Grants:IEG/Making telugu content accessible/Final

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's 6-month project.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

Methods and activities

What did you do in project?

Please list and describe the activities you've undertaken during this grant. Since you already told us about the setup and first 3 months of activities in your midpoint report, feel free to link back to those sections to give your readers the background, rather than repeating yourself here, and mostly focus on what's happened since your midpoint report in this section. My activities in project are driven by some fundamental principles:

• Involving community in all aspects: I might be the one behind this project, but I'm always only one. This project design is always at risk of being isolated effort. In order to avoid that, Ideally I've tried to make community involve in important decisions, ideas, tasks, work related to the project. Finally, I'm successful in making community take the project into its hands and shape it. It also doesn't mean that I didn't participate in this project at all :-) I'm one of the key contributors to this project but I managed to be 2nd or 3rd in the list.
• Developing the existing work plan: Throughout the project term, work plan and other ideas of project have been developed and elaborated using work experience of this project. As per the request from Mr.Pranay raj, our telugu wikipedian and research scholar in theater arts, We got to know that knowledge is not bound to non-fiction books and started adding all kinds of books to this project. Later on prefaces, photos and other information in fiction genre books also got useful to me in developing articles and for inline citations. There are several other changes that volunteers suggested during project period and I come across volunteers who applied their own ideas with out even discussion. I've spotted those changes out and flagged for discussion & ratification in project discussion pages.

Activities

Pavan santhosh and Rajasekhar speaking about the project in a Telugu Wikipedia monthly meet just after its starting(on June 22)

Project activities include:

• Developing a catalog of Dli Telugu books
  • Created catalog pages(based on alphabets) in Telugu Wikipedia along with templates to navigate between them and many other user friendly options.
  • Updated the page by cataloging books with fields adding name in Telugu Unicode, link, writer/poet/editor name, categories, description, DLI barcode and year of publications.
  • DLI books are in jpg format and one should download them page by page. Volunteers downloaded sufficient no. of pages for every book and checked the details in the book and later categorized accordingly. We didn't rely on poorly transliterated and poorly cataloged information given in DLI for title, author's name, category and description.

Developing several village stubs by using a early 19th century travelog named Kasiyatra charitra is one of the thematic sub-projects undertaken in this project. This has resulted improving quality and attention from wikimedians and Telugu book lovers.(This is the Picture of Enugula veeraswamayya who has written kashi yatra charitra)

• Making catalog useful to Telugu wiki projects
  • We have created more than 100 articles and developed more than 1000 articles through this project to show the potential of the catalog. Telugu Wikipedians from various interests like Rajasekhar, Meena gayathri, Swaralasika, Me and many others used these resources to make useful.
  • We've created a few themes, edit-a-thons to do fruitful and thorough work to develop existing articles in Telugu Wikipedia and Wikisource. They are as follows:
    • By using Kasi yatra charitra - 19th century travelogue, which is considered as first travelogue in modern Telugu literature I've developed history in many village stubs and improved them by adding first (in most cases) inline references. Along with that I could have developed some articles related to the Nizam times. This work got appreciated by Sr. Wikipedians because of its tough research nature. This has been recognized by some literary giants also. A popular web-zine called pustakam.net is going to publish an article related to my experience with this piece of work.
    • Created and developed a cluster of articles on Karnool Nawabs, dependent dynasty ruled kurnool about 100 years in 18 and 19 centuries. Through this complete work Wikipedia got 6 quality articles in which on average there is nearly 50 kb quality information with inline resources added. Other than that We've improved Existing articles related to this theme also and are not included in above said statistics.
    • Taken up a sub-project to improve the articles related to eminent poet, writer and critic of Telugu literature Viswanatha satyanarayana to a critically appreciated level. Created a project sub page regarding this plan and worked on it and improved many such articles to satisfactory level. This was taken up because 2014-15 is having an occasion of 120 birth celebration year of this celebrated poet.
    • Swaralasika worked on improving articles related Telugu literature by using dli resources and he finally end up with a new project on Telugu magazines which was greatly inspired by this new resources base.
    • Rajasekhar started adding magazines from dli, a very new section of texts to Telugu Wikisource. This project is synarged with the wikipedia project on magazines lead by Swaralasika.

