social media platforms for visibility of these projects and facilitate need-based technical and online support. For instance, motivate the faculty or student to maintain a blog on the project.
  7. Constant liaison with the anchor faculty/department.
  8. Quarterly review of the project progress with the Telugu Wikipedians mentoring the project.
Projection
  1. Expected to enlist about 150 - 250 new editors on Telugu Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 15-25 people into active editors.
  2. Will result in creation of new 200 quality thematic articles.
  3. Will result in the expansion and quality improvement of 400 existing stub class articles.
  4. Could become a model to attract the attention of bodies like UGC/Universities/NAAC in actively considering the use of Wikipedia as a pedagogic tool in quality higher education in Indian languages.
Small City Outreach (with Community Collaboration)

(CIS-A2K will take lead in supporting the community members)

Plan

Actively spread awareness about Telugu Wikipedia in small cities across Andhra Pradesh, where internet penetration is high.

Execution
  1. Do preliminary research on all the small cities in Andhra Pradesh and collect data on the various metrics including: a) No. of Local Cultural Organizations or groups with Knowledge in Niche Subjects, Hobbies and Independent Projects(KINSHIP Groups); b) Educational Institutions and libraries; c) Data on internet penetration, internet cafes (outlets), broadband connections, etc; d) Virtual communities (like FaceBook communities, bloggers, websites); e) Journalists, College teachers, Writers and other members of the local intelligentsia.
  2. Shortlist six potential cities for focussed outreach in consultation with the Community.
  3. Liaison and build linkages with local hosting institutions.
  4. Train a set of enthusiastic Telugu Wikipedians in executing successful Outreach programs. CIS-A2K will take lead and collaborate with the Telugu Wikimedia community in implementing this project.
  5. Design and Roll-out of Wikipedia Training or Orientation programs in these cities.
  6. Focus on involving the new editors in quality improvement of articles on Telugu with small projects like Village Project.
  7. Nurture local contact institution and community to plan and execute future programs, say after 3-4 programs with A2K assistance.
Projection
  1. Expected to enlist about 80-120 new editors on Telugu Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 8-12 people into active editors.
  2. Will spread more awareness about Telugu Wikipedia beyond the metropolitan context.
  3. Will result in 3 local anchor institutions around which the local Telugu Wikipedia Community could organically grow.
  4. Will result in the creation of 100 new articles.
  5. Will result in improving the quality of existing 200 village/block stub class articles on Telugu Wikipedia in a sustained manner.
User Interest Groups (UIG)

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

Target and enrol existing collectives/groups (both physical and virtual) and motivate them to utilize Telugu Wikipedia as platform. During this year A2K will aim to nurture at least 4 smaller interest groups.

Execution
  1. Identify potential User Interest Groups. A2K team is in conversation with a women writers’ group in Hyderabad, Bangalore Telugu Literary circle, Kavi Sangamam in Hyderabad, Krishna Jilla Rachayithala Sangham in Vijayawada, Young India Volunteer Organization at Vijayawada, Open Minds at Hyderabad, etc.
  2. Establish linkages between these groups and the enthusiastic members from the Telugu Wiki Community.
  3. CIS-A2K will take lead in design and roll-out of Wikipedia Training programs in collaboration with Telugu Wiki Community.
  4. Post training program follow-up.
  5. Incubation of smaller thematic projects around specific themes like theatre, literature, politics and current affairs.
  6. Facilitate support and mentoring of the new editors, by the Telugu Wiki Community, to cultivate into active editors.
Projection
  1. Expected to enlist about 80-100 new editors on Telugu Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 8-10 people into active editors.
  2. Will result in the creation of 50 new articles and improvement of 100 articles.
  3. Will result in improving the quality of specific thematic articles on Telugu Wikipedia in a sustained manner and in improving the diversification of content.
Strengthening Existing Community
Advanced User Training

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

To train existing Wikipedians on advanced editing options on Telugu Wikipedia.

Execution
  1. Community members have approached CIS-A2K asking it to train them in certain areas of advanced editing in Wikipedia such as Template creation and usage, use of mediawiki tools, etc.
  2. CIS-A2K would release a document on creating and using templates, infoboxes, references and citations.
  3. Design a training plan that could be implemented in a session of couple of hours.
  4. Try to implement the designed training as and where possible.
Projection

This advanced workshop is aimed at strengthening about 20 existing Wikipedians at Hyderabad, Bangalore and Vijayawada meetups. Help improve Wikipedia articles and at the same time reducing excessive dependency on the technical resources that are hard to come by in Indic Wikimedia communities.

Training on Copyrights and CC Licenses

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

A need was expressed by many of the Telugu Wikipedians to have a comprehensive understanding of how copyright and Creative Commons licenses work. CIS-A2K will put efforts to create useful materials in Telugu about Indian copyright and Creative Commons. During the community meet-ups separate orientation sessions by experts in the field will be organized for the community members.

Community Meet-ups

(Community will take lead and CIS-A2K will extend the support to the community.)

Plan

To facilitate more qualitative interactions amongst Community Members, with an aim to a) foster creation of new project ideas; b) periodic review and mitigation of troublesome issues; c) foster a culture of collective review of the expansion of Telugu Wikipedia.

Execution

Facilitate 12 offline meetings/events over the next one year and club these with a particular project or theme based edit-a-thon events. Organise/facilitate Google hangouts/Skype calls and IRCs. We'll aim to organise/facilitate minimum of three meetings in the next one year in addition to the above.

Projection

These Community Building efforts will further strengthen the community spirit among the Telugu Wikipedians.

Thewiki Pushkarotsavam (TeWiki 12)

(Proposed by community during Tewiki11. CIS-A2K will extend support to the community.)

Plan

To celebrate 12 years of Telugu Wikipedia at Hyderabad/Tirupati/Vizag. Bring in all active Telugu Wikipedians across globe.

Execution
  1. Create a platform for celebrating a congregation of Wikipedians. Plan a 2-3 day event that would also benefit the venue city.
  2. Use this as an opportunity to train some of the new active Telugu Wikipedians.
  3. Use this as a platform to link the new and old Telugu Wikimedians.
  4. Organize introspection sessions with the community on the growth and development of Telugu Wikipedia.
  5. Chart out plans for the year 2015
  6. Bring other Indic Wikimedians to create strong inter-language networks and projects.
Projection
  1. Biggest congregation of Telugu Wikipedians.
  2. About 70 existing Telugu Wikipedians to be trained on 3 new concepts/tools that has come into vogue recently.
  3. Almost all active Wikipedians would be asked for feedback on plans implemented so far and take inputs from them for forthcoming plans.
  4. An overall discussion on Telugu Wikipedia’s growth by Telugu Wikipedia community members.
Content Generation and Quality Improvement

Most of these projects were discussed at the community level and have been agreed upon. Groups of Telugu Wikipedians will be taking lead in executing these projects. CIS-A2K will offer need based support and resources

Telugu Story Writers Project

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

To create quality articles on notable Telugu story writers.

Execution

This project is linked to the content donation by Katha Nilayam, an entity that has been working for more than 3 decades to systematically keep record of all the Telugu story writers and stories. Using their database CIS-A2K will design and develop a project to create quality articles on notable Telugu writers. CIS-A2K will take lead and collaborate with the Telugu Wikimedia community in implementing this project.

  1. Collect, collate data on at least 1000 notable Telugu story writers.
  2. Develop a basic article structure/template.
  3. Make the articles available to Telugu Wikipedians who can further develop these and create articles on Telugu Wikipedia.
  4. Provide an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the articles created.
Projection
  1. This would bring in at least 900 above start class quality articles on notable Telugu story writers on Telugu Wikipedia.
  2. Improve 100 existing articles.
Lambadi Project

(Proposed by the Telugu Wikimedia community. CIS-A2K will extend support to the community.)

Plan

To create articles on Lambadi culture and language

Execution

Lambadis or Banjaras are nomadic tribes settled down in rural areas of Telugu speaking states with sizeable population in Hyderabad’s rural areas, Warangal, Kadapa and Nellore. They have a very rich culture and language. Their handicrafts are famous. This project will aim to showcase their culture and language. This project was proposed by Telugu Wikimedia community during Tewiki 11 years anniversary. CIS-A2K will extend the needed support to the community.

  1. Recognise and collect content related to Banjaras and Lambadis, probably in collaboration with Telugu University or Tribal museum at Hyderabad and other sources.
  2. Collate and give an organised month on month planning to implement the project.
  3. Take help of M. Malleswara Nayak, a Wikipedian who came up with this idea in collecting media related to the project.
  4. Come up with at least 20 start class articles
Projection
  1. Creates an opportunity to have GLAM projects in the above said museums.
  2. Adds nearly 50 articles onto Telugu Wikipedia
  3. Bring onboard at least 8-10 Wikipedians expert in the topic of project.
Mughal emperors Project

(Proposed by the community during Tewiki11. CIS-A2K will extend support to the community.)

Plan

To create articles on Mughal emperors

Execution

This Project will take Mughal Emperors category on English Wikipedia as its base. This project will be implemented by Wikipedian T. Sujatha with support from CIS-A2K in the form of providing access to databases and repositories for references. CIS-A2K will also attempt to make this as a multi lingual project and encourage the editors from other Indian languages to contribute.

  1. Create articles on Mughal empire and most famous Mughal emperors.
  2. Develop a basic article structure/template.
  3. Make the articles available to Telugu Wikipedians who can further develop these and create articles on Telugu Wikipedia.
  4. Provide an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the articles created.
Projection
  1. Add about 12 complete articles on Telugu Wikipedia about Mughal emperors
Computer Hardware Project

(Proposed by community members during Tewiki11. CIS-A2K will extend support to the community.)

Plan

To create articles on Computer hardware

Execution

This Project will take Computer Hardware category on English Wikipedia as its base. This project was proposed by Telugu Wikimedia community during Tewiki 11 years anniversary. CIS-A2K will extend the needed support to the community.

  1. Develop a basic article structure/template.
  2. Make the articles available to Telugu Wikipedians who can further develop these and create articles on Telugu Wikipedia.
  3. Provide an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the articles created.
Projection
  1. Add at least a 100 new articles on Telugu Wikipedia
  2. Improve about 100 existing articles on Telugu Wikipedia
Telugu Festivals Project

(Proposed by community during Tewiki11. CIS-A2K will extend support to the community.)

Plan

To create articles on Telugu festivals

Execution

This project was proposed by Telugu Wikimedia community during Tewiki 11 years anniversary. CIS-A2K will extend the needed support to the community.

  1. There are year round festivals or fairs celebrated in Andhra Pradesh Telangana both in accordance with Solar and Lunar calendars and among Christians, Hindus and Muslims. A list would be generated for the same.
  2. The same list will be worked upon and a framework for developing articles on these festivals and fairs
  3. Various sources of images and content under free license will be shared among the Wikimedians.
  4. Develop a basic article structure/template.
  5. Make the articles available to Telugu Wikipedians who can further develop these and create articles on Telugu Wikipedia.
  6. Provide an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the articles created.
Projection
  1. This would bring in at least 90 above start class quality articles on Telugu festivals and fairs on Telugu Wikipedia.
  2. Improve 100 existing articles.
Telugu Cinema Project

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

To create quality articles on Telugu Movies of the 20th century

Execution

This project is linked to the content donation by Manasu Foundation (content under public domain), an entity that has been working for more than 3 decades to systematically keep record of all the Telugu literature. Using their database CIS-A2K will design and develop a project to create quality articles on Telugu movies and collaborate with the Telugu Wikimedia community in implementing this project.

  1. Collect, collate data on at least 100 Telugu movies from period early-1950.
  2. Develop a basic article structure/template.
  3. Make the articles available to Telugu Wikipedians who can further develop these and create articles on Telugu Wikipedia.
  4. Provide an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the articles created.
Projection
  1. This would bring in at least 90 above start class quality articles on Telugu movies on Telugu Wikipedia.
  2. Improve 200 existing articles.
Muslim Freedom Fighters Project

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

To create quality articles on notable Muslim freedom fighters.

Execution

This project is linked to the content donation by Syed Naseer Ahamed, a historian, journalist, writer who has been working for more than 2 decades researching, publishing and evangelising people about the contribution of Muslim Telugu story writers and stories. Using his books that are already digitised at Telugu Wikisource, CIS-A2K will design and develop a project to create quality articles on freedom fighters in collaboration with Telugu Wikimedia community.

  1. Collect, collate data on at least 1000 Muslim freedom fighters
  2. Develop a basic article structure/template.
  3. Make the articles available to Telugu Wikipedians who can further develop these and create articles on Telugu Wikipedia.
  4. Provide an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the articles created.
Projection
  1. This would bring in at least 500 above start class quality articles on Muslim freedom fighters.
  2. Improve 100 existing articles.
Sahityam Vedika (Literature Portal)

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

To help bring out major Telugu literary works and their details onto Telugu Wikipedia.

Execution
  1. Telugu literature is very rich, and there are notable writers and their works which has significant encyclopedic value, yet not written anywhere. A complete portal of Telugu Literature could be a lifetime task. But this portal tries to bring in at least 500 articles on authors and their works.
  2. CIS-A2K will provide necessary resources for the successful completion of this project.
  3. Publicize this project nationally and globally through blogs, social media, etc.
  4. CIS-A2K will provide analytical and technical support for the project and encourage the Telugu Wikimedia community in implementing this project.
Projection
  1. At least 500 above start class articles on Telugu Wikipedia.
  2. Improvement of 200 existing articles
Telugu Wikipedia Village Project

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

Support the Telugu Wikipedia community in converting thousands of stub articles into start class articles.

Execution
  1. There are many village articles that were generated by bots on Telugu Wikipedia. Some of the Community members have actively proposed to expand these articles by including publicly available data about the villages (like census, geo-location, etc).
  2. The A2K team will work towards procuring and collating relevant data on these villages through RTIs and other means and facilitate the quality improvement of articles and collaborate with Telugu Wikimedia community in validating and adding the procured content.
  3. Facilitate at least 3 edit-a-thons on this particular theme towards improving quality of articles.
Projection
  1. To potentially improve the quality of about 4000 stub class village articles.
Monthly Stub Article Tracking

(CIS-A2K will take lead in collaboration with the community.)

Plan

To track and improve stub articles on a monthly basis

Execution
  1. Track the stub articles and the editors who created them using a bot and generate list.
  2. Reach out to stub creators and encourage them improve the articles.
  3. Create a week long edit-a-thon to improve these stubs.
  4. Design and run a competition to recognize those who improve the maximum number of stubs.
  5. CIS-A2K will assess the impact of this project with periodic analysis.
Projection
  1. To potentially improve the quality of about 400 articles.
Wikidata awareness Sessions

(This project is proposed by Telugu Wikimedia comunity during monthly meetup at Hyderabad. CIS-A2K will extend support to the community. )

Plan

To have awareness sessions on Wikidata and its usability to Wikipedia

Execution
  1. Have Wikidata discussions as part of each of the Community meetups
  2. Have a wikidata component n each of the projects mentioned above, where labels and interwiki linking will be done with wikidata as platform
  3. Explore other possibilities of including wikidata into Tewiki projects
Projection
  1. To potentially improve the quality of at least 100 articles.
Policy Efforts
  1. CIS-A2K will put in some policy efforts in the two Telugu states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The following efforts are planned.
  2. As part of this we will collaborate with the Telugu Wikimedia community and other like-minded organizations (like FSMI, FSF, etc) in creating draft submission for the govt. of AP and Telangana towards the growth and improvement of open knowledge in Telugu.
  3. Submissions will also be done to some Ministries to consider publishing publicly funded content under CC0.
  4. Submissions will be made requesting the government to license all text books under CC0.
  5. Submissions will be made for the Department of Education to bring curriculum changes to include Telugu Wikipedia and sister projects.
  6. CIS-A2K will also try to hold various orientation sessions for bureaucrats and senior government officials on the importance of Free and Open Knowledge and FOSS.

Goals

Goals for July 2015 - June 2016 (The data here would be updated as per latest available data by May end)

{{
Parameters As on Jan 1, 2015 Expected Target by June 30, 2016 Dream Target by June 30, 2016
No. of Editors 854 1100 1200
No. of New editors 190 (during last year) 220 370
No. of Active editors 70 100 120
No. of Articles 61,106 65,000 68,000
% age of Articles above 2KB size 40% 50% 55%
No. of Outreach Events 15 15 20
No. of Books Donated 50 100 500
No. of Folios Digitized 12000 80,000
No. of Institutional Partnerships 4 3 7
}}
Activity-wise Break-up of Targets
Telugu Wikipedia
{{
Activity No. of New Articles No. of Existing Articles Quality Improved No. of New Editors No. of New Active Editors No. of Events No. of Partnerships built (Institutions/Groups)
Institutional Partnerships (Higher Education) 200 400 150-250 15-25 8 3
Small City Outreach 100 200 80-120 8-12 6
User Interest Groups 50 100 80-100 8-10 4
Advanced User Training 100 (template namespace) 200 (templates to be improved) 2
Training on Copyright and CC licenses 2
Capacity Building Meet-ups 12
TeWiki 11 1
Sahityam Portal 500 200
India districts project 500
Telugu Wikipedia Village Project 4000
Telugu Writers Project 900 100
Monthly stub article tracking 400
Typing Sprint on Telugu Wikisource 100
Total 2,350 5,700 310-470 31-47 36 3
}}


Konkani Wikipedia

CIS-A2K initiated implementation of Konkani Wikipedia Work Plan (2014-2015) in July 2014. Konkani Wikipedia faces a critical problem of low level of activity and participation on Konkani Wikipedia.

Apart from the low level of participation on digital platforms, Konkani as a language faces 3 major challenges:

  • Multiple scripts - Konkani speaking population is limited to 25 lakh approx., and the challenge of multiple scripts further divides this population into even smaller subsets.
  • Dispersed population – Large number of Konkani speaking population settled outside of India which makes it difficult to unite Konkani diaspora towards a common objective or a common movement.
  • Lack of formal Konkani education – There are inadequate opportunities and venues to formally study Konkani in schools and colleges in India.

Needs Assessment

CIS-A2K team is going to work with the Konkani Wikipedia community with renewed vigour and interest during this plan year. We have appointed an active Konkani Wikipedian as a Programme Associate to assist CIS-A2K with the Konkani annual plan.

