Grants:PEG/Community of Wikimedians in India/WikiConference India 2016/Report/Sandbox

Draft report

This is a draft of a grant report for a grant funded is fiscal year Pending. Please do not respond or comment on it just yet

it's not yet ready for review. To read the approved grant submission, please visit Grants:PEG/Community of Wikimedians in India/WikiConference India 2016/Report.

Project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?: YES

Is your project completed?: YES

Activities and lessons learned

Activities

Pre-Conference Activities

Scholarships for participation

Pre-WikiConference India 2016

We selected around 100 volunteers as recipients of the scholarship. In total 460 volunteers applied for the scholarship.

WCI2016 Scholarship Applicants by Gender
WCI2016 Scholarship Applicants by Country
WCI2016 Scholarship Applicants by contribution on Wikipedia
WCI2016 Scholarship Applicants by Global edit count

Pre-Conference Programs Survey

We conducted a pre-conference survey to understand what Wikimedians want to learn at WikiConference India 2016. Aggregated results and the tabulated report for the full survey is available at this document.

Findings

Some of our findings are/were:

Most of the people expressed their need to upgrade their skills.
Sessions related to Wikipedia in Education were the most preferred sessions.
Wikipedia was the most common project among the participants, Wikimedia Commons was the second most common project.
Most of the survey participants edited in English language projects * Most of the people expressed their need to upgrade their skills.

Pre-WCI Programs Survey Participants by Gender
Pre-WCI Programs Survey Participants by duration of Wikimedia contributions
Pre-WCI Programs Survey Participants by likeliness to attend
Pre-WCI Programs Survey Participants by Languages
Pre-WCI Programs Survey Participants by Wikimedia projects
Expectations of Pre-WCI Programs Survey Participants
Pre-WCI Programs Survey Participants by preferred sessions

Punjab Edit-a-thon 2016

Description

Punjab edit-a-thon was a month-long multi-lingual edit-a-thon conducted in the month of July as a pre-event initiative. The edit-a-thon had two objectives:

Try to get new and improved content (mainly articles) on Wikipedia;
Inform and involve Indian Wikimedia community members into the conference and other community initiatives;

As the conference took place at Chandigarh in the Indian state of Punjab, Punjab state was selected as the theme/topic of the edit-a-thon. Wikipedians had to create new articles following a set of guidelines to ensure quality.

The initial response and participation in the edit-a-thon was low.

Later, the organizers adopted several plans to improve participation such as:

contacting active editors of Indian-language Wikimedia communities over Wikipedia talk pages, emails, Facebook and requested them to participate in the challenge. Some experienced editors were requested to join as co-coordinators. This worked really well, as the new community coordinators brought in a large number of new editors.
A Facebook chat group was created for the coordinators where they could share their communities' progress, report the problems they were facing, and interact with others.
A few of the coordinators decided to give barnstars or personal user awards to the top performers. This encouraged contributors to perform better.

Outcome

One of the Punjab edit-a-thon trophies awarded to a winning community

Expected outcome

Before we started the edit-a-thon these were our expectations:

Communities to join: 6
Articles created/expanded: 1000. Creating or expanding 2000 articles was our dream target.

Actual outcome

The actual outcome of the Punjab Edit-a-Thon was:

Communities joined: 11
Articles created/expanded: 3283

Here we are presenting performance details of the participating communities:

Name of the Community Co-ordinators	Project	Event page	Article Count
Nitesh Gill, Stalinjeet, Parveer Grewal	Punjabi Wikipedia	see here	224 (last updated 6 August)
Gopala Krishna, Dhanalakshmi, Ananth subray	Kannada Wikipedia	See here	109 (last updated 28 July)
Sailesh, Abha Pradhan	Odia Wikipedia	See here	36 (last updated 24 July)
Sivakosaran, Ravi	Tamil Wikipedia	See here	256 (last updated 6 August)
Jim Carter, Viswaprabha	English Wikipedia	See here	1,168 (last updated 8 August)
Mourya Biswas, Ananya Mondal	Bengali Wikipedia	See here	77 (last updated 3 August)
Pavan Santhosh, Pranay Raj	Telugu Wikipedia	see here	481 (last updated 8 August)
Jithin Raj T K, Ranjith Siji	Malayalam Wikipedia	see here	735 (last updated 8 August)
Drcenjary, Muhammad Shuaib	Urdu Wikipedia	see here	147 (last updated 7 August)
Mehtab Ahmed	Sindhi Wikipedia	see here	43
Satdeep Gill	Hindi Wikipedia	see here	4 (last updated 7 August)
Elisa (Ting-Yi) Chang	Chinese Wikipedia		3 (last updated 7 August)

