Grants talk:PEG/AbhiSuryawanshi/Hindi Wikipedia Meet Feb2015

GAC members who support this request

1. --DerekvG (talk) 15:13, 31 January 2015 (UTC) I woudl suggest that the organisers also discuss issues like the gender gap and look for ways to tackle the issues.

GAC comments

Hi, I'm sure such meeting is worth supporting. Just 2 questions:

1. In your application there is no information about the venue - where does it going to happen? I guess you have already selected venue - so please provide information about it.
2. How do you want to attract newbies to attend the workshop? Any idea who is going to be?

Polimerek (talk) 13:18, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi,

1. We have shortlisted few hotels near Cannaught Place in Delhi. The Lalit, Hotel Aagami, The Park, Park Plaza etc agreed to give heavy discount as it is social activity. These hotels are 5 minutes away from railway station and connected via Metro stations.
2. We are focussing on housewives and language students for workshops. We are planning launch small social media campaign to get more registrations for workshop AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 19:23, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi, I don't see a real impact in the Wikimedia strategy except organizing an event to discuss about policies or plans. The question is really simple... if the project is to get people in one building to discuss about Hindi Wikipedia, it does not make sense to me. If the meeting is to define a plan to get more editors or more content (how many editathons will be organized, how to improve the participation, etc.) the impact would be more evident. The proposal, as is, will be successful because there is no problem to pay for 20 people to have them to discuss about wikipedia, but the impact, as is, at the moment seems very weak. I suggest to define a plan for the benefit of the Hindi Wikipedia not limited only to a generic discussion but exiting from this meeting with a plan of activities to be monitored. --Ilario (talk) 14:33, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

We are going to work on Programatic Activity in the meeting. It is easy for Marathi or Bengali Wikipedias to gather at one location as these languages are spoken in small area as compared to Hindi. Hindi is 4th most spoken language in world and even in India people who speak Hindi live in various cities and states. Delhi is national capital and most of Wikipedia editors live in Delhi that is why we are going to host first meet-up in Delhi. During meeting, we will come up outreach plan. Government is also active in promoting Hindi language. Recently Obama greeted press conference in Hindi, and when Prime Minister of India visited New York, he gave long speech in Hindi at Madison Square Garden. More people are switching to Hindi, and this is right time to launch outreach workshops with proper strategy.

We have received support and confirmation from 16 active users and 4 admins for meet-up. We are hopeful about government support to planned activities and programs. AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 19:23, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

I would join comments of Ilario above: I understand that there are millions of speakers and India is one of the largest countries by population in the world. But it's a not a direct argument supporting the meeting: large number of speakers wouldn't result in large audience by itself, and I think that there target should be much more challenging: for example, at least 70-100 attendees for each day (150-200 for the whole event) and some online translation with 500-1000 viewers, some targets of conversion into active editors, etc. What about attracting students or other groups at Delhi itself? That wouldn't require travel grants but could gather active and internet-aware audience rubin16 (talk) 20:53, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

We have some important and few serious disputes related to Wiki-policies on Hindi Wikipedia. We need to discuss such things in meet-up and then get consensus after meet-up (on Wiki). It is important to meet face-to-face to discuss tricky policies. For example - In Hindi, we call people with respect by adding 'jee' in the end, few members support this and few users are against this, another example is biographical articles like 'Mahatma Gandi' vs 'Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi'. Hindi is much more complicated than English and it is highly difficult to replicate 'same' policies on Hindi Wikipedia. Travel Grant is to make sure all active users and admins attend event to discuss tricky policies. We (Hindi Wikipedians) 'never' met in real life. This meet-up will be nice opportunity for strategy development along with policy discussions. And off-course, as per your suggestions we will plan outreach activities. Simple outreach without policy clarification will lead to more on-wiki disputes. AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 22:05, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

