Dear friends, The month of January passed quietly for WikiProject India on English Wikipedia. However elsewhere, the SOPA/PIPA discussion in the United States was the hot topic of the month and English Wikipedia went dark on 18 January for 24 hours in protest against these proposed laws.
At this point of time, getting the few small initiatives to keep going have been our concern. We have had [[Premchand]] as [[WP:INCOTM]] and [[Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi]] as GA of the month. Premchand has had substantial improvement. The GA Master Class ( a hoity-toity name I picked up as an excuse for periodically giving a few hints on the Wikimedia-in-en list) for Gandhi has begun and some posts made. GA of the month is a misnomer because despite lots of edits, there is tremendous amount of work yet to be done on Gandhi. It seems that we will be doing a GA/FA a quarter instead. :( The new INCOTM of the month is [[Dance in India]]. The Offline Wikipedia for Schools project has been dawdling along and we need people to recommit themselves to this Project. Recently, I realised that the most important parts of Wikipedia which need doing are not "pop corn and fast food". They require commitment and seem too much like work. They are not as much fun as editing on our favourite topics. That fact perhaps is the reason people begin working on this project and finding it is not much fun, gradually stop editing. However, lakhs of Indian children await our output so I'm requesting participants to return and recommit. On the talk page, we have had a discussion since December and through January into February about whether caste should be mentioned in biographies. The protagonists quoting [[WP:BLP]] and [[WP:V]] took the stand that caste should not be mentioned unless it has been self-identified by the person concerned in a reliable source. Some Indian editors contested it vehemently arguing that caste pervades Indian society and binding strictures on its mention should not be placed. But when it boiled down to a poll, the majority of editors stood up for the conservative position i.e. no inclusion unless self-identified in a reliable source. An earlier discussion about which should be the languages that a title of an article should be translated into in the lead. After lots of discussion, the discussion was closed as no consensus emerged except that IPA should definitely be present for pronunciation. In this regard, I think common sense and not misplaced parochialism should help us decide which all languages the title should be transcribed into in the lead. In this month, we saw Swaroop Rao, aka MikeLynch or Lynch7 as he masquerades nowadays become an admin. That is great. However, I am seeing more activity overall on English Wikipedia from the habitual editors - which is a very good sign. Young former CAs are playing up too but the spectre of exams had made its presence known by end January. All in all, a fairly okay month for WikiProject India. AshLin
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