Grants:IEG/Growing Kannada-language Wikimedia projects with a digital library
This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant
Project idea[edit]
What is the problem you're trying to solve?[edit]
Kannada Wikimedia projects lack in concentrated efforts while enhancing the articles with reliable sources. With our initiatives we understand that crowd-sourcing efforts will work for Kannada projects to bring in important articles, references, out of copyright books to Free Knowledge world of Wikimedia.
What is your solution?[edit]
Our IEG project intends to crowd-source editing on Kannada Wikipedia with a special focus/thematic group for introducing rare and important Kannada Literary works in which we have prior experience in the crowd-sourcing initiative with our earlier project Pustaka Sanchaya. This project was aimed at transcribing book titles and other relevant metadata (Nearly 5500 books). There was participation from all over the world to accomplish this task on our crowd-sourcing platform Samooha Sanchaya. This focused attempt at writing articles on Kannada Wikipedia which will have an added advantage of sourcing these books from Digital Library of India (DLI) and from Osmania University Digital Library (OUDL). As many of these books are copyright free, the articles can also serve as a first step of identifying such books to make their way onto Kannada Wikisource thus enriching not only Kannada Wikipedia but also contributing to the growth of Kannada Wikisource.
Project goals[edit]
Stabilize infrastructure: We are planning to use our digital library index built at Pustaka Sanchaya
- as a platform to learn and to create simple Infoboxes, Wiki templates to build wiki pages for the rare Kannada books, Authors & Publishers.
- to provide access to existing wiki pages if there is any
- help to find the references to online material published by primary sources (Media/Press engagement for this is explained below)
- help to learn on how to use the sources as references while creating new pages or enhancing existing pages
Increase participation: For this IEG grant, we intend to bring a select group of Kannada technical and digital enthusiasts (primarily new Wikipedians) all around the world under one platform to crowdsource the project of writing articles based on the books available on DLI and OUDL.
Improve quality: As all the articles created under this project will be referenced and cited both with references and citations. More importantly these articles will act as references for many new articles as they will contain valuable information about the content of the book, relevance of the book and the relevant metadata. In case the book on which the article has been written is copyright free it will uploaded to Kannada Wikisource as well thus making the entire book available for reference.
Increase reach: Our project we hope, shall create a buzz amongst the common readers who would like to read and research about the rare and important books in Kannada. The availability of information on Kannada Wikipedia shall be a catalyst to bring in new editors. These texts are of immense cultural and literary importance and have contributed extensively in shaping the cultural discourse. By making this information available on Kannada Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia shall find its way into higher education classrooms and research forums thus increasing the reach to a new reader and possibly editor base.
Encourage innovation: The project encourages editors to develop learning patterns that will help new editors to continue adding similar focus articles after the completion of IEG. Innovation and learning -
Does it take an innovative approach to solving a key problem for the Wikimedia movement?: Yes, One of the key problem in the Wikimedia movement is the non-availability of quality articles in non-major languages of the world. The problem manifests itself more acutely when one looks at Indian Languages e.g. Of the 16k articles around 70% of articles do not have references.
The IEG project proposes to address the above problem at two levels:
- a) By creating GA quality articles it will establish a benchmark and a model to be followed.
- b) By the nature of the project articles will be about texts and books that shall serve as reference materials to improve Kannada Wikipedia articles.
Is the potential impact greater than the risks? The risk as we see it is that the project might not be able to continue the similar impact levels post the grant period. However, this is true of any project and should not be a deterring factor.
Project plan[edit]
Activities[edit]
Work Flow of the activities around existing metadata:
- Re-use the platforms built for crowd sourcing ( Samooha Sanchaya & Pustaka Sanchaya) the metadata transliteration of 5000+ books from DLI & OUDL digital libraries to encourage Editing Wikipedia for Kannada books with minimal tweaks required for visual guide.
Note: The platforms quoted above have already solved the problem of accessibility issues of digital library archives and provides base content required for the IEG grant activities quoted below. We will now enhance the interface of these platforms to engage & encourage the new users to learn wiki editing through a visual guide on the site. Changes mentioned are purely to drive the Kannada literary enthusiasts to find Kannada wikipedia and to learn to create their first wikipage & so on. Visual guide to show how book link from DLI & OUDL can be used as a reference, creating the infobox_book, infobox_writer, infobox_publisher templates to add metadata content, how to add category etc.
