West Bengal Wikimedians/Reports/Annual Activities/2022
West Bengal Wikimedians User Group
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This page reports the Wikimedia related activities and projects organized and/or supported by West Bengal Wikimedians User Group during the fiscal year from February 17, 2022 to February 16, 2023. |
To read annual report of 2021-2022, please click here. |
Overview
The West Bengal Wikimedians User Group has completed its 6th year since its recognition in February 2017. Thanks to the funding approvals from the Wikimedia Foundation under different grant programs and with fiscal support from Kiwix, the user group was able to continue its projects and programs which were running for last few years. Digital conservation of nature, culture, history and heritage had been the priority of the user group since its existence and this year was no exception. Wiki Loves Butterfly and Wiki Exploration Program, which are designed to proactively seek and document butterflies and heritage structures respectively continued this year with better photographic equipment which were purchased specifically for that purpose. Like previous years, photographic competitions like the Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Food were also organized on Wikimedia Commons to bring media contents from amateur and professional photographers and proofread competitions and campaigns were held on Bengali Wikisource to create new searchable texts of public domain books in Bengali language. The user group continues to collaborate with like minded organizations and GLAM institutions to digitize their contents and two such partnerships are ongoing currently. All these offline activities are not only limited to the state of West Bengal, but are stretched beyond the borders in other eastern and north-eastern states of India too. At the end of this activity year, more than 27,000 files have been uploaded through direct or indirect support from different user group programs and more than 40,000 files have been uploaded through the competitions it has organized.
All the funded user group projects and programs are run by volunteers without any salary component. It is due to the dedication and commitment of the volunteers to the cause of open knowledge, which has helped to deliver significant amount of impactful output over the years, but several of the limitations and shortcomings of the volunteer run model has always been felt. As part of the prior movement strategy conversations, the user group has always prioritized to work towards building a sustainable system for itself so that it can effectively serve for at least for the next decade, if not more. Keeping that in mind, it has started looking for options compatible to the law of the land and planning for a sustainable future of its own despite having very little supports and long lists of obstacles. The details of these activities and experimentation are not included in this report.Nature and Environment
Wiki Loves Butterfly - Phase V (second half)
Wiki Loves Butterfly is a field documentation project to identify and digitally conserve live butterfly species in different parts of India, which has been running for the last six years by a dedicated group of volunteers. This year, the team concluded the second half of the fifth phase of the project with the funding from the Wikimedia Foundation for which the final report has been submitted. In the entire fifth phase, the team conducted 67 field documentations in total, out of which 35 visits happened this year. The team reached various hot-spots in Changlang and Lower Subansiri districts of Arunachal Pradesh; Barpeta, Bongaigaon, Jorhat, Kokrajhar, Kamrup and Kamrup Metropolitan districts of Assam; Dimpaur, Kohima and Zunheboto districts of Nagaland; North Sikkim district of Sikkim Alipurduar, Bankura, Birbhum, Darjeeling, Paschim Bardhaman, Paschim Medinipur, Purba Bardhaman, Hooghly, Howrah, Jhargram, Kalimpong, Kolkata, Nadia, North 24 Parganas and South 24 Parganas districts of West Bengal in this phase. It has also co-organized two national level butterfly meets at Namdapha National Park in Arunachal Pradesh and Raimona National Park in Assam along with noteworthy butterfly organizations from all over the country and the forest department of the concerned provinces. An awareness program was also conducted in a school at Pasingdang, North Sikkim and few butterfly photo-walks were conducted in different places in West Bengal to engage newcomers.
One of the most noteworthy achievements of this phase was to record a live gynandromorph specimen of Athyma inara inara (Himalayan Colour Sergeant) at Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal having female characteristics on the left side and male characteristics on the right side. This was the first documentation of a live gynandromorph butterfly of the said subspecies in India and the finding was published on a scholarly article. A diff blog post was also published on this finding.
Heritage
Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in India
The user group organized Wiki Loves Monuments photographic competition in India for the fifth consecutive year during the entire month of September, 2022 to increase the media content of different built heritage structures located in the country. This year, we have brought a new member in the organizing team to take care of the promotion and jury selection process of the national competition. For the first time, we have engaged professional photographers from outside of Wikimedia volunteer community as jury members and oriented them with the judging process. We have also added few features in the tables of monuments to display the columns for co-ordinates with dynamic maps and locator images for districts, so that participants can have ease to locate the monuments on maps and identify the right monuments to upload. Unfortunately, we had to remove Wikidocumentaries based upload feature as the site was undergoing major maintenance.
This year, 409 photographers uploaded 5,796 images in total, out of which 6.19% of total uploaded images are used in different Wikimedia sites till now. 76% of all the uploaders were new users. The ten winners were selected by the jury members within deadline. Like previous year, this year too, prizes were also declared for the photographer with highest number of uploads and also for the photograph of an monument located in West Bengal which gets into top 10 of the national contest. The user group designed the prizes and sent the promised gift vouchers, swag materials and digital certificates to the winners. The user group will continue to organize this competition again in 2023.Wiki Exploration Program
The user group has been running a program to proactively search and document heritage sites in a cost-effective way in multiple phases. For the last five years, small teams were sent to different areas locate in the state of the West Bengal under this program. Last year, Amitabha Gupta planned and executed 7 phases covering 9 districts of the state. A Sony ILCE-7M3 camera and a Sony FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS lens were purchased and assigned to Amitabha specifically for this purpose. A drone operator was also given assignment in 3 phases of this program to get aerial videos and images of the monuments. The team covered heritage structured in the districts of Hooghly, Bankura, Purulia, Howrah, Nadia, Purba Bardhaman, Paschim Bardhaman, North 24 Parganas, Purba Medinipur and Paschim Medinipur.