Community
  • Disconnected dispersed Konkani community
Konkani is the official language of Goa. However, with large number of Konkani speakers living outside of Goa there is a need to promote Konkani Wikipedia amongst the dispersed community members. The Census Department of India, 2001 figures put the number of Konkani speakers in India as 2,489,015. Out of these, around 6 lakh were in Goa, 7 lakh in Karnataka, 3 lakh in Maharashtra, 6 lakh in Kerala and rest live outside of India, either as expatriates or citizens of other countries.[1]
With such a dispersed population, there seems to be a disconnect with events and activities taking place to foster Konkani language. In a small community like this, there is a definite need to go beyond borders to increase the outreach and build that connect.
  • Sustainability
Since July 2013 CIS-A2K has invested a lot of time and effort to build and handhold the Konkani Wikipedia project and community. It is essential to make sure that we do not reach a situation where Konkani Wikipedia community is entirely dependent on CIS-A2K for its growth. The community should be able to sustain even if CIS-A2K pulls out of its Konkani work.
Thus, it is necessary that the existing Konkani Wikipedia editors take charge and build leadership to conduct offline and online outreach sessions, handhold new editors, conduct talks and events, prepare outreach material etc. The community should be able to generate enough momentum to grow Konkani Wikipedia with minimal external support.
The community also needs to be strengthened by having Konkani Wikipedia Admins and Sysops to regulate editing activity to observe high standard of conduct. Very soon the community, in order to foster its growth, will also have to build policies and guidelines that serve as best practices for the Konkani Wikipedia community.
  • Need for diversity
Most of the current Konkani Wikipedia editors belong to the age group of 21-30 and are primarily postgraduate students. There is a need to break through this bracket and involve higher age groups (>30 years old) and other professions such as journalists, housewives, professionals, doctors, engineers etc.
  • Retaining editors
There are 13 editors on an average every month editing Konkani Wikipedia since July 2013. There is a definite need to motivate and retain these editors.

Performance against Plans

During the last plan year the momentum of the activities in Konkani did not continue as the CIS-A2K team had expected it to. One of the main reason for this dip in momentum is because the CIS-A2K team member anchoring the Konkani language area left the team. However, CIS-A2K worked with the emerging Konkani Wikimedia community mostly remotely and offered support and advice. This resulted in the Konkani Wikimedians conducting 3 outreach events on their own in Goa. It is important to note that this was the first such attempt entirely led by the community towards organising outreach activities. The following are the Key activities during this quarter.

  • 3 Konkani outreach events entirely led by the Konkani Wikimedians.
  • CIS-A2K builds institutional partnership with Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa.
  • T. Vishnu Vardhan of CIS-A2K took part in the Global Konkani conclave in Mangalore.[2]
  • T. Vishnu Vardhan of CIS-A2K invited to be part of the Steering Committee of the Konkani Language Planning efforts put in by Jogotik Konknni Songhotton (JKS) in association with Karnataka Konkani Sahitya Academy. Please see here for a detailed Konkani Langauge Plan
Update against the Goals set last year
{{
Parameters As on March 31, 2015 Expected Target by June 30, 2015
No. of Editors 287 370
No. of Active editors 15 20
No. of Articles 687 (in Devanagari script) 1200
No. of Outreach Events 6 10
No. of Books Donated Not planned 12
No. of Folios Digitized Not planned 1000
No. of Institutional Partnerships 2 5
}}

Implementation Plan

Cultivating New Editors

As the earlier outreach sessions have been able to attract and sustain new editors, CIS-A2K would like to engage in further creative outreach sessions for building Konkani Wikipedia Community. The following activities have been planned for the period July 2015-June 2016.

Institutional Partnerships (Higher Education)

Based on the institutional experience gathered by CIS-A2K’s work with higher educational institutions we have factored in the following institutions as prospective partners for the growth and development of Konkani Wikipedia Community. CIS-A2K will focus its energies in building institutional partnerships with the following institutions towards developing theme specific projects that shall create new content for Konkani Wikipedia Community (KWC).

{{
Name of the Institution Status
Goa University, Taleigao (Only institution in India to have PG Courses in Konkani) MoU signed
Nirmala Institution for Education (CIS-A2K is an academic partner and T. Vishnu Vardhana has taught a course in this institution titled ‘Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia') MoU signed
Dalgado Konknni Academy (Premier Institution in promoting Konkani writing using Romi script) Exploratory Meetings
Thomas Stephens Konknni Kendr (It publishes the only research journal in Konkani) To be explored
Goa Konkani Academy (Government supported body with previous research and implementation knowledge) To be explored
Konkani Bhasha Mandal (Active Community Support) Exploratory meeting
}}
Plan

To actively engage and establish institutional partnerships with at least four institutions from the list mentioned above towards developing thematic projects and to create a network of academicians that will actively use Konkani Wikipedia as part of their pedagogy. To try and introduce Wikimedia platform as a creative assessment tool. To reach out to five other higher education institutions to conduct Konkani Wikipedia Workshops mainly with an intention to spread awareness and to arrive at possibilities for long-term partnerships and build volunteers for the Konkani Wikipedia Movement.

Execution
  1. Come up with a calendar of events/schedule for each of the institution in consultation with the anchor faculty/s.
  2. Take into account specific challenges and opportunities at a micro level of institution (exams/vacations...) and at the regional level (festivals/monsoon…)
  3. Enter into formal agreements with institutions to define scope of the activity and project the milestones with clarity.
  4. Introduce and involve key Konkani Wikipedians in advanced conversations and benefit from their counsel and experience during implementation plans..
  5. In collaboration with key Konkani Wikipedians, design and roll-out workshops, training programs and resources such as video tutorials for the Konkani Wikipedia Community.
  6. Continuous mentoring (outreach sessions and Wiki counselling), monitoring (quality assessment criteria and watchlist) and evaluation (wiki meet ups) of the new users created under the project with the help of Konkani Wikipedians (i.e. Editor Engagement)
  7. Create and sustain social media platforms for providing visibility to these projects and facilitate need-based technical and online support. For instance, motivate the faculty or student to maintain a blog on the project.
  8. Constant liaison with the anchor faculty/department for resolving technical and content related issues in real time..
  9. Quarterly review of the project progress with the Konkani Wikipedians mentoring the project and adopting course corrections if necessary.
Projection
  1. Expected to enlist about 100 - 150 new editors on Konkani Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 10-15 people into active editors.
  2. Will result in creation of new 100 thematic articles (start class).
  3. Will result in the expansion and quality improvement of 200 existing stub articles.
  4. Could become a model to attract the attention of bodies like UGC/ Other Universities/ NAAC in actively considering the use of Wikipedia as a pedagogic tool towards ensuring quality higher education in Indian languages.
Outreach Programme (with Community Collaboration)
Plan

Actively spread awareness about Konkani Wikipedia across Goa.

Execution
  1. Do preliminary research on Mapusa city and collect data on various metrics. Eg: Religious Institutions, Educational Institutions, Heritage Buildings, Notable Personalities, Feasts, Cultural Practices,
  2. Shortlist three potential institutions for focussed outreach in consultation with the Community.
  3. Train enthusiastic volunteers to become active Konkani Wikipedians in executing successful Outreach programs.
  4. Design and Roll-out of Wikipedia Training or Orientation programs
  5. Focus on involving the new editors in quality improvement of articles on Konkani with small projects like Village Project.
  6. Nurture local institutions and communities that have been working in the area of developing Konkani off-line and synchronise their efforts to plan and execute future programs.
Projection
  1. Expected to enlist about 80-120 new editors on Konkani Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 6-10 people into active editors.
  2. Will spread more awareness about Konkani Wikipedia beyond the boundaries of Goa
  3. Will result in at least 3 local anchor institutions around which the local Konkani Wikipedia Community could organically grow.
  4. Will result in the creation of 100 new start class articles around the earlier mentioned themes..
  5. Will result in improving the quality of existing 50 village stub class articles on Konkani Wikipedia in a sustained manner.
Strengthening Existing Community
Advanced User Training
Plan

To train existing Wikipedians on advanced editing options on Konkani Wikipedia.

Execution
  1. In order to generate enthusiasm and attention towards Mediawiki activities CIS-A2K intends to train enthusiastic Konkani Wikipedia Volunteers them in certain areas of advanced editing in Wikipedia such as Template creation and usage, use of mediawiki tools, etc.
  2. CIS-A2K would release a document in multiple formats (print/video) on creating and using templates, infoboxes, references and citations.
  3. Design a realistic training plan that could be implemented in an outreach session spanning for only couple of hours.
Projection
  1. This advanced skill based workshop is aimed at strengthening and grooming about 15 existing Wikipedians.
  2. Help improve the quality of Wikipedia articles at the same time.
Training on Copyrights and CC Licenses
Plan

Many of the Konkani Wikipedians are editing Konkani Wikipedia with high quotient of interest but it is essential that these editors must be made aware about the global policies and best practices as well. It becomes very important for the Konkani Wikipedia editors to have a comprehensive understanding of how Copyright laws and Creative Commons licenses work if the Konkani Wikipedia has to go live and attract attention from the other linguistic communities worldwide.. CIS-A2K will put efforts to create useful materials in Konkani about Indian copyright and Creative Commons. This is a cross cutting activity that will be taken up by CIS-A2K across 7 Indic languages.

Capacity Building Meet-ups
Plan

To facilitate more qualitative interactions amongst Community Members, with an aim to a) foster creation of new project ideas; b) periodic review and mitigation of troublesome issues; c) initiate a culture of collective review of the expansion of Konkani Wikipedia.

Execution
  1. Facilitate 12 offline meetings/events over the next one year and club these with a particular project or theme based edit-a-thon events.
  2. Organise/facilitate Google hangouts/Skype calls and IRCs. We'll aim to organise/facilitate minimum of three meetings in the next one year in addition to the above.
Projection
  1. These Community Building efforts will further strengthen the community spirit among the Konkani Wikipedians.
Content Generation and Quality Improvement

Most of these projects will be discussed at the community level and their inputs will be used before we finalise the design for this activity. Groups of Konkani Wikipedians will be taking lead in executing these projects. CIS-A2K will offer need based support and resources.

Sahitya Academy Awards (Literature Portal)
Plan

To help bring out major Konkani literary works and their details onto Konkani Wikipedia.

Execution
  1. Konkani literature is very rich, and there are notable writers who have been awarded at national level. Attempts will be made to make their work available on Wikisource.
  2. CIS-A2K will provide necessary resources and offer critical inputs in identifying resources for the successful completion of this project.
Projection
  1. At least 10 books will be uploaded on wikisource.
Konkani Wikipedia Village Project
Plan

Support the Konkani Wikipedia community in converting several of stub articles into start class articles.

Execution
  1. There are few village articles that were created by NIE students on Konkani Wikipedia.
  2. The A2K team will work towards procuring and collating relevant data on these villages through RTIs and other means and facilitate the quality improvement of articles.
  3. Facilitate at least 3 edit-a-thons on this particular theme towards improving quality of articles.
Projection
  1. To potentially improve the quality of about 50 stub class village articles.
Konkani Writers Project
Plan

To create quality articles on notable Konkani writers.

Execution
  1. CIS-A2K will design and develop a project to create quality articles on notable Konkani writers.
  2. Collect, collate data on at least 50 notable Konkani writers.
  3. Develop a basic article structure/template.
  4. Make the articles available to Konkani Wikipedians who can further develop these and create articles on Konkani Wikipedia.We shall also try to develop a multi lingual collaborative project where Konkani writers articles will be taken up by other Indian languages including English.
  5. Provide an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the articles created under this project.
Projection
  1. This would bring in at least 50 start class quality articles on notable Konkani writers on Konkani Wikipedia.
  2. Improve 30 existing articles.
Content Donation/Release under CC-BY-SA 4.0 License
Institutional Partnerships

CIS-A2K will also focus its energies in building institutional partnerships with the following institutions towards getting Konkani Content Donation/release under creative commons license. These institutions have been identified for their pioneering work in the area of Konkani language. These institutions have a dual advantage of maintaining vast repositories pertaining to Konkani culture, history and social life.

{{
Name of the Institution Status
Dalgado Konknni Academy To be explored
Thomas Stephens Konknni Kendr To be explored
Konkani Bhasha Mandal To be explored
}}
Plan

To try and engage these institutions in getting Konkani content donation/re-release under Creative Commons license. This will enrich the Konkani Wikisource project primarily but will also help in creating quality articles on Konkani Wikipedia.

Execution
  1. CIS-A2K will put efforts in formalizing the content donation or release under CC license agreements with the institution.
  2. Organize public events or functions which would encourage other institutions to follow suit.
  3. Digitization of collections if required
  4. Conversion into unicode wherever possible.
  5. Make available all the donated content on Konkani Wikisource.
Projection
  1. To make available 1,000 digitized folios for Konkani Wikisource
Typing Sprint on Wikisource (Konkani focused)
Plan

To organise typing and proofreading sprint to enrich Konkani Wikisource.

Execution
  1. Identify encyclopedic books that are available in public domain or in free license Creating typing sprints and proof-reading competitions on Konkani Wikisource to track the progress and trends
Projection
  1. About 10 books to be made searchable on Konkani Wikisource.
  2. Could help in improving quality of about 50 articles.
Dictionary Donation
Plan

CIS-A2K intends to approach a Konkani Lexicographer, who has worked on various dictionaries, to re-release them under an appropriate Creative Commons license.

Execution
  1. Signing of the CC re-release agreement with the lexicographer in a public event
  2. Upload these dictionaries on commons and Wikisource
  3. CIS-A2K will work towards making these dictionaries available in Unicode fonts. In collaboration the Konkani Wikimedians these will be used to populate thousands of entries on Konkani Wiktionary.
Projection
  1. As some of the dictionaries are of specialized thematic nature like scientific terms, engineering terms.
  2. Also these could benefit numerous students in the higher education sector who are facing challenges understanding technical and scientific terms and increase the popularity of Wikimedia projects.
  3. This donation could also trigger other authors and publishers to consider re-releasing more Konkani content under Creative Commons license.
  4. Increased public and media visibility to the importance of Creative Commons in the Konkani speaking regions.
Individual Donations from Konkani Writers
Plan

CIS-A2K is in conversation with various noted Konkani writers from all fields to re-release the original and translated texts under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.

Execution
  1. Signing of the CC re-release agreement with the writers in a public event
  2. Upload these texts on Commons and Wikisource
  3. CIS-A2K will work towards making these books available in Unicode Konkani through typing sprints and code conversion
Projection
  1. This would enrich Konkani wikisource and help in growing the community around it.

Goals

Goals for July 2015 - June 2016 (The data here would be updated as per latest available data by May end)

{{
Parameters As on March 31, 2015 Expected Target by June 30, 2016 Dream Target by June 30, 2016
No. of Editors 287 400 500
No. of Active editors 15 40 50
No. of Articles 687 1200 1500
No. of Outreach Events 6 10 20
No. of Books Donated 5 20 50
No. of Folios Digitized 3,500 5,000 10,000
No. of Institutional Partnerships 3 5 7
}}

Notes


Creating Movement Resources

After CIS-A2K began actively working with the Indic Wikimedia communities, they soon realized that unlike the English-language projects, there is a dearth of Indic language Wikimedia-related resources. We have tried to produce some resources so far, which were mostly unplanned outcomes. However, we feel that there is an urgent need for concerted efforts to create resources to strengthen the Wikimedia movement in India and in Indic languages.

Needs assessment
 
An "Odia Wikisource handbook" for new contributors detailing about the project, language input, keyboard layouts and "how to contribute" to the project.

There are two important needs that we would like to highlight—

  • Based on our extensive Wikipedia outreach to more than 3,500 people since September 2012, we have two important observations to share about on-boarding new editors on Indic Wikimedia projects—
  1. It is nearly 10 times less probable for a potential editor to start editing on any Indic Wikipedia compared to English Wikipedia. Even if a visitor to an Indic Wikipedia is super highly motivated and comes with an intent to contribute s/he is lost at the very basic level of typing in the Indic script. Many see typing in any Indic script as a huge challenge, who otherwise are comfortable using the key-board in Roman script.
  2. Second, it is 3 times more difficult to train someone to edit on Indic Wikipedia. Because most of the new editors are lost in figuring out the Wikipedia layout and the "pure" terminology of the interface. Many that we trained deeply appreciated if there is someone to hand-hold them or some resource that they could quickly refer to.
  • After close interactions with many of the active Indic editors and even WP administrators, we have realized that many of them need orientation on certain fundamental concepts that underpins the open knowledge movement. For instance, many Indic Wikimedians would value if there is a simple beginners guide to Copyright and Creative Commons. There is also a need to make available some nuggets of information like "how to file a bug" in Indic languages that could go a long way in empowering the volunteer editors and strengthening the movement.

We strongly believe that creating these movement resources will go a long way in growing and strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers beyond the limits of CIS-A2K program.

About the initiative

Under this initiative we have planned to create resources that could: bring new editors on board Indic Wikimedia projects; and b) benefit the existing Indic Wikimedia volunteers. The resources created to bring the new editors on board could also be used by the existing Indic Wikimedia communities and institutional partnerships, which could reduce dependency on CIS-A2K to conduct outreach.

Work done so far
One of the Hindi Wikipedia Video Tutorials by CIS-A2K.

During the last one year CIS-A2K has created these below resources, which were appreciated by many of the community members.

  1. Hindi Wikipedia editing video tutorials
  2. Kannada Wikipedia editing video tutorials
  3. Wikipedia editing manual in Telugu
  4. ULS video in Telugu
  5. Language Input guide in Odia, Konkani, Telugu, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi

We have also received requests and enquires from other language communities if and when we are working on creating some of these resources in their languages.
CIS-A2K has also developed evaluation parameters for using Wikipedia as a higher education resource. This is being used as a resource by some of our institutional partners.

Implementation plan

Some of the activities in this plan have a larger fit with the larger institutional work of CIS in the domain of Intellectual Property Rights and Openness.[1] We will be collaborating with the Pervasive Technologies program at CIS internally in executing some of these activities.

Creating Wikipedia editing manuals
 
Odia language input in Wikipedia explained in an animated tutorial. This has been used in Odia Wikipedia help page "Chatasabha".

CIS-A2K will take measures to create Wikipedia Editing manuals in some Indic languages during this year. Telugu Wikipedia Editing manual is already available.

Plan

To translate and produce Wikipedia Editing manual in at least 4 Indic languages in which CIS-A2K is going to work.

Execution
  1. Discuss with the community to collaborate translating the Welcome To Wikipedia booklet.
  2. If the size of the community is too small, CIS-A2K could also consider commissioning translation.
  3. Once the first draft is done, get the community to give feedback and finalize the draft.
  4. Print a sample of 100 copies to make them available as resource to the community.
  5. Explore possible opportunities to inaugurate these books at a formal event attended by the respective language community.
  6. Explore opportunities to mass distribute these manuals in collaboration with government/media/institutions.
Projection
  1. Will result in Wikipedia Editing manual in 4 languages.
  2. Could result in mass distribution of these manuals to about 20,000 people across these 4 Indic languages.
Wikipedia video tutorials
Video tutorial in Kannada on how to add an image to an article.

CIS-A2K has so far produced Wikipedia Video self-learning tutorials in Hindi and Kannada as part of its Christ University Wikipedia Education Program. These were appreciated by the Hindi and Kannada Wikimedia community. Wikimedians from other languages too suggested that CIS-A2K make such similar video tutorials available in other Indic languages.

Plan

To produce Wikipedia Video Editing tutorials in at least 5 Indic languages in collaboration with an institutional partner.