- Simple guide to be created to show how a non-existent page can be created about a book, author or a publisher's which are notable in Kannada literary world.
- Encourage users to learn about referencing in wiki articles - guide them to try adding a reference to the wiki pages using the visual guide with examples of the live metadata
- Use wiki API to check and highlight the book names, authors or publishers who don't have a page on Kannada Wikipedia to encourage editing.
- Share the guide with the community through various channels. This is done by calling the volunteers who had helped Sanchaya with the earlier projects via mailing lists, Facebook, twitter and other social channels. Sanchaya has more than 3000+ followers on FB for various Open Source projects we are working on.
- Reach out to Kannada Wiki community about the project and how to participate. Request to join the editathon's for Kannada books & writers.
- Social media engagements: Facebook Kannada wikipedia group that I had initiated back in 2014 (https://www.facebook.com/groups/kannadawikipedia) has got more than 7000+ members but many are still not editing Wikipedia. Educate them to find the subject to start their first edit, use the templates and resources as primary guides to start adding pages.
- Reach out Facebook Kannada communities around language, literature and books and educate them about Wiki editing.
- Reach out to Kannada Bloggers community & literature enthusiasts to weave wiki pages for their best books found in the digital library repositories.
- Enhance the metadata & templates by identifying the online newspapers and other 1st level sources carrying review articles on Kannada books. (Also request them(News papers/ publishers) to collaborate with the community to create meaningful articles as an extended activity for this to this IEG grant) (Famous Kannada local newspaper Prajavani has been publishing information about the books found in DLI & OUDL and its a best candidate for collaboration)
- Create Online/Offline Editahon's around Kannada wikipedia for literary enthusiasts.
- Create PR for news papers about the project, it's need and how to collaborate
- Provide a quick link to existing wiki pages for the books in the index (Pustaka Sanchaya) to continue to drive the traffic to Kannada wikipedia.
- Help Kannada community activities such as workshops etc to create programs around Kannada literate as the book metadata index & guide can work as a kick starter for new editors
Why would Kannada on wiki/off wiki community would be interested to work on this activity?
- First of it's kind activity to build Kannada literature related content on Wikipedia
- Guide to make wiki editing easier by providing templates and a know-how
- Book lovers will find a way to explore the digital libraries, read the content of the books and engage themselves in creating a page on Wiki
- Contributing to world's largest FREE Encyclopedia would make them feel proud & happy while technical & other barriers being removed through guides
Time lines:
- 1st & 2nd Week – Prepare the guide, ensure the required templates etc are created and made available.
- 3rd week beta testing with selected Wikipedia community members – reach out to be done via Kannada Wikipedia mailing list & direct contacts. Reach out to at least 5 wikipedians to help review the work & take feedback.
- 4th week outreach via social media, blogs (continuous activity), PR for news paper explaining how Wikipedia community is working towards building the repository of Kannada literature by reusing the metadata.
- 5th Week - Reach out to newspapers & explain how the articles published on their news papers about old books can be re-used on Wikipedia to create articles. Explain the referencing the links back to source URLs, Creative Commons license, possibly request for re-licensing the content specific to the books to be used on Wikipedia if possible.
- From the second month, initiate discussions with bloggers communities, schools/colleges to help conduct editathons around Kannada books
Exclusive Activity around Metadata to enhance Kannada Wikipedia & Kannada Wiki Source
- Identify OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT books (Books printed before 1925 are mostly considered OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT in India, though there are exceptions), sort them for unique & important Kannada books.
- Create pages for OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT books, their authors & publishers
- Identify the books which can be pushed to Kannada Wikisource with a community consensus
- Upload OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT books to Kannada Wiki source
Note: DLI contains 94 and OUDL contains around 215 OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT books as per the metadata we have collated.
Budget[edit]
| S.NO. | Purpose | Amount in USD |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Visual design & development volunteers giveaways | 1000 USD (500 USD each) |
| 2 | Project management | 600 USD |
| 3 | Edit-a-thon/Book-a-thon events & community engagement activities | 400 USD |
| 4 | Wikimedia merchandise for volunteer giveaways | 400 USD |
| 5 | Total Budget | 2400 USD |
Community engagement[edit]
- I have been already working with other community members around this project. The transliterated metadata has helped us find some of the books of Niranjana re-released under creative commons license. We were able to push these books to Kannada wikisource and its digitization work is under progress.
