Community Resources and Partnerships/India General Support Project/Enhancing Indic Oral Culture on Wikimedia projects, Phase II

statusDraft

India General Support Project

Enhancing Indic Oral Culture on Wikimedia projects, Phase II

proposed start date2026-01-05

proposed end date2027-01-05

applicant• Amrit Sufi

organization (if applicable)• N/A

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Universal Code of Conduct

Applicant information

Organization name or Wikimedia Username for individuals. (required): Amrit Sufi

Are you a first-time applicant? (required)

You are applying as a(n). (required): Individual

Are your group or organization legally registered in your country? (required): N/A

Please provide links to the following documents if they are available

These documentation can be provided in your local language(s), no translations required.

Organizational website
Detailed financial reporting and/or audits
Documentation of the governance structure, board list, governance processes
Documentation of the general assembly decision on your plan

Main proposal

1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be a title for the Meta-Wiki page. (required): Enhancing Indic Oral Culture on Wikimedia projects, Phase II
3. Proposed start date. (required): 2026-01-05

4. Proposed end date. (required): 2027-01-05

5. Does your organization or group have an Affiliate or Organizational Annual Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required): Yes; [1]

6. Does your affiliate, organization or group have a Strategic Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required): Yes; https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xX6qrrNOP-z3Nbjpcgz5nQTZdsTBfRDhoCyn2Yn2MUI/edit?usp=sharing

7.1. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required): India

7.2. If your project includes in-person activities, are there any international participants travelling to India for them? (required): Yes
7.2.1. List all countries of participation. (required)

Nepal

7.3. Will the project be transferring funds to any international participants? (required): Yes
7.3.1. List all international participants receiving funding and their countries. (required)

Nepal- Sanjib Chaudhary

8. What are your programs, approaches, and strategies? What are the challenges that you are trying to address and how will your strategies support you in addressing these challenges? (required)

The project's strategies are designed to address the challenges of cultural loss, digital divide, and technical barriers by empowering communities, leveraging Wikimedia platforms, and developing innovative tools.

The oral culture of Indic languages carries information about lifestyles, beliefs, and culture. Homogenization and loss of languages is resulting in the loss of these essential forms of knowledge. By encouraging documentation of oral culture like folk songs, tales, medicinal knowledge, oral history, phrases etc., they are made accessible and encourage the growth and sustenance of these.

Interlinking the media files and transcript text to various Wikimedia projects enriches the Wikipedia articles, Wikidata, and creates a digital library of literature and other forms of knowledge on Wikisource previously available only orally. Apart from that, there will be experimentation with creation of two types of list to nudge the type of oral culture documented by volunteer participants: creating a list of highly-read Wikipedia articles without media to inform the audio-visual collection of material, and secondly a list of

important topics lacking Wikipedia articles and media made in partnership with an academic advisor.

The oral culture projects so far have assessed the needs regarding language and culture documentation and revitalization as part of a needs assessment research, created a toolkit, online training modules, and brought about output in the form of audio-visuals created, awareness raised, and enriched Wikis. In-person meetups have been organized to encourage community building, knowledge sharing, and discussions about future possibilities in language and culture dissemination in South Asia. Specifically, these efforts have resulted in the engagement of 13 distinct languages with 22 participants during the ongoing project 'Enhancing Indic oral culture on Wikimedia projects' and 9 language communities with 17 participants during the previous experimental 'Indic oral culture project', demonstrating tangible progress in expanding the scope of documented oral traditions.

The applicant has been working on these projects for recognition of the importance of oral culture digitization in order to dismantle postcolonial attitudes towards knowledge. She has been documenting and disseminating her own culture on Wikimedia projects since 2021. She also speaks to the larger public via storytelling and blogging, and is steering committee member of global communities promoting linguistic-culture diversity like GLAM/GLOSS working group, Wikimedia language Diversity Hub, and Global Voices community council member.

Spreading awareness and acknowledgement is an integral part of encouraging the preservation and proliferation of oral culture, hence partnership with similarly inclined projects and organizations and spreading awareness on various media channels has been included in the action plans.

Programs, Approaches, and Strategies are listed below:

Comprehensive Training and Capacity Building:

Programs: Online and in-person workshops, mentorship programs, and the creation of training resources. This would be achieved by providing participants with the skills and knowledge needed for oral culture documentation, Wikimedia editing, and knowledge dissemination. These would be achieved by improving training modules and partnering with organizations specializing in language justice and digital documentation. Along with that, providing ongoing support and mentorship would be essential for ensuring ongoing cultural documentation past the project as well.

