CIS-A2K/Work plan July 2015 - June 2016/Odia Wikipedia

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CIS-A2K

CIS-A2K (Centre for Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge) is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape.
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Work plan July 2015 - June 2016

 Main page  Language plans  Movement resources  Budget  Stand alone projects  Community strengthening

Introduction[edit]

This program is designed to provide a broader understanding of CIS-A2K’s annual work plan for the Odia Wikipedia and the community. The impacts section gives an overview of last year’s activities, successes and failures, and learning to shape this year’s plan, details about the proposed activities for this year based on community discussions. The impact in both tangible and intangible way reflects last year’s successes and failure. Based on the experience and learning from the past work CIS-A2K has created this plan with support from the Odia Wikipedia community.

Impact[edit]

Students and faculty with the Odia Wikimedia community during an Odia Wikipedia outreach session at Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) Dhenkanal.

CIS-A2K's initiatives have been a major reason in the growth of Odia community and projects. This section should be looked as the impact of CIS-A2K's efforts that has helped catalyze the growth of content, editors and help build partnerships to strengthen Odia community with the support and consultation with the community. This in no way takes away the credit from the Odia community and all its hard work without whom these impacts would not have been achieved. The major credit goes to the Odia Wikipedia community that has welcomed CIS-A2K, engaged with the plans, understood the program’s limitations and optimally utilized movement resources.

Tangible impact[edit]

The impact of CIS-A2K’s work on Odia Wikipedia can be viewed in the fact-sheet and graphs shared below:

No. of Editors as on Jan 2014 No. of Editors as on Jan 2015 No. of Active Editors as on Jan 2014 No. of Active Editors as on Jan 2015 No. of Articles/entries as on Jan 2014 No. of Articles/entries as on Jan 2015 No. of outreach events No. of celebratory-outreach events
116 99 13 10 8680 8140 1

Update against Last Year's Goals[edit]

Parameters Expected Target
(by Jan 30, 2015)
Dream Target
(by June 30, 2015)
Actual figure
(As of June 2015)
No. of Editors 120 350 99
No. of New editors 13 40 2
No. of New Active editors 35 100 10
No. of Articles 5000 6000 8158
No. of Outreach Events 12 15 9
  • Building thematic projects like the “Medicine Translation Project[1] (a project that aims at creating medicine related articles in multiple languages, this project in Odia currently has the highest number of article among all the South Asian languages) in Odia, “Social Sciences” and improvement of articles about Odisha’s popular personalities are the three major projects that have showed growth in both content and community involvement. About 140 articles related to medicine, 18 articles related to human sciences have already been created/enhanced by the leadership of two Wikimedians. Similarly 7 new editors were brought on board with both online and offline engagement. However there is fluctuation in editor activity over time and like other long term engagements it is challenging for CIS-A2K to sustain the interest of new editors.
  • The dream target set by the A2K team was crossed last year itself. However, total number of editors and total number of outreach events are low as compared to the dream target.
  • Long term outreach plans in partners institutions could not materialize beyond an orientation and outreach program. The reason being another larger scale program for Odia Wikisource was in place and the entire community was occupied in bringing the project live from incubator.
  • A lot of content were already available in digital form located in various locations but with various legacy encoding systems leaving a user with no ways to search and find the relevant source for Wikipedia. CIS-A2K has been instrumental in developing four encoding converters with the help of Wikimedian Manoj Sahukar. These converters have been useful to acquire content from various sources; relicensed books, newspapers and magazines, and web portals, convert the encoding from various legacy encoding systems to Unicode and make the content usable for Wikipedia. CIS-A2K also has put efforts to acquire soft copies for the books relicensed and managed to acquire some that will benefit both Odia Wikisource and in turn Wikipedia.
  • Apart from media publication about Odia Wikipedia and its sister projects, tools built for encoding converters, monthly columns as op-eds and publications in Odia language research publications have helped Odia Wikipedia reach out to more people. The readership has increased with about 200,000 unique visitors to the site in one year.
  • A2K team focused on sustaining the formal partnership that it had initiated. There were however many informal collaboration with institutions for both events and content acquisition.
  • The plan for implementing a Wikipedia Education Program at the partner institute Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) was modified to a Wikisource Education Program based on the community feedback.
  • Though the community has not expanded to a large extent there is addition of a few editors of varied age groups with different skill-sets.
  • Various tutorials about Wikipedia editing were created on-wiki and for offline distribution. The help page “Chatasabha” on Odia Wikipedia was enhanced with more interactive information about Wikipedia basics. Tutorials on Odia language enabling and editing that were created have been useful for newbies.
  • A focused user group “WikiTungi” was founded in Nalconagar and some initial foundation work was done in Bhubaneswar. [2] The WikiTungi Nalconagar has been instrumental towards acquiring content from copyright holders and authors,have also conducted peer-to-peer community training and mentoring, extend support for offline outreach at Dhenkanal (A2K team has an institutional partnership with IIMC-Dhenkanal). Though there are some activities by the Wikimedians in Bhubaneswar these are not community initiatives and are driven solely by volunteer commitment. The library in WikiTungi Nalconagar is now richer by more than 100 books.
  • Though specific train-the-trainer programs were not conducted formally, various community education and training activities were conducted at outreach and celebratory events.
  • About 20 out of the total 81 books in Odia language were relicensed under CC-by-SA 3.0 and 4.0 licenses. Though the content is relicensed Odia Wikipedia has not yet made full use of available data repositories.
  • Some of the volumes of Odia-language culture journal “Utkal Prasanga” were used by converting their encoding from legacy encoding to Unicode, paraphrased to create/enhance Odia Wikipedia articles.
  • Instead of a catalog, a content building/enhancement project was created that is updated daily by converting encyclopedic content from newspapers on a daily basis into Unicode. This project has been extremely useful to create and enhance articles of varied subject areas on Odia Wikipedia.
  • CIS-A2K put effort in proposing policy level changes to Government of Odisha’s Department of Culture and Tourism and Department of Education. However the discussions and implementations are yet to be materialized and CIS-A2K shall follow up with these departments.

