User:Nitesh (CIS-A2K)/IR2021

Series of Mini edit-a-thons

Why mini edit-a-thons?

India was under a lockdown due to the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020. And like other areas of work and businesses, the Wikimedia movement was also affected and nothing was happening on-ground. To keep the Indian communities and volunteers engaged, A2K planned for something on the same platform. The idea of was Mini edit-a-thons series was born out of it. Moreover, during these events, we were able to engage approximately 100 users/editors. We conducted three mini edit-a-thons namely Mahatma Gandhi 2020 edit-a-thon, Festive Season 2020 edit-a-thon and Wikipedia 20th anniversary celebration edit-a-thon.

Mahatma Gandhi 2020 edit-a-thon

The Mahatma Gandhi edit-a-thon was organised on 2 and 3 October 2020. The theme of this edit-a-thon was Mahatma Gandhi and all edits on Wiki sister projects related to this theme were acceptable. The aim of this event was to improve the content available on Mahatma Gandhi. The editors performed well. 61 users had signed up but 42 Wikimedians participated during these two days. Approximately 11 language communities contributed. The Wiki projects were edited on Wikimedia Commmons, Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikisource. Also, a few audio files were recorded and uploaded on commons via LinguaLibre.

Gallery

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  Sabarmati Ashram - Ahmedabad - Gujarat, clicked by User:Vijay Barot
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  Sabarmati Ashram - Ahmedabad - Gujarat - by User:Vijay Barot

Festive Season 2020 edit-a-thon

The communities and editors gave a good response to Mahatama Gandhi edit-a-thon. Thus, A2K decided to organise one more mini edit-a-thon which was named Festive Season 2020 edit-a-thon. This second mini edit-a-thon was conducted on 5 and 6 December 2021. The theme of this mini edit-a-thon was Festivals of India because of the festive season. It was an attempt to improve the content on Indian festivals. No Wiki project was restricted to content creation. For this event, a common list was given to the interested participants. 80 users expressed their interest in participating and the Sanskrit community (17 editors) also did great work collectively who created a local page for the Festive season mini edit-a-thon. Out of 96 editors who had registered for the event, 76 users contributed. There was participation from 13 language communities. The same sister projects were edited. The Wikitongue project was edited by Tamil Wikimedian for the same event.

Gallery

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  नाताळ उत्सव सजावट(१), by आर्या जोशी
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  पुणे येथील मंदिरात महाशिवरात्री उत्सव, by आर्या जोशी

Wikipedia 20th anniversary celebration edit-a-thon

The third edit-a-thon was Wikipedia 20th anniversary celebration edit-a-thon under this series of mini edit-a-thons. This event was specially planned to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia. A2K decided to celebrate the day with Indian Wikimedians to create or develop content related to Wikipedia. For celebrating this event, we focused only on Wikipedia and interested editors contributed more content on their local Wikipedia. From 12 communities, 40 editors contributed but a total of 55 users signed up and expressed their interest. Around 105 articles were created or developed. It was organised on 9 - 10 January 2020. A volunteer by the name User:हिंदुस्थान वासी from Hindi Wikimedians offered his help in organising this event.

Impact of the series

During as well as after the events we found that users participated enthusiastically. The series edit-a-thons have given them a boost to carry on with this work. ~100 editors participated and we are planning to continue with such events this year as well with the help of feedback received from the participants.

International Mother Language Day 2021 - Label-a-thon

CIS-A2k has been actively working for Wikidata and trying to engage more editors with the same. 21 February is dedicated to International Mother Language Day. A2K decided to celebrate this day. The focused project was Wikidata and it was organised on 6 February 2021. It was a pre-event of Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021. The list of items was provided to participants. 18 users registered themselves as participants on the event page but 24 contributors made 1,580 edits.

Impact

The content was created in the local languages. The content was about the languages and within a day 1,580 edits were made.

