User:Hindustanilanguage/Urdu Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles mark

Work Plan (October 2013 - June 2014)
Language Area Work Plan: Hindi

The Indian constitution declares that Hindi shall be written in the Devanagari script and will be the official language of the Federal Government of India. Hindi is also enumerated as one of the twenty-two languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which entitles it to representation on the Official Language Commission. In the 2001 Indian census, 258 million people in India reported Hindi to be their native language; The use of the Hindi language has become widespread on account of inclusion of this language in school education across India as well as because of the popularity of Bollywood or the Hindi film industry and the spiralling growth of the television channels in Hindi. As pointed out in a documentary "Bollywood Mein Hindi" screened during the Eight World Hindi Conference in 2007 at New York, there exists a symbiotic relationship between Bollywood and Hindi. Bollywood's contribution in the growing popularity of Hindi is not only restricted to the non-Hindi speaking regions of India, but also internationally as it has developed audiences throughout the world. Similarly, the Doordarshan has been immensely popular across the length and breadth of country for the memorable serials and dramas since the launch of the national telecasts in 1980s. Many of the serials/dramas telecasted during this era are still remembered by people to this day and even the home videos of these serials are in demand. . Similarly, the launch of the satellite channels in India have Hindi serials popular not just in the non-Hindi speaking youth in India, but also among the youth of the neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh and Nepal. In the recent times, Hindi acquired greater popularity from both native and non-native speakers throughout India because of the following factors:

• Media-related factors such as Bollywood and Indian television mentioned above.
• The growing need for adopting Hindi as pan-India communication tool felt by regional language speakers throughout India.
• Indian diaspora abroad and their desire to remain in touch their compatriots cutting across language barriers.
• Promotion of India as a global tourist destination with Hindi as the primary language.
• Marriages of Indians with diverse linguist backgrounds resulting in Hindi becoming lingua franca of the house.

It can therefore be pointed out that the use of Hindi is not just restricted to Northern states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana, but has spread out throughout India. The existence of both native and non-native speakers of Hindi in Southern India is proof of the Popularity of the language. For example, in Karnataka, Kannada language always had good relationship with Hindi. Hindi is especially widely used in Northern Karnataka. The language of the Natha community near Kadri is viewed by some people as the older form of Hindi. Similarly, Hindi is widely used in Andhra Pradesh, especially in areas around Hyderabad.

In view of the vast population and the need for an online encyclopedia in the language, Hindi Wikipedia was launched on 11 July 2003 and has completed 10 years of its existence. Currently, it has 1,10,386 articles and 324 active editors. In recent times, Hindi Wikipedia has started growing it popularity in numbers, with currently 22.1 percent of page views coming from mobile phones compared to 17.3 percent for all other India languages - suggesting the technologically advanced scale of Hindi language contributors.

Fact Sheet for Hindi Wikimedia Projects

Wikimedia Project	No. of Editors/Contributors (2012)	No. of Editors/Contributors (2013)	No. of Active Editors /Contributors (2012)	No. of Active Editors / Contributors (2013)	No. of Articles/entries (2012)	No. of Articles/entries (2013)	No. of Page Views per Month
Wikipedia	877	1004	54	45	96,300	1,00,529	200,432
Wiktionary	28	32	2	2	1,05,000	1,05,900	361,102
Wiki Quote	9	11	1	1	60	72	35,458
Wiki Books	7	8	1	1	125	133	41,484

As seen from the above table, while Hindi Wikipedia and Wikitionary have seen a rising number of contributors, Hindi Wiki Quote and Wiki Books still need a boost in terms of volunteer engagement.

Reach and Community

A unique feature of Hindi Wikipedia among other Indic Wikipedia is that more than half of the active contributors are non-native contributors. Hence, the account creation in Hindi Wikipedia should not be mistaken as the account created by the native language users. After global account is enabled, lot of automatic account creations have taken place. Yet, for many people outside India, Hindi Wikipedia represent whole of India. For them the first wiki they register among Indian languages is Hindi. All these account add to the total number of registered users.

Added to this, the total number of speakers of Hindi is always exaggerated. The speakers of a few languages like Bhojpuri, Maithili, Rajasthani, Chhatisgarhi, and so on (and many other languages spoken in the Hindi belt) are treated as Hindi speakers. Even though most of the speakers of the above languages can speak Hindi, their mother tongue is one of the above languages. That is, they speak one of the above language at home, and outside they speak Hindi. Of these, Bhojpuri is already moderately active and has its presence on Wikipedia and the electronic media. A further complicated issue in this context is that fact that in North India among the educated class, their is a preference of English over Hindi for reading and writing. But since Hindi is either the native language or more widely spoken language in the country, the speakers of this language need to have the willingness to contribute on Hindi Wikipedia and other related Wikimedia projects.

Nature of Hindi Wikipedia

• Hindi Wikipedia needs more wider readership and contribution from across India because of its geographic prevalence.
• The number of stubs or start class articles, especially regarding places and personalities, is very high and requires community involvement for content improvement.

Key Difficulty of Willing Contributors

• There is a need for educating potential editors on the use of Devanagri keyboard.

Need for Existing Content Improvement

The following measures can be suggested to strengthen the content:

a) help the community evolve a cohesive policy in effectively discouraging creation of stub articles; and

b) find ways and means of expanding the stub class articles and convert them into start class articles.