Pavan santhosh(right) along with viswanath.B.K.(left) training Katta Srinivas On edit-a-thon conducted in monthly meet up(30.11.2014).

• Requesting & Helping community to put their efforts in this project
  • Conducted several formal and informal orientation programs for volunteers in awareness programs, edit-a-thons and even in many monthly meet-ups of Telugu Wikipedia. This community activities started on very next Sunday(22 June 2014) after project got started(21 June 2014). On many such monthly meet ups and awareness programs I could successfully get this work attention to many Telugu Wikipedia as well as some of their interest.
  • Organized some Skype meetings, Conference calls with active editors participated in this project, for an example Recently on 14th March, 8 pm IST I've organized a call where vyza satya, Rajasekhar, Meena gayathri are participants, this call specifically discussed about the sustainability of the project and vyzasatya shared his project specific tools he developed, meena gayathri expressed the possibilities of massive participation in later stage.
  • Conducted meet-ups for users who are active in project with the experts in order to make project more fruitful and yield better quality. I've made a person who is very much interested and working on traditional Telugu literature with Dr. Rajasekhar in his clinic. In the meeting he interacted with that expert and understood priorities in telugu literature which resulted in more good books to Wikisource through project. Also made Meena gayathri meet a library professional Mr. Gopala raju in her home town. This meeting helped her in identifying categories more easily.

Pavan santhosh speaking on presentation "making dli accessible" at swatantra-2014 on tiruvananthapuram, where the number of free software and free knowledge enthusiasts, longtime wikimedians presented as deligates

• Trying to build a widespread campaign
  • Right from the starting of grant project I've made my attempts to make people aware of the ongoing project through the print and electronic media. News items, interviews, special items on various newspapers like eenadu, sakshi, etc., have been published covering various aspects of the project. Even this massive coverage helped the next Telugu I.E.Grantee in terms of quick response from media and library authorities too.
  • Conducted a campaign in social media, in which I could directly appeal the people to work on and use the fruits of project. I've chosen Facebook groups of book lovers in which I'm well known as a book lover, and posted the priority of the project and necessity to Telugu book world. I occasionally used to post interesting and rare books I've cataloged through this project. In conversations about literature I used to quote relevant info from DLI books and give links to project page. I've helped a book lover on his request to a rare book and later he popularized this project in his circle. All the above yielded results.
  • I've made a presentation in swatantra-2014, an international conference on free software along with rehmanuddin which showcased this effort and project to free knowledge enthusiasts and free software enthusiasts came from allover the country. This presentation is supported by cis-a2k. Another volunteer of this project meena gayatri presented this project in train the trainer-2015 to the Indic Wikipedians in order to encourage them to take up such efforts on their respective languages.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

What are the results of your project?

Please discuss the outcomes of your experiments or pilot, telling us what you created or changed (organized, built, grew, etc) as a result of your project.

