Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Commons being blocked in most places.
Also, this also gives a Wikimedian a needed excuse to talk about Wikipedia - a leg in the door, if you will. The Head of IT's interest did get piqued by being told about Commons but I'm not sure if she explored it much more. It was a situation that I could have positively exploited but I was just happy to get the restriction removed. Pradeep Handheld On 26/12/2011, Arun Ganesh arun.plane...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Pradeep Mohandas pradeep.mohan...@gmail.com wrote: hi, Commons was blocked in my college too. All it took for me to get it unblocked was a 25 min conversation with Head of IT dept. She did the needful to unblock Commons. Suggest talking to the college's/cyber cafe's network administrator first to unblocking websites. This is the best way forward, the IT admin of colleges, cafes always have the option of overriding default filter lists. Students/colleges should be encouraged to get contact the admins and get commons/wikipedia unblocked and have free unrestricted access just like the local intranet. it will encourage using wikipedia as a reference and more students to contribute. I remember i needed to pay to browse the web at my engg college. i had made a request to make wikipedia free for access, but back at the time in 2005, the admins did not take it seriously, times might have changed now. -- j.mp/ArunGanesh http://j.mp/ArunGanesh -- Pradeep Mohandas How Pradeep uses email - http://goo.gl/6v1I9 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Summary and perspectives from Discussions with Indic language wikimedians - 2011
What I found one of the key factor behind active communities particularly Tamil and Malayalam, is the support of Government for the initiative. This could be a priority area for other Wikipedias as well. According to my knowledge, World Classical Tamil Conference 2010http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Classical_Tamil_Conference_2010was the only time Tamil wikipedians and Tamil Nadu Government collaborated. During the conference there was an article writing contest which attracted many people to Tamil wikipedia. Also during the same time a huge repository of tamil words were donated to Tamil wiktionary. Apart from that, according to my knowledge, there are no other Govt initiatives. But I should say at least in the case of Tamil the collaboration was a direct one. But the case of Malayalam is slightly different. There was no direct collabration. For Malayalam, the support community received was mainly due to the personal efforts of IT@School director. IT@school supported most of the wiki workshops across kerala, sponsored ml wiki CD, and so on. There were couple of instances when community received indirect support. I have listed some of those herehttp://shijualex.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/ldf-keralam-website-and-wikipedia/. One good thing about Malayalam is the involvement of social organizations (for example KSSPhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_Sasthra_Sahithya_Parishad). This has directly or indirectly helped/helping Malayalam wiki projects. But even though community tried to directly interact with Kerala government multiple times (for example, to discuss about Kerala Govt website licenses) none of them fetched any positive result till now. So even though both Tamil and Malayalam communities received limited support it became possible only because some volunteers from the community were ready do physical outreach programs, meetup, and to talk to people. In short I should say these all some of the after effects of public outreach programs. There are many other things related to the outreach of Indic wikipedias and its benefits, it is not just adding more users to wiki. I may share that at anther point of time. More important is, to grow Indic wikipedias some community members need to take some extra effort. But unfortunately, the community could not be strengthened due to various issues like access to Internet. computing platform, issues with rendering and input methods and we ended up with stub articles remaining in the same state. That is the case in all Indic wikis which used bots to increase the number of articles. According to me strength of the community also should grow as the number of articles grows. If we focus on community growth, articles numbers will grow as a natural outcome of that. As we already saw it will not happen the other way round for Indic wikipedias. As one editor pointed out in discussions, *Users will be attached to a wiki only if they feel proud about it*. So it is important that we should plan some programs to retain existing users and attract more new users to Indic wikis. We need to have some programs to bring back our old editors also. Shiju On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala arjunar...@gmail.comwrote: Hi Shiju, On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote: Dear All, --cut-- I have now completed sharing initial, introductory, exploratory discussions with a host of community members from across Indic language communities. I have shared these for 12 languages (Assamesehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Assamese/Discussions/2011, Hindihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Hindi/Discussions/2011, Tamilhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Tamil/Discussions/2011, Teluguhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Telugu/Discussions/2011, Kannadahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Kannada/Discussions/2011, Nepalihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Neplai/Discussions/2011, Malayalamhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Malayalam/Discussions/2011, Marathihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Marathi/Discussions/2011, Odiahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Odia/Discussions/2011, Sanskrithttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Sanskrit/Discussions/2011, Bengalihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Bengali/Discussions/2011, and Gujaratihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Gujarati/Discussions/2011 .) Thanks for the extensive
