Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Condensed proposed roadmap for Wikimedia work in India

India Community Consultation 2014 was organized on 4 and 5 October 2014 at Bangalore, India. Here is the proposed roadmap of the event—

This roadmap is divided into three parts:

1. Programs/projects/activities -- what we are DOING out there, mostly off-wiki
2. Community organizing, community health -- how we are BEING in our communities, mostly on-wiki
3. Procedures, norms, and expectations in the movement network -- how we are RELATING to other movement actors -- individuals, communities, user groups, chapters, non-Wikimedia partners (e.g. Centre for Internet and Society, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).

Three directions - start/stop/continue

The roadmap plan has been divided into three divisions—

Start	Stop	Continue
Things we can/should start doing	Practices or ways of being we find unhelpful and should stop engaging in	Practices we agree are valuable and should continue or be strengthened

Programs/Projects/Activities

Start

  These initiatives/works need to be started

Work/Activity	Owned by	Supported by	Other comments
1.1.1 - Focus on a few subjects/programs of appropriate size, and see them to completion	Language/project communities	Community members, WMF, WMIN, CIS and other affiliated entities (allied organisations)
1.1.2 - Deliberately cultivate new volunteers to do outreach and represent the community. Mentor them, train them	Language communities, CIS, WMIN & Movement Partners opted by the community
1.1.3 - Digital outreach - Site notices, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter)	Communities	From WMIN, CIS and WMF if needed
1.1.4 - Consider using and publishing information about upstream projects like visual editors for online and offline editing, e.g., LibreOffice (libreoffice-wiki-publisher) - Formatting has known issues eg. Tables, offline mediawiki would be much better solution.	Language communities + Aniket and Asaf to create a learning pattern on this: Meta:Grants:Learning_patterns	Everyone
1.1.5 - Reach out to universities and teacher training institutes to add wikipedia as a topic in syllabus	Chapter (in consultation with the community)	CIS (CIS will create this material in collaboration with the interested community members and other allied organizations like SMC)
1.1.6 - National Mission for ICT's in Education and Spoken Tutorials project http://spoken-tutorial.org/ (Dr. Kannan Maudiga , IIT Mumbai)is a good project to Intervine . Spoken tutorials relicensed recently under CC-BY-SA-4.0 License
1.1.7 - National Museums and curriculum	WMIN	With help from the community
1.1.8 - Create a project to adapt open-OCR technologies to support Indic languages	Communities	SMC, CIS, funded by WMF, training key by and for communities	Action plan: Create a Meta page for discussion on this issue
1.1.9 - Start monitoring new articles and assist new users develop their wiki editing skills (Plase refer to https://metrics.wmflabs.org/ and wkitech.wikimedia.org for improvised tools to check	Communities	Other communities, WMF (for stats/data)
1.1.10 - When conducting workshops, make sure audience is focused and interested (Train the Trainer programs should help to learn this)	CIS, WMIN	Professionals, experts from communities and allied organisations
1.1.11 - Library support network - for print only resources across India	City-based groups	WMIN, WMF CIS (we are exploring this with our institutional partners and will update as and when there is development. E.g. Telugu University, Goa University, Goa City Central Library discussions currently in the pipeline)	For journal subscriptions, try WP:TWL
1.1.12 - Create a core list of India related articles	Communities		Example: English Wikipedia for India related articles: Wikipedia:WikiProject_India
1.1.13 - Complement core list with language / culture specific core articles	Communities	Communities?	Example: Kannada, Kannadiga & Karnataka: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Karnataka Action plan: use Wikidata where needed or appropriate (eg. Calenders, Indian Railway specific details)
1.1.14 - Projects for obtaining media - region specific photographs, obtain high-quality living people photographs	Communities	Via some initiatives, WMIN for Liaisoning
1.1.15 - Promote expert involvement in editing (or even reviewing) Wikipedia	Communities	Chapter can support logistics
1.1.16 - Collect and disseminate best practices and failures on outreach programs	Communities, WMF (learning patterns + other learning and evaluation materials + grants/program development)
1.1.17 - One successful GLAM partnership in the Indian context	Community (ML community has specific initiative currently, Check IEG proposals)
1.1.18 - Evolve model of content absorption for WikiSource	Language Communities (to be initiated by TA, GU and ML)	Self Organised Communities (ML wikipedia have a successfull Model of Wikisource Digitization Contest which succeeded in generating 12500 pages digitized in one month) , CIS (to a limited extent/focus lang areas)
1.1.19 - Special attention for Hindi (official language of the Indian Union) and spoken by many. (grants/conferences/programs etc)	Hindi community	WMF, WMIN, CIS (to a limited extent)
1.1.20 - Gender gap initiatives to be given concrete attention (ta and also if possible in other Indian communities)	Communities	WMIN, CIS

