Grants:Project/Rapid/Suyash Dwivedi/Hindi Wikipedia Conference, 14-15 January 2017 at Bhopal (India)/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2016-17 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Suyash Dwivedi/Hindi Wikipedia Conference, 14-15 January 2017 at Bhopal (India).
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Rapid Grant report

Goals

Hindi Wikipedia Sammelan, Bhopal 2017

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

After 2015, this was the first meetup of Hindi Wiki. Most of the organisers were new to the concept. Still, Yes we have reasonably met most our goals and are very happy with the way the whole project went along with some surprising and promising outcomes, which includes an enlightenment that Gols are a journey rather than an end!

The activities of the event can be broadly categorised as follows:

Meetup

Goals were subjective ones and were met successfully.

The primary goal of the conference was to Socialize with community members and to bring them on common platform for discussions,there was a healthy and fruitful interaction between experienced and new wikipedians .
Another target was to Increase skills of existing editors and sharing experiences of admins and senior wikipedians with new wikipedians .
A workshop to explore other Wikimedia projects in Hindi Language like, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource etc. was conducted .Experienced wikipedians introduced wikisource to existing wikipedians and newcomers , proofreading and editing was also explained .
It was proposed to Celebrate 16th Birthday of Wikipedia hence all the wikipedians celebrated 16th wiki birthday on 15 Jan 2017(please see pics below in gallery).
The community agreed to explore the possibility of creating a forum for representing Hindi Wikipedia. Later on, thsi has resulted in formation of "Hindi Wikipedia User Group" (Platform centric),"Wikimedians of Central India" (Geography centric) and "North Indian cross-wiki User Group" (Geography centric), and the development process is underway. We are now exploring possibilities and encouraging people to for state level groups, whcih are the need of the hour keeping in view the huge population and geographic expanse of India.

Editathon

Goals were objective ones and realised that these were set in over-enthusiasm. Goal was to eliminate uncategorised categories & pages, alongwith a general and undeclared objective of improving the content or adding new pages.

uncategorised categories were eliminated. 100% success.
Eliminating uncategorised pages proved to be a huge task and an unrealistic target to set.
The goal of Adding and improving content in wikipedia was partially achieved, new articles were also created.

Outreach

The talks to discuss and evaluate strategies for 'Wikipedia Education program' With Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hindi Vishwavidyalaya Bhopal was also undertaken.

IT MAY PLEASE BE NOTED THAT A TIE UP WITH THIS UNIVERSITY HAS POTENTIAL OF CREATING A PARADIGM SHIFT FOR HINDI WIKIPEDIA AND HINDI LANGUAGE IN INDIA. THIS NEEDS TO BE TAKEN UP SERIOUSLY BY WMF. WE ALL ARE NOVICES IN THIS FIELD AND NEED SUPPORT. This goal proved to be a path rather than an end.

Goal of Recruiting new editors was also on the agenda and as many as 16 new wikipedians joined wikipedia
A workshop to explore other Wikimedia projects in Hindi Language like, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource etc. was conducted .Experienced wikipedians introduced wikisource to existing wikipedians and newcomers , proofreading and editing was also explained .

