Participant at Kolkata Wikipedia outreach session searching for help on editing Wikipedia
Current position of Wikipedia in India can be summarized as follows:
Over 60,000 editors are contributing to English Wikipedia but only about 3% of these editors come from India.
English Wikipedia has 3.5 million articles, but only about 82,000 are currently estimated to be on “India-centric” topics.
Quality of articles of India-centric topics is relatively low.
There are only 1800 active editors on English Wikipedia from India.
There are only 600 active editors across all Indic langauge Wikipedias.
Considering the fact that Wikipedia is still western centric and most Wikipedia editors come from Global North, there is an imperative need to increase awareness about Wikipedia amongst the Indian masses. It is extremely crucial for us to conduct several outreach sessions to:
The idea is to build capacity and enable community members to conduct outreach sessions independently or with minimal support to introduce Wikipedia to prospective editors in their respective cities/languages (English or Indic). There is a lot of potential to do outreach in India but it is hampered by the community member's lack of time, confidence and/or ability to do outreach.
By way of this pilot we want to support and enable community members who might be interested to conduct Wikipedia outreach sessions. Over the past few months we have conducted several outreach sessions and have been able to curate outreach standard presentation decks, best practices and tips and we want to assist community members in adopting/adapting these to conduct effective outreach sessions in their cities/languages.
We have been working on creating a handbook & supporting documents for outreach sessions in English which we will continue to fine tune during the course of this pilot.
Once English documents are all in order we'll then work closely with Indic language communities to translate all English outreach documents in their respective Indic language.
Once all documents are in place we'll ask community members to volunteer who might be interested to be trained on conducting outreach sessions. For the sake of uniformity we will call these volunteers as Trainers (since they'll be trained to train the participants :). To make sure that we are experimenting in a structured and controlled manner we would want limit the number Trainers to 6. In addition to that to make sure that we are covering at least 5 Indic languages we would like to have 5 Trainers from different language communities + 1 Trainer from English community.
In this stage we'll conduct a week long training period for these 6 Trainers which will concentrate on both theoretical and practical approach towards outreach.
