Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/WikiTungi, an idea of forming city based Wikipedia communities

Title ideas edit

Ideally three to ten words, the headline to your piece will show up in social media shares and on the blog's homepage. Try to capture the most interesting part of your piece.
  • Odia Wikipedia's effort on building city based community building activities.
  • Telugu Wikipedia's quality improvement effort.

Summary edit

A brief summary of the post's content, about 20-50 words. On the blog, the summary will appear in italicized text underneath the headline. You can use this space as a teaser, expansion of your headline, or as a summary of the post.
  • The Odia Wikipedia’s WikiTungi attempt building a community of Wikimedians at the city level. The tungi, named after an ancient practice in Odia that involves passing on knowledge of the scriptures, is a city based Wikipedia community that helps Wikimedians around the city to meet and learn from their shared experiences.

Body edit

What do you want to tell the world? Put it here. The best imagery helps convey your most basic ideas without doing it overtly. Ideas on introductions and writing style can be found in our guidelines.
 
Bhubaneswar Wiki Tungi Meetup April, 2016 by Saileshpat, CC 4.0.
 
Wikimedians editing Wikidata on 6th WikiTungi Puri meetup by Saileshpat, CC 4.0.
 
Wikimedians from WikiTungi Puri in 4th Tungi meetup by Saileshpat, CC 4.0.

The Odia Wikipedia’s WikiTungi is an attempt at building a community of Wikimedians at the city level. The tungi, named after an ancient practice in Odia that involves passing on knowledge of the scriptures, is a city based Wikipedia community that helps Wikimedians around the city to meet and learn from their shared experiences. The Tungi meetups and events are organized with the help of the volunteers. Over a year, the community has created a self-sustaining advanced training program cycle wherein community members train new editors who in turn train editors who come after them.

The WikiTungi is based in two cities, Puri and Bhubaneswar, where the community members organize events and regular meetups for the community Wikimedians. In addition to providing advanced training sessions for existing Wikimedians, 10 Wikimedians in Bhubaneswar and 12 Wikimedians in Puri, WikiTungi meetups also train new individuals who attend the meetups. While Wikimedians in Puri conduct meetups bi-monthly, Bhubaneswar Wikimedians meet once a month. In every meetup, Wikimedians exchange their resources with each other, helping address their doubts and queries regarding their problems and projects. Tungi also helps to mark the presence of the Wikimedia movement in the particular area, and also attracts individuals to take part in it.

The activities with the WikiTungi helped the community is achieving few projects and quality improvement tasks:

Rath Yatra GLAM
Process of wheel making by Jagannath Dora, CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Ratha Yatra GLAM is an activity by WikiTungi Puri, where Wikimedians from Puri documented the process of the chariot for 22 days during the Ratha Yatra festival in the city. Chariot making is a major part of this centuries old festival and the community found the need to improve on photo and video documentation of this ritual on open access platforms. The Wikimedians spent over three weeks to document the important parts of this ancient festival at Rakha Khala where the chariots are made. This is the first GLAM activity conducted by Odia Wikipedians. Due to uncontrollable issues, the project was initially delayed by 15 days. The project started will likely take a year to be completed and will be one of the largest Open Knowledge resources available on Jagannath culture. Correspondingly, a month long edit-a-thon was organised where participants improved/ created 60 articles on Odia Wikipedia.

Image-A-Thon

Image-a-thon is a quality improvement project to add images into the Odia Wikipedia articles that don't have images. A large event of Image-A-thon is also planned for flourishing Odia Wikipedia with good quality images, and also to have " at least one image in one article" The phase-1 of Image-A-Thon was organized in Puri to add images of Puri city into Commons and use those images in Wikipedia articles. In the first phase, almost 7 Wikimedians took part, and 150 images were added into Odia Wikipedia articles.

Wikidata

Odia Wikipedia was one of the first four Wikipedias to have the article place holder extension. Odia Wikipedians have been devoted to conducting Wikidata label-a-thon and translation to increase the presence of Odia language in Wikidata and to improve and enable the article place holder function in Odia Wikipedia. Since August 2016, a series of Wikidata label translation activities have been carried out in collaboration with Wikimedians from Puri.


Odia Wikisource's 2nd-anniversary conference

On January 2017, Odia Wikipedia organized the second anniversary of the Odia Wikisource after the successful approval of the Rapid grant by Jnanaranjan Sahu, The community in Bhubaneswar planned for the event and helped in bringing 30 Wikipedians into the conference. Which resulted in training the Wikimedians on how to digitise books, how to proofread and send OTRS approvals.


Sambad's 100 Women Editathon

Inspired by the BBC's 100 Women editathon, the Odia Wikipedia's Bhubaneswar WikiTungi community is organizing a 100 Women editathon in collaboration with the Sambad newspaper. Sambad is one of the highest circulating newspaper in Odisha. The editathon will be organised in the Sambad office, Bhubaneswar on March 18th and 19th for editing and improving 100 articles related to Women from Odisha. Utkal University's Women study department and Sambad will help the community members in providing the resource for creating or improving the articles.

On December 2016 and February 2017, WikTungi Puri and WikiTungi Bhubaneswar marked their first anniversary, The community discussed various ideas(listed below) and the ways they can be implemented in the regular WikiTungi meetups. During the community meetup, Tungi members came up with few ideas to implement it as a best practice in the Wikipedia movement.
Future Plans
  • The Tungi members will invite one of the global community leaders for a Skype or hangout session.
  • Discuss the best practice from the global community and discuss them with the community.
  • Updating the minutes of the meeting and sharing them with the other community members.
  • Updating the learning and evaluation team about the new learning of the community every month.
  • The community will also send Postcards as a souvenir to the participants of the global community for the online sessions.


Telugu Wikipedia's attempt to clean machine translated articles edit

Know how-Wikipedia content translation tool by Pavan santhosh.s

From 2008, Google started its " IndicGoogle Translate Project" in Indic language Wikipedias to populate the content of the Wikipedias with the help of machine translation tools. The project started in 2008 and continued till 2011 creating articles in Indic language Wikipedias.The project also took place in Telugu Wikipedia (along with many oIndic language Wikipedias), which translated articles from English Wikipedia to Telugu Wikipedia using the machine translation tools.

Despite its goal to improve Indic language Wikipedias, the project was considered as vandalization as the pages contain a large amount of incomprehensible language, redlinks, template problems, broken file links, etc. With the community consultation, the community came up to improving the quality of articles. The community is teaching the Wikipedians to learn the use of Wikipedia translation tool to rewrite the articles more efficiently. A video tutorial was also created for the purpose. As some Wikipedians reflected that Google Translation Project has created too many unnecessary and low-quality articles, a framework has been developed to prioritize which articles to be rewritten, improved, or deleted during edit-a-thons.

...

Sailesh Patnaik, Odia Wikimedian, Community Advocate, CIS-A2K