Challenges

Pre-event challenges

Central Notice: We wanted to put up a central notice focused on reaching Indian Wikimedia communities or India as geolocation but were unable to do so. As a couple of other Central Notices on the main WCI edit-a-thon were already highlighted, we faced difficulties to get a banner for this one.
Solution attempted: As a Central Notice could not be put up, we tried site notice option on individual Wikipedias. We also promoted this edit-a-thon a lot on the social networking sites.
Article topic: A few Wikipedia communities reported that they faced difficulties to find Punjab-related topics to write about. Specifically, a few English Wikipedians reported that all the general Punjab-related topics they had in mind were already covered in the Wikipedia.
Solution attempted: To overcome this problem we prepared a list of possible topics on which articles could be written/expanded and requested the Wikipedians to consider these topics.

Post-event challenges

Result count: Initially it was decided that the edit-a-thon will continue until midnight of 31 July. Later the decision was changed, as we felt the necessity to allow the edit-a-thon to run during the conference as well, so that editors can participate while being at the event too. So the last date of the edit-a-thon was changed to midnight of August 6. However, because of this we faced serious issues towards calculating the final tally and announcing the results as we had only a few hours in hand. There were a few unexpected things too like:

a) A few communities and community members did not report their created articles in their event page even after the deadline. So, it was difficult to find out all these articles with such a short deadline ahead of us. We thought of discarding articles that were not reported before the deadline but we could not arrive at a consensus.

b) More than 100 new articles were created in the last day of the edit-a-thon only, and more than 1000 articles were created in the last 10 days. We did not expect so many entries at the last hour.

Solution attempted: We failed to find a complete solution and we shared our inability during the result announcement of the edit-a-thon as well. After long hours of hard work on the last day, we found that it was impossible for us to prepare detailed statistics, so we calculated and announced the top 3 communities, without mentioning who stood first and further such details.

Learnings

These were our learnings:

For a multi-lingual edit-a-thon, local (language-wise) co-ordinators play a very important role to promote and co-ordinate the event on their respective Wikipedias.
Communication channels such as Facebook group, page, group chat may be used to promote an event and to communicate with others (however it is not an alternative of on-Wiki/on-Meta reporting and documentation)
Attempting to calculate and publish results in short period of time such as 12 hours may be problematic.

WCI 2016 logo challenge

Wiki conference 2016 logo v2

An online LOGO Challenge was organized where Wikimedians and readers from any language and from any country could participate and submit their entries for creation pf LOGO for WCI 2016. A total of 25 proposals were submitted (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiConference_India_2016_logos) and out of which the community members shortlisted 6. After further scrutiny, the final logo was selected (pictured) for WCI2016.

Similarly, the banners were also designed and some of them may be accessed here.

Scholarships

A total of 105 scholarships covering 20 language communities and five different Wikimedia projects were offered including travel support for four speakers. Among them, 25 recipients were women.

Submissions

A total of 178 proposals were submitted for presentation at WCI2016 out of which, 89 were accepted and 83 were rejected because of lack of relevance to the theme of the Conference. 6 proposals were not evaluated as they were submitted after the deadline.

Program Schedule

These were the aims of the program committee:

to increase participation
to enhance cross-language learning and experience-sharing.

The scope of discussions was defined and moderated by the chair persons of the session. Selected proposals on overlapping themes were included in a similar panel. In case of rejected proposals, the individual was given an opportunity to seek time from the panel chair to be heard. The panel chair's decision on time allocation was considered final.

Conference activities

Hackathon Participants

We had around 100 scholarship recipients from 4 countries of Indian subcontinent and those countries were: India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

A few representatives of Wikimedia Foundation also attended the conference; Katherine Maher, Nataliia Tymkiv, Asaf Bartov, Runa Bhattacharjee, Tighe Flanagan, María Kreuz.

Asaf Bartov Presents Wikidata A Gentle Introduction for Complete Beginners, which was one of the most liked sessions.

There were representatives from the following Chapters and User Groups:

The conference program focused on all the aspects of the Wikimedia movement which included sessions related to different aspects of the Wikimedia movement.

Wikimedia projects - Sessions focused on Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage etc.
Wikipedia Education Program - There were learnings from successful education programs being by various Wikimedia communities.
Various Tools - Sessions also consisted of tools such as Content Translation and OCR4wikisource.
Hackathon - 7 applications were created during the Hackathon.

