CIS-A2K/Work plan April 2013 - June 2014/Telugu

Work Plan (April 2013 - June 2014)

Language Area Work Plan: Telugu
Odia • Kannada • GOM (Konkani) • Bengali

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This work plan was primarily posted on Telugu Wikipedia. Please go to this talk page to discuss the work plan.

Telugu Work Plan

The Telugu language is predominantly spoken in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It is also the official language of the state. It is estimated that there are approximately 80 million Telugu language speakers in India, which makes it the third most spoken language in India. Telugu has also been recognized as one of the classical languages by the Govt. of India. There are many Telugu speakers even in the neighbouring states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Odisha and Chattisgarh.

Andhra Pradesh has a literacy rate of 67.6 per cent. In terms of higher education, the state has 46 degree awarding higher education institutions and 4066 colleges, which is one of the highest in India. Further, in the year 2010-11 alone 18,47,479 students enrolled in various higher education institutions across Andhra Pradesh, which is the third largest state-wise student enrollment in India. This is a potential population that could contribute to Wikipedia. Another factor that has been researched is the computer and internet penetration in the state. As per the recent Census (2011) data, Andhra Pradesh has about 21,024,534 households. The census also notes that there are about 1,766,061 computers, based on which one can say that about 8.4% of the households in Andhra Pradesh have access to computers. Of these there are only about 546,638 computers that are connected to internet. This clearly indicates the untapped potential in the state for the improvement and growth of Wikimedia projects in general and Telugu Wikipedia in particular.

It is useful to juxtapose this data (i.e. on higher education, computer and internet penetration) with that from the Telugu Wikimedia projects to get a sense of where we are and to imagine the possible scope of expansion. The Telugu Wikipedia came into existence on December 10, 2003 and has recently celebrated its 9th anniversary. While there are approximately 15,00,000 computer based internet users across Andhra Pradesh and about 2 million students entering higher education in the state, the Telugu Wikipedia has a meagre 555 editors and about 50k articles. The following can be deduced.

1. It is quite obvious that there is serious lack of awareness about Telugu Wikipedia in the state, which needs to be addressed.
2. It is a modern myth to talk about digital divide/gap as there is a major chunk of untapped constituency of Telugu literate internet users to enroll as new editors in the state.
3. The youth in the higher education sector is a major constituency, which needs to be tapped. This work-plan intends to take some steps precisely in this direction.

Coming back to the Wikimedia projects in Telugu, Wiktionary, WikiSource, WikiQuote and WikiBooks are the other projects that are live now. The below fact-sheet provides a quick glimpse of the key data about the various Wikimedia projects available in Telugu.

Fact Sheet

Wikimedia Project	No. of Editors/Contributors (2011-12)	No. of Editors/Contributors (2012-13)	No. of Active Editors /Contributors (2011-12)	No. of Active Editors / Contributors (2012-13)	No. of Articles/entries (2011-12)	No. of Articles/entries (2012-13)	No. of Page Views per Month
Wikipedia	478	555	31	31	49,670	50,970	1,900,160
Wiktionary	40	47	3	5	43,000	73,000	361,102
Wiki Source	34	39	2	2	6,200	6,425	78,974
Wiki Quote	7	9	1	1	201	283	35,122
Wiki Books	-No Data-	1159	-No Data-	7	-No Data-	54	19,388

It is quite evident from the above fact-sheet that Wikipedia is the most active Wikimedia project in Telugu. There is also a decent amount of activity on Wiktionary by some of the contributors. During the discussions with the community it was felt that the CIS-A2K focus primarily in supporting the growth of Telugu Wikipedia and expansion of Wikipedia community.

Needs Assessment

Over the past couple of months, the A2K team personnel visited Hyderabad a couple of times to meet some of the active Telugu Wikipedians and to discuss the status of Telugu Wikipedia. Among these discussion meetings various ideas were generated on how to expand and grow, primarily, Telugu Wikipedia. In addition to these, discussion meetings were also held with some of the Telugu Wikipedia administrators including Telugu SIG. Simultaneously a desk-review of the Telugu Wikipedia community discussions on the Telugu Wikipedia village pump (called Rachchabanda) was undertaken. Based on this the A2K team has arrived at the following sets of needs.