Implementation Plan[edit]

Cultivating New Editors[edit]

A new editor is learning how to type in Odia in Wikipedia during an outreach session in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.

Online outreach[edit]

"Women's History Month" edit-a-thon has resulted in creation of more than 25 new articles and improvement of 23 existing articles by the contribution of nine Wikimedians (Edit-a-thon statistics).
Plan

CCC (Content Created Collaboratively) Online campaign based on popular or trending topics related to Odisha and Odia language/people/culture e.g. “Nabakalebara”, “Ratha Jatra”, current affairs in Odisha, breaking news, announcement of awards for any notable person, death of any notable person that will give Odia Wikipedia visibility in social/web media, help acquire content in real time, and inculcate the sense of community with potential editors.

Execution
  • Creating buzz around any trending topic by sharing a picture, creating online awareness about any notable topic to crowdsource information targeting Facebook groups, trending topics in Twitter, bloggers, etc.
  • Attract the audience attention towards contributing to Odia Wikipedia by showing the current status of information or lack of it as a poor representation of the state (Odisha) and its people on the Internet, and any other trending topic beyond Odisha/Odia.
  • Collecting information from the newspapers, portals and engaging people active on social media to contribute in enhancing topics on Odia Wikipedia.
Projection
  • Engagement with 50-100 people on a monthly basis and mentoring about 1-10 people to contribute images or information on Wikimedia Commons and Odia Wikipedia respectively.
  • Creating/enhancing about 1-10 articles every month.

Building thematic groups[edit]

Wikimedians gathering at development non-profit Samadrusti's in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India to discuss about collaborative book relicensing and digitization, and potential of a GLAM project using Samadrusti's existing resources.
Plan

Building interest based thematic groups for enriching content about specific subjects (e.g. science, film, literature, etc.) have shown positive result with some level of constant engagement with the leadership of group coordinators. The plan for this year will be furthering the same by decentralizing and doing more small-scale projects around specific subject areas. Some of these could also have a combination of online and offline outreach/engagement.

Execution
  • Identifying interest areas based on one-on-one or group interactions (e.g. while talking in a public gathering) and mentoring for small project creation.
  • Enriching topics by the individuals/groups for each of the projects.
  • Identifying institutions and working with existing partners (e.g. Enhancing articles about rice and other pulses by using the installation at Samadrusti, Bhubaneswar office for the International Year of Pulses 2016) for various GLAM and other theme-based projects.
Projection
  • Building 3-4 thematic projects in collaboration with existing partnerships and mentoring/having the community to mentor the group coordinators.
  • Recruit new editors and helping them to be mentored by the group coordinators.
  • Being in constant touch with the editors and integrating them to the larger community.

Media coverage[edit]

Plan
More awareness by spreading out news in print, web and electronic media both locally and globally as it has helped to increase the unique visitors to Odia Wikipedia in the past.
Execution
  • Working with existing contacts with media houses and building new ties.
  • Publishing stories about Odia Wikipedia as a digital changemaker for the coming future and showcasing community efforts.
  • Targeting the audience and aiming at engaging with them based on audience response to news, blogs and columns, etc.
  • Outreach for journalists to educate them about editing Odia Wikipedia.
Projection
  • Monthly columns in renowned newspapers, magazines, portals related to Odia Wikipedia.
  • 2-3 workshops for journalists.