[Wikimediaindia-l] Report on Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011- (15 to 18 Dec. 2011)
Report on Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011- (15 to 18 Dec. 2011) About CMDA: CMDA, Pune is an association of Computer and Media dealers in Pune. It is a registered organisation and is ISO 9000 certified. Recently, it is declared as the best Computer dealers association across India by DQ Week magazine. Website: www.cmdapune.org *About IT Expo: * CMDA organises IT expo every year. This was 14th year of the expo and was held during 15-18 Dec 2011. As per CMDA organisors, the no. of visitors this year was about 4. About our activities: CMDA gave us a 2m X 2m stall. The usual cost for the stall is about Rs 25,000. However, considering that we are not doing any business activities and are working for a social cause, this was given to us GRATIS. The stall allocation was confirmed at a very late stage. As such, the call for volunteers was also sent very late and we were running short of people to man the stall. On day 1, (15th Dec), user:Mahitgar, Sudhanwa, Hisham and Nitika started the activities in the morning session. Flex banners were put up and the printed handouts were ready to be distributed. Hisham and Nitika came all the way from Delhi for this. They also got some T shirts for distribution to the right people. Our stall was the last stall in the expo and was adjoining the seminar hall. After the inauguration, people started visiting our stall. The chief guest was visiting all the stalls and he visited our stall also. He was pleasantly surprised to see our activities (non-commercial, social cause) in the expo. On day 1, second half was handled by Ashwin and Mahitgar. We had printed a handout to create a generic awareness about Wikipedia. This was in English on one side and about Marathi Wikipedia on the other side. Initially, we had about 200 handouts printed as the response was not known to us. Ultimately, we had to make many copies many times as the response went on increasing day by day. Day 2 (16th Dec) was managed by Mahitgar, Ashwin, Abhishek and some other CA volunteers. For the CAs, it was a great experience to interact with the people face to face and answer all kinds of their queries. This was totally different from the usual CA activities where they interact with people who are already much aware of Wikipedia and editing and may be other projects too. Abhishek and some others managed the stall till afternoon and later on by Sudhanwa and some others like Pratik. In the evening, Mahitgar gave a talk on the topic “Marathi Wikipedia- Challenges and Future” in the seminar hall which was received very well. Day 3 (17th Dec) was a hectic day being Saturday, the weekend. Mahitgar and Sudhanwa handled the 1st half. Ashwin joined with his spouse for a couple of hours. Mandar joined in the 2nd half till the day ends. There was really an energetic crowd who visited the stall and asked many many questions. Day 4 (18th Dec) Mandar handled the stall since morning for whole day. He was alone there till lunch time when some more volunteers including Ashwin, Mahitgar came to help him out. Being a Sunday, the fourth day was very hectic and most crowded. Some more volunteers like Lochan Makheja (Hindi Wikipedian from Pune) were also added but it was still difficult to address all the visitors to our stall. Even with 4 volunteers at a time, we were not able handle the running crowd at peak hour on Sunday evening. We had kept a notebook at the stall and noted down names and contact details of the people who were interested in further Wikipedia related activities. During the 4 days of expo, we have collected names and contact details of the interested people and that number is about 250!! That is big enough to have multiple wiki-academies in Pune in the next few months. Our guesstimate of the no of people visited our stall is about 3000. While many visitors knew what Wikipedia is, most were not aware that it is also available in Indian languages, especially Marathi. The few who were aware of both were not aware of other projects like Commons, Wikisource etc. People were mostly unaware of the implications of copyrighted and freely licensed information.The expo gave a very good opportunity to interact with the people directly and get a feel of what the common people understand/know about Wikipedia. Here are some USUAL questions that we faced in the expo. 1. What is the price of Wikipedia? I want to buy some copies. :-) (to be specific - Wikipedia kitne me bech rahe ho ) 2. You are not selling anything here? !!! Then why are you in the expo? 3. You are not getting anything from Wikipedia, then why are you standing for whole day on the stall? 4. If anyone can edit Wikipedia, what is the assurance that the content is correct and authentic? 5. Can you edit Wikipedia in Marathi/Hindi? How? 6. If I write any article on Wikipedia, will there be my name on the article? 7 If I type some search string in Marathi (Devanagari), you get search pages in Marathi/ Marathi Wikipedia?? !! 8. If I
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Summary and perspectives from Discussions with Indic language wikimedians - 2011
