Project Parichaya

Parichaya is an Odia word which means identity. This project aims to add the minimal identity of a known person to Wiki. During our seven years of volunteering experience, we have learned that for survival and development of a language writers have a major role. For Odia language, we see often that the writers are generally underrated. Only a few of them are known to the world, while there are so many books and magazines, still, we know very little writers who are only come under national or international media or platform o internet.

Initially, we had got the idea about the writers but we also found that there are singers, actors local people who are missing from this online world even they have significant work or contribution to the local community, language or people.

We have taken our first step by just getting contact number of people from the newspaper where the there name and phone number has been mentioned. We have contacted several people and succeeded and we learned a little.

We have decided to create a project and add the basic identity of people to the wiki. As all of them are not notable so instead of Wikipedia we have decided to add their data to Wikimedia Commons.

What we collect

To get the identity of person we collect three things of a person. A photo, self-voice introduction, an autograph. We found that it is really helpful if someone wants to know about the person.

Who

As mentioned above we have started with writers as we get their phone number from the newspaper and call them and make an appointment. We have extended the project to film actors, singers. We have got a lot of data about the writers, added some singers, tried to reach the actors but it is hard as our free time is not matching with them.

How we work

We bring the contact number of some notable person and take an appointment on a single day at a different time(We try hard). We take some time off and get with our minimal devices. We let them know what is Wikipedia and its sister projects. Sometimes it is hard to let them understand what is Wikipedia and how it works. We tell our intentions to them and allow permission to take a photo and take the photo of their signature. Record their self-voice intro. Once we collect data we process them and upload them to Wikimedia Commons and add the data to wiki data.

Out comes

Once a person is dead it is hard to get a photo(with our copyright so that we can share it with a free license) of that person and also self-voice intro. A person introducing themselves is the rare thing we get after their life.

Statistics

A major bonus thing we are getting from this project is relicensing the book. As we are in a goal of relicensing more data to a public domain like Govt websites and social channels. Many writers are interested to relicense their books to open.

Equipments we use

We record the voice intro using the smartphone. Take a photo using point and shoot camera sometimes using the phone when camera not available.

Funding

We are currently spending everything on our own. The major spending is transported and sometimes we have taken off from our work. We will never mind if we someone is interested in sponsoring a good camera or a voice recorder.