Quality improvement and community development of Kannada Wikipedia

Kannada Wikipedia started in June 2004. There are slightly more than 31,000 total articles in Kannada Wikipedia. The viewership of Kannada Wikipedia is about 9 million per month (Dec 2023). Quality of Kannada Wikipedia needs improvement. This can be done by way of increasing the number of good articles and also by improving the quality of existing articles. Kannada Wikipedia community needs some rejuvenation. These are huge tasks. Nevertheless. This project aims to work towards achieving this goal.

A survey of Kannada Wikipedia was done with the help of some volunteers. There are about 5000 articles in userpages which are left there without making them live (Sep 2023 data). A survey of these articles was conducted. There are about 850 articles which are in almost good shape and need little work to polish and make live. There are about another 870 articles in userpages which are of average quality which means they need a little more effort to improve so that they can be made live. There are about 14500 articles without reference. They also include articles which are quite small in size. There are about 6800 articles without images.

It is planned to organise workshops to make the good and average articles in the userpages live after making necessary improvements. Some Kannada Wikipedians will participate in this endeavour. There will be workshops every month to brief the participants and guide them. Participants will learn what is a good article from expert resource persons. They will improve the articles in userpages during the workshop. They will continue working after the workshops as well. Online groups will be formed for discussions and interactions. Thus there will be continuous activities happening. The workshops will be conducted at various places of Karnataka State. In each place some existing editors as well as new editors will participate. Existing editors will be trained on improving quality. New editors will be trained on editing Wikipedia. There will be follow-up workshops at these places mainly for new editors. Resource persons and veteran editors will participate in these workshops. These activities will instill new blood and energy into Kannada Wikipedia. Thus these activities will fulfill both aims - improving quality of Kannada Wikipedia and community development of Kannada Wikipedia.

Almost all workshops will be conducted at various educational institutions. This is will help us in 2 ways. Firstly it will help in getting a good computer lab with Internet connection. Secondly, students will be introduced to using Wikipedia as a education platform.

Activities edit

Quality survey:
1. Categorising articles in the list of userpages as Good, Average and Poor - Done
2. Make a list of articles without images - Done
3. Make a list of articles without reference - ongoing
First meeting to explain the project and recruit people for this project - online meet
Physical meeting of recruited persons at a location, consisting of people from that area. This will consist of existing editors. They will be briefed about quality, how to improve quality, the directions to go about and other necessary guidelines. This will be a 2-days workshop. Resource persons and veterans will participate and guide the volunteers.
Creation of online groups for the project and instructions to the participants through the group
Followup activities by the groups
Workshop at another place for training new editors. Resource persons and veterans also will participate and train new editors
Repeat of steps 3 to 6 for other place
More on workshops - in some of them we will improve existing, create missing, pages related to policies. In some workshops we will improve, create or import and localise templates. In some workshops we will improve some of the existing articles which are very important but lack quality.
Meeting of participants at the end of the project.

Participants edit

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja - Principal investigator and Program Manager

Working on articles in sandbox and articles without reference edit

Working on policy documents edit

Enroll @ https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/knwiki/Creation_of_policy_pages_in_Kannada_Wikipedia?enroll=sadglmjz

Working on Featured Article and Good Article edit

--TCsshetty (talk) 05:51, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Community Development Workshops edit

Workshop-1 edit

Place: Belagavi
Venue: KLE Lingaraj College
Dates: Jan 23 & 24, 2024

Participants edit

Workshop-2 edit

Place: Babaleshwara, Vijayapura
Venue: Shantaveera Arts & Science College
Dates: Feb 28 & 29, 2024

Participants edit

Workshop-3 edit

Place: Channenahalli, Bengaluru
Venue: Janaseva School Auditorium
Dates: Apr 06 & 07, 2024