Community

Currently the majority of active Telugu Wikipedians are based out of Hyderabad and the rest in other metros like Bangalore and Chennai. A closer examination would show that the number of active editors has remained more or less unchanged almost since the beginning of 2009. The majority of the current active editors have been continuing their passion for the Telugu Wikipedia over the last 3-4 years, which is laudable. However, one can sense an undercurrent of burnout in these senior but tirelessly committed active editors (for instance there are instances when some active editors have slowly withdrawn or reduced their contributions often citing personal reasons). Almost all of the active editors feel that there is an urgent need to diversify the community through sustained Outreach programmes. The community would see it as a major value add if the number of active editors is doubled in a year or so. Thus a well designed and sustained outreach could not only cheer up the existing community but also strengthen the qualitative and quantitative growth of Telugu Wikipedia. Although Telugu Wikipedia periodically and systematically had new editors coming-in (on an average of 6-8 every month) not many have continued to grow on to become active editors. There is thus a need to understand this scenario to catalyze a better conversion rate of new editors to active editors.

Content

The Telugu Wikipedia is the third largest Indian language Wikipedia. It has more than 50 thousand articles. However, quality of these articles is a major concern. More than 70% of the articles or more than 37k articles are stubs. A list of all stub articles in Telugu Wikipedia can be found here. Although, there is a raging debate on the Telugu Wikipedia village pump on the stub articles, yet there is no unanimous decision. Some of the active members recommend deleting stub articles, while there are some who strongly object to deleting any articles as this will discourage the budding new editors. The following needs were identified: a) help the community evolve a cohesive policy in effectively discouraging creation of stub articles; b) find ways and means of expanding the stub class articles and convert them into start class articles; and c) simultaneously ensure that a majority of the new articles are of start quality.

Other Needs

1. Visibility or Awareness for Telugu Wikipedia in the public is lacking. There is need for a major push to have media presence/coverage for Telugu Wikipedia.
2. There is relatively less presence of Telugu Wiki activities on Social Media, which requires support.
3. Need for the recognition of the efforts put in by committed and veteran Telugu Wikipedians.
4. Lack of Open-Source culture: There is very little presence of the open source methodology across academia, media industry and public and private sector organizations. A lot of knowledge resources produced are not digitized and are mostly individually copyrighted resulting in limited distribution. In fact most of the individual publishers in Telugu fund the entire publication and do not expect to make any profits. There is a need to educate such people and organizations about Creative Commons licensing. Simultaneously demonstrate how they can use Wikipedia and Wikibooks as a free platform for knowledge production and dissemination.
5. Technical Support: Often Community members express the need to have effective bug resolution. There is a need to facilitate bug reporting and resolution.

Implementation Plan

Cultivating new Editors

Institutional partnerships (Higher Education)

Based on a preliminary research the A2K team has long-listed a set of Higher Education Institutions in Andhra Pradesh (see Annexure 1). Out of this long list the A2K team will explore partnerships with the below list of institutions.

Sl. No.	Name of the Institution	Point of Contact(s)
1	English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (Formally CIEFL)	Dr. Uma Bhrugubanda; Dr. K. Satyanarayana; Dr. Satish Poduval; Prof. Madhava Prasad;
2	Hyderabad Central University (HCU), Hyderabad	Prof. Ananthakrishnan; Mr. Rajiv Velicheti; Prof. Vinod Pavarala;
3	Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University, Hyderabad	Dr. Ramarao
4	GITAM University, (Hyderabad Campus)	Dr. K. B. S. Krishna
5	Kakatiya University, Warangal	Dr. Katyayini
6	Osmania University, Hyderabad	Dr. Bala
7	Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam	Dr. Hari Padma
8	TISS, Hyderabad	Dr. Rekha Pappu; Dr. Jayashree
9	Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Urdu University, Hyderabad	Dr. Govindaiah; Dr. Shilpa

Plan To partner at least 2-3 higher education institutions in developing two thematic projects and create a network of academicians that will actively use Telugu Wikipedia as part of their pedagogy. To reach out to at least 3 other higher education institutions from the above list and conduct Telugu Wikipedia Workshops mainly with an intention to spread awareness and to arrive at possibilities for long-term partnerships.