Community-driven content creation: will be enacted by volunteer participants engaging in fieldwork, audio-visual documentation, and content curation. They will be empowered to document their own cultural heritage. They will be facilitated for planning and preparation for fieldwork, provided logistical and technical support, while also implementing quality control measures.
Creation of quality videos will be ensured by providing online workshops by a videographer/filmmaker. In addition to that, equipment like mic in addition to tripod will be provided to the participants.
A list of culturally important topics: Top-read cultural articles without media will be used as suggestions for capturing content on the field. The videos thus created will be integrated into the relevant Wikipedia articles.
Experimentation with participant engagement: Experiment with ways of involving potential citizen archivists: exploring models like internship, involving school students, separate groups of participants for separate sets of tasks- field work, upload, transcription, integration of the videos into relevant Wikimedia projects, etc.
Encouraging wider dissemination by providing guidance on blog-writing: Participants will be provided guidance to creating Diff articles and blogs. They will also be trained for publication in other websites as well, such as The Bridge on Global Voices and PARI.
Wikimedia integration and dissemination: the content will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, transcribed on Wikisource, and the content will be integrated into Wikipedia and Wikidata. Thus, Wikimedia platforms will be utilized to make oral culture content accessible to a global audience. The participants will be provided training on Wikimedia editing and content integration. This will happen after developing best practices for content reuse and creating lists of articles that can be improved with media.
Community building and collaboration via online forums, in-person meetups, and collaborative projects. The aim is fostering a vibrant and supportive community of citizen archivists. Regular online and offline events will be organized to achieve this goal.
Sustainability of community created so far by providing support and informal mentorship to participants to contribute to and apply for support in Wikimedia and in other organizations working on representing language diversity like Wikitongues, PARI, Global Voices etc.
Quality assurance and content selection will be used as strategies to ensure efficient usage of resources and long-term application of the created audio-visuals.
Building partnerships with academic institutions and cultural organizations: Explore collaborations with organizations working with marginalized and rural communities to share resources... and build sustainable, long-term partnerships.
Tool development and improvement: in parallel to the project, researching and developing tools for efficient upload and transcription will go on. This will involve collaborating with developers to create user-friendly tools like these: 1. A tool to convert files directly to webm format on Commons itself. 2. A transcription tool to automate transcription for underrepresented Indic languages.3. A tool based on the GLAMorous2 tool to analyze page views using Commons categories.
Impact assessment and knowledge sharing will be done by conducting community surveys, analyzing content usage, and disseminating project findings.
Evaluating the project's impact and sharing best practices: by preparing and disseminating project reports, creating Diff articles and blogs by participants.
User group formalization as a key strategy: In the current stage of the EIOC project, there have been ongoing discussions around applying for a user group. Phase-wise plans for formalizing the user group have been mentioned in the annual plan.

Team and partners

Project personnel:

Project lead- Amrit Sufi

Communications and community coordinator- Yakshitha Poojary

Integration expert/intern- TBD

Operations support for event- Medini (Open Knowledge Initiatives team member)

Advisors:

Advisor and observer- Maari Maitreyi (language justice researcher at Whose Knowledge?)

Partnership advisor and support- Praveen Das (Wikimedia Foundation)

Language diversity advisor- Daniel Bogre Udell (Wikitongues founder)

Academic advisor and collaborator- Dr Fauzia Farooqui (South Asian studies lecturer at Princeton University and independent oral culture scholar and curator)

9. What categories are your main programs and related activities under? Please select all that apply. (required)


Category	Yes/No
Education	No
Culture, heritage or GLAM	Yes
Gender and diversity	Yes
Community support and engagement	Yes
Participation in campaigns and contests	No
Other	No

Culture, heritage or GLAM

9.2. Select all your programs and activities for Culture, heritage or GLAM. (required): Documenting or incubating languages on Wikimedia projects, Introducing new approaches to underrepresented culture and heritage, e.g. decolonising or reparative work; oral and visual knowledge; outreach to communities of origin, indigenous and first nations self-determination; Other programs and activities if any: N/A

Gender and diversity

9.3. Select all your programs and activities for Gender and diversity.: Focusing on creating content about women and/or gender diverse groups, including biographies, intersectional topic areas and/or adding images, Focusing on creating content about marginalized (underrepresented) communities and their knowledge, Focusing on knowledge equity by bringing in contributors from underrepresented communities, Building organizer skills in women and diversity groups; Other programs and activities if any: N/A

Community support and engagement

9.4. Select all your programs and activities for Community support and engagement.: On-wiki training of community members, Off-wiki training of community members, Organizing meetups, conferences, and community events; Other programs and activities if any: N/A
10. Please include a link to or upload a timeline (operational calendar) for your programs and activities. (required): [2]

11. Describe your team. (required)

Project personnel:

Project lead- Amrit Sufi

Communications and community coordinator- Yakshitha R. P.