- The other volunteers in this IEG grant have been editing kannada wikipedia and they have extensively worked with me on the metadata retrieval & development of crowdsourcing platforms (both Pustaka & Samooha Sanchaya)
- Community members will be encouraged to learn and teach wiki editing with the help of visual tool that would be added to our platform
- Guidance to enhance the wiki templates & references that can be made available will be discussed from time to time on Kannada Wikipedia village pump and meetups that would be arranged as a part of this activity.
Sustainability[edit]
- Project would continue to exist in reality as we expect the learning to be adopted by other Indic Wikimedia projects. DLI and OUDL libraries have books & metadata related to other Indic languages too.
- The crowd sourcing practice that we have researched and explored around Kannada literary activities would be a best examples for other Indic wiki language to adopt the same.
- Newspapers such as Prajavani which already carries reviews on OUDL & DLI Kannada books. If they come forward to re-license the review content under Creative Commons to encourage our activity around Kannada wikipedia, that would be a trend setting for media to join hands with Free Knowledge initiatives here in Karnataka. We will try our best to make it happen to open new avenues to build rich wiki pages around Kannada literature.
Measures of success[edit]
Need target-setting tips? Note: in addition to your project-specific measures of success, you will also be asked to report on some Global Metrics at the end of your final report. Please keep this in mind as you plan, and we'll support you as you begin your project.
- Identifying rare and important Kannada books from the 5500 book's metadata available in digital libraries
- Helping create meaningful articles on these relevant books, their authors and publishers
- Avoiding stub articles with metadata information by encouraging new editors with the visual guide
- Encouraging research on rare Kannada literature by providing possible references from newspapers and other sources for the selected books
- Identifying copyright free books & submitting them to Kannada Wikisource for digitization activities
- Sharing the learning and helping other Indic language community members to adopt the idea for their language
- Collaboration with local newspapers (atleast one) for DLI & OUDL book reviews
| S.NO. | Activity | Target | Dream Target | Comments/Concerns |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Identify rare & Important books from the 5500 book's metadata which is available & create meaningful articles on Kannada Wiki | 750 books, 100 authors, 50 publishers to have wiki pages with valuable information | Maximum number of wikipages (Upto 50% utilization of complete metadata) | Digital libraries might have scanned the same book in multiple places, hence duplication of books might reduce the number of unique books. |
| 2 | Ensure articles are meaningful | 100% valuable information to reach Kannada wiki pages | Can be ensured as the Metadata has enough information to add reference link back to original digital library source, information required for infobox etc. External link's to add more value to the articles. | |
| 3 | Avoid Stub articles | Ensure the articles created have atleast one reference link, 1 interwiki link, infobox, categorization | Articles to contain atleast 2KB content for 100% articles created | Achievable, target is to ensure point 2 & try to work towards the dream target. |
| 4 | Editathons/Wiki Loves Books acitivities | Atleast 2 online and 2 Offline Events | 4 Outreach events | |
| 5 | Get the press releases published in local news papers | Atleast 2 major dailies carrying article on the activity | 4 news dailies carrying PR | Earlier work done by team and support received from local media gives confidence in achieving this target. |
| 6 | Identify & collaborate with news papers to re-use book reviews while creating articles | At least 1 newspaper to join hands | More than 2 newspapers to join the activity | Confident of having collaboration with 1 newspaper. |
| 7 | Social Media & Community reachout | Reach out atleast 10k people via social media | Reach larger audience to be able to achieve 100% results | Existing contributors of our work on Sanchaya and communities we have worked with gives confidence to achieve this |
| 9 | Identify & upload OUT_OF_COPYRIGHT books to Kannada Wiki source | Atleast 100 books to reach Wiki source | DLI has 94 and OUDL has 215 books, after avoiding duplication etc, we should be able to have this entire set contributed to Wikisource. | |
| 10 | No of articles to go on Kannada wikipedia | 750 Book pages, 100 authors pages, 50 publishers (After verifying the notability) to have pages based on the above acivities | Achive max number of pages for each unique book available in the metadata | Achievable as the wiki source & wikipedia activities go hand in hand to create content collaboration with editors. Dream project completion would make this project 100% successful. |
What gives us confidence in completing the project?[edit]
The work around metadata started through a simple word-of-mouth campaign on social media and a small push by media through couple of articles such as this one.Techies to help make digitised Kannada books accessible. The work of transliterating content from non standard Kanglish (i.e Kannada written in English) to Kannada in unicode for metadata content such as book name, author name, publisher name and category was completed in less than 15 days time for OUDL data and just over 30 days for DLI data. The review took few more weeks to complete. This ground work has already generated data that is necessary to take all data to wikipedia systematically with references to each library metadata page. But the intention of the project is beyond just creating articles around the book and to create a movement around wiki to bring more editors as well as to enrich Kannada wiki & wiki source with content on literature.