Institutional partnerships[edit]

Plan

CIS-A2K will focus its energies in building institutional partnerships with higher education institutions and working with existing partners in developing thematic projects.

Execution
  • Identifying potential partners and pilot small-scale pedagogic projects and student-editors.
  • Based on the output and in consultation with the community based on the same, further expansion that could lead to Wikipedia Education Programs will be done for such institutions.
  • “How-to edit Wikipedia” brochure design, production and distribution during the outreach events.
Projection
  • Work closely with 1-2 higher educational institutions and implement a pilot pedagogic project for bringing faculty and students as Wikipedia editors.
  • Identifying a few subject areas and creating groups to smoothen the on-ground coordination process.

Creating Learning Tutorials[edit]

Odia language input in Wikipedia explained in an animated tutorial. This has been used in Odia Wikipedia help page "Chatasabha".
Plan

Building beginner level on-wiki, online and for offline distribution for newbies.

Execution
  • Making “Chatasabha” (help page on Odia Wikipedia) a one point platform for supporting new editors for on-wiki engagement and diverting newbies to it, and enhance it to make it more interactive.
  • Designing interactive tutorials for several other platforms (blogs, social media, etc.) that will aim to educate people beyond Wikipedia readers about Odia language input, searching on web, and diverting them to Odia Wikipedia.
Projection
  • Enriching the Chatasabha with essential information about Wikipedia policies, basics of editing, dos and don’ts.
  • Creating interactive beginner level tutorials and promote them regularly on social media, blogs and other popular web portals so more visitors land on Wikipedia.
  • Engage with people on the above mentioned platforms in a regular basis so some of them would contribute to Wikipedia as editors.

Strengthening Existing Community[edit]

More one-on-one capacity building[edit]

Plan

Based on the successful experience of one-on-one capacity building both by experienced community members and by CIS-A2K staffers, the current plan is to focus and enhance on similar capacity building exercises.

Execution
  • Considering the travel expenses the focus will be more on leveraging events. As proposed and agreed by Wikimedians who attended the Odia Wikisource Sabha small travel grants to be given to community members to travel and mentor editors who need support, this option will be explored and implemented.
  • CIS-A2K’s internal and peer-network would be leveraged for various mentorship programs for the community.
Projection
  • Help community organize about one or two one-on-one capacity building sessions by experienced Wikimedians in every quarter and utilize CIS-A2K trips for such activities in the respective cities.

WikiTungi: Community support by city user groups[edit]

Plan

WikiTungi would be a city-wise group of experienced editors. The WikiTungi will function as an informal local group that will focus on offline outreach locally, meetups and local outreach programs. The activities would be confined to the city and would cater to the interests of the members. Minimal grant would be allocated for activities that incur expenses.

Execution
  • More group activities like edit-a-thons, photothons , other Wikimedia project production sprints.
  • Regular one-on-one capacity building.
  • Supporting local outreach.
  • WikiTungi to lead the outreach in institutional programs.
  • Digitization and content acquisition.
Projection
  • Wikipedia edit-a-thons during events, production sprints for Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, etc.
  • Initiating WikiTungi in Bhubaneswar and helping the Nalconagar WikiTungi grow.
  • 100-200 books for each of the WikiTungi library.
  • Collaborating with local libraries to acquire and digitize public domain books.
  • Regular monthly community meetups.

Train-the-Trainer program[edit]

Plan

To build expertise among community members by providing capacity building trainings during the train-the-trainer programs, individual training by one-on-one coaching, mentor on-wiki and explore ways to provide online training.

Execution
  • Identifying interests of Wikimedians and plan for various ways of interaction and training; one-on-one interaction, encouraging Wikimedians to participate in Train-The-Trainer and MediaWiki Train-the-Trainer programs, online interaction in a regular basis.
Projection
  • Regular remote interaction with individual community members on subjects of their interest, finding experts willing to provide support and connecting local Wikimedians with other South Asian and global Wikimedians who are experts in the respective subjects.
  • Personal interaction during work related visit by CIS-A2K and coaching Wikimedians based on team.

Content donation under CC license[edit]

Institutional and organizational partnership[edit]

Plan

Like last year CIS-A2K will collaboratively work in leveraging CIS-A2K’s institutional experience of partnership building and content acquisition, and help the community to collaborate with authors, publishers and copyright holders to acquire content and digitize on Wikisource. The focus will be identifying encyclopedic content, re-licensing copyrighted content under a CC-by-SA license to enrich Wikipedia.

Execution
  • Building relation with individual authors, copyright holders, and organizations possessing valuable encyclopedic resources, negotiation for relicensing them under CC-by-SA licenses or at least making them available online.
  • Partnering with organizations for acquiring already scanned books (preferably the ones that are exempted from copyright).
  • Article writing and photo competition by collaborating with newspaper publication houses that will result in growth of both content and readers base.
Projection

About 50 books/periodicals with encyclopedic content to be made available under CC0/CC-BY-SA 4.0 and building relation with 2-5 authors/publishers/copyright holders/institutions.

