Work plan July 2016 - June 2017

Main page Language plans Budget Community strengthening

Introduction

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CIS-A2K has taken up Kannada as one of the focus language areas as part of its work plan for the last two years. The plan starts with a critical overview of CIS-A2K's work since April 2013 and presents the plan of activities for the period of July 2016 to June 2017.

Performance against Plans

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  • CIS-A2K is working with students from 4 educational institutions to improve Kannada Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia Education Program (WEP) was started for the students of Christ University, Bangalore in November 2013, and as part of the programme, a large number of students were trained to write articles and edit on Wikipedia. Along with Christ University, WEP is running in St. Aloysius, Mangalore, SDM College, Ujire & Alva's college. The programs gave us mixed results. On one hand many new editors came on board with new articles and content, but on the other hand we noticed that many students faced initial difficulties in typing in their language. Some community members had issues with quality of content of articles that were added. To address these concerns, in the next year, we intend to start a certification course for students,
  • Kannada Wikipedians celebrated their Wikipedia's 13th year anniversary on 14 February 2016 at St. Aloysius College, Mangalore. This activity was preceded by a series of theme based edit-a-thons conducted at Mysore, Sagara, Bangalore and Mangalore. These four edit-a-thons have brought in 70 new Wikipedians to Kannada Wikipedia adding 247 quality articles onto Kannada Wikipedia.
  • 55 books of Kannada writer Niranjana were relicensed under CC-BY-SA. While processing and uploading these books to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, we faced a number of challenges. The first challenge was that the books were unavailable. We approached some libraries and old bookshops and we were able to find only a few books. Then we approached Tejaswini Niranjana and she provided the needed books, which were scanned and now we have 53 of 55 books. These books are being tracked at kn:s:ವಿಕಿಸೋರ್ಸ್:ಯೋಜನೆ/ನಿರಂಜನ. We also noticed that Kannada Wikisource lacked some important tools which were essential for proof reading. We are now using both Google OCR and manual typing process, while another set of Wikipedians are proofreading and typing the books. We imported some templates from English Wikisource for creating a book page and one book has been created in such a way that we can download PDF, ePUB and text format of the book and the same process will be applied for all the books typed.

Impact

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Despite the challenges faced, CIS-A2K's efforts of catalysing the growth of Kannada Wikipedia have had a positive impact. There is a noticeable increase in the number of editors, active editors, and general awareness about Kannada Wikipedia. However, the number of edits and the growth of articles still needs to improve considerably.

Tangible Impact

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Due to the various efforts of CIS-A2K including education programs, workshops & edit-a-thons, Kannada Wikipedia got

Active editors involved New editors Reach Images added to commons Articles added Absolute bytes added
24 600 700 528 1986 28.86MB
  • Above table shows statistics upto March 2016.

Intangible Impact

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There were about 13 mentions in print media about Kannada Wikipedia and Wikisource during this period. This has helped to increase the awareness about Kannada Wikipedia.

Needs Assessment

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The community participation in writing the work plan has increased this year due to our increased effort in involving the community.

The Kannada community has expressed the need for the following to be our focus in the next plan

  • Making edits of new WEP editors more meaningful and of better quality
  • Thematic edit-a-thons/workshops: The content in Kannada Wikipedia is not very diverse. We have only a few articles related to Medicine, Law, Villages of Karnataka, etc. So these Thematic edit-a-thon/workshops will help to enrich the Kannada Wikipedia.
  • Community prioritization of Wikisource books

Implementation plan

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Table 3

Program (1) # of newly registered users (2) # of active editors involved (3) # of individuals involved (4a) # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages (4b) # of new images/media uploaded (optional) (5) # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects (6) Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects
GLAM 25 50 600 500 50 5,00,000
Wikipedia Education Program 350 20 650 4400 2200 750 40,00,000
Edit-a-thon 150 15 225 175 100 175 (Alongwith Wikisource Pages) 700,000
Skill Building - 50 - - - - -

Table 3 notes:Bytes are indicative of Text not images


Cultivating New Editors

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Educational Institutes


There are 50 universities in Karnataka, of which, close to 50 thousand students have chosen Kannada as their language. These students can potentially be turned into Wikipedians. These institutes may have publications which can be released under CC-BY-SA and used in Wikisource. There are already 4 institutes with which CIS-A2K has signed MOUs and we are actively working with these institutions. There are six more institutions listed here which will be explored in coming months.