Execution
  1. Prepare series of editing tutorials like already done in Hindi and Kannada.
  2. Involve the community in script and designing of the tutorials.
  3. Explore possible opportunities to inaugurate these Video tutorials at a formal event attended by the respective language community and institutional partners.
  4. Explore opportunities to mass distribute these Video tutorials in collaboration with government/media/institutions.
Projection
  1. Production of at least 10 video tutorials in each of the languages.
  2. CIS-A2K will provide 100 free copies of the video tutorials to each of the language community, which they could use for outreach.
  3. Could result in mass distribution of these tutorials to about 20,000 people across these 4 Indic languages.
Essential open knowledge resources

During the interactions with various Indic communities we realized that there is a need to improve the understanding about the legal aspects pertaining to open knowledge among Indic Wikimedia communities. Towards this CIS-A2K will take up the following measures.

Plans
  1. Create (Indian) Copyright handbook for Wikipedians in 5 Indic languages.
  2. Creating CC handbook in 5 Indic languages.

This activity has a major fit with CIS's larger work in the domain of Intellectual Property Rights and Openness. CIS as one of the Creative Commons affiliate also see great value in creating these open knowledge resources in Indic languages.

Execution

This is how we hope to execute these plan(s)—

  1. Discuss with the community members to collaborate translating Copyright and CC handbook.
  2. If the size of the community is too small, CIS-A2K could also consider commissioning translation.
  3. Once the first draft is done, involving the community to give feedback and finalize the draft.
  4. Print a sample of 100 copies to make them available as resource to the community.
  5. Explore possible opportunities to inaugurate these books at a formal event attended by the respective language community.
  6. Explore opportunities to mass distribute these manuals in collaboration with government/media/institutions.
Projection
  1. Will result in Copyrights & CC manuals in 5 languages.
  2. Could result in mass distribution of these manuals to about 600 people across these 5 Indic languages.
Essential Wikipedia resources

During our interactions with various Indic communities a need was expressed to have some essential Wikipedia resources made available in that respective language. While some communities are taking lead in creating these resources, it is quite a burden as most of the communities are small in size and the volunteers prefer to spend time on the Wikimedia projects. CIS-A2K would like to support the community in creating these resources.

Plan

To create the Wikimedia resources like cheat-sheets, how to file a bug manual, how to apply for IEG, input guide and offline Wikipedia in collaboration with the respective Indic Wikimedia community.

Execution
  1. Discuss with the community to collaborate on the tasks wherever possible.
  2. If the size of the community is too small, and CIS-A2K does not have internal capacity in any particular language, we could also consider commissioning translation.
  3. Once the first draft is done, get the community to give feedback and finalize the draft.
  4. Other than making these resources available on respective language Wikimedia projects, we will print a sample of 100 copies of each product to make them available as resource to the community to be used during outreach.
  5. Explore possible opportunities to release offline DVDs at a formal event attended by the respective language community.
  6. Explore opportunities to mass distribute these manuals and DVDs in collaboration with government/media/institutions.
  7. Publicize on social media.
Projection

CIS-A2K' efforts will result in the following:

  1. Wikipedia cheat-sheets in 5 Indic languages.
  2. “How to file a bug - Wikimedia way” translated in 5 Indic languages.
  3. Indic input (typing tutor) guide in all Indic languages.
  4. Offline Wikipedia DVD (using Kiwix) in 5 Indic langugaes.
  5. Could result in mass distribution of offline DVDs to about 20,000 people across 5 Indic languages.

Notes


Odia Wikisource

 
Screenshot of Odia Wikisource's main page.

This project aims to enrich Odia Wikisource with valuable Odia language books, journals, unpublished manuscripts and oral literature of Odisha.Expanding the existing community through both online and offline engagement, expanding the content base ranging from older to more contemporary writing, content acquisition and digitization of acquired content are the four major activities planned. Working with existing partner institutions like Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) and building partnership with new institutions for long term pedagogic programs will be taken forward.

Impact

Tangible impact

The impact of CIS-A2K’s work on Odia Wikisource can be viewed in the fact-sheet and graphs shared below:

{{
No. of Wikisourcers on Jan 2014 (Incubator) No. of Wikisourcers as on Jan 2015 No. of active Wikisourcers as on Jan 2014 (Incubator) No. of active Wikisourcers as on Jan 2015 No. of pages as on Jan 2014 (incubator) No. of pages as on Jan 2015 No. of outreach events No. of celebratory-outreach events
6 120 6 72 11 1978 6 2
}}
Intangible impact
The documentary "Odia: Silalekharu mobile", which captures views of notable authors, linguists, copyright holders on digitization of books and Odia Wikisource. The documentary was screened during "Odia Wikisource Sabha 2014", an e-publishing seminar at Bhubaneswar and Odia Wikisource workshop in New Delhi.
"Odia-Silalekharu mobile (Documentary)" © Produced by Subhashish Panigrahi, freely licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0.
  • With the effort of the existing Odia Wikimedians, new contributors groomed online, and new faculty and student contributors of KISS, Odia Wikisource went live last year.
  • The Odia Wikimedia community and CIS-A2K both collaboratively implemented a three-month long Wikisource Education Program that brought over 55 new contributors (faculty and students of KISS) to the project.
  • After the Odia Wikisource went live, a total of 116 active editors have created 1563 pages in the new project.
  • Odia Bhagabata, a 14th century classic was digitized and proof-read completely where the online outreach and capacity building related to this resulted bringing about 10 new contributors to the project.
  • CIS-A2K and the community together were instrumental to get 81 books re-licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0 and 4.0 licenses.
  • A small community was built in Delhi where 2-3 active contributors are being supported who are planning for outreach and educate Odia people living locally.
  • Various new contributor help tutorials were designed to teach about digitization on Wikisource with basics on enabling Odia language, Odia input in computers, etc.

Implementation Plan

 
Odia Wikimedians with philanthropist Achyuta Samanta during the formal MoU signing ceremony. CIS-A2K signed a MoU with KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) that are founded by Samanta to deepen its work in bringing contribution to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects as a pedagogic practice.
Cultivating New Editors
Plan

Building new Wikisourcers by bringing digitization on Wikisource as a pedagogic practice.

Execution
  • Based on the previous year's projects, CIS-A2K will further its work in imparting the knowledge of using Wikisource as a language learning tool for students in existing institutions like Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) and in new partner institutions.
Projection
  • Build a new community of about 50 contributors (both student and faculty) in 12 institutions.
Strengthening Existing Community
Plan

Capacity building of existing Wikisourcers by building both individual level and group level support system.

Execution
  • Individual coaching to be provided to Wikisourcers who need support in certain areas leveraging capacity building events (e.g. Train-the-Trainer program) and celebratory events where community members gather.
Projection
  • Help about 40 Wikisourcers acquire different skills and encourage these Wikimedians to educate others.
Content donation under CC licenses
Content acquisition and relicensing under CC-by-SA licenses
 
An "Odia Wikisource Handbook" that details about enabling Odia language in Wikisource, typing in Odia and digitizing books on the project.
Plan

To work towards acquisition of content of varied subject areas from authors, publishers and copyright holders, and getting them re-released under CC-BY-SA licenses. The acquired content will be digitized on Odia Wikisource.

Execution
  • Acquire more content from copyright holders already touch-based and partner with new individual copyright holders and/or publishers.
Projection
  • Aim to acquire 30 more books from various authors.
  • Acquire and digitize about 20 books that are out of copyright.
Content acquisition by policy changes
Plan

Building relation with government, public sector and private entities to acquire content and relicense them under CC0/CC-by-SA licenses.

Execution
  • Approaching various government departments in Odisha (Department of Culture and Tourism, Department of Tribal Welfare, Department of Information and Public Relations, Department of Mass Education, Department of Higher Education) and put in efforts at the policy level to ensure CC content release.
  • Quality content acquisition from private or institutional possession and their digitization.
Projection
  • Negotiate to bring into Wikisource about 2000 pages of documents from various sources.
Content generation and quality improvement
In this short documentary Odia-language author Ramakrushna Nanda's son Pravat Kumar Nanda speaks about Wikisource's novelty in taking the Odia language to masses and new generation. Ramakrushna Nanda's six books have been relicensed under CC-by-SA 4.0 license and will be made available on Odia Wikisource.
Digitization of books
Plan

To scan and digitize books acquired last year by both online and offline outreach.

Execution
  • The books will be scanned by both new and existing Wikisourcers will digitize them on Odia Wikisource where the experienced Wikimedians will support by proof-reading.
  • The Odia Wikisource Education Program of last year at KISS will be replicated where the faculty will be training students.
  • Old and new batches of the students of KISS will be formed as groups, and educated about digitization by the faculty.
  • New books acquired this year will be digitized.
Projection
  • About 50 books with about 3000 folios are aimed to be digitized.

Goals

{{
Parameters Expected Target (by December 2014 2015) Dream Target (by December 2014 2015)
No. of New editors 30 60
No. of New Active editors 10 20
No. of books made available on Odia WikiSource 20 50
No. of folios typed and proofread 4,500 5,500
No. of Training Workshops 3 5
No. of Events 1 2
}}


Kannada Wikipedia

Kannada Wikimedian Tejas Jain speaks about the importance of Free and Open Knowledge resources at a CC event organized by CIS-A2K.

Kannada is one of the major languages of India. Kannada Wikipedia has been one of the focus language areas as part of CIS-A2K’s work plan during previous years. CIS-A2K team faced challenges regarding grooming and sustaining the new editors and implementing quality parameters of new articles on Kannada Wikipedia and the implementation drive offered a steep learning curve for the team.The current plan takes into account the lessons learnt from the challenges and attempts to re imagine CIS-A2K work in growing the Kannada Wikipedia project and the associated community during the next year also. The plan starts with a critical overview of CIS-A2K's work since April 2014 and presents the plan of activities for the year starting July 2015 to June 2016. The details of the work plan are available in the implementation plan below.

Performance against plans

 
Kannada Wikimedian M G Harish as a trainer conducting Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Tumkur University on 27 September, 2014.
 
Tejas Jain helping participants of Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Mysore University on 22 November, 2014.
 
Kannada Wikipedian T G Srinidhi speaking during the inauguration of Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Bagalkot on 20 September, 2014.

Based on the experience of previous year and after having continuous discussions with the Kannada Wikipedia community, one of the major areas for investment was identified as having strong institutional partnerships. Some partnerships were already in place. Focus was given to strengthen these existing partnerships and leverage more from these partnerships. Ongoing partnerships with Christ University, and University of Mysore yielded fruitful results. Students from Christ University wrote and created new articles on Kannada Wikipedia. Last year students from Christ University wrote articles of their choice whereas this year they wrote articles related to their discipline viz., science stream students wrote articles on science, commerce students articles related to commerce, etc. Students from SDM College Ujire have added some start class articles (as per Kannada Wikipedia standards) to Kannada Wikipedia. A2K team had expected significantly higher interest and participation emerging from these institutional partnerships. New partnerships such as the one initiated with St Aloysius College Mangaluru is showing promising results. Partnership with Tumkur University has progressed with both the students and faculty showing keen interest. Partnership with Alva’s College Moodabidre is yet to take-off.

CIS-A2K has taken into cognizance the kind of editors who will be introduced via these partnerships. These institutional partnerships do guarantee a new wave of editors which is very crucial for the future of Kannada Wikipedia, they must also be groomed to be editors of quality. Both the volunteer community and CIS-A2K are supportive of the new editors and the work they do on Wikimedia platforms but a firm grip on the quality maintained/expected on such platforms will at an early stage go a long way in grooming these new editors. During this plan an important component of institutional partnership CIS-A2K intends to introduce to the new editors is the difference of writing on an open knowledge resource platform (Wikipedia) compared to their routine assignments and course work. The students shall be made conversant with various templates and reference standards in addition to their orientation to Wikipedia. CIS-A2K intends to make use of the peer student editor community as the first measure of quality control at the college level. The senior students who have earlier been part of the Wikipedia in Education Programme will match the article/content against standard templates that shall be given to the new editors. This activity shall help the new editors to learn the Wikipedia standards of verifiability and the senior students get a chance to revive the basic skills imparted to them during the last year. Once the peer student review committee approves the article it shall be reviewed by a CIS-A2K team member along with a community volunteer. It is only after the approval at this level that the article written by the new editor be made live and the other community members can give feedback and develop the article further. This three fold quality check will hopefully increase the skill set of the student as well as the quality of the content being added.

One of the major needs identified during the consultations with Kannada Wikimedia community last year was the designing of long-term outreach programs with regular engagement with new editors. This year also the community has identified such programs as one of the major activities to be focused upon. Based on this, CIS-A2K gave priority towards conducting these skill building workshops for the Kannada Wikipedia community. A total of 17 outreach programs were conducted during this period. About 1500 were reached out including teachers, students, writers, theatre activists and general public. To increase public awareness, CIS-A2K ensured media visibility of the Kannada Wikipedia in the print and electronic media. Outreach programs conducted by CIS-A2K received a wide coverage and there were about 32 reports covering the outreach activities during 2014-15.

Training videos, produced during the previous year, were already available online. But to help new editors operating from the rural and mofussil areas of Karnataka where internet availability is shaky, at best, it was decided to create print resources as well. Hence it was felt that a printed tutorial booklet should be prepared. This need has been fulfilled and the file is available here.

Open Knowledge Day was celebrated at Mysore on 15 July 2014. This was to coincide with World Open Knowledge Day and to celebrate the relicensing of Volumes 1 to 6 of Kannada Vishwakosha (encyclopaedia) by University of Mysore to CC-BY-SA. This was followed by a meet-up of Kannada Wikipedians from Mysore and Bengaluru at the same place. This ushered in renewed enthusiasm in the existing community and also created a lot of buzz in the media towards Open Knowledge Resources and CIS-A2K’s efforts regarding the Indian Wikipedias.

A monthly stub list is being prepared and listed out in Kannada Wikipedia with an aim of improving the quality of articles in Kannada Wikipedia. But the response from the editors who created these articles is not very encouraging and there is an urgent need for the Kannada community to come up with a plan to tackle this.

Since lot of time went into developing institutional partnerships, which included strengthening the existing partnerships and developing new ones, we could not spend more time in organising regular meet-ups of Kannada Wikipedians as promised in the work plan.

CIS-A2K with the help of the Kannada community has been able to achieve a lot in the area of content donation and has been successful in bringing more books under CC-BY-SA. Further details are listed out in the Kannada Wikisource work plan.

Impact

CIS-A2K's efforts at providing impetus to the growth of Kannada Wikipedia have showed positive results. There is a significant increase in the number of articles and there is a general awareness about Kannada Wikipedia among the public and the media. It must be noted that the absence of a peer group of editors who can work on the stub class articles and take it to a start class article is missing in the Kannada community. This has led to a lot of stub class articles which affect the quality of Kannada Wikipedia. CIS-A2K intends to keep a strict vigil on the stub articles (both manually and with the help of a bot) created and inform the respective editors about methods of improving their articles and also set up a peer review editor group who shall work on such stub class articles as a priority task. The peer editor group shall enforce quality standards such as infobox, table of content and references to the identified stub class articles. However, the number of quality editors and the quality of articles needs to improve considerably.

Tangible impact
{{
Parameters Expected target

(by June 30, 2015)

Dream target

(by June 30, 2015)

Actual figure

(As of Jan 2015)

No. of Editors 1000 1200 679
No. of New editors 300 500 62
No. of Active editors 50 80 69
No. of Articles 20,000 22,000 20,034
No. of Outreach Events 12 15 17
}}

It is evident that Kannada Wikipedia is growing in all aspects, viz., number of articles, new editors and active editors. Total number of articles went up from 17,878 to 20,034 (Jan 2015), the number of editors went up from 617 to 679 (Jan 2015), the number of active editors went up from 22 to 69 (Jan 2015), the average number of new articles per day remained at 9 in 2014-15 (July 2014 - Jan 2015)[1]. The Kannada Wikipedia community has continued to become more active on social media.

 
Number of articles, comparing Feb 2014 - Jan 2015 with Feb 2013 - Jan 2014.
 
Number of editors, comparing Feb 2014 - Jan 2015 with Feb 2013 - Jan 2014.

The innovative Wikipedia in Education Program, conducted in collaboration with Christ University, Bengaluru, SDM College, Ujire and St Aloysius College, Mangaluru, resulted in a number of articles and new editors on Kannada Wikipedia. Writing a article on Wikipedia has been made as an assessment exercise for the students. CIS-A2K has always stressed on the importance of quality determining measures such as references and citations for a Wikipedia article to go live in all its education and outreach programs.

The table below, which gives year-on-year statistics of the Kannada Wikimedia projects, presents a useful comparative picture that will help highlight the efforts put in by the Kannada Volunteer community and CIS-A2K in promoting the growth of Kannada Wikipedia and other projects. CIS-A2K respectfully acknowledges the contribution of the Kannada Wikipedia community volunteers towards various Wikimedia projects and reiterate its idea of 'inclusive growth' for the development of Kannada Wikimedia projects.

CIS-A2K during the last plan year has involved itself actively along with the two verticals of the Kannada Wikimedia projects i.e: Wikipedia and Wikisource. The following tables try to capture growth metrics for the most active Kannada Wikimedia projects. Some of the projects such as Wiktionary and Wikiquote have been completely sustained by the volunteer community. CIS-A2K team wishes to learn from these volunteer driven initiatives and attempt to scale these activities to a higher level. The intention of projecting these statistics is for the purpose of a comprehensive reflection of the work done during the last year and explore synergies between the community led efforts and CIS-A2K team plans. It is the intention of CIS-A2K team to build bridges between its resources, community led initiatives and new editor base for an overall qualitative development of the Kannada Wikimedia projects.

{{
Wikimedia projects No. of Editors (Jun 2014) No. of Editors (Jan 2015) No. of Active Editors (Jun 2014) No. of Active editors (Jan 2015) No. of Articles/entries (Jun 2014) No. of Articles/entries (Jan 2015) No. of Page views per month (Jan 2015)
Wikipedia 617 679 22 69 17,878 20,034 16,38,487
Wiktionary 49 57 3 2 250,167 257,442 419,868
Wikisource 38 132 3 122 1,556 2,114 47,125
Wikiquote 10 10 1 1 106 177 17,700
}}
Intangible impact

CIS-A2K worked towards creating awareness about Kannada Wikipedia this year as well. There were about 32 mentions in print as well as electronic media during this period. Lot of buzz has been created about Kannada Wikipedia on many online news websites, social media and blogs. The efforts of CIS-A2K which have resulted in rejuvenating the community spirit last year continued with the same vigour this year also. People from diverse walks of life, like students, teachers, homemakers, writers, became new editors this year.

Revisiting the needs assessment

After discussing with the Kannada Wikimedia community, the needs assessment was done last year and the same was included in the last year’s work plan. Some of them have been met and some deserve attention in this years plan as well. Based on the experience and interactions with the community in the last one year, CIS-A2K has arrived at an understanding of the current needs of the Kannada Wikipedia and the community.