Stop

These works/practices need to be stopped:

 

1.2.1 - Work/Activity	Owned by	Supported by	Other comments
1.2.2 - Same people accepting invitations to do events on their own -- risk of burnout, and no experience sharing
1.2.3 - Indiscriminate bot-based stub creations
1.2.4 - Doing outreach or other representative actions by people without sufficient community experience	communities
1.2.5 - Intervening in communities without community approval (e.g Tamil Wiki)	ONLY the Community

Continue

These works/projects are to be continued

 

Work/Activity	Owned by	Supported by	Other comments
1.3.1 - Collaborative projects
1.3.2 - Outreach initiatives
1.3.3 - Off-line events
1.3.4 - Outreach via SocialMedia channels like @WeAreWikipedia (on Twitter); do the same in our own language
1.3.5 - Create wiki-how (or similar) mechanisms to create HOWTO documents/videos/tutorials/presentations

Support needed

Task	Who will support?	Other comments
1.4.1 - With supply of swags or material for outreach and stuff to work on branding - Wikimedia handbook, stickers, and so on.	WMIN, CIS, WMF
Library and Resource Journals access to selected Wikimedians, like JSTOR, etc. for improving citations. Also find more Indian resources similar to journal libraries.		mylibrary British Council(E-Books) is one suggestion
1.4.1 - Support for the IEG proposals focused on regional language communities, regional projects
1.4.2 - Support needed for WikiSource - need help with digitisation. Need to grab invaluable books from Libraries.		AmritasyaPutra willing to collaborate here.
1.4.3 - Training on how to do PR and how to work with the media
1.4.4 - Training on public speaking
1.4.5 - High-quality outreach material to adapt and translate

• OCR, TTS, spell checker and other Indic language computing related tools.

Discussed above

• Needs understanding with various organisations. Need help there. Support with Content acquisition.

Discussed above

• Adopt affiliate organization model for Outreach.

Discussed above

Community-organizing and Community health

Start

These initiatives/works need to be started

 

2.1.1 - Work/Activity	Owned by	Supported by	Other comments
2.1.2 - Encourage translation of high quality	Communities
2.1.3 - Data analysis of contributions from India on enWP in line with privacy policy	WMF
2.1.4 - Revise notice/warning templates to be more welcoming and less threatening	Communities	WMF
2.1.5 - Write articles according to the most-searched-for list	Communities
2.1.6 - Use Wikimetrics to track users and follow-up with active editors	Communities (Individuals with such capacity)	WMF
2.1.7 - Refer to Most Viewed Articles on home wiki and English, strengthen content on those Articles and add content around them	Communities
2.1.8 - Seek out media representatives and students of mass communication make them aware of various initiatvies on your project	Chapter?
2.1.9 - Citizen Journalism via NDTV, CNNIBN, Citizen Matters etc
2.1.10 - Create short articles, videos to be sent to media outlets
2.1.11 - Mention established twitter handles for media outlets when tweeting wikipedia-related content to encourage media outreach	Communities
2.1.12 - Identify and collaborate on top 1000 articles using Wikiproject India across all Indic Wikis	Communities
2.1.13 - Restart WikiPatrika	Communities - (Omshivaprakash, Mrutyunjay, Darshan, Pavan Santosh, Sumana, Karthik, Dhaval)
2.1.14 - Establish minimum set of policies/guidelines on your wiki such as NPOV; No-copyright-violation, etc		CIS
2.1.15 - Admin conferences, (face-to-face/skype) for skills building and sharing, e.g. conflict resolution	Communities	WMF (grants)
2.1.16 - Subscribe to wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to keep abreast of upcoming changes
2.1.17 - Raise low bandwidth users considerations on the list		Chapter plans to roll out pan-India infrastructure scholarship programs for internet access, better devices as recommended by the local communities. [Based on Tamil wiki experience)
2.1.18 - Work with WikiTech to make WMF Projects on mediawiki low-bandwidth friendly	HPN
2.1.19 - Request better documentation on WikiMetrics on tech-ambassadors mailing list
2.1.20 - Encourage More Participation during framing policies or amending any
2.1.22 - Organize a monthly/periodic hangout/voice conferences to showcase tools/scripts; invite non-wikipedian technical experts (e.g. from FOSS community) to collaborate on tools wikipedia projects need	Communities	Asaf for speaker suggestions
2.1.23 - Translate pages related to WMF funding guidelines to clarify what expenses can be funded/covered as well as the procedure for requesting reimbursement	WMF	Communities for translation
2.1.24 - Pan-India tech-liaison group to help with technical needs of non-technical editors	Rahmanuddin, Viswaprabha, Pavanaja	Sibi
2.1.25 - Inter-wiki village pump on Meta for discussion of pan-India issues on the community organisation and community health	Dhaval
2.1.26 - Enabling regular face to face meetings for each regional language community and cross-community meetings	Communities	Chapter, WMF (grants+)
2.1.27 - Working on fair representation at Wikimania and strengthening it	Communities	HPN
2.1.28 - Identify factors that cause burn-outs of prolific contributors and eliminate those factors.		HPN
2.1.29 - Annual cross community meeting	WMF	WMF, WMIN