Post-conference

Scholarship recipients were asked to prepare a report regarding their participation in WikiConference India 2016. 25 participants prepared reports and these reports can be accessed at the following link:

Reports from WikiConference India 2016 scholarship recipients

Post-Survey

62 participants have shared their views and ratings regarding different aspects of the conference.

Overall rating of WikiConference India 2016
Overall rating of WikiConference India 2016
Overall rating of WikiConference India 2016
Overall rating of WikiConference India 2016
Was the conference as good as you expected ?
Will you attend next WCI ?

Lessons learned

What worked well?

Participation: There was more than expected participation at the event.
Diversity: We were able to bring participants from 20 different language communities.

What did not work well?

We were not able to bring scholarship recipients from Pakistan to attend the event.
We were not able to fund prolific Indic community members from around the world to attend the event.
Organizing the event at an educational institute caused a lot of last minute logistics related problems.
Finalizing the dates before getting the funds.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

We will apply for clearance from Ministry of External Affairs and Home Affairs before we start planning for the rest of the conference.
We will make a better budget to support a number of Indic community members from around the world.
We would suggest doing a conference as big as this in a hotel. This will make it easy for a volunteer team to organize the event.
We will keep the dates flexible and fix them only after receiving the funds.
The media campaign should be started long before the event and the resource persons contact numbers should be made available on meta.
The charges for non-scholarship recipients should be fixed beforehand.
To release the policy and rules before declaration of results.

Learning patterns

Outcomes and impact

Participants - WikiCConference India 2016

Group photo of women at WikiConference India 2016

Tamil wikimedians at WikiConference india 2016

Odia Wikimedia Community with Katherine Maher at WikiConference India 2016

Punjab Edit-a-thon
Punjabi Wiktionary growth
- Punjabi Wiktionary has seen exponential growth during and after the conference. According to the stats, the new entries on Punjabi Wiktionary have seen a growth of 44% in the month of August and 48% in the month of September. Currently, some members of the Punjabi community are working together to record audios and prepare a database of Punjabi vocabulary which will then be uploaded on Punjabi, Western Punjabi and Hindi wiktionaries.
Content donation for Punjabi - Punjabi Wikisource is developing now
- Punjabi Wikisource has been growing a fast pace on the multilingual Wikisource and has been approved by the Language committee as of 25th February 2017.
Strengthening of Punjabi Wikimedians User Group
- This was the first International event locally organized Punjabi Wikimedians User Group. The conference has helped the group to assess its pros and cons. The group is looking forward to get registered as a non-profit organization in India and work as an International organization for the promotion of Punjabi language and culture. The group aspires to receive guidance from Amical Wikimedia.
WEP MoU with CGC

During the WCI conference an MoU was signed between Punjabi Wikimedians User Group and the Chandigarh Group of Colleges with objectives to promote the Wikimedia movement and ideals among the students of the educational institute.

Preliminary meets with Punjabi University's Panjabipedia centre and Language computing department
- A project is going on to improve Punjabi wiktionary.
Hackathon apps
- Following apps were created at Hackathon during WikiConference India 2016:

WikiSpeak
Edit Tamil Wiktionary (Tamil community request)
Audio file upload to WikiData
Wikipedia articles on google map
OCR (Native Application)
Communication platform (WebRTC)
Notification (Event based)

For more details check: WikiConference India 2016/Chandigarh Hackathon

Launching of WLM next version
- The organizing committee of Wiki Loves Monuments 2016 in India started the planning during the conference. WLM was organized after a gap of two years and India went on to become the country with the 2nd highest number of images uploaded during the event.

Top 5 images from WLM in India:

Taj Mahal, Agra
Photograph⧼colon⧽ Antrix3
Qutb Shahi tombs, Hyderabad
Photograph⧼colon⧽ Alaka123
Nageshvara-Chennakeshava temple complex, Mosale
Photograph⧼colon⧽ Bikashrd
Kusuma Sarovara, Mathura
Photograph⧼colon⧽ Aman.arch
Thirumalai Nayak Palace, Madurai
Photograph⧼colon⧽ Karthik Easvur

Check all the 10 winning pictures here

SAARC Countries Representatives at WikiConference India 2016

Preliminary talks for Wikimedia SAARC summit
More User Groups - West Bengal Wikimedians and Karavali Wikimedians have been officially recognized as Wikimedia User Groups.

A meeting between WMIN and CIS was conducted between Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K representatives on the second day of the conference. Wikimedia Foundation representatives Katherine Maher, Asaf Bartov and Natalia Tymkiv attended the meeting.

Hindi Community became active after a gap of two years and organized an event in Bhopal. Efforts are being put in to start new projects in various languages such as Hindi Wikisource in under development now.