On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote: What I found one of the key factor behind active communities particularly Tamil and Malayalam, is the support of Government for the initiative. This could be a priority area for other Wikipedias as well. According to my knowledge, World Classical Tamil Conference 2010http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Classical_Tamil_Conference_2010was the only time Tamil wikipedians and --cut-- More important is, to grow Indic wikipedias some community members need to take some extra effort. Thanks for the clarifications. Agree with your above recommendation. But unfortunately, the community could not be strengthened due to various issues like access to Internet. computing platform, issues with rendering and input methods and we ended up with stub articles remaining in the same state. That is the case in all Indic wikis which used bots to increase the number of articles. According to me strength of the community also should grow as the number of articles grows. If we focus on community growth, articles numbers will grow as a natural outcome of that. As we already saw it will not happen the other way round for Indic wikipedias. As one editor pointed out in discussions, *Users will be attached to a wiki only if they feel proud about it*. So it is important that we should plan some programs to retain existing users and attract more new users to Indic wikis. We need to have some programs to bring back our old editors also. Bringing back old editors could be more difficult than bringing new editors. I talked to few experienced but currently dormant editors on Telugu Wiki and was not successful. Cheers Arjun ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Summary and perspectives from Discussions with Indic language wikimedians - 2011
Ravishankar ravidre...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for these great suggestions Ravi. *1. Active participation of Wikipedians having English Wikipedia experience. * Yes this is very important. Infact I already mentioned this in my second point (attracting newbies) This is what I wrote: We must also look at both newbies to editing as well as existing *English Wikipedia editors* who have inclinations and abilities on Indic languages. Remember that many Indic editors initially started off in English Wikipedia and we must actively seek them out. I know some communities - like Marathi - who look for editors who have Marathi sounding names or edit Marathi/Maharashtra centric topics and quietly invite them to contribute to Marathi Wikipedia. As we can see already few language communities understood the importance of reaching out to users with English wikipedia experience. *2. Developing friends of Wikipedia network.* Yes this is very very important for the growth of Indic wikipedias. In the previous reply to Arjuna I mentioned about the involvement of Social organizations. That will directly or indirectly help Indic wiki projects. One immediate example I can show from ml wiki project is the free licensing of LDF keralam http://ldfkeralam.org, Kerala State Electricity Boardhttp://www.kseb.in/, and Dutch in Kerala http://www.dutchinkerala.com/ website. All those became possible since friends of Wikipedia or community members were ready to talk to people outside wikipedia about the importance of such landmark decisions. *3. Developing the sister projects.* A very valid point. Many Indic languages have rich cultural heritage. There are rich litereacry works in most of them. No need to mention about the rich vocabulary. We have lot of things to do at least in Wikisource, Wiktionary, and Wikiquote. Infact from the example of Tamil and Kannada we have seen the efforts put by community to develop wiktionary. Remember in Kannada, Wiktionary project is active even more than Wikipedia. Also in Malayalam and Sanskrit wikisource is very active. So some communities already understood the importance of sister projects. Infact what I found is, we can use sister wiki projects also (especially wikisource and wiktionary) to develop a wiki community for a language. Networking with state and central governments, various educational institutions, social organizations, and so on are required to grow Indic wikipedia projects. As mentioned before some extra effort and leadership role from some community members of each language is required to grow the community and wiki projects for any Indic language. Thanks for providing all these suggestions. All these important suggestions will help us as we try to help various indic language wiki communities. Thanks Shiju On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Ravishankar ravidre...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Shiju, Thanks for the excellent analysis on Indic Wikipedia communities. When I consider community building, I think of 5 broad aspects: 1. Editor retention 2. Attracting newbies 3. Community communication 4. Community collaboration and 5. Community celebration Based on Tamil Wiki experience, I would like to add few more key points that can make a difference: *1. Active participation of Wikipedians having English Wikipedia experience.* While small communities should not enforce all en wiki practices and rules as such, active participation of people having English Wikipedia experience is a great plus. They can help implement the best practices, clarify on wiki procedures, help in technical aspects and act as ambassadors for the local wiki. Throughout Tamil Wikipedia's growth, we have had such contributors who made immense difference to the project. It is this context, I emphasize that awareness about Indic Wiki for people visiting en wiki should be increased. * 2. Developing friends of Wikipedia network.* Not everyone can contribute to Wikipedia directly even if they know how to do it. But they can still support the cause of Wiki. Efforts should be made in getting friends in blogosphere, technosphere, media, academia and the Government (if possible). These people can be of great help in outreach and other logistical help. *3. Developing the sister projects.* For small communities, developing Wikipedia to a useful stage ( 100K articles of decent quality) is a very long term and intensive process. But, with some meticulous planning, the sister projects like Wiktionary, Wikisource can be scaled with less effort. When these projects grow, they in turn bring visitors and contributors for Wikipedia. They will also serve as a reference source for citations and vocabulary. This is one solution for the chicken and egg problem of building content to get contributors Vs having contributors to build content. This is also one are where formal entities like WMF and the chapter can help the community to network with academic and