• Created and developed nearly 43 catalog pages in Telugu Wikipedia which is cataloged with above 6,010 books(as on date March 21, 2015) that contains Name, DLI link, writer's name, category, DLI Bar code and publication year. Some of them may contain the label Unavailable for Author and Publication year categories basing on availability of those in digital copy. Many of these catalog details are enriched with even a little to little more description in telugu.
• Created more than 100 articles in Telugu wikipedia. Developed quality and quantity of 1000 articles in Telugu Wikipedia. These articles belongs to different kinds, different sizes which ranging from Telugu village articles to History, literature to crackers. Developed these articles in order to showcase wide range of categories of books in DLI to Telugu Wikimedians.
• Conducted several formal and informal programs like workshops, edit-a-thons, awareness programs, conference calls, skype meetings, etc., to interact with wikimedians in order to make them work in this project as well as improve the proposed workplan. This got a good response from Telugu Wikipedians. Telugu wikimedians Rajasekhar, Meena gayathri, Vyzasatya, Swaralasika, KVR Lohit, Viswanadh and some others given very valuable contributions in updating catalogs, developing templates, Using sources and improving articles and other main works in Wikipedia. Rajasekhar has done exclusive work in selecting, prioritizing and adding copyright free books from DLI to Wikisource. While the major credit of cataloging nearly 4000+ books in this pages goes to Meena gayathri. Rajasekhar and Pranay Raj along with some relevent research articles on eemata.com helped us to Re-prioritize the books to be cataloged. Vadduri ramakrishna, Meena gayathri, Viswanadh B.K., Palagiri, Pranay Raj, Rajasekhar and Rehmanuddin helped in conducting off-wiki programs. Vyzasatya shared customized tools he created recently with major contributors. Finally I could say its a collective work and I just anchored it through my efforts.
• Telugu Wikisource has been enriched with 45 new books which contains nearly 4500 pages.
• Major success of this project lies in the sustainability. Telugu wiki stalwarts vyzasatya, Rajasekhar and one of the kingpins of this project efforts Meena gayathri decided to catalog complete set of Telugu books in DLI website. I've organized a skype call with the above contributors on mid of march 2015, In which we have discussed previous efforts, sharpened the ideas, shared customized tools and finally created a road map to the upcoming big attempt.

“ Pavan Santhosh, Your I.E.G. may be limited to 5 or 6 thousand (books) as target. But I've decided to create a catalog for 23 thousand books. I will be bound to create catalog only(ofcource along with discriptions). My desire is to create such catalog and gift it to digital library. ”

• This project helped Telugu Wiki projects to get new wikipedians like lakshmi devi, Bhukya gopi naik and some others. But the real success in this aspect lies in making telugu wikipedians like swaralasika and meena gayathri into a very active wikipedians who has taken lead to new projects.
• Through this project existing telugu wiki projects like Telugu villeges, Sahityam(literature), telugu pramukhulu has been benefited and new projects like godavari pushkaralu, magazines(patrikalu) also made use of these resources. Along with them some sub projects also started and run successfully by using the DLI books as resources.

Progress towards stated goals

Please use the below table to:

1. List each of your original measures of success (your targets) from your project plan.
2. List the actual outcome that was achieved.
3. Explain how your outcome compares with the original target. Did you reach your targets? Why or why not?

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation
Building and Publishing online catalog with details of 6000 telugu books present in Digital library of india.	Completed an online catalog in CC BY SA 3.0 license on wiki with nearly 6000 telugu books.	In the proposal title, author/editor, category, description about the book and hyperlink of the DLI page were proposed details to books. We've done it for two more fields(publication year and DLI Barcode) along with above said fields. This step is taken early in starting of the project after discussing with the interesting members of community. But some of these books left with description field empty, because many of contributors left it and said it is just a repetition to what we have given in other fields.
Conducting atleast one Edit-a-thon by using the books in this catalog which result improving quality of 1000 existing articles and creating 100 new articles in telugu wikipedia.	Conducted Edit-a-thons, awareness programs, orientation sessions and community discussions in the grant period. This resulted Improvement of nearly 1000 articles in wikipedia which includes creation of 100 new articles using the sources in cataloged dli books.	In addition to this 45 books were added to Wikisource. This project become an important motivation behind a wiki project in telugu wikipedia. Conducted morethan 2 sub-projects also.

Think back to your overall project goals. Do you feel you achieved your goals? Why or why not?

Yes. When I assess the outcomes and stated goals I could say we've achieved our goals. Even though the given goal is ambitious, This outcome is possible because The grantee and few volunteers loved the project, which is driven by the need of community for availability of good sources.

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across all grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the "Global Metrics." We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" as often as necessary.