  • Quality improvement - This is one of the major concerns that has to be addressed. Every year lot of new editors are being added and some of them do not strictly follow the quality guidelines towards writing a Wikipedia article. There are 2 kinds of articles which need attention. Articles of small size, ie., less than 2kb in size and the articles which are poorly written. We need to address both of these issues. While it is encouraging that the new editors are adding content to Kannada Wikimedia projects (specifically Wikipedia), it has become extremely important that a close review of the content added must be done to ensure the adherence towards five pillars of Wikipedia. CIS-A2K team faces the problem of the quantitative growth and qualitative content. CIS-A2K during this year plans to engage with the local volunteers in driving home the message of quality based content deeply to the new editors. In order to help stub articles become start class articles an internal peer group must hand hold the new editors. CIS-A2K is fully committed towards ensuring quality content coming up on the Kannada Wikimedia projects.
  • Thematic diversity - The content in Kannada Wikipedia is not as diverse as it is supposed to be. There hardly any articles in some fields like medicine, health, law, etc. Efforts are to be made to make Kannada Wikipedia rich with diverse content
  • Go global - Editors of Kannada Wikipedia are mostly from Karnataka. The number of active editors from outside Karnataka is very small. A large number of Kannadigas live outside Karnataka. There is a sizeable number of writers and bloggers among them. We need to tap into their talent and make them to contribute to Kannada Wikipedia.
  • Other needs mentioned in last year’s work plan, viz., retaining new editors and motivating them, regular meetups and bringing in new editors, still continue to be the needs and are likely to persist.

Implementation plan

Quality improvement

There are quite a good number of articles in Kannada Wikipedia which do not meet the quality standards for a Wikipedia article. Some of them are very small, less than 2kb in size. Some are poorly written and they do not have any inter-wiki links and references.

Plan: Work towards improving the quality of articles in Kannada Wikipedia.
Execution: A project page will be created in Kannada Wikipedia on improving the quality of existing articles. Kannada Wikipedians who are interested in volunteering in the effort to improve the quality will be roped in for this project. Continuous monitoring and peer review mechanisms will be set up with guidelines on creating a good quality article for Wikipedia. Where needed, follow-up workshops will be conducted.
Projection: Quality of about 25% of the poorly written articles is expected to be improved by the end of the year.

Thematic diversity

The content in Kannada Wikipedia is not as diverse as it is supposed to be. There hardly any articles in some fields like medicine, health, law, etc.
Plan: Efforts are to be made to make Kannada Wikipedia richer, with diverse content.
Execution: Workshops and edit-a-thons in creating articles in specific topics will be conducted at different places. Topics from different disciplines will be discussed and assigned to the students from partner institutions who will be writing articles on Kannada Wikipedia.
Projection: At least 25 articles each in selected 2-3 topics is expected to come up.

Go global

Plan: Efforts are to be made to bring in editors to Kannada Wikipedia from outside Karnataka.
Execution: Kannada associations, writers and bloggers from outside Karnataka will be identified. Mails will be sent to them about Kannada Wikipedia and the need to add articles to Kannada Wikipedia. Presentations and workshops will be organised where feasible with help from local Kannada associations and institutions. Web based (Skype or Google Hangout) presentation and workshop will be conducted for overseas Kannadigas.
Projection: At least 20 new editors and 3-6 active editors from outside Karnataka for Kannada Wikipedia are expected to be added.

Cultivating new editors
Institutional partnerships (ongoing)

Institutional partnership is one of the important ongoing activities. Mainly there are two kinds of institutional partnerships at present. The first kind is with educational institutes where tailored Wikipedia in Education programs are going on. In the second kind of partnership, CIS-A2K will be working with institutes which do teacher training. Christ University - CIS-A2K’s partnership with Christ University will enter the third year during this project year. First year students will write on Kannada Wikisource and second year UG students will write articles on Kannada Wikipedia. During 4th semester, they will write subject specific articles. Totally it is expected to produce about 250 articles on the Kannada Wikipedia. The program is expected to bring in about 250 new editors. SDM College Ujire - The partnership started last year will continue this year also. MA students of Department of Communication and Journalism course will be writing articles on Kannada Wikipedia as part of their internal assessment. The program hopes to bring in about 25 new editors and another 75 articles. St Aloysius College Mangaluru - This new partnership has been initiated during the plan year 2014-15. In this institution specific Wikipedia in Education program, Undergraduate students will be writing articles on Kannada Wikipedia as part of their internal assessments. The program hopes to bring in about 150 new editors and about 150 articles. Guru-G Learning Labs - This company has created a digital learning platform for teachers. They regularly conduct teachers’ training workshops. CIS-A2K will partner with Guru-G Labs towards introducing Kannada Wikipedia as a pedagogic tool. Training on editing Wikipedia will be an additional topic during their training programs. This part of the training will be imparted by CIS-A2K team. DSERT - Directorate of State Education Research and Training (DSERT) is the wing of Education Dept of Govt of Karnataka which looks after education at primary and high schools. CIS-A2K has initiated a partnership with DSERT to train the teachers from across Karnataka on editing Wikipedia. Training will also be imparted to to the teachers from teacher training institutes from across Karnataka that come under DSERT.

Institutional partnerships (under exploration)

Alvas College, Moodabidre - There were talks of starting a partnership with this institution during the last year’s plan period. But the partnership did not take place. There are indications that the partnership will happen this year. The students of Master of Communication and Journalism (MCJ) course will participate in hands-on training sessions for editing Wikipedia. The program is expected to create about 15 new editors and generate about 30 - 45 articles in Kannada Wikipedia. Karnataka Janapada (folklore) University - This is India’s only folklore University set up by Govt of Karnataka about 3 years ago. It is still in its nascent stages. They are in the process of digitising and documenting the rich folk culture. CIS-A2K will partner with them from the initial stages itself. The partnership is aimed at getting the digitised folk content under CC and creating new editors from the University who will add folk related articles to Kannada Wikipedia. It is not possible to put some numbers for the outcome at this stage. Manjusha Museum, Dharmasthala - Dharmasthala has a great collection of heritage objects and artifacts, which were in use till recently in the coastal areas. It is housed in a well organised and maintained museum called Manjusha. CIS-A2K will try to partner with the authorities concerned there to have a GLAM project around Manjusha. Telephonic discussions have been initiated in this direction. Since this is just an idea at present, the outcome can’t be predicted at this stage. CIS-A2K intends to establish partnerships which will bring forth the cultural, literary and social diversity of Karnataka. CIS-A2K is keen on partnering with institutions and organisations which work as oral repositories, community archives all across Karnataka with special emphasis towards North Karnataka, Hyderabad Karnataka based organisations and institutions. On the lines of UNC Library initiative, CIS-A2K intends to establish partnerships with various libraries and repositories all across Karnataka in order to make reference material easily available for editors. CIS-A2K believes that these partnerships if established will go a long way in improving the quality standards of Kannada Wikipedia articles. These partnerships will be utilised to arrange theme based edit-a-thons or quality repair workshops for stub articles created on Kannada Wikipedia.

Status of Institutional partnerships (table form)
{{
Name of the Institution Status
Christ University, Bengaluru Ongoing
SDM College, Ujire Ongoing
St Aloysius College, Mangaluru Ongoing
Guru-G Learning Labs, Bengaluru MoU signed
Tumkur University MoU to be signed
DSERT, Bengaluru MoU to be signed
Alvas College, Moodabidire MoU to be signed
Karnataka Janapada (folklore) University MoU to be signed
Manjusha Museum, Dharmasthala To be approached
}}
Strengthening the community
Outreach activities with community participation

It is heartening to know that Kannada community has evolved as a pan-Karnataka community over a period of years. Kannada community volunteers have played a very important role in taking Wikipedia and its sister projects to the farthest corners of Karnataka. CIS-A2K aims to work closely with the Kannada community volunteers who have been doing outreach activities on their own and leverage the advantage of its institutional partnerships to provide infrastructural, logistical and thematic support. This shall ensure a state wide response towards Wikimedia projects in Kannada and also avoid duplication of resources and a close coordination with the community members. CIS-A2K team shall also call upon the community volunteers to mentor, participate and help design activities for its outreach programmes and Wikipedia in Education initiatives. CIS-A2K will also attempt to involve a local wikimedian as a policy measure for its outreach activities. The participation and engagement of a local Wikipedian will carry an advantage of regular follow up and will serve as quality control mechanism. This attempt of making Kannada Wikipedia truly pan-Karnataka will in turn result in the diversity of content and active participation of volunteers from Hyderabad Karnataka region and North Karnataka region as well.

Meetups for capacity building

This was proposed in last year’s plan also. But could not be done much in achieving this. It is proposed to achieve more this year. Plan: To have regular interactions among the community members and strengthen the community spirit among the editors of Kannada Wikipedia.
Execution: Have initial discussions over mailing list, village pump and IRC. Decide on the date, time and venue for the events. Organise and facilitate the meetup. It is planned to have at least 3 meetups of members of existing community.
Projection: These efforts in community building will strengthen and enhance the community spirit among Kannada Wikipedians and help them be more active. The meet-ups may also yield some project ideas.

Wikipedian of the month

To project one Wikipedian every month whose contribution to Kannada Wikipedia is remarkable. Plan: To have a Kannada Wikipedian of the month
Execution: A template and Wiki page will be created in Kannada Wikipedia. This page will have profiles of Wikipedians who are doing good contribution to Kannada Wikipedia. The criteria for this selection has to be evolved by discussing with community and the consensus of the community. Every month one person from this page will be showcased on the front page of Kannada Wikipedia. Tamil Wikipedia already has this feature.
Projection: This will be a good motivating factor for new and existing Wikipedians to be more active and contribute with quality work on Kannada Wikipedia.

Visibility/recognition

This activity will be a regular affair every year. We got some success in this activity during the last year and we plan to do the same this year also.
Plan: To have higher visibility for the activities of the Kannada Wikipedia community. Execution: Information about the activities of the Kannada Wikipedia community will be sent to the media regularly. This will also be done by utilising the social media.
Projection: The benefits or impact are expected to be intangible and would be difficult to calculate the success of the efforts put in.

Content generation
Thematic & focused monthly sprints

Plan: To organise and conduct topic centric or place-centric editing sprints. These will be an event of just one or two days and then followed by a month long editing activity like the Wiki Women’s month.
Execution: Make a list of possible topics after discussing with the community over village pump, mailing list and IRC. Topics that have been already obtained by discussing with the community are -movies, books, food, cities, tourist places, historic places. Organise the editing sprint every month.
Projection: About 5-10 editors are expected to take part in each editing sprint. Overall in one year, it is expected to bring about 30-40 new editors and about 120 new articles. These editing sprints will also help in strengthening the existing community.

Workshop for writers

Plan: Training people to write articles in encyclopaedic style for Kannada Wikipedia on specific subjects like science, technology, health, culture, and others. Execution: Workshop will be organised where budding Kannada writers will be trained in writing for an encyclopaedia. Veteran Kannada writers and Wikipedians will train them on writing for Wikipedia. The content generated at the end of the workshop will go into the Kannada Wikipedia. Projection: This project is expected to create about 20 new editors and about 20 to 40 good Kannada articles. It is expected that this new set of editors will regularly contribute articles to the Kannada Wikipedia.

Goals

The A2K team will strive to achieve the following goals for Kannada Wikipedia in collaboration with the Kannada Wikipedia community during 2015-16.

{{
Parameters Expected target Dream target
No. of Editors 1000 1200
No. of New editors 200 300
No. of Active editors 50 80
No. of Articles 22,000 24,000
No. of Outreach Events 10 15
}}

Notes


Engaging Media Practitioners

CIS-A2K has always leveraged its experience and reach with the media personalities towards providing greater visibility and maximising the impact of the work done by Indic language communities. However, the impact quotient has still not reached the desirable standards. This is mainly due to the way Wikimedia related stories are conceived and executed. Most often the outreach activities often are seen as mere activities and the larger initiative of creating Open Knowledge Resources take a back seat. The stories end up mentioning the names of the volunteers and the activities conducted without explaining the need for such activities. This does not mean that Indic Wikipedia projects have not received positive news coverage. These positive coverage models need to be optimised and set as a best practice to be followed for further news cycles.

About the Project

This project intends to engage media personalities (both print and electronic) who have supported the Indic language communities on a more concerted level. Often times the journalists are unaware of the impact that has happened due to their stories. CIS-A2K team intends to engage these journalists with a greater conceptual and social understanding of the Wikimedia initiative. CIS-A2K shall hold workshops for the journalists where expert Wikimedians will devise an collaborative action plan along with the participants to take the Indic language communities work ahead and provide greater visibility.

Implementation Plan

CIS-A2K intends to bring the media personalities who have been associated with an Indian language community to a common/shared platform. The workshop will also serve as an outreach activity towards bringing in more active and interested journalists to the Wikimedia fold. The workshops will be a combination of focused discussion between the journalistic community and Indic language wikimedians, case studies that will pick the interest of the journalists to dig deeper and write about the Indic language Wikipedia communities and an introduction to Wikimedia projects session. CIS-A2K shall strive to identify synergies with the media personalities and its own outreach activities. It will also try to make the journalists take part in the research, documentation and publicity plan put out by CIS-A2K. These workshops have a dual advantage of setting up a robust media/communications network for the movement as the media professionals would understand the commitment and ideas behind our activities. It will also help the Wikimedia movement in Indian languages to attract more volunteers and attract the public imagination towards the collaborative creation of Open Knowledge Resources.

Project Execution

  • CIS-A2K team in consultation with the WMIN and the resepective Indic language communities will identify media professionals who have been active/engaged/sympathetic/interested in the Wikimedia projects.
  • CIS-A2K will organise day long workshops with the above mentioned objectives to create momentum and interest towards Indic language Wikipedias
  • CIS-A2K shall organise dedicated Wikimedia orientation sessions for this target audience and explore methods for them to engage in the movement.
  • CIS-A2K along with the support of the Indic Wikimedia communities will formulate regular meetups and followup sessions to keep the media practitioners in the know-how of Indic language Wikimedias.

Projected Outcomes

  • To increase the visibility of Indic language Wikipedias
  • To attract a professional/working group of volunteers for the Indic Wikipedias
  • To explore possible collaborations towards Wikimedia projects such as commons, wiki source and wiki quotes
  • To highlight best practices of the Indic language Wikipedias and facilitate multilingual projects


Marathi

An in-house video tutorial by CIS-A2K on using ULS on Marathi Wikipedia done in collaboration with Mahitgar, an active editor on Marathi Wikipedia.

Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language which is predominantly spoken in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. It is also the official language of the state. It is estimated that there are approximately 72 million Marathi language speakers in India, which makes it the fourth most spoken language in the country. There are many Marathi speakers even in the neighboring states of Gujarat, Karnataka and Telangana.
Maharashtra has a literacy rate of 83 per cent. [1] In terms of higher education, the state has 45 universities and university-level higher education institutions and 4836 colleges.[2] It is also the wealthiest state in India, contributing about 15 per cent of the GDP.[3]

Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote and Wikibooks are the Wikimedia projects that are live now in Marathi. The fact-sheet below provides a quick glimpse of the key data about the various Wikimedia projects in Marathi. CIS-A2K has designed the upcoming annual plan based on the community engagement activities and institutional partnerships that CIS-A2K has established. This plan has also learnt immensely from the formal and informal discussions that CIS-A2K team has had with the community members during various community engagement initiatives, outreach activities and TTT2015. Updated Fact Sheet (4th March 2015)

Fact Sheet

{{
Wikimedia projects No. of Editors (January 2014) No. of Editors (January 2015) No. of Active Editors (January 2014) No. of Active editors (January 2015) No. of Articles/entries (January 2014) No. of Articles/entries (January 2015)
Wikipedia 575 617 23 27 41,130 42,073
Wiktionary 23 24 0 0 1,852 1.9k+
Wikisource 30 32 0 1 944 966
Wikiquote 6 7 0 0 57 58
}}

The above table is projected for a clear understanding of the current status of the Wikimedia projects. As CIS-A2K was unable to find a competent Programme Officer to anchor the Marathi programme during 2014, not much could be achieved during that plan period. CIS-A2K has been able to identify and recruit a Programme Associate to work with the CIS-A2K team towards growing and strengthening Marathi Wikipedia for the current plan year.

It can be gleamed from the above table that the rate of growth across Marathi Wikimedia projects is minimal and it needs a catalytic agent to spur growth and explore new avenues of engagement for Wikimedia projects. CIS-A2K intends to play the role of a catalytic agent and along with the support of the Marathi community attempt to bring positive change during the next plan year across Marathi Wikipedia and Wikisource projects in specific and other projects in general.

Needs Assessment

During the last 8 months, the A2K team personnel have had formal and informal discussions with Marathi Wikimedians based in Mumbai and Pune about the status of the Marathi Wikipedia and the associated projects of Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to these, discussions and meetings were also held with some of the active Marathi Wikipedia community volunteers. Based on these discussions, the A2K team has arrived at the following sets of needs.

Community
Wikipedia Summit Pune-2013 participants sharing thoughts.

Currently the majority of active Marathi Wikipedians are based out of Mumbai and Pune. A closer examination would show that the number of active editors has remained more or less unchanged almost since the beginning of 2009. An analysis of Wikitrends metrics related to the Marathi editors clearly shows a poor rate of growth of new editors over a period of last three to four years. It is imperative for the growth of Marathi Wikipedia that new editors are groomed and they take up responsibilities from the senior editors. Towards achieving this goal the Marathi community unanimously feels that there is an urgent need to diversify the community through sustained outreach programs, and at least double the number of active editors in a year or so. Thus a well-designed and sustained outreach engagement would not only enthuse the existing community but also strengthen the qualitative and quantitative growth of the Marathi Wikipedia. Although the Marathi Wikipedia has had new editors coming-in periodically (on an average of 5-6 every month), not many have been groomed into active editors. There is a need to understand this scenario so that we can catalyze a better conversion rate of ‘new editors to active editors’. During the last year there is a significant decline in terms of active editors, edit count and new articles being created.

Content
 
Abhay Natu, Abhishek Suryavanshi and Nikhil Kawale-Marathi Wikipedians interacting with other Indic language community volunteers at India Community Consultation.

The Marathi Wikipedia is the fourth largest Indian language Wikipedia. It has more than 40,000 articles. However, the quality of these articles is a major concern. More than 65 per cent of the articles (i.e. 27,000 out of 41,500) are stubs. A list of all stub articles in Marathi Wikipedia can be found here.[4] A comparative analysis of the quality of the Marathi Wikipedia articles with quality parameters followed in other language Wikipedias will give a better perspective for the improvement of stub articles in specific and the improvement of Marathi Wikipedia content in general. [5]

Content Donation Initiative
Plan

To Digitize and relicense texts with encyclopedic content that shall be useful towards creating Wikipedia entries and other related Wikimedia projects. CIS-A2K shall also strive to relicense and release books, journals and magazines under CC license published by various departments of Pune University and other like minded organisations. CIS-A2K intends to approach Dr. Balaji Tambe a renowned Ayurveda Doctor regarding content donation to be released under CC license. CIS-A2K intends to partner with authors, higher education institutions and artists to donate their original work under CC license.