Other Related Needs

1. Visibility or Awareness for Hindi Wikipedia in the public is lacking. There is need for a major push to have media presence/coverage for Hindi Wikipedia.
2. Lack of Open-Source culture: There is very little presence of open source across academia, media industry, public and private sector organizations. A lot of knowledge resources produced are not digitized and are mostly individually copyrighted resulting in limited distribution.
3. Technical Support: Often community members express the need to have effective bug resolution. There is a need to educate on the use of bug reporting and resolution mechanism.
4. Need for the recognition of efforts put in by committed and veteran Hindi Wikipedians.

Implementation Plan

Cultivating new Editors

Institutional partnerships (Higher Education)

Based on a preliminary research the A2K team has long-listed a set of Higher Education Institutions in India. Out of this list the A2K team will explore partnerships with the below list of institutions for strengthening Hindi Wikipedia.

Sl. No.	Name of the Institution	Point of Contact(s)
1	Christ University, Bangalore	Prof K Sebastian & Prof George Joseph, Dept of Hindi
2	Delhi University, Delhi	Prof Apoorvanand, Dept of Hindi
3	Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi	Mr Abhay Dube and Mr Ravikant
4	P G D A V College, Delhi	Prof Aniruddha Kumar
5	Bangalore University, Bangalore	Prof M Vimla, Head, Dept of Hindi
6	Mysore University, Mysore	Prof M Pratibha, Professor, Dept of Hindi
7	Jawaharlal Nehru University	Dr. Chaman Lal, Retired Professor, Centre of Indian Languages

Plan To partner at least 2-3 higher education institutions in developing two thematic projects and creating a network of academicians who will actively use Hindi Wikipedia as part of their pedagogy. To reach out to at least 2 other higher education institutions from the above list and conduct Hindi Wikipedia Workshops mainly with an intention to spread awareness and to arrive at possibilities for long-term partnerships.

Christ University Wikipedia Education Programme: The Christ University, Bangalore with about 525 students witnessed the largest Hindi language Wikipedia outreach programme between November 2013 - February 2014. A valedictory function was organized on March 10 2014 in the University Campus. Another round of the outreach programme is likely to begin from the next semester,tentatively, from April 2014. The outreach programs at the Christ University will involve the following activities:

1. Faculty Orientation Programmes
2. Campus Ambassadors Orientation Programmes
3. Manning of the Wikipedia Help Desk in the campus (for about two-three months)
4. Administering the especially designed video tutorials to the students on the University website Moodle Platform as well as on Wikimedia Commons.
5. Providing online support to the students
6. Addressing to telephonic queries of the students
7. Reaching out to the students over the phone to update them on: a) Commencement of the project b) Supportive information about registering on Wikipedia c) Providing links to the Students Online Project Registration Form d)Monitoring the student edits and d) Checking and apprising the student contributions.

Projection

1. Expected to enlist about 525 editors on Hindi Wikipedia from Christ University alone. Of these, 250 are likely to be new editors expected to retain 300 editors who participated the previous round of Christ University Wikipedia Education Programme.
2. Of these, an attempt will be made to convert 50 people into active editors.
3. An approach by way of outreach activities will be made to enlist 50-100 more editors.
4. Will result in creation of new 300 quality thematic articles.
5. Will result in the expansion and quality improvement of 250 existing stub class articles.
6. Could become a model to attract the attention of bodies like UGC in actively considering the use of Wikipedia as a pedagogic tool in quality higher education using Indian languages.

Making Hindi Content in Public Domain Accessible

Necessity of Hindi Content in Public Domain:

• Ensuring that the resources are available to the editors for the purpose of reference.
• Ensuring more informative content in Wikipedia articles.
• Obviating or limiting the need for the translation of resources quoted from other languages with the increased availability of Hindi resources.

Plan: Support the Hindi Wikipedia community by providing information and access to content that is digitally available in Public Domain.

Execution:

1. In consultation with the community, identify absolutely essential books for various Hindi Wikipedia projects and digitize them.
2. Link books and other resources to various Wiki-projects.
3. Develop and execute wiki-projects around specific themes in collaboration with the community (For example, the "Lilavati's Daughters" or "WikiProject:Astronomy" which saw the interest and registration of some of the Hindi Wikipedians.
4. Facilitate at least 2 edit-a-thons on particular theme and towards improving quality of articles and growth of new articles.

Projection: To potentially improve the quality of about 100 stub class articles on Hindi Wikipedia and create an equal number of quality articles.

Content donation

Plan: Channelize encyclopaedic content into Public Domain or license it under Creative Commons such as the On-Line Hindi Vishwakosh published by Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Varanasi which was brought out in public domain as the joint project of Central Hindi Institute, Agra (Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India) & C-DAC Noida

Execution:

1. Identify data/material in Public Domain.
2. Identify digitized content and public institutions, which are into digitization.
3. Hold CC events to encourage institutions to take up this form of licensing intellectual property.

Projection:

1. At least 3 different kinds of encyclopaedic content will be brought under CC, which will then be digitized and put up on Hindi Wikisource. In this context, the available Hindi translation of the national song Vandematram in Hindi on the Wikisource instead of the whole Anand Math novel is a startling revelation of the areas in which valuable content can be acquired.
2. Could result in the addition of about 150 quality articles on Hindi Wikipedia.