Outcome

Original project targets,outcomes and their briefing is provided below :-

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Socialize with community members	Achieved	The local wikipedia team of 4 members interacted with 8 wikipedians who came from different places of India.the interaction between admins of hindi and sanskrit Wikipedia,rollbackers,autopatrolled members and new Wikipedia brought excitement in new members. Inspired by conference categorization target ,punjabi wiki community is conducting categorisation editathon in punjabi wikipedia from 1-15 feb 2017.
Recruit new editors	Achieved	16 new editors joined wikipedia,created their account and took part in editathon on wikisource. Articles Created,Articles Edited Here are the statistics
Increase skills for existing editors	Achieved	Existing editors learned how to do proper categorization on wikipedia,how to work on wikisource related projects,how to deal with copyright and CC contents. Admins and other senior wikipedians discussed about technical issues in main page of hindi wikipedia like “aaj ka lekh”,”nirwachit chitra” and sorted out the issue. Wikipedians Suyash Dwivedi,Swapnil Karambelkar,Vijay Tiwari,Sushma Sharma and Preeti Chabbra learnt categorization.
Add or improve content	Partially Achieved	Though almost all wikipedians (16) from bhopal were new ,except the local team and the workshop on “introduction” and “how to write article on wikipedia” went well.below is the data for editathon of 15th jan 2017 . All uncategorised categories in hindi wikipedia (approx 642 at the time of conference ,now zero)were sorted out. More than 1200 uncategorized pages were categorized in Hindi Wikipedia. Discussion about standards of creating good article in Hindi Wikipedia.
To explore other Wikimedia projects in Hindi like, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource etc	Achieved	Wikisource was introduced to the new and existing wikipedians and how to do proofreading,editing the scanned content and many doubts were cleared regarding wikibooks and wikisource.
To discuss and evaluate strategies for 'Wikipedia Education program' With Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hindi Vishwavidyalaya Bhopal.	Partially Achieved	Discussion and evaluation of strategies for 'Wikipedia Education program' With Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hindi Vishwavidyalaya Bhopal went very well with guidance from senior wikis some of them were admins.we are currently in the process of doing so and is a long process,but the response from the university has been very positive.
Celebrate 16th Birthday of Wikipedia	Achieved	All wikipedians celebrated 16th birthday of wikipedia on 15th jan 2017 with great joy (pictures attached)

Learning

What worked well?

The introductory presentation worked very well and many new enthusiastic wikipedians join us.the greatest thing is that we had new wikis from almost all streams of education,be it technical, management, science etc all in Hindi (which was our target group)

What did not work so well?

Though initially we did faced problem due to 6 account/IP address limitation (which we overcome by initiating the account from mobile) and the Hindi keyboard typing (unexpectedly all the new wikipedians from university were well versed in native hindi typing) but encountered problem in configuration of hindi keyboard.

Some of the targets like categorization of all uncategorized pages (3650+) to finished (about 1200 done) was higher. we should keep small realistic targets .

What would you do differently next time?

We would ask for delimiting of account restriction/ip address prior to the workshop/editathon/new wikipedians recruitment drive.

We will ensure that both the native hindi keyboard as well as google input tools keyboard are present and are working will prior to the program.

Grant funds used

Budget (Applied for USD-1990~INR 134,740)

Grant Received : Rs 134,349.00

Serial Number	Type of Expense	Approx. Amount (INR) (1 USD ~ 67.71 INR)
1	Travel Expenses for 8 out-station Wikipedians	23648/-
2	Accommodation for 8 Outstation wikipedians	39111/-
3	Food Expense (Including Morning Tea,Breakfast,Lunch,Evening Tea Evening Snacks for 40 Participants for 2 days) and (Dinner for visiting wikipedians)	26597/-
4	Wikipedia Birthday Cake	526/-
5	Local Transportation (some wikipedians are arriving on 13th and leaving on 16th)	4782/-
6	SWAG for edit-a-thons participants	8850/-
7	Internet/Mobile/Communication expense	1183/-
8	Stage decoration for 2 days	2590/-
9	Stationary,Flex Poster,notepad Holder etc.	4650/-
10	Momento and Shawls for Dignitaries	1883/-
11	Miscellaneous	830/-

Amount Spent :Rs 114,650.00

Unused funds

We are left with Rs 19699.00 and since we are planning a Editathon,photowalk and workshop at Atal Bihari Hindi university in near future ,where this fund can be used ,we request you to let the funds be with us,if not we would like to return the remaining funds to the foundation.thanks

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of INR 19699 were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/Pilot_project_of_GLAM_at_Regional_Museum_of_Natural_History,_Bhopal.

Other Notable Outcomes

Old and new hindi wikipedians are Highly motivated by this conference and following the conference formation of "Hindi Wikipedia user group " is underway and vary likely to be operational in near future.
Moreover members from "Punjabi wiki community" also got inspired from the conference/meetings and are conducting "Editathon to Categorize the uncategorized categories and pages" from 1-15 Feb 2017.