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

Report summary

• 300 participants from 20 language communities. Included a month long editathon on Punjabi topics, and a hackathon with 33 participants at the event where 7 applications were created.
• 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. There were 460 applicants.
• Pre-conference survey showed that most people expressed a need to upgrade their skills. High interest in education programs. Most respondents worked on English Wikipedia.
• Sessions focused on WikiSource, Wiktionary and Wikivoyage, Education and tool workshops for the content translation tool and OCR4wikisource. Wikidata session was a favorite.

Outcomes:

• 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.
• 20 new users, including 4 new female editors who completed more than 100 edits in the first month. 2 of these women completed 100wikidays on Hindi Wikipedia.
• Editathon significantly exceeded expectations - 11 communities participated, 3283 articles expanded or created.

Lessons learned

• Best not to finalize dates until funding is confirmed
• Hosting the event at an education institution caused a lot of last minute logistical problems
• Consider hosting a large event (300 people) at a hotel rather than a university, might make it easier for organizers to manage.
• Research requirements from local government before the event so that there is time to apply for required clearances.

WMF Comments

Thank you to everyone who participated in the planning and execution of WikiConference India 2016. It was very impressive to see so many volunteers working together across so many different communities to make this event a success. We heard that many language communities found it valuable to meet in person at this event.

• The information shared in reports by scholarship recipients was very interesting. It was great to read about the ways people benefited from the event, learn about the projects that they started at the conference or upon returning home, and their feedback. The reports are particularly helpful because they give us a better understanding of why events like this are important for communities, and how they investment in travel scholarships leads to new work after the event is over. Have you followed up with some of the scholarship recipients to find out if they have continued working on projects they started at the conference?
• If you are thinking of hosting a national conference in the future, we recommend that you send out an additional survey to all participants, asking them to answer questions about projects they have started after the event, problems they solved during the event, or new skills they have learned at the conference that were valuable. This will help you make a clear case for why it is important to have large conferences in the future.
• It is great to hear that the Punjabi community was strengthened by this event, both in terms of growth in content on Punjabi topics through the editathon, increase in the number of editors on Punjabi Wikisource and Wiktionary and in the lessons your community learned in planning a large event together.
• Upgrading skills was a primary interest from many of the survey respondents. Do you know what skills people seemed most interested in learning? Different language groups are welcome to apply for rapid grants to hold events where they work on learning new skills together. We hope that you will share this with conference participants so that they know they can continue to work on skill building.
• Please submit the financial report as soon as possible so that we can close this grant.

--KHarold (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 25 May 2017 (UTC)