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Report on Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011- (15 to 18 Dec. 2011)
Quite heart warming to hear about this... hope we have something like this in Delhi soon :) On 26 December 2011 14:01, Sudhanwa Jogalekar sudhanwa@gmail.comwrote: Report on Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011- (15 to 18 Dec. 2011) About CMDA: CMDA, Pune is an association of Computer and Media dealers in Pune. It is a registered organisation and is ISO 9000 certified. Recently, it is declared as the best Computer dealers association across India by DQ Week magazine. Website: www.cmdapune.org *About IT Expo: * CMDA organises IT expo every year. This was 14th year of the expo and was held during 15-18 Dec 2011. As per CMDA organisors, the no. of visitors this year was about 4. About our activities: CMDA gave us a 2m X 2m stall. The usual cost for the stall is about Rs 25,000. However, considering that we are not doing any business activities and are working for a social cause, this was given to us GRATIS. The stall allocation was confirmed at a very late stage. As such, the call for volunteers was also sent very late and we were running short of people to man the stall. On day 1, (15th Dec), user:Mahitgar, Sudhanwa, Hisham and Nitika started the activities in the morning session. Flex banners were put up and the printed handouts were ready to be distributed. Hisham and Nitika came all the way from Delhi for this. They also got some T shirts for distribution to the right people. Our stall was the last stall in the expo and was adjoining the seminar hall. After the inauguration, people started visiting our stall. The chief guest was visiting all the stalls and he visited our stall also. He was pleasantly surprised to see our activities (non-commercial, social cause) in the expo. On day 1, second half was handled by Ashwin and Mahitgar. We had printed a handout to create a generic awareness about Wikipedia. This was in English on one side and about Marathi Wikipedia on the other side. Initially, we had about 200 handouts printed as the response was not known to us. Ultimately, we had to make many copies many times as the response went on increasing day by day. Day 2 (16th Dec) was managed by Mahitgar, Ashwin, Abhishek and some other CA volunteers. For the CAs, it was a great experience to interact with the people face to face and answer all kinds of their queries. This was totally different from the usual CA activities where they interact with people who are already much aware of Wikipedia and editing and may be other projects too. Abhishek and some others managed the stall till afternoon and later on by Sudhanwa and some others like Pratik. In the evening, Mahitgar gave a talk on the topic “Marathi Wikipedia- Challenges and Future” in the seminar hall which was received very well. Day 3 (17th Dec) was a hectic day being Saturday, the weekend. Mahitgar and Sudhanwa handled the 1st half. Ashwin joined with his spouse for a couple of hours. Mandar joined in the 2nd half till the day ends. There was really an energetic crowd who visited the stall and asked many many questions. Day 4 (18th Dec) Mandar handled the stall since morning for whole day. He was alone there till lunch time when some more volunteers including Ashwin, Mahitgar came to help him out. Being a Sunday, the fourth day was very hectic and most crowded. Some more volunteers like Lochan Makheja (Hindi Wikipedian from Pune) were also added but it was still difficult to address all the visitors to our stall. Even with 4 volunteers at a time, we were not able handle the running crowd at peak hour on Sunday evening. We had kept a notebook at the stall and noted down names and contact details of the people who were interested in further Wikipedia related activities. During the 4 days of expo, we have collected names and contact details of the interested people and that number is about 250!! That is big enough to have multiple wiki-academies in Pune in the next few months. Our guesstimate of the no of people visited our stall is about 3000. While many visitors knew what Wikipedia is, most were not aware that it is also available in Indian languages, especially Marathi. The few who were aware of both were not aware of other projects like Commons, Wikisource etc. People were mostly unaware of the implications of copyrighted and freely licensed information.The expo gave a very good opportunity to interact with the people directly and get a feel of what the common people understand/know about Wikipedia. Here are some USUAL questions that we faced in the expo. 1. What is the price of Wikipedia? I want to buy some copies. :-) (to be specific - Wikipedia kitne me bech rahe ho ) 2. You are not selling anything here? !!! Then why are you in the expo? 3. You are not getting anything from Wikipedia, then why are you standing for whole day on the stall? 4. If anyone can edit Wikipedia, what is the assurance that the content is correct and authentic? 5.
