Grants:Project/Rapid/Jnanaranjan Sahu/Odia Wikisource's 2nd anniversary/Report
- Report accepted
- To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Jnanaranjan Sahu/Odia Wikisource's 2nd anniversary.
- You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
- You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.
Goals[edit]
Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?
We planned to work on a few major areas; a) conduct workshops for a large group of people for common topics of interest and topics that we identified from multiple village pump discussions over time, b) have experienced and long time contributors to engage 1:1 with new contributors and provide them training in important areas like technical knowhow in Wikisource and all the other Wikimedia projects, and c) build a strategy and lay out goals for the future.
We had 40 Wikimedians—a fair combination of long time and new members, and over 15% women. A few of the female contributors that are primarily active in Wikipedia could not attend it but the event did see most of the active contributors, and some inactive contributors that made a return to their projects because of these events. We have tried to capture their feedback in this section.
We managed to conduct several short workshops—on a low cost set up for large-scale digitization of books, managing communications for small–large events, how to upload scanned works on Commons, dealing with OTRS-related issues, OCRing scanned pages, cropping images and inserting them in Wikisource, general guidelines for proofreading, and tips for promoting digitized works on social media and other platforms. Apart from most new contributors meeting the long term contributors who are now collaborating with their mentors on-wiki for several day-to-day activities, a new WikiProject called ”Pothi” emerged around this event. Several non-Wikimedians that are friends of the Wikimedia community and Wikimedians are helping collect rare books that are in the verge of being perished, and those books are being digitized on Wikisource. This work has opened up a way to start a GLAM collaboration with the Utkal University, one of the oldest universities in the Indian state of Odisha, to get access to digitize the rare books in their library. The need for reviving a less active project Odia Wiktionary was felt and now we are creating audio recordings of words under the ambit of project Kathabhidhana, an open source platform to record large chunks of words. We also dived into planning for collaborating with the Wikispeech project to create a text-to-speech project for the Odia language.
However, when we made great progress in strengthening the foundation of the community, we did not get much time post grant disbursal to focus on organizing a large public gathering. We also not get a very wide coverage in the media about the event, and the reason for the same is partly tied to the earlier failure. Though we would like to keep more preparation time for our future events, there is a significant consensus in the community to have more community-focused events rather than public-focused events. Our most active contributors have come from online and offline outreach, and several long term 1:1 interactions whereas offline one-off events and orientation events have not been quite useful.
Outcome[edit]
Please report on your original project targets.
| Target outcome | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
| Number of participants: 50 | Number of participants: 35 | We have kept a big hope but according to the activeness of users the participants number is very good |
| Number of events: 1 | Number of events: 1 | |
| Number of new editors: 15 | Number of new editors: 5 | We have focused more on teaching existing users. |
| Number of articles created or improved: 100 | Number of books digitised are 3 ( more than 300 pages) | Three rare books before 1931 having more than 300 pages have been digitized |
Learning[edit]
Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:
- What worked well?
- The interest and enthusiasm of editors were quite remarkable. We have expected some books to be collected during this event but a good thing is we have got more than 10 books to be copyright free. We also got so many rare books from different organizations.
- What did not work so well?
- A media attentions could have given us more boost. Though we have ordered the t-shirts before 7 days and it has been mentioned that the shirts will reach on proper time, they didn't send us on proper time.
- What would you do differently next time?
- Next time we will apply for the grant before 5 months. Try to get more attention from media.
Finances[edit]
Grant funds spent[edit]
Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.
| Serial | Item | Amount in INR |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Travel | 50918 |
| 2 | Food | 12274 |
| 3 | Conference Room | 8500 |
| 3 | Tshirt | 8994 |
| 4 | Accomodation | 4785 |
| 5 | ID Card/Banner/Award | 3315 |
| 6 | Internet | 3998 |
| 8 | Stationaries | 905 |
| 9 | Bank Charges | 391 |
| Total | 94080 |
Remaining funds[edit]
Do you have any remaining grant funds?
Yes, we have 1370 INR left with us. We want to spend that money by sending the t-shirts by courier to some active users that could not collect them as the t-shirts were delivered late by the vendor.
Anything else[edit]
Anything else you want to share about your project?
The event was very fruitful and we are happy that we got some rare books to be included in Odia Wikisource. Thank You.