Fundraising 2010/Contribute Indic

This page is intended for Contribution to the Indic language Wikis.

Please use it to discuss ideas, provide suggestions and talk about Indic outreach plan.

Ideas

Banners

There was a wiki-marathon held earlier this month, we can support something similar for Indian language wikis. We can create translated pages with embedded videos and put up banners for the marathon.
We can place DYK banners along the lines of "DID you know there is a wikipedia in your languages?" with a link to a landing page embedded in the message with a small list of large Indian language wikis.
We want to turn readers of Indian language Wikis, into editors. We can use banners like "did you know you could edit this page?" with translated pages on how to edit wiki pages. This was an approach employed by other languages around the world.
one issue that we have heard about was, newcomers not being aware of wiki guidelines and policies being handled abruptly by experienced admin and general lack of helpfulness to newcomers. We can create a centralized page with links to all the guidelines under something along the lines of "Dont bite the newbies", where they can describe their issue and experienced admins can look in and explain the policies or talk to the admins themselves. I would suggest this page being on Meta to provide a centralized location and get helpful very experienced users, not to mention promote multilingualism/multiculturalism .
In addition to banners of "DID You know there is wikipedia in your language", an additional javascript based on geolocation to provide Indic Interwiki links at the top of the page will do a lot good in awareness for Indic wikipedia projects.Interwiki links though present in en wikipedia are not prominently placed. One needs to scroll and then locate the Indic languages at the side left which not many will do. Example screenshot here
Backlog elimination drive for India related topics....
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Discussion

There are some misconceptions about Indian language wiki communities. Not all Indian language wiki communities (in fact most of them) are active enough (and mature enough) to participate in these type of donation drives.

Many of us voluntarily donate to foundation, and we are doing it at least for the past 3-4 years. But much activism needs to happen among each language community to collectively contribute for the donation drives.

If foundation is really serious about raising funds from India, here are few things they must do:

provide provision for accepting donations in Indian rupees.
provide provision for using the debit card (along with credit card). Many Indians prefer debit card over credit card.
the fund raiser message must appear in the local language of the wiki from where the donor arrived. For example, when I clicked Jimmy's request message (request is in Malayalam) from Malayalam Wiktionary I got this appeal page. But the Malayalam version of it is available here. If this is the way the messages (that each language community translate) are using then what is need of putting extra effort in Translating all these messages.

--Shijualex 03:18, 20 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I guess Shiju has got the context wrong. I think this page is all about how to increase Indic Contributions (content / community wise). Salmaan, Please correct me if am wrong. Logicwiki 06:30, 20 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No Srikanth. This is the sub page of Fund raising. This page is intended for above discussion only. we can discuss the rest of the things else where. May be in wikimedia.in site itself. --Shijualex 13:04, 20 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry Shiju, Logicwiki is right, the intention is to increase Indic contributions (content and community) and not funds , it might be a sub-page under fundraising because its a campaign under this year's fundraiser - the contribute campaign, which will run very soon (geo-located to a location). I apologize if you misunderstood, I should have clarified better, I just replied to your email to clarify.

The focus for the contribute campaign are non-monetary contributions by our readers and supporters, we want them to make their first edit during out drive on Indian language wiki and drive up readership on local languages. I hope you both would consider joining and helping us support the indian languages.Theo10011 15:59, 20 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Notes

http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Suggestions_to_improve_Hindi_wikipedia (suggestion for improving Hindi Wikipedia)
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