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Report on Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011- (15 to 18 Dec. 2011)
Dear Mitra, why don't you join the chapter and we can work something out for Delhi too :) Hope to catch up with you in Delhi! On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Mitra sharma mittyko...@gmail.com wrote: Quite heart warming to hear about this... hope we have something like this in Delhi soon :) On 26 December 2011 14:01, Sudhanwa Jogalekar sudhanwa@gmail.comwrote: Report on Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011- (15 to 18 Dec. 2011) About CMDA: CMDA, Pune is an association of Computer and Media dealers in Pune. It is a registered organisation and is ISO 9000 certified. Recently, it is declared as the best Computer dealers association across India by DQ Week magazine. Website: www.cmdapune.org *About IT Expo: * CMDA organises IT expo every year. This was 14th year of the expo and was held during 15-18 Dec 2011. As per CMDA organisors, the no. of visitors this year was about 4. About our activities: CMDA gave us a 2m X 2m stall. The usual cost for the stall is about Rs 25,000. However, considering that we are not doing any business activities and are working for a social cause, this was given to us GRATIS. The stall allocation was confirmed at a very late stage. As such, the call for volunteers was also sent very late and we were running short of people to man the stall. On day 1, (15th Dec), user:Mahitgar, Sudhanwa, Hisham and Nitika started the activities in the morning session. Flex banners were put up and the printed handouts were ready to be distributed. Hisham and Nitika came all the way from Delhi for this. They also got some T shirts for distribution to the right people. Our stall was the last stall in the expo and was adjoining the seminar hall. After the inauguration, people started visiting our stall. The chief guest was visiting all the stalls and he visited our stall also. He was pleasantly surprised to see our activities (non-commercial, social cause) in the expo. On day 1, second half was handled by Ashwin and Mahitgar. We had printed a handout to create a generic awareness about Wikipedia. This was in English on one side and about Marathi Wikipedia on the other side. Initially, we had about 200 handouts printed as the response was not known to us. Ultimately, we had to make many copies many times as the response went on increasing day by day. Day 2 (16th Dec) was managed by Mahitgar, Ashwin, Abhishek and some other CA volunteers. For the CAs, it was a great experience to interact with the people face to face and answer all kinds of their queries. This was totally different from the usual CA activities where they interact with people who are already much aware of Wikipedia and editing and may be other projects too. Abhishek and some others managed the stall till afternoon and later on by Sudhanwa and some others like Pratik. In the evening, Mahitgar gave a talk on the topic “Marathi Wikipedia- Challenges and Future” in the seminar hall which was received very well. Day 3 (17th Dec) was a hectic day being Saturday, the weekend. Mahitgar and Sudhanwa handled the 1st half. Ashwin joined with his spouse for a couple of hours. Mandar joined in the 2nd half till the day ends. There was really an energetic crowd who visited the stall and asked many many questions. Day 4 (18th Dec) Mandar handled the stall since morning for whole day. He was alone there till lunch time when some more volunteers including Ashwin, Mahitgar came to help him out. Being a Sunday, the fourth day was very hectic and most crowded. Some more volunteers like Lochan Makheja (Hindi Wikipedian from Pune) were also added but it was still difficult to address all the visitors to our stall. Even with 4 volunteers at a time, we were not able handle the running crowd at peak hour on Sunday evening. We had kept a notebook at the stall and noted down names and contact details of the people who were interested in further Wikipedia related activities. During the 4 days of expo, we have collected names and contact details of the interested people and that number is about 250!! That is big enough to have multiple wiki-academies in Pune in the next few months. Our guesstimate of the no of people visited our stall is about 3000. While many visitors knew what Wikipedia is, most were not aware that it is also available in Indian languages, especially Marathi. The few who were aware of both were not aware of other projects like Commons, Wikisource etc. People were mostly unaware of the implications of copyrighted and freely licensed information.The expo gave a very good opportunity to interact with the people directly and get a feel of what the common people understand/know about Wikipedia. Here are some USUAL questions that we faced in the expo. 1. What is the price of Wikipedia? I want to buy some copies. :-) (to be specific - Wikipedia kitne me bech rahe ho ) 2. You are not selling anything here? !!! Then why are you in the expo?
