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West Bengal Wikimedians/Reports/Annual Activities/2018

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West Bengal Wikimedians
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Wiki Loves Butterfly

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Main article: Wiki Loves Butterfly

After the successful completion of the second phase of the WMF-funded Wiki Loves Butterfly (WLB) Project, where the WLB team carried out documentation of butterfly in different districts of West Bengal, the team initiated the third phase on June 1, 2018 entitled Wiki Loves Butterfly in North-East India (WLB-NEI) to venture and document vividly the available butterfly resources in the states of North East India along with relevant article creation & development. The said project work is ongoing & will come to an end on March 31, 2019. Bengali Wikimedian Ananya Mondal and other dedicated wiki volunteers, lepidopterists, resource persons and notable scientific bodies from different parts of the country meticulously collaborated as a team which has covered and documented the butterfly hotspots and wild life sanctuaries of 5 states of North East India so far, contributing largely in Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies and Wikidata.

1165 images of butterfly species and sub-species have been uploaded and properly categorized in Wikimedia Commons. Information of their behavioral aspects, habitats etc. have been added in Wikipedia and Wikispecies etc. in the form of 171 articles in Bengali language, out of which, 1 has been selected as Good Article. We are also too glad to mention that Wiki Loves Butterfly project has touched the prestige of 100 images in Valued Image Category. So far 112 images are now in Valued Image category and 48 images in Quality Image category. The project also brought new wiki editors, broad outreach programs, bringing special interest groups and scientific bodies under the broader spectrum of Wikimedia Movement and so on and so forth. Giving a multilingual touch to the wiki project has also been done in the present phase through the inclusion of Assamese language description of butterfly species and sub-species.

An event, worth mentioning, of this third phase of Wiki Loves Butterfly project is that the team has successfully co-organized the All India level North East Butterfly Meet, 2018 held at Pakke Tiger Reserve) in Arunachl Pradesh, with the Forest Department of Government of Arunachal Pradesh and other famous scientific bodies. In the said meet-up, a nice presentation appertaining to Wiki Loves Butterfly project & Wikimedia Foundation was given by Subhendukhan of WLB team, assisted by another WLB team member Dipanjali Biswas, which had subsequently cherished a good deal of outreach programme & the immediate outcome was the joining of Gayerti Dutta, a butterfly enthusiast in our team. Another notable fact is that two North-east India based female Zoologists have created their Wikimedia accounts and are now actively working in the Wiki Loves Butterfly project.

Wiki Explores Malda - Phase I

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Wiki Explores Malda - Phase I was a three-days event to document the archaeological and historical sites of Malda district and some parts of nearby Murshidabad district of West Bengal, planned and executed by Amitabha Gupta and Agniswark. The duo covered 29 heritage structures of the two districts and uploaded 606 photographs to Commons. Wikidata items of all the monuments have already been created. West Bengal Wikimedians User Group provided the team with necessary funds, created proper categories for the images and Wikidata items.

Wiki Explores Hooghly - Phase I

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Wiki Explores Hooghly - Phase I was a four-days event to document the archaeological and historical sites of Hooghly district of West Bengal, planned and executed solely by SuvadipSanyal. He covered 17 historical places of the district, most of which are under-represented in Wikimedia sites and uploaded 2150 photographs to Commons. West Bengal Wikimedians User Group provided him with necessary funds and created proper categories for the images.

Bengali Wikisource workshop in Assam University

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The first ever Bengali Wikisource workshop outside of the state of West Bengal was organized in collaboration with Department of Bengali, Assam University in Silchar on May 18, 2019. The user group sponsored the food, travel and accommodation expenditure of Bodhisattwa and Dr. Bir, the two resource persons, who conducted the workshop. The department provided computer lab, internet connection, projectors and other logistics needed. In spite of the bad internet connection in the computer lab and frequesnt loss of power, which was causing difficulties, the students were engaged to participate on hands-on practice session starting from the very basics of Wikisource editing. Details of the workshop can be found here.

Bengali Wikisource New Readers Awareness Campaign, 2018

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The user group requested for a rapid grant to create short films in order to promote Bengali Wikisource among new readers. SGill (WMF) from New Readers team helped the user group and Bengali Wikisource community to collaborate with film production professionals from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata, as a result of which 2 short films were produced. The films were uploaded to Youtube chennel of the user group. The grant report was submitted within deadline and was accepted by WMF. New Readers separately started promoting the videos in Facebook by spending 950$, as a result of which the videos more than 1.5 million views in total. The videos were shown at Wikigraphists Bootcamp in New Delhi, GLAM Wiki Conference in Tel Aviv and at Indic Wikisource Community Consultation in Kolkata.

Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 in India

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West Bengal Wikimedians User Group decided to organize Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 in India during Wikimania 2018, Cape Town. Punjabi Wikimedians User Group joined hands few days later. After extensive pre-event preparation, the user groups successfully organized the photo-competition during September, 2018. The ten winners were selected by the respected jury team within deadline, special thanks to Sumitsurai from the organizing team for efficiently coordinating the judging round. The User Group sent three postcards for each winners and CIS-A2K sent the declared national prizes to them. The team is also working with Wikidata editors on adding Monuments of National Importance into Wikidata. Pmlineditor created a python script to retrieve coordinates of those monuments from Bhuvan - the geoplatform of Indian Space Research Organization.

Content donation

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Dr. Tapodhir Bhattacharjee, ex-Vice Chancellor of Assam University, released the copyright to CC_BY_SA 4.0 of 9 of his books under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, 6 of them are in Bengali and rest are in English, thanks to Dr. Tanmay Bir for all the initiatives he had taken to make this happen. The books were scanned, uploaded to Commons and work has already been started in Bengali and English Wikisource to proofread them. These books are the first license released content donated to Bengali community. Few other articles published in different magazines, were also relicensed.

Bengali Wikisource meetup, Kolkata

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A Bengali Wikisource meetup was arranged on November 25, 2018 in Kolkata by the user group. 9 users participated in the event including 3 administrators of Bengali Wikisource communities. The details of the discussion can be found here

Wikidata WikiProject West Bengal

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A dedicated Wikiproject was initiated by the user group to add and improve data related to West Bengal in November, 2018. The Wikidata related activity in West Bengal started getting organized after the user group organized Wikidata workshop in September, 2017. As a part of this initiative, demographic data of 2001 and 2011 Indian census data of more than 40,000 villages and 300 community development blocks in West Bengal were incorporated into Wikidata. The villages were linked to community development blocks and around 3,000 Panchayats. Data about 1500 railway stations, 10,000 health sub-centres and 1300 public hospitals in West Bengal were added. Details can be found here.

Bylaws

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The user group adopted a bylaw on February 2, 2019 through an online meetup of General Members of the group. The draft of the bylaw was open for community consultation for 1 month and taking consideration of the community output, it was finalized. The formation of the Representative members and committee is underway.