Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Cycle 3/Odia Wikimedians User Group Salon

Information

This salon was organized on July 30 by the Odia Wikimedians User Group which brought together all the active Wikimedians from the Indian city of Bhubaneswar, three Wikimedian-coordinators, and three non-Wikimedian experts that have contributed largely on community engagement, media research, and publication.

Making Wikimedia community a more inclusive place by bringing in more students, veterans especially educators, opening the influx of knowledge from other language Wikimedia community members are some of the areas most participant unanimously aspired to change.

Sections

• A - Direction: Improving the content quality by regular engagement with the community—we have to care for our readers that are seeking important and factual information on Wikimedia projects.
• B - When new contributors always tend to be in a hurry to create more content, existing and experienced ones always have to redirect them to better the quality of their contribution.

Priorities

• 1 - There are many local challenges related to technological infrastructure (Wikipedia editing app is buggy and crashes even more for many non-English Wikipedias), partnerships (Wikimedia communities and affiliates are yet to partner with the government departments that have resources but are creating more mess by adopting proprietary and outdated technology).
• 2 - Relicensing government websites so that we can get (reliable) data directly both as source and citations

Section	Priority	Summary Statement	Overall sentiment	Keyword or phrase
A	1	Need for app development for editing Wikimedia projects: Local technical challenges like problematic Wikipedia app needs to be fixed as a significant portion use mobile devices to edit. Neither the official Wikipedia app on Android nor the Desktop mode in phone is stable.	supportive	App editing challenge
B	2	Low quality Wikipedia content because there are only a handful of citable sources that exist on the Internet when it comes to regional topics. Partnership with mediahouses, publishers and other content producers is a top priority	concern	Grow citable resources of local relevance
A	2	Building educational resources for new contributors, welcoming back inactive old contributors, and diversifying the community by bringing veterans (people who have access to educational resources, computer, and are retired from jobs)	supportive	Stronger community support

Detailed notes (Optional)

If you have detailed notes in addition to the summary, you may add them here. For example, the notes may come from an in-person discussion or workshop. If your discussion happened on a wiki or other The participants—Wikimedians, Wikimedian-facilitators, and ie.

Observations

The participants—Wikimedians, Wikimedian-facilitators, and invited experts—together participated in a brainstorming exercise. They documented the findings in three major areas—Challenges, Current state, and Future plans.

Areas	Challenges	Current state	Future plans
Tech	Building new tools and templates	Many essential templates are yet to be imported, need for special templates for some local content	Developing OCR
	Rendering issues	Multiple standards are in practice across fonts that lead to rendering issues, many mobile devices do not have Odia support yet
	Know-how about other regional Wikimedia projects not available in Odia
	Mobile editing is extremely troublesome	Odia and most Indic tools have serious issues with Wikipedia app while editing	Different app for Odia and/or other Indic-language WIkimedia projects
	Input tools	Loading time is slow, UI is not new user friendly
Community	Low quality articles in Wikipedia is drowning community's name	% stub articles really high	Collaborate with state archive and other news paper archives to increase Odia-language citations for Odisha/Odia-related content that are not covered well in national/global media
	Active contributors not growing substantially	The number of active contributors across projects remain more or less the same except exceptional hikes during campaigns/editathons	Learning from other language communites and diversifying community by bringing veterans
	Awareness	inactiveness of some admins	Supported encouragement for users
	Communications gap in community		Reaching to new authors for new books
	Social media engagements		Relicensing governement websites so that we can get data drectly
	Support to existing active community members		Contacting book collectors
	Home-coming of old contruibutors
	#images in articles	Activity of contributors declining	Cover different areas and follow up activities
Content	Lack of online/other resources of local importance	Historical resources of local importace like history Odia cinema not available	Updating policies with time
	Lack of high quality instructional videos for new users	Currently videos do not have voiceovers	Documenting community's work
	Quality of content	A lot of projects of local importance are not documented	Categorize and enrich wikipedia content by readers
	Growth in # articles	Low basic Wikimedia policy training for Wikimedians	Collborating with potentials stake holder
	Many projects in incubation	1-2 Incubator projects have enough interest
Partnership	Official redtape	Permissions not available for photography in GLAM institutions	Partnership with govt organisatioin (For preloading Kiwix and other free software to meritrious students)
	Difficult to explain why community's work is important	Increasing the number of readers / number of views of pages	Partnership with GLAM organizations (Odia newspapers have collection from 1965)
	Collaboration with private and government entities		Partnership with local mediahouses for media equipments to create video tutorials
Others	Computer literacy		Bringing a language parity in Wikipedia's content as some articles might not be written in a language easy enough for general public
	Social media
	Transcribing old manuscripts