Execution
  1. Speaking with potential partners about Wikimedia projects and possible content donation under CC License.
  2. Signing of CC re-release agreement.
  3. Upload the 'content' on Wikimedia Commons.
  4. Digitise the uploaded content on Marathi Wikisource.
  5. CIS-A2K shall provide on site support and work closely with the Marathi community volunteers towards the digitisation and uploading efforts towards making the books available in Marathi Unicode.
  6. In collaboration with Marathi Wikimedians this content will be used to enrich Marathi Wikimedia projects.
Projection
  1. This will help in creation of at least 200 new articles and improve existing articles on Marathi Wikipedia.
  2. This content donation initiative could also trigger other authors and publishers to consider re-releasing more Marathi content under CC license.
  3. Increased public and media visibility to the importance of creative commons in Marathi circles.
Marathi Wiki Celebrates The Day
Plan

Create And Improve articles in Marathi Wikipedia by conducting events and activities on The Special Days. Listed at Special Days

Execution
  1. Narrow down on the list of Special Days such that 1 special day per month will be selected.
  2. Prepare theme for the day and announce on event page and spread the news at least prior a month.
  3. Do edit-a-thon, hack-a-thon or photothon on this occasion.
  4. During edit-a-thon, photothon content related to the occasion will be added to the relevant Marathi Wikimedia projects or Commons.
Projection
  1. Adding 60 Articles and/or 300 unique photos. These will be uploaded on Commons.
  2. Getting on board new Wikipedians with the Theme of the Day by conducting outreach activities on special days.
Marathi Bhasha Divas
 
Marathi Bhasha Divas (Marathi language day)was celebrated by CIS-A2K and other Indic Wikimedians during TTT-2015 in Bangalore.
Plan

To celebrate Marathi Official language day with Marathi Wikimedians from across the globe in February 2016.

Execution
  1. Create a platform for celebrating a congregation of Wikipedians. Plan a 1-2 day event that would also benefit the venue city.
  2. Use this as an opportunity to train some of the new active Marathi Wikipedians.
  3. Use this as a platform to link the new and old Marathi Wikimedians.
  4. Organize feedback and review sessions with the community on the growth and development of Marathi Wikipedia.
  5. Bring in other Indic Wikimedians to create strong inter-language networks and projects.
Projection
  1. Could help in bringing together 50% of all India-based Marathi editors onto a common platform.
  2. Could help in the Marathi Wikimedia community building efforts, which could lead to increased collaboration.

Cultivating new editors

Institutional partnerships (Higher Education)
 
Marathi Wikimedia community members in an outreach program at IIT-Bombay, Techfest. Active Marathi Wikipedian Rahul Deshmukh lead the outreach.
.
 
Marathi Wikipedia Training Session at University of Pune, conducted by CIS-A2K during October 2014. 30 women editors were trained over 2 days.

Sau Dhuni Teen Project:CIS-A2K has already started working with Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women's Studies Centre (KSPWSC), University of Pune, Pune and Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE),Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai in a multi institutional project which intends to achieve the following goals:

Under the Sau Dhuni Teen project, student and faculty volunteers will write digital content on one hundred notable persons, one hundred key books, and one hundred key concepts relating to women's studies, gender studies, and more broadly, interdisciplinary social sciences, between January 2015 and March 2016. Marathi and Hindi will be the two focus languages, with the potential of adding other languages and other institutional partnerships in future. The content contributors will be the very students who are undergoing the courses at WSC, and the research staff and faculty of the WSC who can volunteer some time.

The project's goals include
  1. Increase access to information regarding key concepts relating to women's studies, gender studies, and more broadly, interdisciplinary social sciences in Marathi and Hindi on a digital platform.
  2. Editing, enhancing and creating new articles or content related to women's studies, gender studies, and more broadly, interdisciplinary social sciences
  3. Increase total number of editors on Hindi and Marathi Wikipedia.
  4. Increase the number of photos on Wikimedia Commons related to the above mentioned themes.
Execution

Building on the collaborative knowledge production model pioneered by the Wikipedia, our project draws on the very people who will use the resources and turn them also into knowledge producers. It is a strong part of our pedagogic philosophy that instead of top-down lecturing or conventional class expositions the students should strengthen their competences in their field of study by grappling with primary texts and concepts, and learning how to annotate them by picking out the most important issues raised by the authors. They will learn the basics of content generation and Wikipedia editing through two special workshops conducted by KSPWSC faculty, the first to be conducted in March 2015 and the second in August 2015.

Based on a preliminary research the A2K team has prepared a list of higher education institutions that A2K team could approach for collaborative partnerships in Maharashtra.

{{
Sl. No. Name of the Institution Status
1 Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai MoU signed with TISS. Two workshops conducted and one more scheduled.
2 SIES College of Arts, Science, and Commerce, Mumbai Exploratory visit done. Discussions under progress
3 University of Mumbai, Mumbai Exploration underway.
4 Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune Discussions with faculty in progress. Two workshops conducted and two more planned for 2015-16.
5 FLAME School of Liberal Education, Pune Discussion with faculty in progress
6 Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar Exploration underway.
7 People's College, Nanded Discussion with faculty in progress
8 SVERI, Pandharpur Discussion with faculty in progress
9 Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women's Studies Centre (KSPWSC),
University of Pune
One workshop conducted
}}
Plan

To establish partnership with at least 3-4 higher education institutions in developing thematic projects and creating a network of academicians who will actively use Marathi Wikipedia as part of their pedagogy. To reach out to at least 3 other higher education institutions from the above list and conduct Marathi Wikipedia Workshops mainly with an intention to spread awareness and to arrive at possibilities for long-term partnerships.

Execution
  1. Conduct initial meetings with faculty from the short-listed higher education institutions.
  2. Work with faculty who are enthusiastic and active in listing out the expectations, incentives, broad framework of project design, mutually beneficial outputs for the institution and the Marathi Wikipedia.
  3. Introduce and involve key Marathi Wikipedians in advanced conversations with the possible partner institutions.
  4. Arrive at clear terms of reference (ToR) for the partnership between the institution and CIS-A2K.
  5. In collaboration with key Marathi Wikipedians, design and roll-out workshops and training programs.
  6. Continuous mentoring, monitoring and evaluation of the new users created under the project with the help of Marathi Wikipedians.
  7. Create social media platforms for visibility of these projects and facilitate need-based technical and online support. For instance, motivate the faculty or student to maintain a blog/facebook page on the project.
  8. Constant liaison with the anchor faculty/department.
  9. Periodic review of the project progress with the Marathi Wikipedians mentoring the project.
Projection
  1. Expected to enlist about 150 - 250 new editors on Marathi Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 5-10 people into active editors.
  2. Will result in creation of new 300 good quality thematic articles.
  3. Will result in the expansion and quality improvement of 200 existing stub class articles.
Institutional Partnerships(GLAM Project)
 
Parvati Hill in Pune.
Plan

To partner with 2-3 instituttions with a potential of having GLAM workshop.

Based on a preliminary research the A2K team has prepared a list of possible partnerships with GLAM institutions in Maharashtra.

{{
Sl. No. Name of the Institution Status
1 Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum Exploration underway
2 Parvati Hill Exploration underway
3 Mahatma Phule Museum Exploration underway
}}

Pune was once center of power of Maratha Empire. These museums conserve objects of not only historical but also cultural importance. The Raja Dinkar Kelkar museum holds over 3000 artifacts on display.These consists mainly decorative items, armors and other art objects mostly from 17th and 18th centuries. This collection depicts the skill of the Indian artist of the time. Parvati hill temple is one of the oldest heritage structure in Pune and was built during Peshwa dynasty. Mahatma Phule museum is one of the oldest museum in Pune. Museum contains pictures, charts, science models and machines. The artifacts in Mahatma Phule museum are related to Engineering, Geology, Agriculture, Forestry and Armoury.


Execution
  1. Exploring the possibilities of GLAM in the institutions.
  2. Discussing with concerned person for GLAM project possibility.
  3. Plan and implement GLAM edit-a-thon.
  4. Post event reports and documentation.
Projection
  1. Bring in 50 new Wikipedians on Marathi Wikipedia.
  2. Plan and groom 10 new Wikipedians to active Wikipedians.
  3. Upload 1000 photos on Commons.
  4. Create 100 articles on Marathi Wikipedia.
Strengthening Existing Community
Capacity Building Meet-ups
 
Two Marathi volunteers (from right) at the Wikipedia help desk put up at Swatanthra 2014. CIS-A2K sponsored the participation of 4 Marathi Wikipedians for the event.
Plan

To facilitate more qualitative interactions amongst community members, with an aim to
a) foster linkages between new and existing users;
b) creating learning and support space for new Wikimedians;
c) foster a culture of collective review of the expansion of Marathi Wikipedia.

Execution
  1. Facilitate 4 offline meetings/events over the next one year. Other than community interactions the group will be encouraged to participate in a specific theme based edit-a-thon, fix a couple of pages, test some specific new tools, etc. This has been successfully done by CIS-A2K in Telugu Wikipedia during the last year, which proved beneficial.
  2. Organise/facilitate Google hangouts/Skype calls and IRCs. We will aim to organise/facilitate minimum of three meetings in the next one year in addition to the above.
Projection
  1. These community building efforts will further strengthen the community spirit among the Marathi Wikipedians and in ensuring that new editors get converted into active editors especially in the small cities and towns.
  2. Could result in the quality improvement and creation of 100 articles.
Train-the-Trainer program
 
Participants recording Articles for spoken Wikipedia.
Plan

To build expertise among community members by providing capacity building trainings during the train-the-trainer programs, individual training by one-on-one coaching, mentor on-wiki and explore ways to provide online training.

Execution
  • Identifying interests of Wikimedians and plan for various ways of interaction and training; one-on-one interaction, encouraging Wikimedians to participate in Train-The-Trainer and MediaWiki Train-the-Trainer programs, online interaction in a regular basis.
Projection
  • Regular remote interaction with individual community members on subjects of their interest, finding experts willing to provide support and connecting local Wikimedians with other South Asian and global Wikimedians who are experts in the respective subjects.
  • Personal interaction during work related visit by CIS-A2K and coaching Wikimedians based on team.

Special Interest group:- Pune Instagrammers Club & GLAM project Collaborations Creating Marathi Wikipedians from Marathi social media groups

Social Media Group for
User Interest Groups
Plan

Target and enrol existing collectives/groups (both physical and virtual) and motivate them to utilize Marathi Wikipedia and Commons as platform. During this year A2K will aim to nurture at least 4 smaller interest groups.

Execution
  1. Identify potential User Interest Groups which are active on social media.
  2. Explore their possibilities to support Wiki Projects.
  3. Establish linkages between these groups and the enthusiastic members from the Marathi Wiki Community.
  4. Design and roll-out of Wikipedia Training programmes in collaboration with Marathi Wiki Community.
  5. Post training programme follow-up.
  6. Facilitate support and mentoring of the new editors, by the Marathi Wiki Community, to cultivate into active editors.
Projection
  1. Expected to enlist about 50-60 new editors on Marathi Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 5-10 people into active editors.
  2. Will result in improving the quality of specific thematic articles on Marathi Wikipedia in a sustained manner and in improving the diversification of content.
Botany Project
Plan

To create articles on plant taxonomy, especially pertaining to agricultural sector in Maharashtra and India.

Execution

This is an ongoing project on Marathi Wikipedia as part of which plant related Wikipedia articles are being created. However, this project could benefit with more momentum and resource.

  1. CIS-A2K will get useful information and resources that could enrich these articles.
  2. Assess the need from the Marathi community's point of view in successfully executing this project and provide necessary support.
  3. Provide an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the articles.
  4. Help organize article writing competition in select higher education institutions.
Projection
  1. About 100 above start class articles to be created.
  2. Improve quality of stub articles related to botany.


Content Donation/Release under CC-BY-SA 3.0

Plan: Channelize encyclopaedic content into public domain or license it under CC-BY-SA 3.0

Execution:

  1. Identify data/material in public domain.
  2. Identify digitized content and public institutions, which are into digitization.
  3. Do a study of all the digitization efforts that have taken place so far.
  4. CC events to build perspective of institutions.

Projection:

  1. To get about 50 books donated in Marathi that could enrich Marathi Wikisource.
  2. To add about 5,000 new folios to Marathi Wikisource.
  3. To build and rejuvenate community around Marathi Wikisource.
Wikipedia In Education
Plan

In collaboration with a Government Organization Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited (MKCL) work closely towards setting up of a

-Digital University and

-Digital Library.

Execution
  1. Department of Higher and Technical Education and Government of Maharashtra is currently working on Digital Library and Digital University project.
  2. Conduct initial meeting with program officers of MKCL.
  3. Find out interested officers and work with them to design project framework, expected outcome on mutual benefits for government organization as well as Marathi Wikipedia.
  4. Introduce and involve key Marathi Wikipedians in advanced conversations with organizations.
  5. Arrive at clear terms of reference (ToR) for the partnership between the institution and CIS-A2K.
  6. In collaboration with key Marathi Wikipedians, design and roll-out workshops and training programs.
  7. Continuous mentoring, monitoring and evaluation of the new users created under the project with the help of Marathi Wikipedians.
  8. Periodic review of the project progress.
Projection
  1. Increasing Marathi Wikipedia user base.
  2. Adding quality educational resources and content .
  3. Putting already available resources and the resources produced during the collaboration on Marathi Wikipedia.

Notes


Telugu Wikisource

Syed Naseer Ahamed has donated 10 of his books relicensing them under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Telugu Wikiosurce was part of Telugu language workplan in the last year's strategy. Telugu Wikiosurce activities have grown to such a level that CIS-A2K is required to have a separate strategy workplan for this plan year. The plan gives an overview of CIS-A2K's work since April 2014 and presents the plan of activities for the year starting July 2015 to June 2016. The details of the work plan are available in the implementation plan below.

Journey so far

 
Andhra Loyola College signs MoU with CIS-A2K.

Telugu Wikisource has had a good engagement with other Telugu Wikimedia projects. All the possibilities of using Telugu Wikisource have been used by Telugu Wiki librarians. Telugu Wikisource was populated with classical Sanskrit texts and epics written in Telugu in their original form. However, Telugu Wikisource did not have a lot of contemporary literature. In early 2013 proofread page extension was introduced to Telugu Wikisource, but even then there was no significant contribution from the contemporary literature section and only books published long ago were being typed in. With CIS-A2K's intervention Indu Gnaana Vedika donated their 10 books, followed by other authors donating their books to Telugu Wikisource. Significant among these works are those of Syed Naseer Ahamed. This was followed by an MoU with Andhra Loyola College. The students of Andhra Loyola college typed various works onto Telugu Wikisource and became part of the Telugu Wiki-librarian community, while the faculty donated their own books to Telugu Wikisource.

 
Number of pages created under namespace Page on Telugu Wikisource. The Andhra Loyola College collaboration has helped in the incremental growth in the number of folios added.

Efforts will be put up this year too to increase the content donation initiative by increasing awareness about re-releasing books under a free license.

Implementation Plan

Telugu Content / Literature Donation/Release under CC License
 
Syed Naseer Ahamed donating his books to be re-released under CC License.
Plan

To work towards getting Telugu content re-released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license and host it on Telugu Wikisource

Execution
  1. Explain the importance and impact of CC Licenses
  2. Formalize agreement with authors
  3. Organize a formal function for the re-release so that it motivates others to follow suit
  4. Arrive at priority list from the catalogue to be digitized and typed on Wikisource
  5. Books will be scanned and PDF files will be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons
  6. Digitize and make available the encyclopedic books on Wikisource, as these will serve as references and can be used to create new articles on Telugu Wikipedia.
Projection

1. 50 Telugu books to be made available on Telugu Wikisource.
2. This will also contribute to the improvement of articles on Telugu Wikipedia and could result in 50 quality articles.

Kandukuri Veeresalingam works

Kandukuri Veeresalingam (16 April 1848 – 27 May 1919), also known as Kandukuri Veeresalingam Pantulu (Telugu: వీరేశలింగం పంతులు), was a social reformer of Andhra Pradesh. He is widely considered as the man who first brought about progressive ideas about social reform in people of Andhra Pradesh and Telugu literature. He was influenced by the ideals of Brahmo Samaj particularly those of Keshub Chunder Sen. He got involved in the cause of social reforms. In 1874 he started a Telugu journal named 'Vivekavardhini'. He encouraged education for women, and started a school in Dowlaiswaram in 1874. He started a social organisation called Hitakarini Samajam.

Plan

To bring in all the works of Kandukuri Veeresalingam onto Telugu Wikisource.

Execution

CIS-A2K’s institutional partnership with ALC paired with active Wikisourcerers’ community, will try to bring in all works of Kandukuri Veeresalingam on Wikisource Already 24 of about 60 works and 1000 folios of about 10,000 folios have been digitised by ALC students in the last quarter of last year’s workplan, which is a phenomenal achievement. Efforts to put up more of Veeresalingam’s works will continue during this year.

Projection

Creates about 10000 subpages on Wikisource. Will open up Telugu Wikisource to a new set of audience interested in Veeresalingam’s literature. All of available Veeresalingam’s works will be online through Wikisource as a platform

Annamacharya Sankeertana Project
 
Annamayya Sankeertana index catalogue being released under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Saint Annamacharya was an exponent poet who rendered close to 32,000 songs in praise of Lord Venkateswara. Of these, only about 15,000 sankeertanas are available.

Plan

To bring in all these sankeertanas onto Telugu Wikisource.

Execution

These sankeertanas were published by TTD many times, many volunteers have typed the sankeertanas into Unicode Telugu. In recent conversations, Vishnu was able to speak to one of these volunteers, who is ready to donate the work to Wikisource. All the available sankeertanas typed into Unicode would be handed over to Wikimedians by Annamacharya Project volunteers. The sankeertanas will be put up on Telugu Wikisource in Telugu alphabetic order Categories will be created for Sanskrit Keertanas, Telugu keertanas, folk, classical, romantic, devotional sankeertanas.

Projection

Creates about 15000 subpages on Wikisource. Will open up Telugu Wikisource to a new set of audience All of available Annamacharya sankeertanas will be online through Wikisource as a platform

Goals

Goals for July 2015 - June 2016

{{
Parameters As on February 28, 2015 Expected Target by June 30, 2016 Dream Target by June 30, 2016
No. of Editors 101 150 200
No. of New editors 53 (during last year) 100 200
No. of Active editors 39 50 100
No. of Articles 10,891 12,000 15,000
No. of Outreach Events 5 5 10
No. of Books Donated 50 100 500
No. of Folios Digitized 6,000 50,000 100,000
No. of Institutional Partnerships 2 3 7
}}
Activity-wise Break-up of Targets
{{
Activity No. of Items Donated No. of New Articles No. of Events No. of Institutional Partnerships
Institutional Partnerships (Content) 50 50,000 (folios in TE Wikisource) 2 3
Typing Sprint on Telugu Wikisource 1,000 (folios typed)
Content donation by individual authors 200 20,000 2 1
Total 251 71,000 4 4
}}


Urdu Wikipedia Education Program

This project aims to roll out Wikipedia Educational Programme aimed at the students of Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad. In addition to this University, the project seeks to explore other avenues of reaching out to the Urdu-speaking population of Hyderabad and seek their cooperation on Urdu Wikipedia projects.

