West Bengal Wikimedians/Reports/Annual Activities/2020

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West Bengal Wikimedians User Group has now completed 4 years since its recognition in February 2017.

Almost throughout 2020, the entire world saw an unprecedented situation in the form of health-related catastrophe, global lock-down, economic shutdown, and restriction of movements due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The situation in India was not different either. Like many other affiliates from all over the world. this entire scenario affected the activities of the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group too. The user group was one of the first affiliates to welcome Wikimedia Foundation's March 13 notice to cancel or postpone all offline (in-person) public events funded by Wikimedia Foundation until further notice and was one of the first affiliates to suspend all its funded or non-funded offline activities since March 14, 2020.

The suspension mostly affected our on-field documentation projects like Wiki Exploration Program, Documenting Kolkata Heritage, Wiki Loves Butterfly, etc. But, we continued to organize our online events like previous years.

Wiki Loves Butterfly - Phase IV

Wiki Loves Butterfly (WLB), a continuous project funded by the Wikimedia Foundation through Rapid Grants Program for the last 4 years, completed its 4th phase entitled Wiki Loves Butterfly in North East India Part II (WLB-NEI-II). The (grant report) was duly submitted and was accepted. In this phase, the WLB team documented in different areas of North-east India and West Bengal collected photographs of available butterfly species and subspecies, created and updated related articles, and contributed to different sites of Wikimedia. After it became disrupted by COVID-19 Pandemic, the field documentation activities were carried out by the team members at their respective home backyards in their respective residences. The WLB team, comprising of a good number of dedicated Wikimedia volunteers, lepidopterists, resource persons, and noted scientific bodies mentored by Bengali Wikimedian Atudu collaboratively contributed on Bengali Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, and Wikidata. So far, at the end of this phase, Wikimedia Commons is enriched with a total 2078 images of 403 butterfly species and subspecies and 221 related articles were created on Bengali Wikipedia.

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Rabimas proofreading contest 1427

The user group organized a 3-months long proofreading contest on Bengali Wikisource from 8 May 2020 to 7 August 2020 celebrating the occasion of the birth and death anniversary of Nobel laureate author Rabindranath Tagore. This was the second iteration of the same event which happened last year. 24 books written by Tagore were selected for the participants to proofread. 19 people enrolled and 28 people actually participated in the contest proofreading 3632 pages and validating 2812 pages in total. Necessary information from the 10 top contributors was collected and sent to CIS-A2K and Wikimedia Bangladesh representatives to distribute the prizes to the winners.

Wiki Loves Monuments 2020 in India

West Bengal Wikimedians User Group continued to organize the national level Wiki Loves Monuments photographic competition during the month of September 2020 for the third year in a row. This year, we had made some significant changes compared to the previous years.

We have—

• massively expanded the list of monuments beyond Monuments of National Importance and State Protected Monuments and had not only added designated sites UNESCO sites, Gandhi Heritage sites and Heritage inventory of Indian Railways, but also expanded non-designated temples, forts, and Buddhist monasteries too.
• collaborated with a citizens' initiative operating in Bangalore to include inscription stones located there.
• included all graded monuments by Pune Municipal Corporation, INTACH listed monuments in Solapur, and many non-designated temples located in different parts of Maharashtra, thanks to the collaboration initiated by CIS-A2K with different citizens' initiatives of the Maharashtra,
• migrated the entire list of monuments to Wikidata and fetched data from there.
• modified our upload campaign to adapt for Wikidata, so that the QID gets added automatically in the file description when someone uploads a photograph of a monument from the event list.

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T262156

• collaborated with User:Susannaanas from Wikidocumentaries to have a specific upload link for Wiki Loves Monuments in India from their visualisation website and included their link along with each monument in our list.
• added links for WLM map website along with each monument in our list to give participants the option to upload monuments from their website, which auto-generates the majority of the metadata in the descriptions.

This year, 594 photographers uploaded 4,470 images. 79% of all the uploaders were new users. The ten winners were selected by the respected jury team within deadline. CIS-A2K sponsored the prizes and took care of sending the promised gift vouchers to the winners. The user group designed the rest of the prizes and sent them to the winners.

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Bengali Lexeme project

On Wikdiata, the user group members are working to improve Bengali-language lexicographical data. As of 16 February 2021, there are around 3,900 Bangla lexemes on Wikidata, with more than 32,000 forms and 4,900 senses. This is the highest among the Indian languages. More than 31,000 pronunciation audios (P443) has already been added, making Bengali the second highest language to have pronunciation audio files on Wikidata, after German language. Transliteration styles like ISO 15919 transliteration (P5825), and ITRANS (P8881) are also being added to the lexeme forms. A few sample lexeme entries are দেখা (L3035), হৃদয় (L301993) etc. Attempts are also being made to create lexicographical data of some of the dialects of the language. The documentation related to the Bengali language lexicographical data may be seen here.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar 200th birth anniversary proofreading contest

26 September 2020 marked the 200th birth anniversary of Bengali educator and social reformer Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. West Bengal Wikimedians User Group celebrated the occasion by organizing a month-long proofreading contest on Bengali Wikisource which ended on his birthday. A total of 25 books, either written by Vidyasagar or written about him by other authors were selected for the participants to proofread. 14 people enrolled and 14 people actually participated in the contest proofreading 3,282 pages. In this contest, the organizers decided to exclude validation as this step attracted lots of vandals in the previous contests organized on the Bengali Wikisource. The necessary information of the 5 top contributors of the contest was collected and sent to CIS-A2K and Wikimedia Bangladesh representatives to distribute the pre-committed prizes.

Wikimedia movement strategy prioritization event

The representative members of the user group met online on November 8, 2020 to prioritize from the 10 recommendations of WIkimedia movement strategy. The representative members have always felt to run the group in a more sustainable and productive way than before and through the first recommendation which says about sustainability of the movement, they have found an opportunity to re-organize itself in that way. Systematic approach to improve satisfaction and productivity, funding for underrepresented communities along with global revenue generation policy and fundraising strategy were the three top actions prioritized from this recommendation. The user group members also prioritized the recommendations which talked about investment in skills and leadership development, managing internal knowledge and ensuring equity in decision-making, but they have strongly emphasized that all these priorities will mostly be dependent on how successfully our priority No. 1 was implemented. The user group also identified the resources needed to work on the implementation part in the future.

Indic Wikisource Proofreadathon - Bengali Wikisource version

CIS-A2K organized a 15-days long proofread contest from 1 November 2020 to 15 November 2020 on all Indic language Wikisource projects. West Bengal Wikimedians User Group decided to organize it locally for Bengali Wikisource. The different learning experiences gained by the user group from previous proofread contests on the Bengali Wikisource site helped them to adopt some new rules locally different from the main event. To ensure quality on Bengali Wikisource, validations were totally excluded from the contest, a bot was activated to find and replace common error patterns in proofreading, mass reverts were done using AutoWikiBrowser whenever some low-quality edits were identified from some users and Abuse filters were activated to prevent users to vandalize the pages. 35 people actually participated in the contest proofreading 6,136 pages in total.

Annual General Meeting 2021

West Bengal Wikimedians User Group conducted its second Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 9 January 2021 and 10 January 2021 online following Article 23 of the Bylaws of the user group. The previous year's activities of the user group were critically reviewed, the financial situation was updated, new representative members and committee members were selected, upcoming activities, future strategy, and action plans were thoroughly discussed. The meeting led to some important changes in the Bylaws.