1. Next to each metric, list the actual numerical outcome achieved through this project.
2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for a research project which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. Number of active editors involved	95 (out of which not less than 35 editors are worked on this project for sure. out of which 10 editors only worked in telugu wikisource)	Upon these 95 editors 18 added more than 10,000 bytes under this project works. 5 of them added more than 250000. These 95 editors worked on the pages created or developed under this project, but this fascinating figure may not give a real picture of the project. I would humbly say at least 35 of them are worked for project, our of which not less than 10 editors only worked on Telugu Wikisource. 5 editors are worked to improve project with a great dedication.
2. Number of new editors	7	We have conducted only one awareness program aiming new users. remaining off-wiki programs are aimed to make existing wikimedians aware of and involve in the project. So, the awareness program conducted in tadepalligudem resulted 5 new users, facebook campaign resulted 2 users. In these 7 users, 2 members are editing wikipedia sustainably through out the months.
3. Number of individuals involved	135	135 members are the participants, organizers and others who helped in awareness programs, edit-a-thons and other outreach programs organized in this project umbrella.
4. Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	19 images in commons and they've been added to some telugu wikipedia pages.	This project is not designed to add images in commons, but it has great potential to add many of the common files. Because Lot of the DLI books cataloged under this project and many telugu books added into wikisource through this project consists of a large number of free images in them. We can crop them and upload in commons.
5. Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	more than 1000 articles improved in telugu wikipedia and nearly 45 books added in telugu wikisource	This is not just increasing quantity, but also improved quality of the wiki-projects. In improving these 1000 articles we have created some sub-projects, themes and 45 books added in telugu wikisource are mostly useful to wikipedia. We've prioritized the books and the very important and valuable books have been added to wikisource.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	11,404,222	In the above sum 9632613 is from telugu wikipedia and 1771609 is from telugu wikisource.

Learning question

Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

• Yes. Because my work is to make 6 thousand books available to users. These books consists of a great variety of telugu literature. So, editors like Rajasekhar exited to add them to wikisource and Swaralasika worked to improve many articles in telugu wikipedia and finally started a wiki-project related to magazines and is using this repository as main source. Meena gayathri who is already a registered user with limited number of edits took lead in catalog activities and now added nearly 4062768 bytes information in the project pages. This is partly possible because of the edit-a-thons, awareness programs, skype calls and interactive sessions I've conducted. Regular updates about project also helped some wikipedians to sustain in woking on this project. First of all, main reason behind this support is because project we have taken is something really telugu wikipedia is looking for. Sources is a major problem till these days for many wikipedians, and a good example to that is Swaralasika, who has been inactive for a long time an now is very active because of the sources that are easily available now.

Indicators of impact

Do you see any indication that your project has had impact towards Wikimedia's strategic priorities? We've provided 3 options below for the strategic priorities that IEG projects are mostly likely to impact. Select one or more that you think are relevant and share any measures of success you have that point to this impact. You might also consider any other kinds of impact you had not anticipated when you planned this project.

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects? Yes. This project helped us to get nearly 2-5 new editors work on telugu wikipedia. I could revive the participation of 2 existing wikipedians, who are not so active till this project started. Swaralasika and Meenagayathri are not so active till this project starting and finally now they are one of the very active wikipedians of the community and swaralasika started a new wiki-project and heading towards very good success in it. Many telugu wikipedians also participated in this project both off wiki and on-wiki.

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects? This project helped improving nearly 1000 telugu articles and in near future many more articles are also going to benefited out of the resources developed from this project. Added information, given references and added some pictures also in the above said articles. Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects? This project got a good coverage in telugu media (print and electronic too) and this helped reaching the efforts and objectives of wikipedia to larger telugu community who read and view news. Some of the research scholars thanked me on building this project and they've said me that this helped in accessing the books they needed in order to do their research. Literature circles also got to know about this effort and they're using this repository. Finally in many a ways this project helped to increase reach of telugu wikipedia and telugu wikisource.

