Grants:TPS/Bodhisattwa/Wikimania/2016/Report

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Welcome back from Wikimania 2016!

Participant[edit]

Bodhisattwa

Bengali Wikipedia, Bengali Wikisource

Outcome[edit]

Shared Experience[edit]

  • With Bengali Wikisource Community: reported to the community about the resolved bugs and tool developments relevant to Bengali Wikisource during Wikimania.

Learning Pattern[edit]

Wikisource Hackathon
Wikisourcers gathered at a separate space for Hackathon. Here I learned few more things about Wikidata and Wikisource integration. Learning about The Quick Statememt tool to import data into Wikidata and the Wikidata SPARQL query service to extract data from Wikidata also increased my practical knowledge on this matter. I also learned Petscan which helped me to link all books from Breton Wikisource recently with Wikidata. Currently I am exploring these tools to get more insight about their full implication. Here, I also learned from Aubrey about Author Citation and Text Citation templates used in Italian Wikisource, which helps to track different authors and texts which are cited in different books. I have already implemented these templates in Bengali Wikisource.
Welcome to Wikisource - a short explanatory video created during the workshop
Explanatory video
I attended the Explanatory Video Workshop presented by Simpleshow Foundation representative Jens Schmelze and Ilya Kompasov. The workshop showed how easy an explanatory video can be made. During the second half of the session, participants were asked to come up with an idea and transform it into a video. Claudia suggested me to make a video on Wikisource and so, I created a very short explanatory video on Wikisource, uploaded it into Commons and shared in the Wikisource mailing list.
SVG illustration
I attended the SVG illustration workshop by Shyamal Lakshminarayan, where I learned about tricks to create different types of SVG files utilising Inkskape. Gordon Lee also showed some examples of dynamic SVG files from his awesome creations. In this session, during interaction, David Richfield told about his Parliament input tool. Incidentally I also learned about multilingual SVG files at the same time and with the help of these recently learned lessons, I created my first multilingual parliament input svg file
Wikimaps Warper
I also attended the Historical maps workshop presented by Susanna Ånäs and Albin Larsson. There I learned how to import historical maps to Wikimaps Warper and rectify it.
OpenStreetMap
I attended OpenStreetMap training session by Simone Cortesi where I learned how to edit for OpenStreetMap. I added few details of my locality in the OpenStreetMap.
Pronuncify
I cleared my doubts regarding running of the Pronuncify script developed by Asaf Bartov from him. I already started collecting words from different books of Bengali Wikisource, recording them and processing the audio files. Soon I will start uploading the files Bengali pronunciation files in Commons, which could be used in Bengali Wiktionary project in coming days.

New Creation[edit]

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T117711 resolved
Tessaract OCR package updated
Tpt updated Tessaract Bengali package updated in tool labs upon my request during hackathon. This was a backlog which needed to be fixed as a priority basis. Now, the OCR in Bengali Wikisource is improved with lesser garbage than previous.
Bengali added for ws-cat-browser tool
Upon my request, Samwilson added links for Bengali Wikisource to the ws-cat-browser tool in tool labs. Now, the git repository of this tool will track changes of (or at least additions to) validated books of Bengali Wikisource.
WBPLN added to BUB
Rohit Dua added West Bengal Public Library Network (WBPLN) into his Book Uploader Bot tool upon my request. This new addition allows the books stored in this digital library to be directly uploaded into Internet Archive from where using IA uplaod tool, they can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. All these can be done sparing user bandwidth. This will increase the number of uploaded books for Bengali Wikisource. The Bengali Wikisource have started utilising it already, see for example.
Tool lab version of OCR4Wikisource
Rohit Dua and Psychoslave started working on hosting the OCR4Wikisource python script in tool lab upon my request. The tool is not available yet, but I am glad they took interest in it.

Connections[edit]