Integration expert/intern- TBD

Operations support for event- Medini (Open Knowledge Initiatives team member)

Advisors:

Advisor and observer- Maari Maitreyi (language justice researcher at Whose Knowledge?)

Partnership advisor and support- Praveen Das (Wikimedia Foundation)

Language diversity advisor- Daniel Bögre Udell (Wikitongues founder)

Academic advisor and collaborator- Dr Fauzia Farooqui (South Asian studies lecturer at Princeton University and independent oral culture scholar and curator)

12. Will you be working with any internal (Wikimedia) or external partners? Describe the characteristics of these partnerships and bring a few examples of the most significant partnerships. (required)

yes, we are collaborating with Dr Fauzia Farooqui (South Asian studies lecturer at Princeton University and independent oral culture scholar and curator) who will function as academic advisor and collaborator on this project. She is in charge of the Taaoos Chaman project. Its ongoing project, funded by Princeton’s Chaddha Center for Global India, focuses on documentation, digitization, and research of oral literature in Awadhi language. We will be collaborating with each other in terms of building participant networks, sharing collected materials on each other’s websites, offering help with transcription and translation, identifying potential research topics, and supporting training workshops and academic endeavors.

13. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select all that apply. (required): Improve User Experience, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Identify Topics for Impact, Innovate in Free Knowledge

Metrics

Wikimedia Metrics

14. Please select and fill out Wikimedia Metrics for your proposal. (recommended)

14.1. Number of participants, editors, and organizers.

All metrics provided are optional, please fill them out if they are aligned with your programs and activities.

Participants, editors, and organizers
Metrics name	Target	Description
Number of all participants	30	Exisiting participants from the project 'Enhancing Indic oral culture on Wikimedia projects'- 18 (to be supported in various ways to continue documenting and disseminating underrepresented knowledge based on skills and interest). The participants represent around 13 language communities and comprise of Wikimedians as well as newbies from various backgrounds. New participants- minimum 12 from 8 language communities.
Number of all editors	N/A	N/A
Number of new editors	N/A
Number of retained editors	N/A
Number of all organizers	3	1 project lead, 1 project coordinator and 1 operations support person will be involved in conducting an in-person meetup for project participants
Number of new organizers	N/A

14.2. Number of new content contributions to Wikimedia projects. (recommended)

Contributions to Wikimedia projects
Wikimedia project	Created	Edited or improved
Wikipedia	40	60
Wikimedia Commons	250
Wikidata	200
Wiktionary
Wikisource	40
Wikimedia Incubator
Translatewiki
MediaWiki
Wikiquote
Wikivoyage
Wikibooks
Wikiversity
Wikinews
Wikispecies
Wikifunctions / Abstract Wikipedia

Description for Wikimedia projects contributions metrics. (optional)

Other Metrics

15. Do you have other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): Yes


Other Metrics	Description	Target
Feeback survey for field work	Participants will be asked to fill feeback survey immediately after they have finished field work to inform future activities and plans	N/A
Feeback survey for in-person event	Participants' feedback from EIOC project is being used to plan for the meetup of the proposed project.	N/A
Overall experience feedback form	Participants will be requested to fill a final feedback form after they the completion of the project activities to assess satisfaction and learnings.	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

Budget

16. Will you have any other revenue sources when implementing this proposal (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): No

16.1. List other revenue sources. (required)

N/A

16.2. Approximately how much revenue will you have from other sources in your local currency? (required): N/A

17. Local currency: Indian Rupees (INR)

18. What is the requested amount in Indian Rupees? (required): 2838377 INR

19. Does this proposal include compensation for staff or contractors? (required): Yes

19.1. How many paid staff members and contractors do you plan to cover with this General Support Project? (required): 1.5 paid staff members and 1

19.2. How many FTEs (full-time equivalents) in total will be covered with this General Support Project? (required): N/A

19.3. Describe any staff or contractor changes compared to the current year / ongoing General Support Project if any. (required only for returning applicants): N/A

20. Please provide an overview of your overall budget categories in your local currency. The budget breakdown should include only the amount requested with this General Support Project. (required)


Budget category	Amount in local currency
Staff and contractor costs
Operational costs
Programmatic costs

21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)

Additional information

22. In this optional space you can add any other additional information about your proposal or organization that you think can help us when reviewing your proposal. (optional)

By submitting this proposal request you agree with the Institutional Partner Privacy Policy, Application Privacy Statements, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

No

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