A comparative study of Wikipedia article creation campaigns in India

The objective of this study was to compare the Analysis of Article Creation Campaigns on Wikipedia i.e, Project Tiger and Wikipedia Asian Month. The aim of this study was to identify: what motivates volunteers to contribute to Wikipedia during a campaign or a contest, the challenges they face, the kind of content being added during these contests, etc. During this study, we observed that campaigns or contests follow a few common aspects but also have some differences. The whole analysis is based on community members or event participants' interviews. The report Research:A Comparative Analysis of Article Creation Campaigns on Wikipedia was published on 1 June, 2021. To introduce this, the community sent an email to the India Mailing list. A blog post was also created in two parts part i and part ii which was published on CIS-A2K website.

Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021

Why?

March 2020 onwards, on-ground events have been shut down and communities have not been able to interact with each other in person. In 2020, A2K decided to plan an event that would be virtual and that would engage the communities or Wikimedians from India. This planning began with finding out what Wikimedians and communities needed. After completing the planning, the three-day event of Wikimedia Wikimeet took place. The main objectives behind organising this meet were to celebrate the work done by Wikimedians of India, to provide an online platform for wiki-learning and skill-share, to support discussions and interactions, to give training on important and relevant topics, and explore the medium of online training and wiki-event for future use.

What?

A2K conducted such a large scale virtual meet for the very first time. Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021 was a three-day-long event that took place on 19, 20 and 21 February 2021. It started as a national level meet but it reached International engagement or involvement. A few experienced international experts were invited to address the topics to Indian Wikimedians. The dates were well planned for the event. On the third day (21 February), it was International Mother Language Day. The participants celebrated International Mother Language Day together during WMWM on the same platform. The time for this event was according to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as well as the Indian Standard Time (IST) taking all the volunteers, participants, and experts into consideraton so that they could all attend all the sessions and could engage in fruitful discussions. During this event, different components were focused on such as online workshops, presentations, discussions, etc. Katherine Mehar and Asaf Bartov were the key speakers of the event. The detailed report of the meet is here

How?

A2K introduced Wikimedians to this event through Village pumps, mailing list, social media channels and newsletter. We asked them to involve themselves to translate the important information into their languages and create an SVG logo in this event. Wikimedians were also involved in request for comments and so on. We also approached volunteers to submit their projects or ideas to others. For selecting the submissions and making the program a program committee was selected. Every session was scheduled after reviewing all the submissions and the committee selected those presentations which were important or necessary. The presenters were also from outside India and from Wikimedia Foundation. The timing of the event was fixed according to attendees and presenters who were from outside India.

For attending the sessions or meet, registration was opened for a month 16 January 2021 to 16 February 2021 and after closing the registration special registration opened till the last day.

Impact

• First ever virtual Wiki meet in India on the national level to set remarks on how we can engage communities.
• International engagement and Indian Wikimedians got important information.
• Participants felt enthusiastic after the meet and they got ideas about virtual meets or events.

Productive, helpful sessions. Was very helpful to me personally. Good effort by all involved. If I were to suggest improvements, Would have liked slots for conversations, and networking sessions. A "state of the nation" like updates by projects would have helped too.

Thanks a lot again, this was a very good event. Online events are not the same as physical ones but it was still very interesting and useful.

Internet Support for Wikimedians in India

what? COVID-19 has affected our volunteers' financial situation and they highlighted this concern. Some of them were unable to recharge and get internet because they lost their jobs and a variety of other reasons. Internet Support for Wikimedian in India is a program run by A2K from 1 June to 31 August 2021. We are extending our support to the Indian Wikimedians in need. We started this program when we have got multiple requests regarding internet support on our request page. Till June, we received 52 requests on the meta page from different communities' editors. We gave 19 recharges in the month of June for three months. For tackling the whole process, we have set up a committee of four volunteers.

Impact: Editors are not concerned anymore about Internet service and they are able to edit Wikimedia projects.