About the project

Among all the cities in India, Hyderabad has significant track of Urdu learning and Urdu medium educational institutions. The H. E. H. Nizam VII Nawab Mir Osman Ali Khan was very much interested to reframe the educational policies for the betterment of needy person and to promote Education from root level to Higher Education in all the faculties on par with the foreign countries. Since Urdu was the lingua franca and the official language, Osmania University was established in 1918 and had Urdu as the medium of instruction for its faculties during the the Nizam rule. [1]

According to a survey carried out by AP Urdu Academy, there are 131 govt. Urdu primary schools in the city. The details of the Urdu education in the schools of Hyderabad are as follows:[2]

{{
Level Boys Girls Total
Primary 8,366 13,533 21,899
Upper Primary and High Schools 66,321 79,361 1,44,682
}}

(Source: Compiled from the AP Directorate of School Education data and Urdu Academy Survey)

As against 131 schools, the degree and postgraduate level education in Urdu is offered by the following in Hyderabad:

Maulana Azad National Urdu University is the only university in Hyderabad and India to offer the widest range of courses in both regular and distance mode through Urdu medium. In this context it is far ahead of all universities in India. It has hundreds of students on its rolls.

Leading Urdu newspapers such as Siasat, Etemad and Munsif are published from Hyderabad. Because of these factors the city has been chosen for the current project.

Work done so far: First Urdu Wikipedia workshop

Maulana Azad National Urdu University hosted the first Urdu Wikipedia Workshop in its campus in association with the Access to Knowledge Program, Centre for Internet and Society on 4 March 2013 - this was the first Urdu Wikipedia Workshop anywhere around the world. The event was initiated by Prof. Zafaruddin, Head, Department of Translation Studies. It was attended by 28 participants comprising students pursuing MA, M Phil and Ph D courses. The participants learned and practised the editing basics of the Wikipedia. Prof. Zafaruddin emphasised that the department desires to see all the students contributing to the Urdu Wikipedia and hence this event has been organised.

Implementation plan

This is how we hope to implement our plansê

  • Potential Courses with instructions in Urdu: M A (Translation, Urdu, Political Science, Womens’ Studies and Islamic Studies), Master of Social Work (MSW), Master of Communication & Journalism (MCJ).
  • According to Prof Zafaruddin, the translation studies students are more familiar with Unicode typing than the students of other departments. They are more adept in translating the text from English to Urdu or vice-versa, hence they represent a dedicated group for Urdu Wikipedia contributions.
  • During the course of the Wikipedia Workshop, many translation students stressed on the need for further workshops and meetups.
  • The total number of students enrolled in the Translation Department involving MA, M Phil and Ph D is 32.
  • Based on the discussion with the Head of the Deparment, fresh intake of 15-30 students is likely in June 2014.
  • Some of the students pursuing M Phil and Ph D are employed with the electronic media / press can be supportive in getting media coverage for the events as well as for reaching out to other interested students.

Project execution

  • Urdu Wikipedia Video Production: Urdu University has its own production facility. An Urdu Wikipedia video tutorial similar to Christ University Hindi Videos can be planned and worked out.
  • Reaching out to Urdu TV Channels: Urdu Wikipedia Workshop evoked interest by the electronic media especially ETV Urdu and Ruby Channel. A series of Wikipedia educational programmes can be possibly planned after consulting the channels.
  • Press: Two of the leading local Urdu newspapers Etemad and Siasat have stressed on the need for technological innovation as a necessity for survival of languages in the contemporary world. They had also highlighted the growing role of Wikipedia.Their collaboration can be sought in terms of:
a) having a periodic column (weekly / fortnightly)
b) events - either organized by the newspaper or utilizing the newspaper office space for the same.
  • Other Institutions of Higher Learning: Maulana Azad National Urdu University has recognized Al-Mahad Al-Aali's graduated students as qualified for admissions to its Master’s programmes. Mahad also has its own research programmes which require students graduating from other religious schools. The students are also required to come up with thoroughly researched articles on various topics. A Wikipedia programme can possibly be rolled out here where the research training received by the students could result in contributing quality articles on Urdu Wikipedia. Similar exercise can be planned for other Urdu or Urdu-related institutions in Hyderabad.

Projected outcomes

  • To initially target an increase of 150-200 good articles.
  • To increase the number of editors by from the core project :40-50 and equal number from other (40-50) from other educational institution targeted - making the total targeted tally to about 100.
  • To enlist the number of 10-20 active editors
  • To aim for video tutorials production for Urdu Wikipedia under aegis of Maulana Azad National Urdu University.
  • To aim for Televised sessions on Urdu Wikipedia by the Urdu TV Channels.
  • Regular periodic newspaper columns for Urdu Wikipedia.

Notes


Odia Wikipedia

Introduction

This program is designed to provide a broader understanding of CIS-A2K’s annual work plan for the Odia Wikipedia and the community. The impacts section gives an overview of last year’s activities, successes and failures, and learning to shape this year’s plan, details about the proposed activities for this year based on community discussions. The impact in both tangible and intangible way reflects last year’s successes and failure. Based on the experience and learning from the past work CIS-A2K has created this plan with support from the Odia Wikipedia community.

Impact
 
Students and faculty with the Odia Wikimedia community during an Odia Wikipedia outreach session at Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) Dhenkanal.

CIS-A2K's initiatives have been a major reason in the growth of Odia community and projects. This section should be looked as the impact of CIS-A2K's efforts that has helped catalyze the growth of content, editors and help build partnerships to strengthen Odia community with the support and consultation with the community. This in no way takes away the credit from the Odia community and all its hard work without whom these impacts would not have been achieved. The major credit goes to the Odia Wikipedia community that has welcomed CIS-A2K, engaged with the plans, understood the program’s limitations and optimally utilized movement resources.

Tangible impact

The impact of CIS-A2K’s work on Odia Wikipedia can be viewed in the fact-sheet and graphs shared below:

{{
No. of Editors as on Jan 2014 No. of Editors as on Jan 2015 No. of Active Editors as on Jan 2014 No. of Active Editors as on Jan 2015 No. of Articles/entries as on Jan 2014 No. of Articles/entries as on Jan 2015 No. of outreach events No. of celebratory-outreach events
116 99 13 10 8680 8140 1
}}
Update against Last Year's Goals
{{
Parameters Expected Target
(by Jan 30, 2015)
Dream Target
(by June 30, 2015)
Actual figure
(As of June 2015)
No. of Editors 120 350 99
No. of New editors 13 40 2
No. of New Active editors 35 100 10
No. of Articles 5000 6000 8158
No. of Outreach Events 12 15 9
}}
  • Building thematic projects like the “Medicine Translation Project[1] (a project that aims at creating medicine related articles in multiple languages, this project in Odia currently has the highest number of article among all the South Asian languages) in Odia, “Social Sciences” and improvement of articles about Odisha’s popular personalities are the three major projects that have showed growth in both content and community involvement. About 140 articles related to medicine, 18 articles related to human sciences have already been created/enhanced by the leadership of two Wikimedians. Similarly 7 new editors were brought on board with both online and offline engagement. However there is fluctuation in editor activity over time and like other long term engagements it is challenging for CIS-A2K to sustain the interest of new editors.
  • The dream target set by the A2K team was crossed last year itself. However, total number of editors and total number of outreach events are low as compared to the dream target.
  • Long term outreach plans in partners institutions could not materialize beyond an orientation and outreach program. The reason being another larger scale program for Odia Wikisource was in place and the entire community was occupied in bringing the project live from incubator.
  • A lot of content were already available in digital form located in various locations but with various legacy encoding systems leaving a user with no ways to search and find the relevant source for Wikipedia. CIS-A2K has been instrumental in developing four encoding converters with the help of Wikimedian Manoj Sahukar. These converters have been useful to acquire content from various sources; relicensed books, newspapers and magazines, and web portals, convert the encoding from various legacy encoding systems to Unicode and make the content usable for Wikipedia. CIS-A2K also has put efforts to acquire soft copies for the books relicensed and managed to acquire some that will benefit both Odia Wikisource and in turn Wikipedia.
  • Apart from media publication about Odia Wikipedia and its sister projects, tools built for encoding converters, monthly columns as op-eds and publications in Odia language research publications have helped Odia Wikipedia reach out to more people. The readership has increased with about 200,000 unique visitors to the site in one year.
  • A2K team focused on sustaining the formal partnership that it had initiated. There were however many informal collaboration with institutions for both events and content acquisition.
  • The plan for implementing a Wikipedia Education Program at the partner institute Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) was modified to a Wikisource Education Program based on the community feedback.
  • Though the community has not expanded to a large extent there is addition of a few editors of varied age groups with different skill-sets.
  • Various tutorials about Wikipedia editing were created on-wiki and for offline distribution. The help page “Chatasabha” on Odia Wikipedia was enhanced with more interactive information about Wikipedia basics. Tutorials on Odia language enabling and editing that were created have been useful for newbies.
  • A focused user group “WikiTungi” was founded in Nalconagar and some initial foundation work was done in Bhubaneswar. [2] The WikiTungi Nalconagar has been instrumental towards acquiring content from copyright holders and authors,have also conducted peer-to-peer community training and mentoring, extend support for offline outreach at Dhenkanal (A2K team has an institutional partnership with IIMC-Dhenkanal). Though there are some activities by the Wikimedians in Bhubaneswar these are not community initiatives and are driven solely by volunteer commitment. The library in WikiTungi Nalconagar is now richer by more than 100 books.
  • Though specific train-the-trainer programs were not conducted formally, various community education and training activities were conducted at outreach and celebratory events.
  • About 20 out of the total 81 books in Odia language were relicensed under CC-by-SA 3.0 and 4.0 licenses. Though the content is relicensed Odia Wikipedia has not yet made full use of available data repositories.
  • Some of the volumes of Odia-language culture journal “Utkal Prasanga” were used by converting their encoding from legacy encoding to Unicode, paraphrased to create/enhance Odia Wikipedia articles.
  • Instead of a catalog, a content building/enhancement project was created that is updated daily by converting encyclopedic content from newspapers on a daily basis into Unicode. This project has been extremely useful to create and enhance articles of varied subject areas on Odia Wikipedia.
  • CIS-A2K put effort in proposing policy level changes to Government of Odisha’s Department of Culture and Tourism and Department of Education. However the discussions and implementations are yet to be materialized and CIS-A2K shall follow up with these departments.

Implementation Plan

Cultivating New Editors
 
A new editor is learning how to type in Odia in Wikipedia during an outreach session in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.
Online outreach
 
"Women's History Month" edit-a-thon has resulted in creation of more than 25 new articles and improvement of 23 existing articles by the contribution of nine Wikimedians (Edit-a-thon statistics).
Plan

CCC (Content Created Collaboratively) Online campaign based on popular or trending topics related to Odisha and Odia language/people/culture e.g. “Nabakalebara”, “Ratha Jatra”, current affairs in Odisha, breaking news, announcement of awards for any notable person, death of any notable person that will give Odia Wikipedia visibility in social/web media, help acquire content in real time, and inculcate the sense of community with potential editors.

Execution
  • Creating buzz around any trending topic by sharing a picture, creating online awareness about any notable topic to crowdsource information targeting Facebook groups, trending topics in Twitter, bloggers, etc.
  • Attract the audience attention towards contributing to Odia Wikipedia by showing the current status of information or lack of it as a poor representation of the state (Odisha) and its people on the Internet, and any other trending topic beyond Odisha/Odia.
  • Collecting information from the newspapers, portals and engaging people active on social media to contribute in enhancing topics on Odia Wikipedia.
Projection
  • Engagement with 50-100 people on a monthly basis and mentoring about 1-10 people to contribute images or information on Wikimedia Commons and Odia Wikipedia respectively.
  • Creating/enhancing about 1-10 articles every month.
Building thematic groups
 
Wikimedians gathering at development non-profit Samadrusti's in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India to discuss about collaborative book relicensing and digitization, and potential of a GLAM project using Samadrusti's existing resources.
Plan

Building interest based thematic groups for enriching content about specific subjects (e.g. science, film, literature, etc.) have shown positive result with some level of constant engagement with the leadership of group coordinators. The plan for this year will be furthering the same by decentralizing and doing more small-scale projects around specific subject areas. Some of these could also have a combination of online and offline outreach/engagement.

Execution
  • Identifying interest areas based on one-on-one or group interactions (e.g. while talking in a public gathering) and mentoring for small project creation.
  • Enriching topics by the individuals/groups for each of the projects.
  • Identifying institutions and working with existing partners (e.g. Enhancing articles about rice and other pulses by using the installation at Samadrusti, Bhubaneswar office for the International Year of Pulses 2016) for various GLAM and other theme-based projects.
Projection
  • Building 3-4 thematic projects in collaboration with existing partnerships and mentoring/having the community to mentor the group coordinators.
  • Recruit new editors and helping them to be mentored by the group coordinators.
  • Being in constant touch with the editors and integrating them to the larger community.
Media coverage
Plan
More awareness by spreading out news in print, web and electronic media both locally and globally as it has helped to increase the unique visitors to Odia Wikipedia in the past.
Execution
  • Working with existing contacts with media houses and building new ties.
  • Publishing stories about Odia Wikipedia as a digital changemaker for the coming future and showcasing community efforts.
  • Targeting the audience and aiming at engaging with them based on audience response to news, blogs and columns, etc.
  • Outreach for journalists to educate them about editing Odia Wikipedia.
Projection
  • Monthly columns in renowned newspapers, magazines, portals related to Odia Wikipedia.
  • 2-3 workshops for journalists.
Institutional partnerships
Plan

CIS-A2K will focus its energies in building institutional partnerships with higher education institutions and working with existing partners in developing thematic projects.

Execution
  • Identifying potential partners and pilot small-scale pedagogic projects and student-editors.
  • Based on the output and in consultation with the community based on the same, further expansion that could lead to Wikipedia Education Programs will be done for such institutions.
  • “How-to edit Wikipedia” brochure design, production and distribution during the outreach events.
Projection
  • Work closely with 1-2 higher educational institutions and implement a pilot pedagogic project for bringing faculty and students as Wikipedia editors.
  • Identifying a few subject areas and creating groups to smoothen the on-ground coordination process.
Creating Learning Tutorials
 
Odia language input in Wikipedia explained in an animated tutorial. This has been used in Odia Wikipedia help page "Chatasabha".
Plan

Building beginner level on-wiki, online and for offline distribution for newbies.

Execution
  • Making “Chatasabha” (help page on Odia Wikipedia) a one point platform for supporting new editors for on-wiki engagement and diverting newbies to it, and enhance it to make it more interactive.
  • Designing interactive tutorials for several other platforms (blogs, social media, etc.) that will aim to educate people beyond Wikipedia readers about Odia language input, searching on web, and diverting them to Odia Wikipedia.
Projection
  • Enriching the Chatasabha with essential information about Wikipedia policies, basics of editing, dos and don’ts.
  • Creating interactive beginner level tutorials and promote them regularly on social media, blogs and other popular web portals so more visitors land on Wikipedia.
  • Engage with people on the above mentioned platforms in a regular basis so some of them would contribute to Wikipedia as editors.
Strengthening Existing Community
More one-on-one capacity building
Plan

Based on the successful experience of one-on-one capacity building both by experienced community members and by CIS-A2K staffers, the current plan is to focus and enhance on similar capacity building exercises.

Execution
  • Considering the travel expenses the focus will be more on leveraging events. As proposed and agreed by Wikimedians who attended the Odia Wikisource Sabha small travel grants to be given to community members to travel and mentor editors who need support, this option will be explored and implemented.
  • CIS-A2K’s internal and peer-network would be leveraged for various mentorship programs for the community.
Projection
  • Help community organize about one or two one-on-one capacity building sessions by experienced Wikimedians in every quarter and utilize CIS-A2K trips for such activities in the respective cities.
WikiTungi: Community support by city user groups
Plan

WikiTungi would be a city-wise group of experienced editors. The WikiTungi will function as an informal local group that will focus on offline outreach locally, meetups and local outreach programs. The activities would be confined to the city and would cater to the interests of the members. Minimal grant would be allocated for activities that incur expenses.

Execution
  • More group activities like edit-a-thons, photothons , other Wikimedia project production sprints.
  • Regular one-on-one capacity building.
  • Supporting local outreach.
  • WikiTungi to lead the outreach in institutional programs.
  • Digitization and content acquisition.
Projection
  • Wikipedia edit-a-thons during events, production sprints for Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, etc.
  • Initiating WikiTungi in Bhubaneswar and helping the Nalconagar WikiTungi grow.
  • 100-200 books for each of the WikiTungi library.
  • Collaborating with local libraries to acquire and digitize public domain books.
  • Regular monthly community meetups.
Train-the-Trainer program
Plan

To build expertise among community members by providing capacity building trainings during the train-the-trainer programs, individual training by one-on-one coaching, mentor on-wiki and explore ways to provide online training.

Execution
  • Identifying interests of Wikimedians and plan for various ways of interaction and training; one-on-one interaction, encouraging Wikimedians to participate in Train-The-Trainer and MediaWiki Train-the-Trainer programs, online interaction in a regular basis.
Projection
  • Regular remote interaction with individual community members on subjects of their interest, finding experts willing to provide support and connecting local Wikimedians with other South Asian and global Wikimedians who are experts in the respective subjects.
  • Personal interaction during work related visit by CIS-A2K and coaching Wikimedians based on team.
Content donation under CC license
Institutional and organizational partnership
Plan

Like last year CIS-A2K will collaboratively work in leveraging CIS-A2K’s institutional experience of partnership building and content acquisition, and help the community to collaborate with authors, publishers and copyright holders to acquire content and digitize on Wikisource. The focus will be identifying encyclopedic content, re-licensing copyrighted content under a CC-by-SA license to enrich Wikipedia.

Execution
  • Building relation with individual authors, copyright holders, and organizations possessing valuable encyclopedic resources, negotiation for relicensing them under CC-by-SA licenses or at least making them available online.
  • Partnering with organizations for acquiring already scanned books (preferably the ones that are exempted from copyright).
  • Article writing and photo competition by collaborating with newspaper publication houses that will result in growth of both content and readers base.
Projection

About 50 books/periodicals with encyclopedic content to be made available under CC0/CC-BY-SA 4.0 and building relation with 2-5 authors/publishers/copyright holders/institutions.

Content acquisition by policy-level changes
Plan

Building relation with government, public sector and private entities to acquire content and relicense them under CC0/CC-by-SA licenses.

