Wiki Project Med/South Asia Outreach Meetup

Casual online meetup was planned on 1st December 2019.

Details

• Date : 1st December 2019.
• Time :
  08:30 PM (IST - India time)
  06:00PM (EEST - Eastern European Time)
  07:00AM PST (PST -  California time)
  10:00AM EST (EST New York time)

How to join

• To join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, or Android, go to https://virginia.zoom.us/j/391364140. You have the option to disable video so that you participate by audio only.
• Alternatively, you may join by phone, but if you do this then your phone number will be visible to other participants. For phone connection information: find your local number in https://zoom.us/u/aeBOBQMw0a, then use the meeting number 391-364-140.

Agenda

• Introduction of participants
• Preliminary discussions
• Going through previous efforts related to healthcare outreach in South Asia
• Possibility of doing healthcare outreach in South Asian Medical Colleges
• Tools for metrics evaluation (WikiEdu Dashboard and localizing it)
• In-person meeting (possibility - December/January?)
• Feel free to add topics you would like to discuss
• Wikitherapy in India: discussions that have been held and possibilities

Participants

Attending

1. AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 06:42, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
2.  Innocentbunny    TALK  06:45, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
3. Pavanaja (talk) 12:02, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
4. Abhinav619 (talk) 12:30, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
5. Raju Jangid (talk) 16:27, 25 November 2019 (UTC)
6. Santosh Shingare (talk) 04:12, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
7. Dhanalakshmi .K. T (talk) 08:59, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
8. Muzammil (talk) 10:29, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
9. Nikhil.kawale (talk) 06:24, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
10. Raavimohantydelhi (talk) 09:46, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
11. Sushma Sharma (talk) 10:33, 29 November 2019 (UTC)
12. Rajeeb^(talk!) 13:50, 29 November 2019 (UTC)
13. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:39, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
14. Saintfevrier (talk) 15:18, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Maybe attending

• Nilamkarn (talk) 15:16, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
• Biplab Anand (Talk) 10:05, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
• Pankaj Deo (Talk) 11:34, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
• -J. Ansari Talk 14:51, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Post-meetup summary

shared notes

Introduction of participants

1. Abhishek Suryawanshi - Hindi Marathi, editing since 2010 with the translation task force of WikiProject Medicine, interested in outreach
2. Lane Rasberry - with WikiProject Medicine, do wiki projects
3. Pavanaja - editing since 2004, most Kannada Wikipedia, also Commons, Wikisource, and Wikiquote, started a user group, living in Bangalore, have participated in about 300 Wikipedia meetups and part of Wikipedia community groups which have recruited 4000 new account registrations. Regarding medicine, our group conducted a Wiki Women's Wellbeing article and also various science articles related to health.

   Abhishek: for those who do not know, Dr. Pavanaja is one of the most active contributors conducting offline events.

4. Tim Moody - living in Toronoto, involved with Internet in a Box project, member of Wikimedia Medicine, long time interest in South Asia where I was in the Peace Corps in Nepal and where I learned some Hindi and Nepali
5. Biplab - I have been editing since 2003. I am active in Hindi Wikipedia and Nepali Wikipedia. I also do outreach.

   Abhishek: Biplab is also part of the Affiliations Committee.

6. Pankaj - hello, I am with Nepali Wikipedia and I contribute to Maithili Wikipedia
7. Innocent Bunny - I edit mostly Hindi Wikipedia. I have been editing since 2012. I live in Kolkata. I also know the Bengali Wikipedia and Maithili Wikipedia communities quite well.

   Abhishek: He also was one of the organizers of the Indian conference.

8. Rajeeb: I work with Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and organize Wikimedia outreach projects. I just came back from a meetup of our West Begal Wikimedia user group which was earlier today.
   • (Abhishek - can you check with other people in the room who seem to not be able to speak in the audio channel?...)
9. Redmi: I am from Nepali. I am active on Maithili. I have been trying to bring other women into Wikimedia projects.
10. Dhana Lakshmi
11. Abhinav
12. Mina Theofilatou
13. Neelam Karn

Preliminary discussions

1. Going through previous efforts related to healthcare outreach in South Asia

   Abhishek: One of the challenges which we face in outreach is showing who we are. For example, schools ask who we are, whether we are a student, an organization, or Wikipedia itself. Explaining this situation takes a lot of time.

2. Possibility of doing healthcare outreach in South Asian Medical Colleges

   Pavanaja: Writing medicine articles in my languages, such as Kannada, is very difficult because of the terminology. It is typical for doctors to have no writing skills as far as Kannada language, as they write in English. About two years back at one of the Wikipedia conferences I gave a medical workshop inviting medical professionals to edit, and they were enthusiastic, but they were unable to actually follow through all the steps to get their contributions in.

   Abhishek: What do you think is the solution to this challenge?

   Pavanaja: Some time has passed and people have more tech skills, so if we tried again, it could be easier. another big problem is incentives. People who contribute to Wikipedia get no money, no credit, and none of their colleagues respect Wikipedia editing. We have tried to go after big name experts, but maybe it would be easier to go after lower level professionals who might find this more attractive.