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Report on Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011- (15 to 18 Dec. 2011)
Hey Noopur, Have figured out the procedure, will get it done at the earliest. Am looking forward to contributing and interacting with wiki members in Delhi :) On 26 December 2011 17:17, Noopur noopur.ra...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Mitra, why don't you join the chapter and we can work something out for Delhi too :) Hope to catch up with you in Delhi! On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Mitra sharma mittyko...@gmail.comwrote: Quite heart warming to hear about this... hope we have something like this in Delhi soon :) On 26 December 2011 14:01, Sudhanwa Jogalekar sudhanwa@gmail.comwrote: Report on Wikipedians participation in CMDA IT Expo, 2011- (15 to 18 Dec. 2011) About CMDA: CMDA, Pune is an association of Computer and Media dealers in Pune. It is a registered organisation and is ISO 9000 certified. Recently, it is declared as the best Computer dealers association across India by DQ Week magazine. Website: www.cmdapune.org *About IT Expo: * CMDA organises IT expo every year. This was 14th year of the expo and was held during 15-18 Dec 2011. As per CMDA organisors, the no. of visitors this year was about 4. About our activities: CMDA gave us a 2m X 2m stall. The usual cost for the stall is about Rs 25,000. However, considering that we are not doing any business activities and are working for a social cause, this was given to us GRATIS. The stall allocation was confirmed at a very late stage. As such, the call for volunteers was also sent very late and we were running short of people to man the stall. On day 1, (15th Dec), user:Mahitgar, Sudhanwa, Hisham and Nitika started the activities in the morning session. Flex banners were put up and the printed handouts were ready to be distributed. Hisham and Nitika came all the way from Delhi for this. They also got some T shirts for distribution to the right people. Our stall was the last stall in the expo and was adjoining the seminar hall. After the inauguration, people started visiting our stall. The chief guest was visiting all the stalls and he visited our stall also. He was pleasantly surprised to see our activities (non-commercial, social cause) in the expo. On day 1, second half was handled by Ashwin and Mahitgar. We had printed a handout to create a generic awareness about Wikipedia. This was in English on one side and about Marathi Wikipedia on the other side. Initially, we had about 200 handouts printed as the response was not known to us. Ultimately, we had to make many copies many times as the response went on increasing day by day. Day 2 (16th Dec) was managed by Mahitgar, Ashwin, Abhishek and some other CA volunteers. For the CAs, it was a great experience to interact with the people face to face and answer all kinds of their queries. This was totally different from the usual CA activities where they interact with people who are already much aware of Wikipedia and editing and may be other projects too. Abhishek and some others managed the stall till afternoon and later on by Sudhanwa and some others like Pratik. In the evening, Mahitgar gave a talk on the topic “Marathi Wikipedia- Challenges and Future” in the seminar hall which was received very well. Day 3 (17th Dec) was a hectic day being Saturday, the weekend. Mahitgar and Sudhanwa handled the 1st half. Ashwin joined with his spouse for a couple of hours. Mandar joined in the 2nd half till the day ends. There was really an energetic crowd who visited the stall and asked many many questions. Day 4 (18th Dec) Mandar handled the stall since morning for whole day. He was alone there till lunch time when some more volunteers including Ashwin, Mahitgar came to help him out. Being a Sunday, the fourth day was very hectic and most crowded. Some more volunteers like Lochan Makheja (Hindi Wikipedian from Pune) were also added but it was still difficult to address all the visitors to our stall. Even with 4 volunteers at a time, we were not able handle the running crowd at peak hour on Sunday evening. We had kept a notebook at the stall and noted down names and contact details of the people who were interested in further Wikipedia related activities. During the 4 days of expo, we have collected names and contact details of the interested people and that number is about 250!! That is big enough to have multiple wiki-academies in Pune in the next few months. Our guesstimate of the no of people visited our stall is about 3000. While many visitors knew what Wikipedia is, most were not aware that it is also available in Indian languages, especially Marathi. The few who were aware of both were not aware of other projects like Commons, Wikisource etc. People were mostly unaware of the implications of copyrighted and freely licensed information.The expo gave a very good opportunity to interact with the people directly and get a feel of what the common people understand/know about Wikipedia. Here are some USUAL questions
[Wikimediaindia-l] StatisticsBot for closer look on Indic numbers