Get involved[edit]
Participants[edit]
- Omshivaprakash :- Editor on Kannada Wikimedia projects & Sysop on Kannada Wikipedia. I started editing wiki in 2007 and I have been active on Kannada Wikipedia since 2012 with 23850+ edits. I also contribute to commons. Apart from editing wiki, I have been active in community building activities in and around Kannada Wikipedia in Bangalore & other parts of Karnataka. My articles on wikipedia history, culture and editing have appeared in leading local news papers. Bangalore University's text book for 1st semester Bachelors in Computer Science carries my article on Wikipedia. Kannada Sahitya Parishath's centennial celebration edition of 'History of Modren Kannada Literature' (Kannada: ಆಧುನಿಕ ಕನ್ನಡ ಸಾಹಿತ್ಯ ಚರಿತ್ರೆ) volume carries my articles on Wikipedia, Free Culture & other Free Knowledge initiatives. I'm also working on digitizing various other Kannada literary work with my team at Sanchaya. Vachana Sanchaya: 11th century Kannada literature to enrich Wikisource blog on Wikimedia talks about our other efforts. Recently participated in Mediawiki Train the Trainer Program at Bangalore. I'm also a FOSS contributor, Kannada technology blogger (Exclusive on FOSS).
- Pavithra Active contributor for Kannada Wikiquote, Wikipedia. She has worked been an active volunteer contributor (Data scientist) for Open knowledge initiatives at Sanchaya which includes, Vachana Sanchaya, Pustaka Sanchaya & Samooha sanchaya projects. Her python development skills help us work with metadata & also with pywikibot extensively. She has attended Bangalore Language Engineering Meetup November 2012, various Kannada wikipedia meetups, MWTTT - Bangalore 2015 etc.
- User:Devudilip Editor on Kannada wikipedia, Volunteers as a developer behind Open knowledge initiatives of Sanchaya including Vachana Sanchaya, Pustaka Sanchaya & Samooha sanchaya projects, FOSS contributor.
Community Notification[edit]
Please paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?
Kannada Wikipedia
- Village Pump notification: ಪುಸ್ತಕ ಪ್ರಿಯರನ್ನು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಸಂಪಾದಕರನ್ನಾಗಿಸುವ ಯೋಜನೆ (IEG)
Endorsements[edit]
Do you think this project should be selected for an Individual Engagement Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the talk page of this proposal).
- Community member: add your name and rationale here.
- This seems like a pretty important project and it is going to improve Kannada wiki projects. Satdeep Gill (talk) 17:33, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
- Good project. Wishing you a great success.Vidyu44 (talk) 06:38, 1 October 2015 (UTC).
- Good project. I am exited to see this. Best wishes. Arkrishna (talk) 07:57, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
- This project hopes to help the Kannada wikimedia community and their efforts to build a quality crowd-sourced Kannada digital content on the Internet. I endorse this project. Csyogi (talk) 22:04, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
- So happy to see this coming that took shape some time back and hope that all that you all planned back in last year get real. --Subhashish Panigrahi (talk) 08:49, 2 October 2015 (UTC)
Support --Rahmanuddin (talk) 14:10, 3 October 2015 (UTC)- Good project, i hope this would increase the activity level in Kannada wiki projects--Shanmugamp7 (talk) 14:21, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
- Support -- A good project, of course, by some very-trusted Kannada Wikipedians. I am eager to see digital content in Kannada Wikisource enriched in near future. Good luck. -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 16:05, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
- Support -- Lahariyaniyathi (talk) 07:18, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- Support --Pavanaja (talk) 14:48, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
- Support I would like to volunteer for the required efforts. Devudilip (talk) 18:36, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
- Support This is going to be interesting work to enrich and pool our existing digital library content in different sources and contribute to Kannada Wikipedia.I would be more excited to work as a volunteer. Pavithrah (talk) 04:47, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
- Support The team's track record is impeccable and the outcomes from this program can be reused for other Indian languages too. --Ravi (talk) 06:45, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