Execution

1. Conduct initial meetings with faculty from the short-listed 9 higher education institutions. From the above list, A2K team has over the last two months initiated discussions with a) University of Hyderabad; b) English and Foreign Languages University; c) Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University. The discussions have been successful and the faculty from all the three Universities have expressed interest in further exploring collaboration with the A2K team in designing and rolling-out digital training workshops for Researchers, which will have Wikipedia as a key component.
2. Work with enthusiastic faculty in listing out the expectations, incentives, broad frame-work of project design, mutually beneficial outputs for the institution and Telugu Wikipedia.
3. Introduce and involve keyTelugu Wikipedians in advanced conversations with the short listed institutions.
4. Arrive at a clear ToR for the partnership between the Institution and A2K.
5. In collaboration with key Telugu Wikipedians, design and roll-out Workshops and Training programmes.
6. Continuous mentoring, monitoring and evaluation of the new users created under the project with the help of Telugu Wikipedians.
7. Create social media platforms for visibility of these projects and facilitate need-based technical and online support. For instance, motivate the faculty or student to maintain a blog on the project.
8. Constant liaison with the anchor faculty/department.
9. Periodic review of the project progress with the Telugu Wikipedians mentoring the project.

Projection

1. Expected to enlist about 100 - 150 new editors on Telugu Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 15-20 people into active editors.
2. Will result in creation of new 200 quality thematic articles that could become base for future institutional collaborations.
3. Will result in the expansion and quality improvement of 400 existing stub class articles.
4. Could result in creation of free and open course material content in Telugu language that can be used by other higher education institutions.
5. Could become a model to attract the attention of bodies like UGC in actively considering the use of Wikipedia as a pedagogic tool in quality higher education in Indian languages.

Small City Outreach (with active Community Collaboration)

Plan: Actively spread awareness about Telugu Wikipedia in small cities across Andhra Pradesh, where internet penetration is high.

Execution:

1. Do preliminary research on all the small cities in Andhra Pradesh and collect data on the various metrics including: a) No. of Local Cultural Organizations or groups with Knowledge in Niche Subjects, Hobbies and Independent Projects(KINSHIP Groups); b) Educational Institutions and libraries; c) Data on internet penetration, internet cafes (outlets), broadband connections, etc; d) Virtual communities (like FaceBook communities, bloggers, websites); e) Journalists, College teachers, Writers and other members of the local intelligentsia.
2. Shortlist three potential cities for focussed outreach in consultation with the Community.
3. Liaison and build linkages with local hosting institutions.
4. Train a set of enthusiastic Telugu Wikipedians in executing successful Outreach programmes.
5. Design and Roll-out of Wikipedia Training or Orientation programmes in these cities.
6. Focus on involving the new editors in quality improvement of articles on Telugu with small projects like మేము - మా ఊరు (Our Village and Us.
7. Nurture local contact institution and community to plan and execute future programmes, say after 3-4 programmes with A2K assistance.

Projection:

1. Expected to enlist about 60-80 new editors on Telugu Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 8-12 people into active editors.
2. Will spread more awareness about Telugu Wikipedia beyond the metropolitan context.
3. Will result in 3 local anchor institutions around which the local Telugu Wikipedia Community could organically grow.
4. Will result in the creation of 100 new articles.
5. Will result in improving the quality of existing 200 village/block stub class articles on Telugu Wikipedia in a sustained manner.

User Interest Groups (UIG)

Plan Target and enrol existing collectives/groups (both physical and virtual) and motivate them to utilize Telugu Wikipedia as platform. During this year A2K will aim to nurture at least 4 smaller interest groups.

Execution

1. Identify potential User Interest Groups. A2K team has already identified with the help of an Active Telugu Editor a group of 30 Telugu journalists working for Vishalandhra Newspaper. A2K has also already identified a group of 10 people interested in Telugu Theatre and Literature
2. Establish linkages between these groups and the enthusiastic members from the Telugu Wiki Community.
3. Design and roll-out of Wikipedia Training programmes in collaboration with Telugu Wiki Community.
4. Post training programme follow-up.
5. Incubation of smaller thematic projects around specific themes like theatre, literature, politics and current affairs.
6. Facilitate support and mentoring of the new editors, by the Telugu Wiki Community, to cultivate into active editors.

