User:Mrb Rafi/My work
Thanks a lot for your interest in my workǃ Here's a non-exhaustive list of the projects I worked on till now.
Till 2023
[edit]Project Featured Article
[edit]My first project was "project featured Article" on Bangla Wikipedia. I am an alumnus of Notre Dame College, Dhaka and I was very much interested to add information to my college article following all the rules of Bangla Wikipedia. Maybe in March of 2020, after enriching the article for almost two months alone, me and some of my friends from the same institution decided to enlist our college article as a ভালো নিবন্ধ in Bangla Wikipedia; equivalent to Good articles in English Wikipedia - the second best list of articles in any language version of Wikipedia.
There were a lot of challenges. Despite having a strong possibility of Conflict of interest, we were able to build trust in the community. We informed the community very clearly about our relation to the college and notified them regularly about our contributions. We had to learn about Neutral point of view in depth to conduct this project. At the first step of this project, we were able to enlist this article as a Good Article in Bangla Wikipedia. After the first success, we targetted the নির্বাচিত নিবন্ধ list of Bangla Wikipedia; equivalent to Featured articles in English Wikipedia - the list of the best articles of any language version of Wikipedia. The new target was a lot tougher than our first target. I focused on forming a team. I invited classmates from my college who had no previous experience in Wikipedia and taught them the basics of Wikipedia editing. With almost no experience and expertise, we worked hard for another two or three months and after a super-long and tiresome process of debate, evaluation and community discussion, we were able to enlist our college article as one of the nine best articles of Bangla Wikipedia.
Notre Dame Workshop & Edit-a-thon 2020
[edit]After the success of "Project Featured article", I could feel the importance of recruiting new editors from among the students of Notre Dame College, Dhaka. So, I approached Notre Dame English Club with this proposal. I was the then Assistant General Secretary of the Writing & Publication department of NDEC. After watching my previous experience on Wikipedia, they felt interested and agreed on my proposal. I was the Chief Coordinator of this outreach campaign. We arranged a workshop and a week-long edit-a-thon, where the students showed great enthusiasm; at least the number of the participants told us the same story. (75 workshop participants and 23 edit-a-thon participants; the numbers were very high compared to the similar Wikimedia outreach activities in Bangladesh)
Read more about this event on the documentation site of Wikimedia Bangladesh, Notre Dame English Club's website and the monthly online magazine of Wikimedia Bangladesh.
Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2021
[edit]I was the Chief Organizer of the local national version of Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2021 in Bangladesh. Participants of this campaign had to try finding a list of the articles with no photo in the target wiki and then find a suitable photo from Wikimedia Commons and add that to the target Wikipedia page. This campaign is the largest photo reuse campaign of the movement. Visit the local page of Bangla Wikipedia from here.
I built my own organizing team of 12 members. I tried to create a unique "Brand Value" for this event. I created a unique banner (my younger brother helped me with thisǃ), tried to use some particular color codes wherever promoting the campaign, used a unique tag line - উইকিপিডিয়া হোক আরো রঙিন, জ্ঞান হোক আরো প্রাণবন্ত (enː Let Wikipedia be more colorful, Let knowledge be more lively), I focused on the words রঙিন (enːcolorful) and প্রাণবন্ত (enːlively) and used these two words to promote the campaign. The local chapter, Wikimedia Bangladesh helped me in this campaign, they took care of the prizes and other costs.
I always wanted to do these types of experiments while organizing Wikimedia campaigns like creating brand value, creating a unique visual identity, doing content marketing to promote campaigns or creating a multi-dimensional team capable of handling all the aspects of the campaign and many more. This was the first time someone tried all these things in Bangla Wikipedia. (This was my first experiment alsoǃ) I had to face a lot of challenges while working on this campaign. My team members were "burning out" (I couldn't also force them as they were all volunteers). I didn't have enough computational infrastructure and expertise to create unique illustrations. My younger brother couldn't make illustrations on Adobe Illustrator or other illustration software; he used Microsoft Powerpoint instead to make that poster. (Yes, you saw it right - Microsoft Powerpointǃ) We had to struggle finding illustration templates that may be modified to use as a poster. There aren't enough sites from where we may get illustrations and modify them and use them under the Creative Commons license. My brother took help from his friends to make that poster.
According to the Wikimedia Hashtag tool, 69 users did 7949 edits during the two months of this campaign. Though these figures are not very much reliable, we can get an overview of the impact of this campaign from the hashtag tool.