  • Nicolas belett Vigneron: Wikimania 2016 gave me the opportunity to interact with this wonderful supportive jolly French Wikisourcer again after Wikisource Conference 2015 in Vienna. I learned a lot from him. Some of the outputs from this interaction have been mentioned in this report.
  • Andrea Zanni: Its always been a delight to meet Italian Wikisourcer Aubrey, a true leader, who cares so much about language equity and has a deep insight about the problems Wikisource community is facing. Some of the outputs from this interaction have been mentioned in this report.
  • Rohit Dua: Before Wikimania, I had only interacted with Indian developer Rohit via mail while reporting bugs about his famous Book Uploader Bot tool, which Wikisource communities uses a lot. Though we are from the same country, we never met before. We spent times together during Wikimania and we are now good friends. Some of the outputs from this interaction have been mentioned in this report. We are in touch after the conference also and recently I have requested him to help mass upload the Gramophone Recordings from the Linguistic Survey of India to Commons.
  • Niharika Kohli of WMF: I had interacted with Niharika previously to help host OCR4wikisource python script in tool labs. I am so glad she took interest in the script and working on it.
  • Psychoslave: I am glad he took interest in the OCR4wikisource python script and started working with Rohit Dua to host it in tool lab.
  • Thomas Tanon: Mentioned in the report.
  • Sam Wilson: Sam told me about his plan of new tool developments. Also some of the outputs of our dicussion have been mentioned in the report
  • Satdeep Gill: This Wikimania was the third occasion where Satdeep and me traveled together. We had long discussions and heated debates about getting an effective outcome from the WikiConference India 2016, as we both are core organizers of it.
  • Shyamal Lakshminarayan: I was eagerly waiting to meet and learn Shyamal face-to-face for a long time and Wikimania 2016 gave me the opportunity. I attended his SVG illustration workshop and we had discussions about the Wikimedia dynamics in India.
Wikipedia Asian Month Organizers' interview in English
Wikipedia Asian Month Organizers' interview in native languages
  • Addis Wang: We had discussions about organizing the upcoming Wikipedia Asian Month and few issues about last year's event. Addis also organized to record two videos (one in English and another multilingual) interviewing Wikipedia Asian Month 2015 organisers who were present in Wikimania. As an organizer of the event in Bengali Wikipedia, I was also interviewed.
  • Alex Stinson of WMF: Alex told me during the Wikisource meetup about the ongoing negotiation with Google to use their OCR service through Cloud API. I also attended his Wikipedia Library workshop.
  • Nahid Sultan: I met Bengali Wikipedian and steward from Bangladesh, Nahid Sultan, who is also a good friend of mine, after almost a year. We had long discussions on different projects of Bengali Wikipedia, social media campaign and other issues. We also had a heated discussion on transliteration and pronunciation of Tibetan words. ;-)
  • Tanvir Rahman: This was my first face-to-face interaction with Bengali Wikimedian Tanvir, with whom I have been working collaboratively for last few months in Bengali Wikisource. We had few meetups together and I requested him to resume his OCR activity in Bengali Wikisource which has been stopped due to his extremely busy schedule.
  • Pratyya Ghosh: I met English cum Bengali Wikipedian Pratyya from Bangladesh for the first time. He told me how he wants to activate the Wikipedia Library project in Bengali.
  • Felix Nartey from Ghana: I told Felix about the basic workflow of Wikisource. Also we had some interaction about documenting oral traditions.
  • Sk Mohsen: Mohsen showed interest in the OCR4wikisource python script and requested me to show a demo for Farsi Wikisource. I showed him the steps of installation but unfortunately the OCR process did not happen due to some mysterious connectivity issue for all Ubuntu users, which was bothering throughout the conference.
  • Claudia Garad
  • User:Takot
  • User:Meursault2004
  • User:Kenrick95

Anything else[edit]

Meetups[edit]

Wikisource Meetup
I participated in Wikisource Meetup as the only representative from Bengali Wikisource community. It was a happy moment for me when Aubrey showed everyone about the recent surge of activity in Bengali Wikisource during last few months. I was asked by him to share about the simple idea which I placed at 2015 Community Wishlist Survey and the community developed OCR4wikisource python script which proved to be a game-changer for Bengali Wikisource project. The details of the discussion can be found here.
Wikimedia Asia Meetup
Participated in Wikimedia Asia Meetup. We talked about strengthening community collaboration and organization of possible pan-Asian conference in near future. The details of the discussion can be found here.
Bengali Wikimedia Meetup
This Wikimania brought together 6 Bengali Wikimedians from both India and Bangladesh and we decided to have our first official language meetup in Wikimania. In this meetup, we decided to improve the quality of Bengali Wikipedia articles by expanding the important stubs and improving the most important articles which should be in any encyclopedia. We also discussed to be part of the Wikipedia Medicine Translation task force and improve the medical contents in Bengali Wikipedia.
Wikimedia SAARC Meetup
SAARC meetup was a total disappointment. Despite informing all SAARC participants way before the conference started, only 6 participants (4 from Bengali and 2 from Punjabi community) showed up. We concluded that whole SAARC community is not ready to involve in collaborative initiative. To show our commitment, the Bengali and Punjabi community agreed to have an online edit-a-thon in coming month with a common topic which affected the two regions, i.e. the Partition of India.

Media report[edit]