Name of the Institution Status Description Wikimedia project WMF Strategy Alignment
Christ University, Bengaluru Ongoing Content donation Wikipedia & Wikisource Improve Quality & Increase participation
SDM College, Ujire Ongoing Content generation Wikipedia Improve Quality
St Aloysius College, Mangaluru Ongoing Content generation Wikipedia Improve Quality & Increase participation
Alva’s College, Moodbidri Ongoing Content donation Wikimedia commons Improve Quality
Mysore University Ongoing Content donation Wikimedia commons Improve Quality
Tumkur University Under consideration Content generation Wikipedia Increase reach
Karnataka Janapada (folklore) University Under consideration Increase reach
University of Horticultural Sciences, Bagalkot To be approached Increase reach
Kannada University, Hampi Under consideration Increase reach
Mangalore University, Mangalore Under consideration Increase reach
Kannada Sangha, Christ University Under consideration Content donation Wikimedia commons Increase reach
Kavyalaya Publishers Under consideration Content donation Wikimedia commons Increase reach
Goal(Plan)

The goal is to approach the above mentioned universities and institutions to conduct workshops, create a network of academicians. A2K also aims at bringing content under free license that can be used for Kannada Wikimedia projects.

Objective(Execution)
  • Creating separate project pages for each engagement (single workshop or a set of workshops as a single entity)
  • Creation of articles by students in their user name space (sandbox pages) or draft namespace
  • Evaluation based on language, length, references from CIS-A2K
  • Notifying the community for a review process of articles written by students as the quality of the Wikipedia should be maintained.
  • If there is a publication in these universities, re-license them under CC-BY-SA and use them on wikisource.
Target(Projection)
  • At least 200 new Wikipedians to join Kannada Wikipedia
  • At least 400 new articles and 200 existing articles to be improved.
  • At least 4000 new images/files to be added to commons
  • At least one educational institution partnership to be added to existing 4 institutional partnerships.
  • At least 1000 kilobytes to be added.




Building Leadership among Indian Wikimedia communities


Goal(Plan)

A2K would like to actively spread awareness about Kannada Wikipedia in small cities across Karnataka, where internet penetration is high (at Least 5 cities).

Objective(Execution)

Do preliminary research on all small cities in Karnataka which have large number of cultural, literary and volunteer organisations. A2K would like to collect data on various metrics including:

  1. No. of local cultural organizations or groups with knowledge in niche subjects, hobbies and independent projects;
  2. Educational institutions and libraries;
  3. Data on internet penetration, internet cafes (outlets), broadband connections, etc;
  4. Virtual communities (like Facebook communities, bloggers, websites);
  5. Journalists, college teachers, writers and other members of the local intelligentsia.

Shortlist five potential cities for focussed outreach in consultation with the community. Build linkages with local hosting institutions. Train a set of enthusiastic Kannada Wikipedians to execute successful outreach programs. Design and Roll-out of Wikipedia Training or Orientation programs in these cities. Focus on involving the new editors in improving the quality of articles on Kannada Wikipedia with small projects like village project.

Target(Projection)

Expected to enlist about 100 new editors on Kannada Wikipedia. Of this, an attempt will be made to convert 10-12 people into active editors. These active editors are going to be supported by A2K towards conducting follow-up workshops and attending capacity building programs. Will result in the creation of 100 new articles. Will result in improving the quality of existing Village articles.


Strengthening Existing Community

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Advanced editing training


Goal(Plan)

To train existing Wikipedians on advanced editing options on Kannada Wikipedia.

Objective(Execution)

Community members have approached CIS-A2K to train them in certain areas of advanced editing in Wikipedia such as template creation and usage, use of MediaWiki tools, etc. We are looking to design a training plan that could be implemented in a session of couple of hours. We have the Train-a-Wikipedian program, which will support Kannada Wikipedians in enhancing their skills.

