CIS-A2K/Work plan July 2015 - June 2016/Kannada Wikipedia
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
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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
editCIS-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
edit| 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.
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
editCIS-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
editAfter 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
editQuality improvement
editThere 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
editThe 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
editPlan: 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
editInstitutional partnerships (ongoing)
editInstitutional 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)
editAlvas 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)
edit| 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
editOutreach activities with community participation
editIt 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
editThis 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
editTo 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
editThis 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
editThematic & focused monthly sprints
editPlan: 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
editPlan: 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
editThe 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 |
Budget
edit| Expenditure Item | FDC Support (INR) | FDC Support in US$ | Other Sources and in kind support (INR) | Other Sources and in kind support (US$) |
| 1 PM x 30% & | 316,800/- | 5,119.49 | - | - |
| 1 PD x 5% && | 79,200/- | 1,279.87 | 40,800/- | 659.33 |
| Travel and Stay &&& | 100,000/- | 1,616.00 | 120,000/- | 1,939.20 |
| Volunteer Support | 50,000/- | 808.00 | 20,000/- | 323.20 |
| Events/Meet-ups/Workshops | 50,000/- | 808.00 | 100,000/- | 1,616.00 |
| Digitisation costs | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Consumables/Printing/Stationery/Swag | 25,000/- | 404.00 | - | - |
| Miscellaneous | 5,000/- | 80.80 | - | - |
| Total | 626,000/- | 10,116.16 | 280,800/- | 4,537.73 |
Notes:
& 30% of Dr. U.B. Pavanaja's time as Program Manager at CIS-A2K, who will anchor this plan at CIS-A2K
&& 5% time of Program Director, CIS-A2K
&&& Expenses incurred by the CIS-A2K program team towards executing the plan
List of contributors
editThe following Kannada Wikipedians have contributed in making this work plan—