Execution
  • Proposing various government departments in Odisha ( Department of Culture and Tourism, Department of Tribal Welfare, Department of Information and Public Relations, Department of Mass Education, Department of Higher Education) and chasing for policy level move for CC content release.
  • Quality content acquisition from private or institutional possession and their digitization.
Projection
  • Negotiate to bring about 2000 pages of document from various sources.
Other Policy Efforts

CIS-A2K will put some policy efforts in Odisha. The following efforts are planned:

  • As part of this we will collaborate with the Odia Wikimedia community and other like-minded organizations in creating draft submission for the Government of Odisha towards the growth and improvement of open knowledge in Odia.
  • Submissions will also be done to some of the ministries to consider publishing publicly funded content under CC0/CC-by-SA.
  • Submissions will be made requesting the government to license all text books under CC0/CC-by-SA.
  • Submissions will be made for the Department of Education to bring curriculum changes to include Odia Wikipedia and sister projects.
  • CIS-A2K will also try to hold various orientation sessions for bureaucrats and senior government officials on the importance of free and open source and free knowledge.
Technical Support and Development
Font and Software Building
 
Keyboard layout for "Lekhani" input tool for typing in Odia language.
Plan
New tools and enhancement plans for addressing several technical issues faced by the community.
Execution
  • Building and/or enhancement of free software tools like offline Odia input tool, encoding converters for converting content typed in non-standard/outdated standard legacy fonts into Unicode, tools to measure metrics.
  • Mass distribution in various events to individuals and institutions.
  • User and community feedback for bugs and feature enhancement needs.
  • Enhancement, fixing bugs.
Projection
  • Building/enhancement of various free software tools that will directly or indirectly to enrich Odia Wikipedia and help the community.

Goals

{{
Parameters As on Jan 30, 2015 Expected Target by June 30, 2016 Dream Target by June 30, 2016
No. of Editors 116 200 250
No. of New editors 16 (during last year) 30 50
No. of Active editors 13 30 50
No. of Articles 8680 10,000 12,000
No. of Outreach Events 4 15 30
No. of Books Donated 81 75 100
No. of Folios Digitized 1500 5,000 7,500
No. of new institutional partnerships 0 5 10
}}
Activity-wise Break-up of Targets
{{
Activity No. of New Articles No. of Existing Articles Quality Improved No. of New Editors No. of New Active Editors No. of Events No. of Partnerships built
(Institutions/Groups)
Institutional Partnerships 100 50 20 10 10 5
WikiProjects 300 100 10 5 5 2
Capacity/Building Meetups 4 2
Advanced Training 5
Total 1300 250 40 15 29 9
}}

Notes


Mediawiki TTT

After a close engagement with the Wikimedia movement in India during the last two years CIS-A2K has realized that there is an urgent need to build and nurture Mediawiki and technical talent hidden within each of the language communities. It was noticed that many language communities need support on bugs, which are not priority at a global scale but are a key problem for that particular language community. Neither the global Media Wiki volunteer community nor the WMF Engineering team are able to commit quality time to this task.[1] It should also be noted that having access to an expert Media Wiki volunteer or WMF Engineering team is seen as a prized possession by some of the community members, so that they can try to get quicker responses/solutions to the problems at hand.

CIS-A2K sees an opportunity of making these small Indian language communities relatively more self-reliant in addressing minor technical issues through nurturing and building community level technical leadership. This could go a long way in reducing excessive dependency on the Engineering resources and will help the Indic communities in building strong technical liaison with the Media Wiki global community and the WMF Engineer team.

About the project

There are two components to this project. One CIS-A2K will hold a 4-5 day program to bring together identified Wikimedians from across all Indic communities. Selected technically enthusiastic wikimedians would be trained on working with various Technical tools and bug fixing procedure for Mediawiki related bugs. Also a peer learning networked space will be created among these, which could grow beyond the CIS-A2K efforts. The program will be a mix of training workshop and hackathon space. Mediawiki and Open Source expert resource persons will be invited to take specific sessions during the first half of the day, whereas in the second half the Wikimedians will work in teams to resolve particular issues/bugs or engage in peer-to-peer learning activities.
The other is to support community participation in Free Software events, hackathons and Localization sprints that are held in India. CIS-A2K will consider giving travel and stay scholarships for select Wikimedians from across India, who are interested to participate in such events and benefit from it.

Implementation plan

Plan

Our aim is to train a group of Indic Wikimedians about Mediawiki tools, bug fixing environment, fixing minor bugs, automating tasks etc.

Project execution
  1. Identify technically savvy (tech-savvy) people from all the Indic Wikimedia communities,
  2. Create a needs assessment framework to capture the technical requirements from each of the Indic Wikimedia projects as a precursor to the program.
  3. Create an expectation list from the potential participants for the program.
  4. Prepare a curriculum to be circulated in advance to all the participants.
  5. A pre-course assignment would be sent out to participants and potential participants would be selected for the residential program.
  6. Create a peer-level interaction among the group before they arrive for the program. E.g mailing list, FB group, IRC session, etc.
  7. Prepare Mediawiki tutorials and training guidelines.
  8. Identify Resource Persons for the program.
  9. Design the 5 day training program in consultation with the Resource Persons and the participants.
  10. Execution of the program.
  11. Fixing of certain number of bugs during the course of the program.
  12. Participant and Resource Person feedback on the program.
  13. Follow-up activities or events.
Possible curriculum
  • Mediawiki gadgets, tools, scripts.
  • Mediawiki installation
  • Mediawiki, Special, Wikipedia pages
  • Bug filing, monitoring, fixing
  • Scripting and usage of pywikipediabot
  • Unicode conversion from old non-Unicode proprietary encoding schemes of various Indian language packages
Projection
  1. Capacity building of about 20-25 committed Wikimedians from across all major Indic Wikimedias.
  2. Strengthening the support structure for all major Indic Wikimedia communities.
  3. At least one bug per language community to be fixed during the program.
  4. At least one essential extension to be rolled out per language community.
  5. Exhaustive list of bug compilation across all Indic Wikimedia projects.
  6. Creation of user guides on typical bugs/extensions/tools.

Notes

  1. One of the bugs which is very serious for Indian languages which contain only ligatures as alphabet, yet not so important bug to be fixed for Latin & other languages with less ligatures.


Kannada Wikisource

 
Open Knowledge Day at Mysore University to commemorate the release of Kannada Vishwakosha under CC-BY-SA, July 15, 2014.
 
Function releasing Niranjana's Book under CC-BY-SA by Tejaswini Niranjana, November 11, 2014.
 
T Vishnu Vardhan with Om Shivaprakash H L - Invited Talk during 10th Anniversary Celebration of Bengali Wikipedia at Jadavpur University, Kolkata on 09-01-2015.

Kannada is one of the major languages of India. Kannada Wikipedia has been one of the focus language areas as part of CIS-A2K’s work plan during previous years. While implementing the work plans on Kannada Wikipedia, as a spin-off, lot of content came into Kannada Wikisource as well. There was an increase in the associated community also. These results encouraged CIS-A2K to evolve a plan to work on strengthening Kannada Wikisource and the associated community. The plan gives an overview of CIS-A2K's work since April 2014 and presents the plan of activities for the year starting July 2015 to June 2016. The details of the work plan are available in the implementation plan below.

Journey so far

Kannada Wikisource was moving at a very slow pace till last year. Due to CIS-A2K’s efforts lot of content has come under Creative Commons License. Notable among these are the 14 volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha (Encyclopaedia) by University of Mysore, 122 books by the Kannada and Culture Department of Govt of Karnataka and 55 books of late Niranjana by his daughter and copyright holder Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana. These are being added to Kannada Wikisource there by increasing the number of folios as well as editors on Kannada Wikisource. Partnership with Christ University, Bengaluru, has contributed a lot in increasing the folios on Kannada Wikisource as the first year students of the Christ university have contributed on this platform as a part of their internal assessment. A pro-active collaboration has been initiated by the Kannada Wikimedia community in digitising and uploading the content on Wikisource. CIS-A2K looks forward to working closely with the community volunteers and to successfully digitise the complete corpus of content donated towards Kannada Wikisource during this plan year.

{{
Parameters Expected target

(by June 30, 2015)

Dream target

(by June 30, 2015)

Actual figure

(As of Jan 2015)

No. of Editors 1000 1200 679
No. of New editors 300 500 62
No. of Active editors 50 80 69
No. of Articles 20,000 22,000 20,034
No. of Outreach Events 12 15 17
}}

Implementation Plan

Adding content released under CC License

University of Mysore had released first 6 volumes of the Kannada Vishwakosha (encyclopaedia) under CC-BY-SA on May 27, 2014. Later on jan 19, 2015, it released remaining 8 volumes of the encyclopaedia under CC-BY-SA. There are about 14,970 articles in the encyclopaedia. About 2000 articles have been already added to Kannada Wikisource. This is an ongoing work and efforts will be made to add remaining articles. Kannada and Culture Department of Govt of Karnataka has released 122 books under CC-BY-SA. Tejaswini Niranjana, who is the daughter of famous Kannada writer late Niranjana, has released 55 books of late Niranjana under CC-BY-SA. Efforts will be made to add these books to Kannada Wikisource. Plan: Add content that have been released under CC to Kannada Wikisource Execution: Digitisation meetups will be organised where volunteers who have shown interest in participating in this venture will be participating. Scanning of the books, using OCR to convert into text as much possible, cleaning up and uploading to Kannada Wikisource will be done in this meetups. Projection: 5 to 10 books are aimed to be uploaded in each meetup. We aim to organise at least 3 such meetups.

Christ University partnership

CIS-A2K has signed a MoU with Christ University to run a tailored Wikipedia in UG Education program. This is running successfully for two years now. As part of this program, UG students of first and second semester will be digitising Kannada text and adding them to Kannada WIkisource Plan: Add Kannada content that have been released under CC to Kannada Wikisource by students Execution: UG students of first and second semester will be trained on editing Wikisource and typing in Kannada. They will type the Kannada text by looking at the scanned pages of Kannada books that have been added to Commons. Projection: About 750 folios are expected to be added to Kannada Wikisource by this project.

Partnership with TESS India

TESS-India project is a project led by The Open University in the UK and is funded by the UK government. It is working towards improving the quality of teacher education in India. TESS India creates lot of teacher education material. These include text, audio and videos. CIS-A2K will partner with TESS-India to bring them under CC as OER. Plan: Partner with TESS India in the area of OER and release under CC and add them to Commons and Wikisource Execution: Arrive at the modality of working together, design the training where needed, work together and bring the content under CC Projection: This partnership will ensure quality teacher education resources and will contribute to Kannada and other Wikimedia projects.

Content from Other Universities, Academies, Govt departments and Institutions

CIS-A2K has been negotiating with many institutions, NGOs and universities to get the content generated by them to be released under CC. Remarkable success has been achieved so far which is mentioned above. The efforts will continue to convince others and to bring more content under CC.

Bringing Textbooks into Public Domain

We wrote this as one of the action items in last year’s work plane. But due to many reasons, change of officials at Govt department being the main one, this could not be achieved last year. We try again this year to achieve this. Plan: To bring the textbooks of primary and secondary schools published by the Education Department of Karnataka State under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. Execution: Efforts will be made to convince the Education Department to bring the textbooks into public domain. Already there is an example from Kerala State which will be used to persuade the Department of Education of Karnataka State. Projection: If successful, this will improve Kannada Wikisource and also help grow the Kannada Wikisource as an OER which could benefit thousands of students.

Golas

The CIS-A2K team will strive to achieve the following goals for Kannada Wikisource, in collaboration with the Kannada Wikimedia community during 2015-16.

{{
Parameters Expected target Dream target
No. of Editors 300 400
No. of New editors 170 270
No. of Active editors 20 30
No. of Articles 5,000 12,000
No. of Outreach Events 5 7
}}
Activity-wise break-up of Goals
{{
Activity No. of New Articles
Christ University 750-1200
Encyclopaedia donation (Mysore University) 800-12000
Digitsation meetups 30 books
}}


General Support and Service to the Movement

CIS-A2K deeply believes in extending support and service to the Wikimedia volunteer community in India. This has been one of the important aspects of our work. We have honoured up to 100 requests of all sizes that we received from the Wikimedia volunteer communities across all Indic languages. Most of these requests are listed here and here. CIS-A2K also receives requests over e-mail and some community members do reach out to us over mobile phones to place requests. In general the quick response time of CIS-A2K to these requests has been appreciated by many of the community members. We would like to continue with our efforts in supporting and serving the Wikimedia community in India and maintain the quick response time. CIS-A2K has actively consulted with the Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) before supporting most of the community requests, especially when it involved allocating funds for large community events like Bangla Wikipedia 10th anniversary celebrations at Kolkata. We also ensure that supporting community events is done in a transparent manner. However, we would need to review our methods and further streamline systems of support, which will be worked up on during this year. Based on support and service that we extended to the community so far, we have categorized them under two broad heads, which are Community and Technical.

Community Support and Service

Work done so far

Since the inception of the grant we have supported the following types of community requests.

  1. Designed and produced swag for various Wikimedia volunteer driven outreach and community events.
  2. Supported volunteers' travel and stay expenses in conducting Wikimedia outreach programs.
  3. Supported volunteers' travel and stay expenses to participate in Wikimedia community events.
  4. Supported volunteer led Women's History Month 2013 and Women's History Month 2014 and Women's History Month 2015
  5. Supported volunteers in designing and running competitions on Indic Wikimedia projects.
  6. Supported volunteer groups across India in celebrating the Wikipedia 13th Anniversary.
  7. Offered CIS's office space for various Wikimedia events held in Bangalore and Delhi.

CIS-A2K also pro-actively supported most of the Indic Wikimedia communities in organizing their respective language Wikipedia 10th, 11th anniversaries and other community events. The below table gives a glimpse of the support extended to some of the major community events across India.

{{
Indic Wikimedia Community Type of Support
Bengali
  • Funding support to "Wikipedia Stall at Kolkata Book Fair-2014" & Bengali Wikipedia 10th Anniversary at Kolkata.
  • Routed the money from the WMF-GAC to the Bengali Wikimedia community for both the community events.
  • Swag and other support.
  • CIS-A2K Program Director & Program Officer took part in the 10th anniversary event.
Hindi
  • Funding support to Hindi Wiki Sammelan during 2015.
  • Swag and other support.
  • Actively helped with the logistics organization for the event.
  • CIS-A2K Program Officer took part in the event.
Kannada
  • Significant funding to the Kannada Wiki 10 event.
  • Actively helped with the event planning and organization.
  • Organized media publicity.
  • CIS-A2K Program Director and Program Manager joined the community in the event.
Malayalam
  • Funding support to Malayalam Wiki Sangamotsavam during 2013 & 2014
  • Swag and other support.
  • CIS-A2K Program Director and a Program Officer took part in the event.
  • In collaboration with ML Wikimedia Netha Hussain wrote a blog about the event
Odia
  • Entirely funded the Odia Wiki 10 anniversary celebrations.
  • Actively helped with the event planning and organization.
  • Organized media publicity.
  • CIS-A2K Program Officer took part in the event.
Sanskrit
  • Funding support to Sanskrit Wiki 10th anniversary & Sanskrit Wiki workshop for VCs and Professors
  • Swag and other support.
  • CIS-A2K Program Officer took part in one of the events.
Tamil
  • Contingency funding of INR. 185,000/-
  • Swag and other support.
  • CIS-A2K Program Director took part in the event.
Telugu
  • Significant funding support to the Telugu Ugadi Mahotsavam; Telugu Wiki-10 event & Telugu Wiki-11 event
  • Routed the money from the WMF-GAC to the Telugu Wikimedia community for Telugu Wiki-10.
  • Actively helped with the planning and organization of the event.
  • Organized print and electronic media publicity.
  • Helped in getting significant discounts.
  • CIS-A2K Program Director and Program Officer took part in the events.
}}
Plans for July 2015-June 2016
  1. During CIS-A2K's recent meeting with the WMIN Executive Committee (EC) and the visiting WMF team, while appreciating our quick response time to requests placed by community, suggested more active consultation with the WMIN EC. CIS-A2K will work with WMIN EC to review the current process and put in place a rigorous protocol of consultation with the WMIN in extending community support (especially when it involves giving funds).
  2. Based on the protocol agreed upon by the WMIN, CIS-A2K will in consultation with WMIN continue to support and serve the Wikimedia communities in India.

Technical Support and Service

Work Done so Far
  1. Facilitated Echo system message translations in various Indic languages.
  2. Liaison with WMF Engineer Team for Echo roll out on Indic Wikimedia projects.
  3. Beta testing of Visual Editor (VE) on Indic Wikipedias and shared feedback with the WMF Engineer Team. During our feedback to the WMF Engineering liaison we shared how there is no handshake between VE and ULS.
  4. Helped the community to file the bugs and resolved some technical issues.
  5. Continuous support to various Indic communities in troubleshooting various technical issues they faced. For example when ULS was removed as a default option, many of the Indic community were at a loss and confusion. CIS-A2K took swift measures to reach out to many volunteers who were facing problems.
  6. Gave timely information to the volunteers about the new technical developments and helpful tools.
  7. Facilitated inter Indic language interactions among volunteers on technical matters.
Plans for July 2015-June 2016
Technical Support and Service
  • Help community to check and resolve technical issues concerning Indic input
  • Help community to check and resolve technical issues concerning font rendering in Wikipedia sites
  • Will take active lead in Beta testing of VE on Indic Wikimedia projects whenever it is ready. Specifically we will check if there is smooth handshake between VE and ULS across all the Indic languages. CIS-A2K will proactively reach out to the Indic communities in testing the VE and channelising the feedback to the WMF Engineering team.
Technical Liaison WMF Engineering Team
  • Help WMF Engineering Team in understanding requirements and needs of Indic Wikipedia communities.
  • Help WMF Engineering Team in getting feedback and opinion about various new features and tools being implemented on Indic wikimedia projects.
  • Regular participation in WMF Language Engineering Team and Multimedia Team office hours.
Technical Liaison Indic Communities
  • Help Indic community members’ voices reach to WMF Engineering Team.
  • Strengthen Indic Community members by creating awareness about various policies pertaining to WMF Engineering Team.
Technical Leadership
  • Train selected Wikimedians on Mediawiki. Nurturing Mediawiki and Tech Talent in Indic Communities, another Community Strengthening Initiative from CIS-A2K would help in realising this.
  • Encourage Wikimedians to participate in Technical discussions over Meta.
  • Create a technical peer network across Indic language Wikimedians.
Technical Documentation
  • Create sufficient technical documentation on topics like Advanced Wikipedia Editing (involving advanced topics in editing like templates, tables, style sheets, images, media, infoboxes, etc)
  • Create Wikipedia cheat-sheets in 5 Indic languages
  • Create “How to file a bug - wikimedia way” in 5 Indic languages
  • Create Indic input (typing tutor) guide in all Indic languages)

The above would be taken up under Creating Movement Resources project to be implemented by CIS-A2K in continuous consultation with Wikimedia India Community.