   Rajeeb: Last year I was working with the WWW project to develop content on science and medicine. Both science and medicine are difficult in local languages. I think we need more experts doing this. We have three doctors in our West Bengal user group. One of these edits Wikipedia, another edits only Wikisource, and one has not edited Wikipedia but he comes to the meetings. I am a science student and I learn my material in English and editing in local languages is challenging for me.

   Viresh: The medical students and doctors typically have no knowledge of medical terminology in their own languages. If we somehow get people used to writing or translating articles, most of these people are accustomed to translating literature. They rarely have experience translating science or medical terminology. If we could somehow train people to do this then I think they would make other people more confident in contributing.

3. Tools for metrics evaluation (WikiEdu Dashboard and localizing it)
   1. Q: from Abhishek: How does anyone judge success in outreach? For me, I used the "Programs and Events Dashboard". This system tracks all the edits of a group of people, counts them, and also reports how many people have been reading the articles.

      (Pavanaja, Viresh): yes, we use it in editing events. Is this the same as the "Outreach Dashboard"?

      Lane: Yes, it is the same

   2. Abhishek: How useful would it be to translate this system into local languages?

      Pavanaja: There is not much English on the board and people who cannot read English still understand. They are still able to use it. I am not aware of anyone doing outreach who does not know English. The lack of local language versions is not a roadblock to using it.

      Viresh: Yes, the people who do outreach tend to know English. However, many of the people at events would not use the English version.

      Pavanaja: We populate the Dashboard with people's information instead of having users register themselves, so non-English speakers do not typically see the dashboard.

4. In-person meeting (possibility - December/January?)
   1. Abhishek: Who would be interested in meeting in December or January?

      yes!

      1. Pavanaja - Mumbai or Bengaluru not Delhi
      2. Rajeeb, yes, Koljata
      3. Abhinav - pollution in Delhi
      4. Tim Biratnagar
   2. How many people could join last weekend in December, 28 and 29, for an in person meeting? Perhaps it would be in Mumbai, but possible to change the city. I think we would have local resources such as a space to meet.

      many people say yes or maybe

      Tim and Lane: we could join remotely, Mina: too far away!

      Many of us have been doing workshops in our local communities for some years. We should collaborate. I have started to organize a project page to collect the contributions of various editors in India in medicine.

   3. Feel free to add topics you would like to discuss
      1. Tim: I want to make everyone aware of the South Asian Internet in a Box. This device has offline copies of 25 South Asian languages of Wikipedia. This website shows how people can access it.

         http://med.iiab.me/s-asia/

         A distributor in India is selling it local https://www.thingbits.net/products/medical-and-health-internet-in-a-box-south-asia-edition

      2. Pavanaja: We have a similar project called "Offline Wikipedia for Schools". We continually have editathons to develop articles related to the textbook syllabus. Our plan is to package all this in a Kiwix package. We are not distributing the Raspberry Pi devices, but are just packaging the content in Kiwix software as the schools have computers but do not have Internet access.
      3. Mina: I have been developing a project called WikiTherapy. There are participants in various place, but I am based in Athens and many experiments are in Greece. In this program we are training people to edit Wikipedia as therapy.

         https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitherapy

         I have organized workshops in Argentina. If anyone would be interested in offering this project with other health programs in India then please contact me.

5. Abhishek: other comments from anyone?
6. Summary:
   1. We talked about our various challenges and what good programs we have. We are fortunate to be able to have a global collaboration - where is everyone?

      Lane, New York, Tim, Toronto, Mina, Greece, rest: India!

   2. We collaborate online but we have not yet had an in-person meeting in India for health programs. In the longer term it would be helpful for us to be able to collaborate with government health agencies, schools, and experts of all kinds. If we could organize to collaborate among ourselves then we would be able to better communicate and have partnerships with health organizations. We talked about how we run workshops, how we can track impact, doing online and offline projects, Internet in a Box, and the challenges of getting contributors.
7. Rajeeb: Can we use telegram to stay in touch with each other?

   Abhishek, can everyone access telegram? Let's do that, and let's also have a Google Group for email.

   Abhishek - okay let's wrap up.

   1. Viresh: I like that so many people joined this group. I see Kannada, Tamil, Maithili, and Hindi represented, but I do not see people from other groups here. I wish we had Punjani and Oria participation in this group.
   2. Biplab: (??? could not hear)
   3. Pavanaja: What will happen on that 28-29?

      Abhishek: The basic idea is to plan to collaborate with medical colleges or government agendies. We should identify a few organizations with whom we could collaborate and plan to give them what they want. They probably want things like official collaboration and good projects, and also for us to use their projects.

      Pavanaja: Can you say something about financial things? How we will pay for editathons, organization, and the rest?

      Abhishek: Please come up with a proposal for how much money we need and what we would do with it. I think that there are private organizations and government agencies who will sponsor these things. ##::If you come to the December meeting with a proposal then I think we can do this.

   4. Viresh: so the basic idea is to make a plan of action for this project
8. Abhishek thanked everyone for joining.