Grants:Project/PanLex/Balinese palm-leaf transcription platform on Wikisource/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Draft report

This is a draft of a Project Grant midpoint report for a grant funded for fiscal year 2019-20. Please do not respond or comment on it until its status has changed from draft to under review. To read the approved grant submission, please visit Grants:Project/PanLex/Balinese palm-leaf transcription platform on Wikisource

For grantees: When this report is complete and ready to review, please contact projectgrants

wikimedia.org with the subject line Ready to review.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the first half of the grant period.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

Carma Citrawati

Many supports from local communities and offices in Bali were given to the undergoing project of Wikisource. At some point, one or two offices in Bali are looking forward to creating collaborations with Wikipedia Bali Community in regards of using Wikisource. We are making sure that prospectus users of Wikisource are involved in the socialization event which comprises of introducing Wikisource and workshop on how to use Wikisource. This event also specifically aims at promoting Wikisource to youngsters in Bali.

Discussions with experts in Bali was very fruitful that they suggested many insightful advices regarding improvements on Wikisource, one of them is related to transliteration system used in Wikisource.

The socialization event, which is planned to hold in Decemeber, will show how the Balinese palm leaves (lontar) are portrayed in Wikisource, including the transliteration using the widely used system in Bali

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

Carma Citrawati

· Establish communication with local communities and related-field offices in Bali

· Discuss practical matters and exchanging information with volunteers of Wikipedia Bali and Indonesia

· Consult to experts and academics in related field to ask for suggestion

· Discuss the transliteration system of Balinese transcript with Balinese Language educators

· Ask permission to purikauhanubud.org for using their well-established and widely-used transliteration system on Wikisource.

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

Carma Citrawati

· Support from comunities and universities in Bali for wikisource

· The transliteration system has been inserted in Wikisource to be readily accessed by users and people in general

· The system used in Bali to transliterate Balinese script to latin script was not standardized officially. There are several systems that have been commonly used by Balinese language educators. Therefore, a further study and investigation were done to decide which appropriate system should be inserted in Wikisource. This study gave me a further insight that Wikisource could be the first site introducing transliteration system to a wider context, including to non-Balinese users.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Carma Citrawati

· The biggest challenge so far was educating people in general in Bali that palm-leaves (lontar) in the past were books in its era. Many palm-leaves were found crushed or destroyed, and it indicates that a safe “treasure box” is indeed important. The safest place to safe today is Wikisource.

· an early approach to Cultural office of Bali Province was unsuccessful, therefore an official letter was sent to establish a more formal communication. We are planning to have an audience with the Head of Cultural office of Bali Province regarding project on Wikisource.

· Other than the difficulties of communicating face-to-face with the local communities and offices in Bali due to Covid-19, there was not yet any critical issues we encountered.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Carma Citrawati

· The migration process run smoothly, I made a couple of changes on home page Wikisource to help users access the content easier, as seen on the link below: https://wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page/Basa_Bali

· Also, we are working on technical preparation to help users read the palm-leaves (lontar) at Wikisource. https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Bali_Alih_Aksara

Your learning pattern link goes here

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

Carma Citrawati

· We are on the process of establishing more cooperation with local communities and offices in Bali to participate in the socialization event.

· We plan to ask for a proper training from Wikimedia Indonesia on Wikisource.

· We are preparing socialization concept.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

Carma Citrawati

I really enjoyed the work and challenges I have been working on for the past 3months. Even though the Covid pandemic hinders most outdoor activities, I am working my best to keep the project running well. However, on the positive side of the current situation, I can manage my time better, and there are always chances for me to learn new things including learning how to establish good and proper communication with communities and offices, and how to state and elaborate new innovations for improvements.