Pavanaja,

Thanks for the explaining the outcome of Tulu Workshops and Christ
University partnership.

While you take a microscopic view of the recent activity and ask me to be
optimistic, I would like to be realistic after taking a macroscopic view on
past activities.

Please see

http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/launch-of-assamese-wikipedia-education-program

where active editors going from 20 to 20 over a period of 6 months is
called 45% growth.

The real state of Assamese Wikipedia now after two years can be seen at

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaAS.htm

Here is what Asaf from WMF has to say on this:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form#Q2a

"For a tiny Wikipedia like Assamese, it's possible the temporary editing
boost leading to a *doubling* of its size by article count and
*tripling*of its size by contents was itself the seed of future
growth, as the
bootstrapping of a Wikipedia is also slow and not self-sustaining work,
until that moment when a virtuous cycle kicks in and the usefulness of the
resource begins attracting new editors "organically". We have perhaps not
reached that moment with Assamese, and as you point out, the program is
implicitly judged to be less valuable than other opportunities and has thus
been discontinued."

If this is the case of Assamese Wikipedia which is already out of incubator
and that once had a very small but dedicated community, then what is CIS
doing working with projects in incubator?

Even after CIS working for a year on Konkani Wikipedia, it is not out of
incubator.

But, it seems you have started the Tulu plan even before the FDC grant is
approved.

Your FDC proposal staff assessment also notes as follows:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Staff_proposal_assessment

"CIS’s strategy for its stand-alone projects may not be the most effective
for the language communities each project is targeting, given that projects
other than Wikipedia (for example, Wikisource or Wiktionary) may be more
effective entry-points for working with language communities like Tulu or
Santali."

To quote Asaf from WMF again:

"The *sine qua non* of most programs is a core of self-motivating active
editors... Where that core doesn't exist, it's very hard to deploy any
other type of program..."

Tulu has a population around 2 million speakers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulu_language

You can find a realistic estimate of Editors per million speakers here:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

For the Indian landscape, Malayalam has around 3 editors (those who make 5+
edits every month) per million and it is the highest (you need to ignore
the highly extrapolated value for Sanskrit owing to its tiny population and
institutional support). It goes down until 0.2 editors per million for
Hindi. To put it in plain words, for every 50 lakh people speaking Hindi,
we can hope to get 1 editor making 5+ edits. This trend has been consistent
over the years and I don't expect drastic change occurring in the near
future unless there is a huge change in socio-economic scenarios.

If you look for languages similar to Tulu, Nepal Bhasa comes close.

You can check the activity for their Wikipedia at

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaNEW.htm

(to be continued.. ) :)

Ravi
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