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.

discuss the challenges and problems they are facing to execute their plans and projects and try to find solutions;
tell about their works, workplans, achievements and activities and getting feedback;
exchange useful tips, best practices and other information;
improve collaborations with all the Indic-language communities;

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.: Problems faced by different communities were discussed with possible solutions demonstrated by certain communities.

Introduction to OCR4WikiSource at WikiConference India 2016

Sessions related to using Google OCR for Indian Wikisources proved to be very useful. We will surely see new Wikisources in Indian languages in the coming months. Punjabi Wikisource has been approved as of 25 February 2017.
Hindi community has been more active after the conference and has organized a meeting of Hindi Wikimedians in January 2017.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
We expect that the active community members from all the Indic language Wikipedias including English Wikipedia community members from India to participate	105 scholarships to Wikimedians from 20 different communities from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.	We gave scholarhips on the basis of language communities and not on the basis of country.
Encyclopedic content (articles, images and other media files) generated in all the Indic Wikimedia projects and at least one project with pan-Indian theme generating 50 articles.	3283 articles related the host Punjab region.	Punjab Edit-a-thon became the largest pan-Indian Edit-a-thon
At least 1,000 photographs taken during the pre-conference work	~1200 images	Images are related to the host city and Wikimedians.
At least 100 unused photographs from Wiki Loves Food included in articles	0	No project could be organized to meet this outcome
A new set of Wikimedians would be created from Chandigarh. At least 50 new editors will come on board Wikipedia and sister projects. Of these, 10 are expected to be active Wikimedians	20 new users and 4 editor with more than 100 edits.	All the 4 of these editors are female and 2 of them even completed 100wikidays on Hindi Wikipedia.

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the Global Metrics. We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" where necessary.

Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for an edit-a-thon which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	120	This includes all the scholarship recipients and the local organizing team.
2. # of new editors	10	The number of new editors from the host institution.
3. # of individuals involved	300
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (Optional)	https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiConference_India_2016	A number of these images are in multiple subcategories so an exact number is hard to estimate. There are well over 1000 images relevant to the Conference
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	3200+	Punjab Edit-a-thon became one of the most successful edit-a-thons in India
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects

Learning question: Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

Indian Community was dormant as a single unite community for the past few years. We indeed increased the motivation of the contributors and the participants as many communities are also willing to host WikiConference India 2017.

Impact

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option C: Media Coverage:

English

Hindi Wikipedian Raju Suthar at WikiConfrence India.

The event, the event-related activities and focus was reflected in many regional, national and global newspapers and other media portals. NDTV Gadgets 360, a renowned online portal described how the event was "very distinct Indian flavour and will deal primarily with issues relating to India on Wikipedia and its sister projects". The event also marks the birth of the Tulu Wikipedia which went live and was announced in the keynote speech of Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Katherine Maher. The news was covered in as many as 20 different newspapers/online portals. The Punjab edit-a-thon that ran for a month to boast Wikipedia's scope in multiple languages about the Punjabi region in India, the people, their language, history and culture also got highlighted. This, in turn would have increased more attention towards many notable subjects related to Punjab and the Punjabi people on the Internet in general and many Wikipedias in particular. Story of long time Hindi Wikipedian Raju Suthar who contributes from his cellphone while working in a carpentry workshop not just touched how the Wikimedia community is bringing a revolution in a very grassroot level, but also showcased how many Indians have overcome the barrier of technology. The event being a national level also highlighted the overall image of many other Indian language Wikimedia projects and the contributor communities. Apart from the English media, Punjabi, Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam and Telugu newspapers also covered the event and contribution of the communities contributing to the respective languages.

“	I came across the Wikipedia as an eighth standard student. I noticed that the top results (of online searches) would often throw up links to this site[..] There aren't enough cricket articles in the Hindi Wikipedia; so I set up a 'wiki project cricket' and we now have some 70-80 articles[..]	”
— Raju Suthar^[1], Hindi Wikipedian

“	We're working on our new global strategy. In 2010, we identified India as the number one most strategic region, and I expect India to continue to have pride of place	”
— Asaf Bartov^[2], Senior Program Officer, Emerging Wikimedia Communities, Wikimedia Foundation