Target(Projection)

This advanced workshop is aimed at strengthening about 25 existing Wikipedians.


Capacity Building Meetups


Goal(Plan)

To facilitate more qualitative interactions amongst Community Members, with an aim to

  1. Create new projects
  2. Conduct periodic reviews and mitigate troublesome issues
Objective(Execution)

Facilitate 12 offline meetings/events over the next year and club these with a particular project or theme based edit-a-thon events. Organise/facilitate Google hangouts/Skype calls and IRCs.

Target(Projection)

These community building efforts will further strengthen the Kannada Wikipedia community.


Content Generation

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Wikipedia Education Programme

Wikipedia in Education program intends to combine the interest and energies of the students and educators towards content generation and creation of knowledge resources by using Wikimedia projects. WEP initiatives allow students and educators contribute to Wikimedia projects in their local language thus strengthening local Wikimedia projects.


Goal(Plan)

To increase the quality of the work done by existing institutional partners

Implementation
  • Introducing possibilities of assimilating Wikimedia projects with their syllabus in an orientation session
  • Identifying campus ambassadors to support activities in the college
  • Involving community members during discussions regarding goal setting, deliverables, timeline and execution plan.
  • Rolling out customised WEP for the students according to their course plan and skill sets.
Objective(Execution)

Community can help to motivate the students.

Target(Projection)
  • At least 150 new Wikipedians to join Kannada Wikipedia and create 150 new articles, improve existing articles and images to particular article.


Edit-a-thons


Goal(Plan)

To conduct thematic edit-a-thons. These would be an event of two or three days (follow up also). Kannada Wikimedians have suggested the following themes for edit-a-thons to be conducted during the next plan year:

  • Concepts of Science
  • Women Achievers
  • Kannada Literary History and Biographies of literary personalities
  • Places of Karnataka
Objective(Execution)

Monthly edit-a-thons will be conducted at various parts of Karnataka.

Target(Projection)

These edit-a-thons are expected to bring in about 50 new editors and about 75 articles. These edit-a-thons will also help in strengthening the existing community.



GLAM


Goal(Plan)

GLAM activities are opportunities for A2K to engage non-wikimedians in contributing towards Wikimedia projects. Many organisations and individuals are not inclined to become Wikimedians themselves but can be persuaded to donate content and images for re-licensing, which can be further used to enrich articles.

Implementation
  • To visit Archives, Museums & libraries
  • To digitise content that has been relicensed to A2K and incorporate them in Wikimedia projects
  • Conduct photo-walks, mapping of archives


Objective(Execution)

At least 4 GLAM projects in next year.

Target(Projection)
  • Upload at least 600 images/files to Wikimedia Commons with encyclopedic value.



Budget

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Expenditure Item FDC Support (INR) FDC Support (US$) Other Sources and in kind Support (INR) Other Sources and in kind Support (US$)
1 PA x 100%[1] 252,000 3675.55363 0
1 PD x 2.5%[2] 70,330.92 1025.813763 0 0
1 PM x 5%[3] 52,800 770.1159987 0 0
3 PO x 11.11%[4] 318,283 4642.321958 0 0
1 PA x 11.11%[5] 55,733 812.9003181 0 0
Travel and Stay[6] 50,000 770.1159987 44,000 641.7633323
Volunteer support 150,000 2,187.829542 50,000 729.2765139
Events/Meet-ups/Workshops 120,000 1,750.263633 35,000 510.4935598
Digitization 20,000 291.7106056 100,000 1,458.553028
Consumables/Printing/Stationery/Swag 5,000 72.92765139 0 0
Skill Building Initiatives 25,000 364.638257 0 0
Miscellaneous 0 72.92765139 0 0
Total 1,124,147 16437.11901 229,000 3340.086434

Notes

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  1. 100% time of Ananth subray as Program Associate who will anchor this plan at CIS-A2K
  2. 2.5% time of Program Director, CIS-A2K
  3. 5% time of Program Manager, CIS-A2K
  4. 11.11% time of 3 Program Officers, CIS-A2K
  5. 11.11% time of Program Associate, CIS-A2K
  6. Expenses incurred by the CIS-A2K program team towards executing the plan