NDEC Wikipedia Editorial ̩& Research Team
[edit]Depending on my previous project management and organizing experiences, I could feel the importance of my own strong, diverse, sustainable and multi-dimensional team. As I've already worked with Notre Dame English Club and they were also happy with my voluntary service, I reached them with my proposal of a team. Thanks to NDEC, they shared their human resource with me and gave me the freedom to train this team as I wanted. I worked really hard to build this team. I arranged a number of training sessions, met them face to face, designed a detailed training plan and after a real tiresome journey of several months, now I have a complete team with me.
The team has its own photographers, videographers, photo & video editors, animators, illustrators, each type of equipment needed for their works and everything you need to complete a diverse project. This team is getting official support from the authority of Notre Dame College, Dhaka, the main workforce of Notre Dame English Club is also with this team with their experience and expertise always. The most important and interesting thing is, this team's "human resource supply" will never run out. Each year, from every new batch, more than a thousand students of Notre Dame College become members of Notre Dame English Club and This specialized team can easily recruit new members from those thousand NDEC members. We just need to keep the wheel moving. Besides, NDEC has relations with more than 400 educational institutions of Bangladesh and as I told earlier they are always with this team with all their might. NDEC or this specialized has a huge potential to serve the open knowledge movement. Visit the main description page of this team from here.
Project In Search of the Roots
[edit]This was the very first project of NDEC Wikipedia Editorial & Research Team. I, myself designed the whole project alone as the other members were complete newbies then. This project served a good number of purposes then. Firstly, from my experience of the Project Featured Article, I could understand that we were lacking a good number of resources to use as reference. Finding online resources in a country like Bangladesh is always challenging because most of the people lack the expertise or motivation to transform their works online. On the other hand, collecting offline resources are always challenging for Wikipedians. So, I planned this project to collect offline resources needed to improve the article of Notre Dame College, Dhaka. Besides, this project was also designed to serve as an "On The Job" training opportunity for the new members of this team.
Till now, we've collected 150 historical B&W photos of Notre Dame College, 80 photos of historical places of the same institution. We are preparing these photos to publish under Creative Commons license. Besides, we've been able to collect 5 rare books related to the history of NDC, we'll use them later to improve the target articles. We're trying to prepare a drone view videography which we will publish under the same license later. Besides, we've rushed to a lot of people, organizations and institutions for this project and tried to make them understand the importance of open knowledge. We requested them to publish their resources under an open license. I, personally have devoted more than 50 hours so far behind this project and will have to work more. Visit the main project page from here.
The Translation Project
[edit]The translation project is another ambitious project of our team. My team will translate the articles related to Notre Dame College, Dhaka and try to spread the information about these topics to as many language versions of Wikipedia as possible. We've noticed that there are some Knowledge Divides between different language versions of Wikipedia. Small Wikipedia communities lack necessary volunteers as well as good coverage of internationally important topics. At the same time, small wikis may have good coverage on the local culture of the geographical area that particular language covers but the same knowledge about those cultures are absent in almost all other wikis. To bridge this gap, this team of enthusiastic college students thinks the interaction between different Wikipedia language communities and inter-culture efforts can be crucial.
In the primary phase, we are translating our college article to English for English Wikipedia. We'll try to collaborate with different language communities later and with their help, we'll translate this article to those languages. If we can see a good outcome from this project, we'll try to use our model to bridge the knowledge gap in other sectors of Wikipedia too.
Getting recognized as a certified trainer by the WMF Edu team
[edit]After a successful pilot in Morocco, Bolivia, and the Philippines, the WMF Education Team was searching for trainers to expand their "Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom" program internationally. This program is actually a professional development course for high school teachers that will equip them with the tools to use Wikipedia, the world's largest free encyclopedia, to improve the media and information literacy of their pupils. I received the designation of "Certified Trainer" for this program after completing all the necessary tasks and assignments for ToT. I'll collaborate with the high school teachers in our nation to implement Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool in their classes and improve the students' media and information literacy. I'm trying to put this into practice right now.
My badge and certificate can be verified from these links: Badge, Certificate
Serving the Leadership Development Working Group
[edit]"Leadership Development Working Group" is a global, community-driven group to define, identify and plan to nurture the leadership inside the movement. There are 15 Wikimedians working there, selected from applications submitted from all across the world, and I'm pleased to be one of them with a one-year commitment. Find the diff blog regarding LDWG here.