Wiki Explores Semaphore Towers - Phase I
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A Semaphore tower at Baitalkuli
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Bird's eye view of a Sempahore tower at Arrah
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Drone video of the interior of a Sempahore tower at Palsara
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360° aerial video of a Semaphore tower at Sindurpur
Wiki Explores Howrah - Phase II
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An at-chala temple with char-chala porch at Dhasa
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Terracotta figurine of Shiva on a temple at Ganeshpur
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Terracotta figurine on a temple at Garh Balia
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An at-chala temple at Mellak
Wiki Explores Purba Bardhaman - Phase IV
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A deul at Khatnagar
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Terracotta relief on a Dolmancha at Shyamsundar
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Terracotta relief on an at-chala temple at Hat Gobindapur
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An at-chala temple at Baikunthapur
Wiki Explores Paschim Bardhaman - Phase I
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A pancharatna temple at Panagarh
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A stone temple at Garui
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An aerial view of a temple in Asansol
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An aerial video of a temple at Khandra
Wiki Explores North 24 Parganas - Phase I
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An at-chata temple in Kanchrapara
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A pancharatna temple in Gobardanga
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Sculpture of a sitting lion at a ghat in Panihati
Wiki Explores Nadia - Phase II
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A temple with Jor-bangla architecture in Birnagar
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Decorative element at a Zamindar house at Barnia
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A bronze idol of a Hindu goddess at Juranpur
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Terracotta reliefs on a temple at Matiari
Wiki Explores Paschim Medinipur - Phase III
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An at-chala temple at Brahman Basan
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Terracotta relief on a temple wall at Rabidaspur
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A temple complex at Khordda Bishnupur
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A terracotta relief depicting Mahishasuramardini on a temple at Mangloi Shyamballabhpur
Culture
Wiki Loves Food 2022 in India
Filmi music datathon
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Filmi music became the top musical genre after the datathon
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1634 films were linked with their songs
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522 playback singers were linked with their songs.
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322 composers were linked with their songs.
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294 lyricists were linked with their musical works.
During the occassion of the 10th birthday celebration of Wikidata, the user group organized a 15 days long data-thon focusing on music produced and used in Indian films in different languages. Indian films are famous worldwide for their musicals, popularly grouped as the genre of filmi music. Although it has effects on contemporary Indian culture, the musical genre is still very much underrepresented on Wikidata and that's why the user group wanted to bridge some data gap. Although the enrollments were very few, the datathon managed to get 6800 edits, create 3720 new items on film songs along with 2410 new references. At the end of the datathon, filmi music was the top genre for musical works on Wikidata with 4897 items and 1634 items of films were linked with their songs. 522 playback singers, 322 composers and 294 lyricists were linked with their filmi musical works at the end of the datathon.
GLAM
Research Institute of World's Ancient Traditions, Cultures and Heritage
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Group of Mishmi people photographed by Benjamin Simpson in 1860
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An elderly Adi lady leading a folk song
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A documentary film on Adi people
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A headgear made of made of bamboo & horn-bill beak used by Nyishi people
A GLAM project has been initiated at the Research Institute of World's Ancient Traditions, Cultures and Heritage (RIWATCH) located in the village of Khinjili near the town of Roing at Lower Dibang Valley district of Arunachal Pradesh in the North-eastern part of India. RIWATCH has an ethnographic museum and a collection of photographs, audio and video files depicting the rich cultural tradition of different tribes and indigenous people of Arunachal Pradesh and North East India at large. CIS-A2K had made contact with the institute back in 2019 for a possible GLAM project but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting nation-wide restriction of movement, further communication was postponed. Communication with the institute was resumed again on January 2022 and after receiving their positive response, it was decided to have a field visit during the month of March, 2022. West Bengal Wikimedians User Group was formally approached to help facilitate and execute the partnership. Kime Rilla, a resident of Itanagar and a close associate with RIWATCH, was given Wikimedia training by the user group personnel and assigned as Wikimedian-in-Residence (WiR) for the GLAM partnership. Vijay Swami, the executive director of the institute, has released all RIWATCH digital contents under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. Slow internet is the major challenge of this GLAM project which has hindered the smooth uploading of the media files on Wikimedia Commons. A scanner was also provided by CIS-A2K to the institute to digitize the collection of Tibetan Buddhist canon which was presented to the institute from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The digitization is currently stalled due to the non-availability of the WiR due to her professional career and another alternatives are being sought.
Mr. Vijay Swami for hosting us and providing valuable logistics to inititate and run the program!
Bengalee Association Bihar
International Museum Day 2022 Wikidata competition
Ilario for creating the map for museums in West Bengal!
History and Legacy
Subhas Chandra Bose 125th birth anniversary campaign
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Azad Hind newspaper with news of Bose laying foundation stone of Azad Hind Memorial in Singapore
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A declassified document by Government of India on wherabouts of INA treasury.
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A declassified document on activities and death of Subhas Chandra Bose from War Office UK
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A declassified CIA document erroneously depicting Rashbehari Bose as brother of Subhas.
Rabimas proofread competition
Swadhinatar Amrit Mahotsab proofread campaign
Indic Wikisource Proofreadathon - Bengali Wikisource version
Bangladesh Liberation War proofread competition
Vocabulario em Idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez
Daria Cybulska (WMUK) for sponsoring the digitization cost!