As I see, there are 400+ active editors on wiki: are you sure that decision of 10/20/50 people at meetup will show real consensus on this questions? Why that questions couldn't be sold by discussions in Wikipedia itself? If they weren't solved there, why are you sure that there will be some break-through during the real meet-up? rubin16 (talk) 14:29, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you so much for comment. There were (failed) attempts to solve problems.Some wiki policies that have historically been difficult to agree on on-wiki, can sometimes be effectively debated in person, to come up with a proposal to take back to the wiki. Four administrators confirmed their presence for this policy discussion meeting. This is small effort to solve problem. Do you think it is wrong idea to meet to discuss such things? If it is based on your previous experience, kindly share learning, we will try to avoid those things. Your guidance will help us to improve our Hindi Wikipedia. If you have any better solution, feel free to suggest :) AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 14:57, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I am speaking from my experience... there are something about ~15-20 members of Wikimedia Russia and even having just 10-15 people at the meeting it's practically impossible to find the solution at the meeting itself, without any prior preparation (preliminary search for options, gathering arguments, preliminary voting and identification of the outstanding issues). If we need just to vote and choose who will be responsible for the implementation - it's working for us, otherwise we can spend a day, sit till midnight but if we couldn't find solution in-wiki, we aren't able to find it face-to-face. Speaking about Russian Wikipedia, we never used such conferences as a place to reach some decisions - even when we have hundreds of people on the conference/meeting who reached clear consensus, it will be nothing for the community as: it's not documented anywhere in the Wikipedia and others can't see our ideas and conclusions; the meeting of a small part of editors' community isn't representative and couldn't be treated as a consensus. That's why I don't believe that problem could be solved in 1 day of personal discussion if it wasn't solved during weeks of written discussins rubin16 (talk) 16:18, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

What was the problem and agenda of meet-up? Do you think meeting was less successful because of lack of preparation? It can be changed? and Can you please share report of meeting? AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 06:50, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

You are asking right questions but they are not easy to answer as it needs to go deep into my memories for the particular example :) I thought a lot about it: I don't think that preparation of questions for some kind of voting is applicable for Wikipedians meeting as it's an informal community, not an organization that needs voting for formal decisions. I think that the best option for such a conference would be selection of most actual problems and searching for some members who could share their insights of solving similar problems: for example, it's not easy to become partners with some cultural institutions but if you find someone who already succeeded in it and who is ready to share his experience, his learning patterns and will personally motivate and inspire others on working in the same direction - that would be a good impact. Haven't you thought about the list of issues that you are planning to discuss during the meeting? How can you turn discussions into some results? Who will lead such discussion? I think the answers for this questions will certainly increase the value of your project :) rubin16 (talk) 20:05, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Dear All, Please give a second though to the issues raised by AbhiSuryawanshi. The notion that all this would not result in any feasible outcome is ideally false, at least encourage people taking some initiatives. Abhinav619 (talk) 09:36, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

I am reading the measures of the success of this initiative: 20 members attending the conference and general happiness and discussion of policies and some programmatic points. I am a little bit skeptical about the programmatic points because the government outreach or the institutional partnerships seems to me difficult to have without the umbrella of an organization (local chapter?). At the moment the impact seems weak. Please consider that we have a lot of Wikipedias and each of them with a community but the meetups of the communities in general are not financed. I could understand that a community may ask for a cost sharing to rent a conference hall, but paying an accommodation or a trip for people to do something that can be done with a virtual meeting, seems to me incorrect in comparison with other wikipedian communities where people meet paying their trip, their accommodation (sometimes with couch-surfing) and sharing the costs for the hall. What I am saying is that, to be correct, the Hindi community should justify this financing request with stronger deliveries in order to justify this "discrimination" within other wikipedian communities. --Ilario (talk) 13:08, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you all. We will revise our plan. We will post updated proposal soon. :) AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 20:36, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Valid or obsolete?

Since the submitted dates have passed - is this still valid or obsolete submission?
— Danny B. 00:29, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Community comments

Hello. I am an active Hindi Wikipedian - Editor and Reviewer to be precise since 2011. I have close to 10,000 edits, about 400 created-articles besides many hundreds of article expansions, counter-vandalism edits as well as maintenance-exercise edits. My take on his exercise is:

• In terms of edits and article creations, Hindi exceeds all other Indian language Wikipedias.
• There is a huge untapped potential to be tapped for Hindi, something which I mentioned in the PPT I shared @ WMF-India Community Consultation 2014: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hindi_Wikipedia_Reach,_Problems_%26_Solutions.pdf (See the detailed blogpost by Asaf Bartov and me: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/11/13/india-community-consultation-2014/)
• We are geographically dispersed and rarely get a chance to meet each other.
• WMF funding to India generally benefits other languages such as Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, etc and not Hindi.
• Other languages such as Tamil, Malayalam and more recently Bengali have conducted special events with gatherings mostly from the community members. These events have boosted and resulted in more growth for the communities.

It is a long-cherished dream of Hindi Community to hold national events, get support for the community by allocation of funds and device a mechanism for frequent meetups and outreach events. --Muzammil (talk) 05:20, 30 January 2015 (UTC)