Projection

1. Expected to enlist about 50-60 new editors on Telugu Wikipedia. Of this an attempt will be made to convert 6-10 people into active editors.
2. Will result in improving the quality of specific thematic articles on Telugu Wikipedia in a sustained manner and in improving the diversification of content.

Strengthening Existing Community

Capacity Building Meet-ups

Plan To facilitate more qualitative interactions amongst Community Members, with an aim to a) foster creation of new project ideas; b) periodic review and mitigation of troublesome issues; c) foster a culture of collective review of the expansion of Telugu Wikipedia.

Execution

1. Facilitate 3 offline meetings/events over the next one year and club these with a particular project or theme based edit-a-thon events. A2K is actively in conversation with the Telugu Wikipedia Community in organizing a meeting of Telugu Wikipedians coinciding with the celebration of Ugadi – Telugu New Year Day.
2. Organise/facilitate Google hangouts/Skype calls. We'll aim to organise/facilitate minimum of three meetings in the next one year in addition to the above.
3. Tie up with an institute/organization in Hyderabad that could provide the community with space and resources in terms of internet connection etc where the community could periodically gather for meet-ups. A2K is actively in discussion with the ‘Theatre Outreach Unit’ at Golden Threshold regarding this. A small meet-up of Telugu Wikipedians was already facilitated by the A2K team.

Projection: These Community Building efforts will further strengthen the community spirit among the Telugu Wikipedians. This could also lead to development of plans to cohesively build the community and will be potential trigger for Wikipedia projects.

Advanced User Training

There are many current users who need training in using the advanced features like creating tables or maps, adding a category for the article in Wikipedia or photo in Commons, etc. The A2K team will facilitate to impart these skills by organizing 2-3 training programmes Hyderabad, where the bulk of Telugu Wikipedians are based. If there is a demand from other small cities few more such training programmes will be facilitated.

Content Generation

Telugu Wikipedia Village Project

Plan: Support the Telugu Wikipedia community to revive the Village project with an aim to converting thousands of stub articles into start class articles.

Execution:

1. There are many village articles that were generated by bots on Telugu Wikipedia. Some of the Community members have actively proposed to expand these articles by including publicly available data about the villages (like census, geo-location, etc).
2. The A2K team will work towards procuring and collating relevant data on these villages through RTIs and other means and facilitate the quality improvement of articles.
3. Facilitate at least 3 edit-a-thons on this particular theme towards improving quality of articles.

Projection: To potentially improve the quality of about 4000 stub class village articles.

Making Telugu Content in Public Domain Accessible

Plan: Support the Telugu Wikipedia community by providing information and access to content that is digitally available in Public Domain.

Execution:

1. Conduct a baseline survey of all the Telugu content (books and other resources) available in the Public Domain. For instance there are nearly 23,000 Telugu books on Digital Library of India.
2. Transcribe the entire catalogues with key words into Telugu in a searchable form.
3. In consultation with the community, identify absolutely essential books for various Telugu Wikipedia projects and digitize them.
4. Link books and other resources to various Wiki-projects.
5. Develop and execute wiki-projects around specific themes in collaboration with the community.
6. Facilitate at least 3 edit-a-thons on particular theme and content towards improving quality of articles and growth of new articles.

Projection: To potentially improve the quality of about 500 stub class articles on Telugu Wikipedia and create about 200 quality articles.

Content donation

Plan: Channelize encyclopaedic content into Public Domain or license it under Creative Commons

Execution:

1. Identify data/material in Public Domain.
2. Identify digitized content and public institutions, which are into digitization.
3. Do a study of all the digitization efforts that have taken place so far.
4. CC events to build perspective of institutions.
5. 3 Creative Commons events with special groups (Journalists, activists, NGOs like Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies). A2K team has actively engaged with an individual copyright holder of a Telugu Theatre Magazine to digitize and license the work under Creative Commons. The copyright holder has agreed in principle and showed willingness to put all the editions in Wiki-Source. This could immediately add about 50 high quality articles on various aspects of Theatre on Telugu Wikipedia.

Projection:

1. At least 3 different kinds of encyclopaedic content will be brought under CC, which will then be digitized and put up on Telugu Wiki-Source.
2. Could result in the addition of about 150 quality articles on Telugu Wikipedia.