Hi all, ar:User:OsamaK had developed a pywikipedia based bot to collect daily stats[1] and has been running for over 2 years. I had just translated it and started running for Tamil wikipedia here[2]. I am now looking ApiSandbox[3][4] to build queries which will get more data(Bot activity, number of users with atleast 1 edit on the day,anon edits etc) which might be useful to log and keep track on daily basis.let me know if some other parameter might be useful to collect. Feel free to run this on your Indic wiki project and observe the numbers :) This can help notice sudden spikes on any parameter on day-day basis and help relate to some event (outreach / real world events) Thanks to Osama for the base code, the english version of which is available here[5]. Please feel free to fork and and add to it :) [1] http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/مستخدم:OsamaK/إحصاءات/ديسمبر_2011 [2] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics/December_2011 [3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ApiSandbox [4] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox [5] https://gist.github.com/b37a1d07888597f7c9ac -- Regards Srikanth.L PS : This entire thing was a by-product of Bala's Doha visit when he interacted with Osama in the Arabic wiki convention and got to know of this. Apparently Bala learnt this from Osama and he learnt about wmf grant process from Bala :) ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] StatisticsBot for closer look on Indic numbers
PS : This entire thing was a by-product of Bala's Doha visit when he interacted with Osama in the Arabic wiki convention and got to know of this. Apparently Bala learnt this from Osama and he learnt about wmf grant process from Bala :) Mutual learning? :) Good tool/feature. :) Once again congrats the duo. :) *$U®¥∩* http://goo.gl/RoMyo.com http://firefoxsurya.blogspot.com/ http://about.me/suryaceg ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
[Wikimediaindia-l] Announcing Wikipedia Takes Ahmedabad!
Dear all, I take great pride and joy in announcing Wikipedia takes Ahmedabad on January 3, 2012. As a great start to the event, we had a new volunteer join us and make our logo. He is very excited to have discovered Commons and has offered his help for all events in future. We are coordinating it thru FB group and event page and details are listed on Wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Ahmedabad You can join and invite your friends here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/wpabad/ Please do give us your suggestions on how to make this event a success :) Look forward to your best wishes! Thank you, Warmly Noopur -- Noopur Raval Student Arts and Aesthetics Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Ph: 9650567690 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] StatisticsBot for closer look on Indic numbers
Srikanth, Good work. And thanks for sharing. Since in this we are calculating edits per day, new users per day, new articles per day, and so on, I feel it will be good if those details are displayed instead of the current total edits/users/articles. In fact for daily analysis that data is more valubale than total edits/users. I know for developers like you it is just one line of code. But for non-developer users like me it makes big difference. :) Also is is it possible to get the data of number of users who do at least 5 edits per day. I know that makes sense only for very active wikipedias. But still it is a good metric I suppose. Thanks once again for sharing this. Shiju 2011/12/26 Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com Hi all, ar:User:OsamaK had developed a pywikipedia based bot to collect daily stats[1] and has been running for over 2 years. I had just translated it and started running for Tamil wikipedia here[2]. I am now looking ApiSandbox[3][4] to build queries which will get more data(Bot activity, number of users with atleast 1 edit on the day,anon edits etc) which might be useful to log and keep track on daily basis.let me know if some other parameter might be useful to collect. Feel free to run this on your Indic wiki project and observe the numbers :) This can help notice sudden spikes on any parameter on day-day basis and help relate to some event (outreach / real world events) Thanks to Osama for the base code, the english version of which is available here[5]. Please feel free to fork and and add to it :) [1] http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/مستخدم:OsamaK/إحصاءات/ديسمبر_2011 [2] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics/December_2011 [3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ApiSandbox [4] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox [5] https://gist.github.com/b37a1d07888597f7c9ac -- Regards Srikanth.L PS : This entire thing was a by-product of Bala's Doha visit when he interacted with Osama in the Arabic wiki convention and got to know of this. Apparently Bala learnt this from Osama and he learnt about wmf grant process from Bala :) ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