Project resources

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

• Category which sorted the photos added through this project to commons.wikimedia.org - This category also consists of the photos of meet ups, edit-a-thons and other project related outreach programs.
• Category in telugu wikipedia which categorized the articles that are improved and created through this project
• Category consisting the books uploaded through this project to telugu wikisource
• SQL Query which helped us to get the details of bytes added through this project in telugu wikipedia
• SQL Query which helped us to get the details of bytes added through this project in telugu wikisource

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

Kasyap a telugu wikimedian showing the wikipedia bottle given in the part of encouraging community participation and token of gratitude towards their contributions

What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Learning pattern

What didn’t work

What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

• First of all we tried to work off-wiki using excel and later convert them into tables and publish in telugu wikipedia and other sites as well. But in few days trial period we got to know the advantages of working on-wiki. Working on wiki helps you preventing doubling of work, Improves co-ordination between project volunteers, etc., So, we shifted to on-wiki.
• DLI Website stopped suddenly for few hours to weeks, atleast 30-40 days during this project period wasted if we can sum that time. We don't know what is the technical problem regarding this shutdown or slowdown. But We couldn't fix it and just suffered simply. Some of our wikipedians tried to sort it out by creating a mirror site, but site is not free and open source, so they couldn't make it possible. But fortunately from this january there is no major problem reported with the site which takes a long period technical problem with site.
• Although the wikimedians helped me a lot in outreach programs, adding books in wikisource, creating new articles using these sources, and improving existing articles with dli books as source, Core catalog work has been done by only 4-5 of us. Even in those 4-5 members Meena gayathri and Me stood first and second in adding more books and 2 of them are very active and nearly 80% work completed by them. I thought of involving more wikimedians to make this work more sustained.
• We thought of publishing these catalogs in various other websites to make them more accessible. But we found that it is improbable to make publish in other websites and expect more accessibility than Wikipedia. So this improbable idea has been left over.

Other recommendations

If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

• I've written another version of this project report in telugu and published it in pustakam.net, famous telugu webzine on books - here is the link.

Next steps and opportunities

Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

Think your project needs renewed funding for another 6 months?

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Expense	Approved amount	Actual funds spent	Difference
Project leader Living expenses = Rs.96,000 Internet connectivity = Rs.8,000	104,000 Rupees	104,000 Rupees	0
Travel for edit-a-thon expenses (travel, etc) Travel from Hyd to TPG to Hyd, Hyd to VJY to Hyd, etc., = Rs.6,900 Catering for guests (Breakfast, Lunch, snacks, Tea) in 3 programs = Rs.1,800 Banners (total 3 banners), cheat-sheet, etc = Rs.1,200	10,000 Rupees	9,900 Rupees	100 Rupees
Bank transfer fees	300 Rupees	0 Rupees	300 Rupees
Total	114,300 Rupees	113,900 Rupees	400 Rupees

Remaining funds

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

• Yes. there are nearly Rs.400 unspent. Initially my banker said that there may be some extra charges for this money transfer, and indicated that may be Rs.300, but finally I could see they didn't charged me for it. so that Rs.300 is unspent. In edit-a-thons expenditure there is Rs.100 remained as unspent money.

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadminwikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

Confirmation of project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being an IEGrantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the IEG experience? Please share it here! I've learnt, enjoyed, honored to work on this grant as an IEG. Learnt a lot in the aspects of encouraging, channelizing volunteers, Working in odd times with ups and downs of the website, Conducting online & print publicity campaign, etc., Enjoyed during every step of project because that's just what I wanted to do and what change I wanted to see in telugu wiki environment. Doing what you love and what you believe is bliss. Respected by many people who believe in Open knowledge, Regional language computing, Telugu language lovers. Finally - I'm thankful for the telugu wikipedians for supporting my idea and contributing what they can, for grant making team of IEG for supporting me in many ways, and I'm grateful to everyone who supported me in growing my Idea into a substantial and fruitful work.