Making Santali Wikipedia Live

Santali is an Indian indigenous language in the Munda subfamily of Austroasiatic languages. Around 6.2 million living in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal speak Santali. Majority of its speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Odisha, Tripura, and West Bengal. [1] Santali is written in Ol Chiki, Roman and Devanagari script.

About the Project

Santali Wikipedia is in incubation since September 2010. Currently Roman script is used as there is no free licensed Ol Chiki font available. There are totally 30 articles contributed by 19 editors over time. [2] This project aims to make Santali Wikipedia into a live project. Towards this CIS-A2K will undertake two major activities. First, it will address the technical challenges facing the Santali script and will work towards bringing out a free Ol Chiki unicode font. Second, it will cultivate a small group of enthusiastic Santali editors who could contribute regularly to the Santali Wikipedia project. The project will be based at Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) which is home to about 20,000 tribal students out of which about 1,000 students speak Santali as a native language.

Work done so far
  • Preliminary interactions with Santali speaking students at KISS to know their knowledge in reading and writing in Santali using Ol Chiki.
  • Discussion with Google webfont project about free font project.
  • Preliminary survey on potential resources (Textbooks, other literary books in Santali).
Challenges
  • Native speakers of Santali (students at KISS for this project) are conversant but do not have formal reading and writing skills in Santali.[3]
  • KISS library currently has hardly any book written in Ol Chiki script.
  • Santali Wikipedia incubation project has articles in only Roman script. None of the current operating systems have Ol Chiki support.
  • Though there are few fonts created by the Wesantals project there is no free licensed Unicode font. So, webfont support can not be provided.[4]

Implementation Plan

Development of Free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font

Plan:
To facilitate a project for developing a free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font.

Execution:

  1. Facilitating development of an OFL Ol Chiki font.
  2. Testing of the font by native speakers and getting bugs fixed.
  3. Liaison with Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team for webfont support.

Projection:

  1. One free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font to be made available.
  2. Making available one free licensed Ol Chiki Webfont on ULS.
Reviving Santali Wikipedia incubator project

Plan:
To cultivate a community of enthusiastic Santali Wikipedia editors at KISS.

Execution:

  1. Creating a group of faculty and students to contribute to Santali Wikipedia
  2. Organize training workshops. One per month.
  3. Finding educational resources in Santali
  4. Regular mentoring and support

Projection:

  1. Santali Wikipedia training to about 80-100 Santali students of which 10-15 could turn in to active contributors
  2. To result in 100 new articles on Santali Wikipedia

Notes


Making Tulu Wikipedia Live

Tulu Wikipedian Vishwanatha Badikana speaks about his experience of contributing to Tulu Wikipedia.
Tulu Wikipedian Karishma B K speaks.
 
Tulu Wikipedia Workshop at Udupi, 15 October, 2014.
 
Tulu Wikipedia Workshop at Mangaluru, 26 November, 2014.

Tulu is a language spoken by about 2 million people Tulu language. It is spoken by people in the coastal Karnataka. There is a significant population of Tulu speakers residing outside Karnataka, mainly at Mumbai and in the Gulf countries. It is mainly written using Kannada script. Tulu Wikipedia is in incubation since 2007. CIS-A2K had made efforts towards bringing Tulu Wikipedia out of incubation in its previous work plan.

Journey so far

CIS-A2K held three meetings in Mangalore and one meeting at Udupi with Tulu language writers, academicians, scholars, teachers and general public. CIS-A2K team member has participated in the above mentioned meetings including the World Tulu Conference held at Mangaluru and gave a presentation about Tulu Wikipedia and Tulu Unicode. CIS-A2K actively participated in setting up and managing an information counter during the World Tulu Conference. Article about Tulu Wikipedia and Unicode written by CIS-A2K team member was published in Udayavani, most popular Kannada daily in coastal Karnataka. Workshops and edit-a-thons were organised at Mangaluru and Udupi with greats success. An interview with two active Tulu Wikipedians was broadcast by Spandana TV which is a popular TV channel in coastal Karnataka. CIS-A2K played an important role in bringing media attention towards the Tulu Wikipedia. All these activities have resulted in increased awareness about Tulu Wikipedia, increase in number of articles and number of editors.
Here is the growth of Tulu Wikipedia in table form[1]:

{{
Month Total articles Total editors with more than 10 edits Editors with at least one edit
Mar 2014 147 8 31
Jul 2014 365 19 50
Feb 2015 827 69 124
}}

CIS-A2K intends to come up with a different strategy regarding content donation in Tulu as there are no encyclopedic works have been published.

Implementation plan

We had intended to bring Tulu Wikipedia out of incubation but the project needs to meet certain prerequisites and CIS-A2K would be organising events and programs to meet these minimum standards. Tulu Wikipedia project is still in the incubator stage as there is a dearth of active Wikipedia editors. CIS-A2K tried to engage the community with initiatives such as edit-a-thons and spreading awareness but the interest generated by these events does not last long. There is also a lack of reference materials such as Vishwakosha and other compendiums from which references can be provided to the new articles. Hence many of the articles that get created are stub class articles. The need of the hour is to sustain Tulu Wikipedia editors is to build a vibrant and active editor community that takes charge of the project and increase the number of good quality articles and translate MediaWiki system messages. CIS-A2K's activities will be focusing around these goals. These are still valid and efforts will be continued towards achieving the goal.

Cultivating new editors
Institutional partnerships (ongoing)

CIS-A2K partnered with Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy, Regional Research Centre at Udupi, Rashtra Kavi Govinda Pai Samshodhana Kendra, Akhila Bharata Tulu Okkoota and Sahyadri College of Engineering and Management towards conducting workshops and edit-a-thons at Mangaluru and Udupi. These will be continued this year also.

Institutional partnerships (under exploration)

Efforts will be made to establish partnerships with institutes and academies working towards preserving and promoting Tulu. Some notable institutions are Kerala Tulu Academy, Rani Abbakka Adhyayana Kendra at B C Road, Dept of Tulu of Dravidian University at Kuppam and the archives at Shri Dharmasthala. Efforts were made during last year towards partnering with these institutions but not much progress could be achieved. The institutions that CIS-A2K approached for enriching Tulu Wikipedia were receptive to the idea but due to a host of reasons such as the clash of academic calendar, non availability of volunteers, apprehension of point persons at the institution level regarding free and open nature of resources have proved to be some of the major problems that have hampered the growth of Tulu Wikipedia.

Outreach programs

Outreach programs which included presentations, workshops and edit-a-thons have been able to capture the public interest. However the participants are not continuing on Wikipedia post the outreach sessions. CIS-A2K is revising its strategy of conducting introductory workshops and engage the participants on a focused basis by providing them hands on reference material and technical support for better familiarity with the process. CIS-A2K is planning to groom institutions and organisations in a continuous manner based on the interest and outputs produced during the outreach programme. We hope that this continuous engagement shall lead to fruitful partnerships. Efforts will be made to expand the outreach programme to other parts of coastal Karnataka during this plan year.

Projected outcomes
  • Increase total number of articles to minimum 1200.
  • Have minimum of 5-6 active editors per month.
  • Organise regular Tulu Wikipedia community meet-ups.
  • Have an active Tulu Wikipedia community

Notes


Making Hindi Wikisource Live

Please note that all organizations will be asked to report on the global metrics, so please review them and keep them in mind as you design your programs, and then track and measure the impact of your programs.

Hindi Hindi is one of the official languages of India and is spoken almost across India as a linking language. Hindi also has wide spread literature and texts available. This project aims to make Hindi Wikisource a live project. Towards this three things will be done by CIS-A2K. First, to get content in Hindi re-released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and to host it on Commons and Wikisource. Second, with the help of ongoing Christ University partnership , undertake a project whereby the students will type and proof read the books on Wikisource. Third, the digitized literature in Hindi will be freely distributed across the government schools in an offline form. This project is inspired by the Malayalam Wikimedia community's efforts of introducing Wikisource in schools as part of the IT at Schools program in Kerala and the Odia Wikisource as OER project from last year's workplan.

Work Done so Far

  • CIS-A2K team had worked with Christ students in bringing up all of Premchand's stories on Wikisource.
  • CIS-A2K signed an MoU with Christ University, the students with Hindi as second language will help in digitizing Hindi content for WikiSource. CIS-A2K has discussed with the Christ management and faculty to involve students in the the digitization project of Hindi classics

Implementation Plan

Hindi Literature Donation/Release under CC License
Plan

To work towards getting the Hindi content re-released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license and put up on Wikimedia platform.

Execution
  1. Formalize agreement with Hindi authors.
  2. Organize a formal function for the re-release such that it motivates others to follow suit.
  3. Arrive at priority list from the catalogue to be digitized and typed on wikisource.
  4. Books will be scanned and PDF files will be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons
  5. Digitize and make available the top priority (encyclopedic in nature) books on Wikisource
Projection

1. 50 Hindi books to be made available on Hindi Wikisource.
2. This will also contribute to the improvement of articles on Hindi Wikipedia and could result in 50 quality articles.

Revive the HI Wikisource Project
Plan
To revive the Hindi Wikisource project that is in incubation.
Execution
  1. Create a group of committed contributors at Christ University consisting of faculty and students.
  2. Upload digitized books on Wikimedia Commons
  3. A core group will be selected by Christ to coordinate the digitization work locally.
  4. Organize regular typing and proofreading sprints.
  5. Hindi Wikisource is currently under incubation. Now active community (at least 5 members) will be digitizing books on the incubation project to bring it live.
  6. Once the project gains momentum write to Language Committee to make the project live
  7. Wikimedians from Hindi community who are interested would be involved in this project to support in training the Wikimedians and on-wiki support for the project.
Projection
  • Around 1000 folios will be typed and proof-read on Hindi Wikisource.
  • It is expected to have totally 30 active Hindi Wikisource editors.
  • Hindi Wikisource project to go live.

Goals

{{
Parameters Expected Target (by December 2015) Dream Target (by December 2015)
No. of New editors 30 60
No. of New Active editors 10 20
No. of books made available on Hindi WikiSource 10 30
No. of folios typed and proofread 1,000 5,000
No. of Training Workshops 3 5
No. of Events 1 2
}}


Staff and contractors: upcoming year's annual plan

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1. Please describe your organization's staffing plan or strategy here, or provide a link to your organization's staffing plan or organogram.
CIS does not have any staff plan and hires staff only based on requirement of different projects. At this point in time we are not sure whether our core funding will increase, decrease or remain the same and therefore we cannot make any plans for staffing outside the project requirements.
2. List of staff by department or function.
You can use this table (or substitute your own list) to show us the number of FTEs (fulltime equivalents) for each department or function, where one person working at 100% time would be counted as 1.0. We need this information about the total number of staff (FTEs) you will have hired by the end of the current funding period, and staff you will have hired by the end of the proposed funding period.

Table 4

FTEs
Department or function End of current funding period End of upcoming funding period Explanation of changes
Accessibility 1 1 No change
Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) 5 8 We have taken 3 consultants (Program Associate level) during the last two months, who are field based to anchor language area plans. They are giving 100% time. We would like to continue with them as FTE into the next year.
Internet Governance 4 5 One more new recruitment to work within a new project that may come through this year.
Access to Knowledge (IPR & PT) 4 4 No change
Researchers at Work 2 2 No change
Telecom 0 0
Admin/Accounts and Support Staff 6 6 No change
Total (should equal the sum of the rows): 22 26 Increase in the scope and size of the program plans

Table 4 notes or explanation of significant changes:

  • CIS also has the following personnel working for various programs, who are not included in the above table.
    • 4 Distinguished Fellows who get paid 48,000 per month.
    • 4 Fellows unpaid.
    • Paid interns who work full-time. CIS also have some short-term interns mostly to work with us in the field of IPR, Internet Governance, who do not get paid.
    • Consultants (paid) for specific projects/activities
3. How much does your organization expect to spend on staff during the current funding period, or in the twelve month period before your proposed grant will start (e.g. 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2015), in currency requested and US dollars?

INR 18,799,620/- US$ 303,801.85 (for the FY ending March 31, 2015)

4. How much does your organization expect to spend on staff during the proposed funding period (e.g. 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2016), in currency requested and US dollars?

INR 22,151,940/- US$ 357,975.35 (for the FY ending March 31, 2016)


Financials: upcoming year's annual plan

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Detailed budget: upcoming year's annual plan

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Please link to your organization's detailed budget showing planned revenues and expenses for the upcoming funding period (e.g. 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2016). This may be a document included on this Wiki (Meta) or as a publicly available spreadsheet.

Revenues: upcoming year's annual plan

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This section is about your organization's anticipated revenues for the upcoming funding period you defined in the Overview section (e.g. 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2016).

1. Does your organization plan to draw on its operating reserves during the upcoming funding period to support its expenses? If so, please provide the amount you intend to draw from your reserves here. This should not be included as revenue in the table below.
We don't have significant reserves and therefore we cannot draw upon them this year. The reserves we had last year have been utilized to support programme at CIS without donor support such as CIS RAW and Telecom and the unfunded parts of the A2K and IG programme.
2. Please use this table to list your organization's anticipated revenues (income, or the amount your organization is bringing in) by revenue source (where the revenue is coming from) in the upcoming funding period (e.g. 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2016). Use the status column to show if this funding is already guaranteed, if you are in the process of requesting funding, or if you are planning to request funding at a later time. Please feel free to include in-kind donations and resources in this table, as applicable, but use the status column to show that they are in-kind resources.

Table 5

Anticipated revenues for the upcoming funding period
Revenue source Currency requested US dollars Status (e.g. guaranteed, application)


Kusuma Trust - UK 12,000,000 193,920.00 Requested
Wikimedia Foundation 12,908,632 208,603.49 Requested
Omidyar 18,126,000 292,916.16 Requested
McArthur Foundation 10,540,000 170,000.00 Guaranteed
IDRC 9,632,000 155,354.84 Guaranteed
Privacy International 4,960,000 80,000.00 Planned
Individual donors 1,000,000 16,160.00 Guaranteed


Total revenues (should equal the sum of the rows): 69,166,632 1,117,732.77 -


Table 5 notes: If your organization has significant funding other than FDC funds, please note how those funds will be used.

  • All these funds are tied to specific projects at CIS. Wikimedia Foundation's grant will bear significant costs of the work planned under A2K (Wikimedia). CIS will raise some money from other donors towards the A2K (Wikimedia) work as indicated in the Budget page.


Operating reserves: upcoming year's annual plan

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Please use this section to report information about your organization's current and planned operating reserves.

1.How much does or will your organization have in operating reserves on each of these dates?

Table 6

Total amount of operating reserves. Currency requested US dollars
1 March 2015 1,095,580 17,704.57
End of the current funding period (e.g. 30 June 2015). 1,095,580 17,704.57
End of the upcoming funding period (e.g. 30 June 2016). 4,609,092 74,482.93


2. Does your organization have a reserves policy in place, or a strategy about maintaining, reducing or adding to your reserves? Please share your organization's thinking about reserves here in one or two sentences, or by sharing a link to your organization's more detailed policy.
  • We don't have a reserves policy in place. We ask all our donors to contribute 10% of the budget towards institutional development. In the initial years we were able to use this to build our reserves but as core-funding dried up we have been using reserves for unfunded activities at CIS. Only after we have a clear idea about core-funding from July 2015 to June 2018 can we make a plan for reserves. Our board wants us to accumulate 3-6 months of salaries and essential costs as reserves. We hope that with generous core-funding the institutional contribution could be used to build reserves.
3. If your organization plans to use FDC funding to increase its reserves in the upcoming funding period, please list the amount of FDC funding your organization will use to build its reserves here (in the currency requested and in US dollars). Please note that there is a policy that places some restrictions on how much FDC funding your organization can use to build its reserves.
  • We have requested for INR 1,173,512/- or US$ 18,963.95 as institutional development costs in the budget.


Expenses: upcoming year's annual plan

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1. Expenses by program (excludes staff and operations).
Program expenses are the costs associated specifically with your organization's programs. These costs do not include operating expenses or staff salaries, which will be described in separate tables. For example, program expenses may be the costs of an event, the costs of outreach materials specific to a program, budgets for microgrants and reimbursements, or technical costs associated with specific programs. The programs listed in this table should correspond to the programs you have listed in the programs section of this proposal form.


Table 7

Program / initiative In currency requested In $US
Accessibility 5,480,159 88,559.37
Access to Knowledge (Wikimedia) 5,850,800 94,548.93
Internet Governance 4,927,578 79,629.67
Access to Knowledge (IPR & PT) 4,019,083 64,948.38
Digital Natives & RAW 1,638,447 26,477.31
Telecom 1,656,526 26,769.47
Total program expenses (should equal the sum of the rows) 23,572,595 380,933.13

Table 7 notes: If your organization has significant funding other than FDC funds for specific programs, please make a note of that here.

  • CIS has grant support from multiple donors for various programs. Details of the revenues are given above.


2. Total expenses. Please use this table to summarize your organization's total expenses overall.
These are divided into three expenses categories: (1) staff expenses from Table 4 (including staff expenses for both staff working on programs and operations), (2) expenses for programs from Table 7 (does not include staff expenses or operations expenses), and (3) expenses for operations (does not include staff expenses or program expenses). Be sure to check the totals in this table to make sure they are consistent with the totals in the other tables you have submitted with this form. For example, your total program expenses excluding staff will be equal to the total in Table 7, while your total staff expenses will be equal to the total in Table 4 and your total expenses will be equal to the total in Table 1.


Table 8

Expense type In currency requested In $US
Program expenses (total from Table 7, excludes staff) 23,572,595 380,933.13
Operations (excludes staff and programs) 7,500,200 121,203.23
Upcoming staff total expenses (from Table 4) 22,151,940 357,975.35
Amount to be added to operating reserves (if applicable) 3,513,512 56,778.35
Total expenses (should equal the sum of the rows) 56,738,247 916,890.07

Table 8 notes:


Verification that this proposal requests no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation for political or legislative activities

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Please enter "yes" or "no" for the verification below.

The term “political or legislative activities” includes any activities relating to political campaigns or candidates (including the contribution of funds and the publication of position statements relating to political campaigns or candidates); voter registration activities; meetings with or submissions and petitions to government executives, ministers, officers or agencies on political or policy issues; and any other activities seeking government intervention or policy implementation (like “lobbying”), whether directed toward the government or the community or public at large. Grants for such activities (when permitted under U.S. law and IRS regulations) should be sought from the Wikimedia Foundation Project and Event Grants Program .
I verify that this proposal requests no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation for political or legislative activities Yes


Once this proposal is complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.


Please do not make any changes to this proposal form after the proposal submission deadline for this round. If a change that is essential to an understanding of your organization's proposal is needed, please request the change on the discussion page of this form so it may be reviewed by FDC staff. Once submitted, complete and valid proposal forms submitted on time by eligible organizations will be considered unless an organization withdraws its application in writing.
https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form
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