WikiConference India 2016 Starts Friday in Chandigarh, NDTV Gadgets 360, DigitalCutlet.Co.In, Tech.Musiqcafe.Com, Headlines-News.com, Moomblr.com, In.Shafaqna.com, NewsThrive.com, ShortIndia.com, US.MakeMeFeed.com, NewsKreeda.com, Aug 4 2016
The largest Wikipedia gathering in South Asia kicks off Opensource.com Aug 5, 2016, Global Voices
India’s 23rd regional Wikipedia, in Tulu, goes live The Indian Express, DailyWorld.in, HuffingtonPost.in, The News Minute.com, DailyHunt.in, The Hindu, Debate on Reddit.com, ReadBing.in (excerpt), WikipediaReview.com, W3LiveNews.com (excerpt), IndiaEveryday.in, ViralShots.com, in.shagaqna.com (excerpt), TodayIndya.com, latestnews360.com (excerpt), electropneumaticpositioner.com (excerpt), ccm.net, makemefeed.com -- headline only, Bangladesh Sun, Aug 6, 2016

International Conference Begins, The Tribune, Chandigarh Aug 6, 2016
‘Punjabis most active community on Wikipedia’ Hindustan Times Aug 6, 2016.
Indian tech skills to the rescue of Wikipedia's diverse tongues. Business Standard, Economic Times, Business Insider, ET Telecom, "AvenueMail.in", YahooNews-In, Brazil Sun, ResolutionNews.Ga, AlcusNews.org, Aug 6, 2016.
Bank officer turns wildlife enthusiast in Kerala. The Hans India, Dajjiworld, The Sentinel, Assam, WebIndia123.com, CanIndia.com, Business Standard, NewKerala.com, DaijiWorld.com. Aug 7, 2016
After eight years, Tulu Wikipedia goes live. The Hindu, Aug 7, 2016.
Want Tamil e-books for free? Then here’s a website for you
How (not) to get started on Wikipedia, an 18-year-old's story. Business Standard. Financial Express. NewKerala.com. LeadersSpeak.in. Aug 8, 2016.
Wikipedia takes a bite… at Indian food and forts. Indian Express. Millennium Post. DailyPost.in. IndiaEveryDay.in. Gizmodo.in.KollyTalk.com. New Indian Express. PunjabTribune.com. SocialNews.xyz. VishwaGujarat.com. IndRead.com. BFirst.in. The Free Press Journal. W3LiveNews.com (excerpt). Aug 8, 2016
India grapples to find a way forward on Wikipedia. Techradar, Aug 8, 2016. NDTV.com. India Today. TechRadar.com. Daily Post. LatestNews360.com. PalestineOnline.net. WikipediaReview.com.
Wikipedia gets 'taste of Indian food'. Indian Express, Aug 8, 2016.
India at top of Wikipedia's priorities. The Economic Times, Aug 9, 2016. NewsWorldIndia
Carpenter crafts cyber content using ancient mobile. Business Standard. Free Press Journal. The Jodhpur Gazette. NewsKerala.com. ProKerala.com. SocialNews.xyz. The Statesman. DaijiWorld.com WindowToNews.com. Business Standard. Eastern Mirror, Nagaland. Aug 10, 2016.
Wikiconference India 2016: Wikipedia’s plans for growth in India are unclear Newsthrive Huntnews
India will remain No.1 strategic region in Wikipedia's global plans, The Hans India, Aug 11, 2016.

Punjabi

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".: No

Expenses

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.

Sl. No.	Expenditure Item	Approved Budget (July 2016 to December 2016) Rs.	Actual Expenses (July 2015 to December 2016) Rs.	Variance (+)Balance Left (-)Excess Spent
1	Chandigrah Event Facilities & Management Exps	325,400.00	413,040.00	(87,640.00)
2	Chandigrah Featured Events	58,000.00	53,000.00	5,000.00
3	Chandigrah Food Accommodation & Local Transport	1,312,200.00	763,050.00	549,150.00
4	Chandigrah Swage Publicity & Infomation Dispersal	188,400.00	229,451.00	(41,051.00)
5	Chandigrah Travel Reimbursement Exps	1,437,500.00	1,373,172.00	64,328.00
6	Consultancy Fees Manavpreet Kaur		75,000.00	(75,000.00)
7	WCI-Pre-Conference Events	15,000.00	29,800.00	(14,800.00)
	Total	3,336,500.00	2,936,513.00	399,987.00

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 3,343,160 INR (US$ ~ 49,627)

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source): 3,343,160 INR (US$ ~ 49,627)

Total amount spent on this project: 2,936,513 INR (US$ ~ 44,022)

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project: 2,936,513 INR (US$ ~ 44,022)

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.: None

Remaining funds

Are there any grant funds remaining?: Answer YES or NO.; YES

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)

399,987 INR (US$ ~5996)

If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.

Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.

PLACEHOLDER TEXT

[1] The Statesman

[2] India at top of Wikipedia's priorities. The Economic Times, Aug 9, 2016.

[1]

[2]