Content acquisition by policy-level changes[edit]

Plan

Building relation with government, public sector and private entities to acquire content and relicense them under CC0/CC-by-SA licenses.

Execution
  • Proposing various government departments in Odisha ( Department of Culture and Tourism, Department of Tribal Welfare, Department of Information and Public Relations, Department of Mass Education, Department of Higher Education) and chasing for policy level move for CC content release.
  • Quality content acquisition from private or institutional possession and their digitization.
Projection
  • Negotiate to bring about 2000 pages of document from various sources.

Other Policy Efforts[edit]

CIS-A2K will put some policy efforts in Odisha. The following efforts are planned:

  • As part of this we will collaborate with the Odia Wikimedia community and other like-minded organizations in creating draft submission for the Government of Odisha towards the growth and improvement of open knowledge in Odia.
  • Submissions will also be done to some of the ministries to consider publishing publicly funded content under CC0/CC-by-SA.
  • Submissions will be made requesting the government to license all text books under CC0/CC-by-SA.
  • Submissions will be made for the Department of Education to bring curriculum changes to include Odia Wikipedia and sister projects.
  • CIS-A2K will also try to hold various orientation sessions for bureaucrats and senior government officials on the importance of free and open source and free knowledge.

Technical Support and Development[edit]

Font and Software Building[edit]

Keyboard layout for "Lekhani" input tool for typing in Odia language.
Plan
New tools and enhancement plans for addressing several technical issues faced by the community.
Execution
  • Building and/or enhancement of free software tools like offline Odia input tool, encoding converters for converting content typed in non-standard/outdated standard legacy fonts into Unicode, tools to measure metrics.
  • Mass distribution in various events to individuals and institutions.
  • User and community feedback for bugs and feature enhancement needs.
  • Enhancement, fixing bugs.
Projection
  • Building/enhancement of various free software tools that will directly or indirectly to enrich Odia Wikipedia and help the community.

Goals[edit]

Parameters As on Jan 30, 2015 Expected Target by June 30, 2016 Dream Target by June 30, 2016
No. of Editors 116 200 250
No. of New editors 16 (during last year) 30 50
No. of Active editors 13 30 50
No. of Articles 8680 10,000 12,000
No. of Outreach Events 4 15 30
No. of Books Donated 81 75 100
No. of Folios Digitized 1500 5,000 7,500
No. of new institutional partnerships 0 5 10

Activity-wise Break-up of Targets[edit]

Activity No. of New Articles No. of Existing Articles Quality Improved No. of New Editors No. of New Active Editors No. of Events No. of Partnerships built
(Institutions/Groups)
Institutional Partnerships 100 50 20 10 10 5
WikiProjects 300 100 10 5 5 2
Capacity/Building Meetups 4 2
Advanced Training 5
Total 1300 250 40 15 29 9

Budget[edit]

Expenditure Item FDC Support (INR) FDC Support (US$) Other Sources and in kind Support (INR) Other Sources and in kind Support (US$)
1 PO x 30% * 272,448/- 4,402.76 - -
1 PD x 5% ** 79,200/- 1,279.87 40,800/- 659.33
Travel and Stay *** 75,000/- 1,212.00 30,000/- 484.80
Volunteer Support 30,000/- 484.80 10,000/- 161.60
Events/Meet-ups/Workshops 120,000/- 1,939.20 20,000/- 323.20
Digitization 20,000/- $323.20 - -
Consumables/Printing/Stationery/Swag 55,000/- 888.80 - -
Miscellaneous 5,000/- 80.80 - -
Total 656,648/- 10,611.43 100,800/- 1,628.93

Notes:
* 30% time of Subhashish Panigrahi as Program Officer who will anchor this plan at CIS-A2K
** 5% time of the Program Director, CIS-A2K
*** Expenses incurred by the CIS-A2K program team towards executing the plan

List of Contributors[edit]

Wikimedians who joined for a work plan preparatory IRC and various formal and informal meetups that helped to build this work plan (in alphabetical order):

Endorsements[edit]

After going through the plan, please do let us know your consent by "logging in" and share your support. Please start the note with a # sign and sign right after your endorsement note by clicking on the Signature and timestamp icon in the edit tool bar or typing --~~~~ at the end of the feedback.

  1. I'd be working on a 'mythology translation project' and 'scientists biography project' on similar vein as medical translation project. --Coldbreeze16 (talk) 10:54, 27 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. This plan will be fruitful to Odia Wiki community.--Saileshpat (talk) 16:40, 1 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Notes[edit]