NDEC Wikimedia Bootcamp 2022
[edit]After the Notre Dame Workshop and Editathon 2020, NDEC Wikimedia Bootcamp 2022 is the second training and recruitment event for the NDEC Wikipedia Editorial & Research Team. This event had me as its trainer and project lead. Three two-hour workshops covering nearly all facets of the wikimedia movement were part of the two-week program, along with an editathon. A total of 128 Notre Dame College students from Batch 23 enrolled for the bootcamp, and 23 people participated in the editathon and contributed 300 new articles to Bangla Wikipedia!
2024
[edit]Most of my 2024 involvement was about outreach and training. I also worked for commons photography campaigns.
Photography campaigns
[edit]- Project lead: Wiki Loves Folklore Bangladesh, 2024. This was the first major photography campaign led by me. Long experience in the wikimedia outreach arena taught me that people value brand. We created a powerful viual brand for WLFBD24 and reached out to the photograohers from Bangladesh. We didn't receive any grant support for this campaign, we funded this project personally and the impact was way higher than most of the well funded campaigns. The impact in numbers can be found in the "Statistics" section at the bottom of the page. There were four prizes from Bangladesh in the international final round, including the first one.
- Project lead: Wiki Loves Earth Bangladesh 2024. This campaign was also self funded. We utilized our learnings from WLFBD24 in this campaign as it was organized just after a few month of WLFBD24. Receiving a good response from the customized brand identity of WLFBD24, we created a unique brand for WLEBD24 also. We went for organizational partnerships in this campaign for the first time and had external partners; the name of the partners can be found at the bottom of the landing page.
- Jury member: Wiki Loves Food Philippines 2023. The jury process took place during the months of February and March of 2024 and the organizers trusted me to be a part of the jury. This is the social media announcement from the organizers.
- Core Organizing Team member: Wiki Loves Earth Philippines 2024. I shared my learnings from WLFBD24 and WLEBD24 with the WLEPH24 team and added value there. My name as a part of the organizing team can be found in the landing page of the campaign.
- Project lead: Wiki Loves Folklore Bangladesh 2025. I am serving as the project lead for WLFBD25. The campaign will take place in Feb, Mar 2025, but the preparations have already been started from September, 2024. I am utilizing my learnings from the previous WLX campaigns as well as formal project management trainings from different entities, including PMI to lead this campaign.
- Covered one of the biggest concerts in the country with press pass on Nov 15. All the 90's bands performed there, so almost every artist there was significant. This is a significant milestone for us since for the first time, we have been recognized as a partner by any of the organizers and were provided with press pass. This is the category of the event.
Outreach and Training campaigns
[edit]- Project lead from the wikimedia end: An Evening with Doc James. This was an outreach session at BUET Biomedical Engineering Department where James Heilman was the speaker. Participants were mostly from medical colleges and biomedical engineering department of BUET, there were also a few high school students. I led the arrangement with my younger brother from the wikimedia end. The images from that event can be found here.
Training around 200 highschoolers on how to be a wikimedian during NDEC Wikimedia mini workshop 2024! - Project lead and trainer: NDEC Wikimedia Bootcamp 2024. I am leading this wikimedia bootcamp from 2021. Every year, I am onboarding new wikimedians, who are slowly turning into new leaders. For example, the leaders last entered wikimedia in 2021. We are slowly learning and improving every year. This, this and this diff blogs are some of the comms pieces from this event. The Wikimedia Foundation Community Development team helped us in some aspects of this bootcamp.
- Instructor: Wikimedia Mini Workshop, NDEC WERT. I took a mini wikimedia workshop at NDEC WERT on Nov 27, 2024. 150 to 200 high schoolers joined the workshop and showed overwhelming enthusiasm. This mini workshop is gonna be a catalyst for the next NDEC Wikimedia Bootcamp 2025. The images from this mini workshop can be found here.
Advocacy and Leadership
[edit]- 2024 was critical for Bangladeshi wikimedians due to the Student–People's uprising. I am the strategic lead of Project Korikath and one of our photographers was arrested while covering the protest for wikimedia commons in the field. There were heavy firing and he didn't have any protective gears. A few of our photographers were in the streets to cover the protest and were trying to avoid arrest or injuries. One of our highschooler wikimedians was detained by the police for a few hours during the protest days. Being one of the leads, I had to take care of everyone from the team, I had to increase my public exposure as the community leader in exchange of the privacy and safety of our team members. We published a public statement to demand the release the arrested photographer which was later supported by the Open Knowledge Foundation later. We'll share our experience and learnings with the wikimediaverse via diff when the situation is right.