GOALS

The A2K team would like to commit to setting the following goals based on: a) an examination of the expansion of Telugu Wikipedia; b) the growth of the Telugu Wiki Community over the last 2-3 years; and c) an initial needs assessment. These would be achieved in partnership with the Telugu Wiki Community and the Wikimedia India Chapter, wherever possible. However, based on specific needs, the A2K would also take lead in catalyzing these goals through specialist projects/interventions by keeping the process transparent to the Community. These goals are categorized as a) Expected, which the A2K team would aim to compulsorily achieve; and b) Dream, which would be an ambitious target on which the A2K team would set its eyes.

Parameters	Expected Target (by March 31, 2014)	Dream Target (by March 31, 2014)
No. of Editors	755	905
No. of New editors	200	350
No. of New Active editors	25	40
No. of Articles	54,000	55,000
% age of Articles above 2KB size	33% (i.e. about 17,800 articles)	34% (i.e. about 18,700 articles)
No. of Outreach Events	29	34

Activity-wise Break-up of Targets

Activity	No. of New Articles	No. of Existing Articles Quality Improved	No. of New Editors	No. of New Active Editors	No. of Events	No. of Partnerships built (Institutions/Groups)
Institutional Partnerships	200	200-250	100-150	12-18	9-12	4
Small City Outreach	100	200-250	60-100	8-12	3-4	3
User Interest Groups	50-100	100-150	50-100	5-10	3-4	4
Capacity Building Meet-ups		100-200	3	1
Advanced User Training					2
Telugu Wikipedia Village Project		4000-4500			3
Making Telugu Content in Public Domain Accessible	500	200			3
Content Donation	150				3
Total	1,000 to 1,050	4,800 to 5,900	210-350	25-40	29-34	11

List of contributors

We are grateful to the following list of Wikimedians who have engaged with the A2K Team and contributed to the development of the Telugu language area work plan with their ideas and inputs:

1. Arjuna Rao
2. Bhaskara Naidu E
3. Durga Prasad G
4. Kameswara Rao Malladi
5. Pranayraj
6. Prasad JVRK
7. Radha Krishna A
8. Rahmanuddin
9. Rajachandra
10. Rajasekhar A
11. Ramakrishna Reddy Palagiri
12. Rao CB
13. Reddy YVS
14. Sharma KBS
15. Srinivas Sharma Bandi
16. Sujatha T
17. Veera Venkata Chowdhary
18. Vishwanath BK

Annexure 1

Long list of Higher Education Institutions

Sl. No.	Name of the Institution	Details about Wikimedia activities previously undertaken
1	Acharya NG Ranga Agricultural University, Hyderabad	NONE
2	Adikavi Nannaya University, Rajahmundry	NONE
3	Andhra University, Vishakapatnam	NONE
4	BITS Pilani, Hyderabad.	CIS-A2K organized a Hackthon
5	Dr. Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao University of Health Sciences, Vijayawada	NONE
6	Dravadian University, Kuppam.	Telugu Wikipedians organized a multi-lingual Wiki-Academy
7	English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (Formerly CIEFL)	NONE
8	GITAM University, Vishakhapatnam.	NONE
9	University of Hyderabad.	NONE
10	ICFAI University, Hyderabad.	NONE
11	Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad.	NONE
12	Indian School of Business, Hyderabad	NONE
13	Institute of Hotel Management Catering technology and Applied Nutrition, Hyderabad.	NONE
14	International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad	NONE
15	Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU), Anantapur	NONE
16	Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU), Hyderabad	Some students participated in the Hackathon at BITS, Hyd.
17	Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU), Kakinada.	NONE
18	Kakatiya University, Warangal.	NONE
19	Nagarjuna University, Guntur.	NONE
20	NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.	NONE
21	National Institute of Technology NIT, Warangal	NONE
22	Osmania University, Hyderabad	NONE
23	Palamoor University, Mahaboobnagar.	NONE
24	Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University, Hyderabad.	NONE
25	School of Planning and Architecture, Vijayawada.	NONE
26	Sri Krishnadevaraya University, Anantapur.	NONE
27	Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam	NONE
28	Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupathi.	NONE
30	Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Urdu University, Hyderabad.	NONE