Stop

These works/practices need to be stopped:

 

Work/Activity	Owned by	Supported by	Other comments
2.2.1 - Disallowing English (or other foreign editors) on Wikipedia.
2.2.2 - Indiscriminate bot stub creation without a committed group to expand them.
2.2.3 - Anathema to adding material from English Wikipedia (suitably translated and processed) to Indic language Wikipedias.
2.2.4 - Reluctance to develop rules and raise standards on editting practice and content quality on Indic Wikipedias.

Continue

 

• 2.3.1 - Meetups - thematic + regional
• 2.3.2 - Collaborations of the Month
• 2.3.3 - Assessment of article quality
• 2.3.4 - Keeping the community in the same way is good enough in some cases (Tamil Wikipedia for instance).

Support Needed

• 2.4.1 - Tutorials, Manuals and HOWTOs.
  • Ownership: Communities
  • Supported: WMIN
• 2.4.2 - Technology, tools and software related support.
• 2.4.3 - In making available low-bandwidth solutions for users of lower-end devices, which seem to be the case with large number of users in India.
  • Ownership:
  • Supported:Chapter will roll out a infrastructure scholarship program based on community recommendations
• 2.4.4 - Active help from institutions within the country for projects (for instance: Hindi) and help with Education program with active participation of the government.

Norms and expectations in the movement

Start

 

• 3.1.1 - Drawing inspiration and learning *critically* from comparison of policies of other Wikipedias.
  • Ownership: Community
  • Supported:
• 3.1.2 - Select/nominate individuals as points-of-contact on embassy as well as mailing lists
  • Ownership: Community
  • Supported:
• 3.1.3 - Strengthening Wikipedia Zero with active participation from regional communities to solve access issues.
  • Ownership: Community +WMF
  • Supported:
• 3.1.4 - Recognition of various regional movement partners (for more plurality and diversity).
  • Ownership: WMF
  • Supported: WMIN will identify pan-Indian, regional and expertise based partners with community input
• 3.1.5 - Building an extensive generic pan-India policy on image uploads, work out licensing. Regional communities can derive from these and adapt them for their context.
  • Ownership:
  • Supported: CIS
• 3.1.6 - Better practices and adapting fair methods to ensure active bureaucrats and sysops on regional projects.
  • Ownership: Communities
  • Supported:
• 3.1.7 - Any communication coming from WMF or other institution should be in local language.
  • Supported: Translation infrastructure (Meta-Wiki translation admins and translators, Translators list), target language communities, WMF where practical
  • Ownership: Institution in question; WMIN will make a policy decision to communicate with each language community in their language. We need volunteers :)

Stop

 

• 3.2.1 - imitating/copying policies verbatim from other Wikipedias. They may not be appropriate for our wikis; may be premature; may backfire and drive people away.

 

Support Needed

• 3.3.1 - Seek help via Human resource from institutions within the country (WMIN/CIS-A2K) for logistics, administration, grant-writing and reporting. Further help in reducing administration overhead by assigning Program Officers from CIS-A2K or WMIN on request.
  • Ownership: Communities
  • Supported: WMIN may support when staff team expands
• 3.3.2 - Stats have become stale for Indian language projects. Help bring these back.
• 3.3.3 - Make easily available a list of tools available through WMFlabs or Wiki-tech.