Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?
The objective of this project was to have a partnership with the Government library to establish a long term relationship with the Wikimedia community and to digitize important Punjabi Literature essential for Wikipedia and Wikisource projects by organizing different programs and workshops for community engagement in the project. And with the organized workshops and online program, the entire project has been successful.
We originally kept the targeted outcome as 50 books but it is difficult to track the stats of projects that way since there are books that are of 20 pages and 500 pages, so we kept a standard tracking by number of pages (assuming 100 pages ~ 1 Book for facilitating the stat tracking.
Number of Workshops/events: 4
Number of Workshops/events: 8
For better results, more number of outreach events were organized
Number of Proofread pages:2000
Number of Proofread pages:5300
Our outreach efforts, consistent motivation on online group, social media campaigns and Proofreading contest got us 31 participants and over 5000 proofread pages
Pages Proofread in Punjabi Wikisource vs Timeline from 2017 to 2019Wikisource editors stats with 50 + edits in October and January
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?
Our initial goal of doing partnership with Rajindra Victoria Diamond Jubilee Municipal Public Library was successful. The idea was to set precedence for other government institutions to follow and this partnership helped us in collaborating with other government GLAM bodies in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.
Additionally, the original target of digitizing was 5000 pages and proofreading 2000 pages seemed impossible to achieve in such a small window of time. Because along with partnership, the research work for checking out the copyright free work was time-consuming work since there is no open directory online or offline for punjabi authors from prior 1950s (except few legendary authors who were quite renowned). After that the main challenge was post-processing which again, in short amount of time, was hard to manage.
There was also lack of resources, including, a community shared scanner and supporting laptop needed for scanner and post-scanning software. But we managed to digitize around 7000 pages during this timeline. The proofreading outcome of 5000 plus pages we had is the result of constant online and offline community engagement via outreach workshops, edit-a-thons, online help portal on Facebook group, and Wikisource Proofreading Contest. The proofread books are currently being validated via Validation Campaign in Punjabi Wikisource and would be integrated in Wikipedia under #1li1ref campaign.
What did not work so well?
There was a technical issue within Punjabi Wikisource for which a ticket on phabricator was launched. The header and footer for putting page numbers had disappeared for a month during the Wikisource contest and created a lot of problems for the participants. There were other issues in uploading, that created some kind of script error due to which some books had to be re-uploaded again.
What would you do differently next time?
Put grant for more infrastructure for digitization and outreach events. That can improve the output to a considerable level.
This exercise was a new territory for any Indic language and had no real set path to get the right results, so everything done was on the basis of a hit and a trial method which at the end worked pretty well.
Finding the source about authors bio information from old times was challenging. Except for the most popular authors, the source for old Punjabi authors does not exist.
Utilizing community scanning had been challenging as it was already in use in different cities and sharing it for Municipal Library Patiala was really challenging, since the timeframe for this project was very small and the deliverables were the ones that could have been easily achieved in 6 or more months instead of two months.
The deliverables in next project should be kept based on number of pages because a book can be of 20 pages or 1000 pages. So, measuring the stats can be made effective by counting it by number of pages.
The Wikisource community is rather small and under developed, so getting a large number of books proofread was not possible in a month. The community was expanded via Wikisource awareness workshops and edit-a-thon events.
The library is really old but hasn't been kept in a good condition. The books haven't been moved from their bookshelves since 13 years, therefore, have allergic dust of about 2 inches and made it hard to manually check each book after cleaning it. That has made the process harder. The catalogue they have is not functional. The search for each book has to be done manually. The dust is allergic and causes fungal infection and harsh itching all over the body. Had to buy protective wear which is still is not doing much to stop the allergy.
Searched online for different directories, archives and books for author information but was dead end for old authors so far.
The staff members easily caught up how to scan the books using our SV600 Fujitsu Scanner and Mac system but the consequent cleaning and post processing is a more technical work that is not easy to learn and the staff member allocated for the project was only able to learn scanning.
Stats of No. of users on Indic Wikisource who have 50+ edit in Oct 2018, Dec 2018, and Jan 2019
Pages Proofread in Punjabi Wikisource vs Timeline Bar graph view
Create a raw data for approx. 100 books that are free of copyright: Name of book, name of author, publishing date ( if stated on book), publishing company and place of publication
Searched through Wikidata items through different queries to search:
Authors of Punjab
Authors who were born in Punjab
Authors who wrote in Punjabi
Authors of India
Authors of India, Pakistan and British Raj
People of India who spoke Punjabi
People of India and Pakistan without profession author
People who wrote during British Raj
Manually searched from each Wikidata item and the attached wikipedia item to verify the information and cross it off the list or edit/add information to Wikidata item
Searched through list of authors and poets of Punjabi language from Wikipedia through list of authors from Wikisource
Searched some books such as Lekhak Sandarbh Kosh to check biodata about author’s records.
Searched various research scholars for the author’s information and the book directories.
Consulted with copyright experts for Indian authors.
Searched online for different directories, archives and books for author information.
Correspondence via emails with Commissioner office to finalize details of the agreement
Created posters and promotion video for Punjabi Wikisource and ran these on Twitter and Facebook handle.
Online Promotion: Ran a Facebook advert for the Promotional video. Hours taken: 10
Online mentoring: Created a Facebook and Wattsapp Group for the Wikisource Contest to provide consistent assistance for the participants in formatting in proofreading or solve issues (technical and non-technical) that came up during proofreading for the contest to make it smooth.
(November 1, 2018 - January 20,2019)
The stats from this project are illustrated in graphs and pie charts below:
Global Stats of Proofreading done between December 14, 2018 and Feb 1, 2019
Daily Average of Punjabi Wikisource site increased from 190 viewers to 1088 viewers.
Proofread pages from 1169 to 6334
Digitized pages = 6980
Proofread pages = 5300+
Total Edits = 36,773
Pageviews on Punjabi Wikisource = 89,207
Total participants = 32, (26 new editors)
Total editors with 100+ edits= 19
Active editors = 67
According to the data, Punjabi Wikisource is currently, the top most active and fastest growing community in India and third fastest growing Wikisource community in the world in terms of content and editor demographics. [1][2]
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