CIS-A2K/Reports/CIS-A2K Quarterly Report 3/Odia

Overview

During this quarter CIS-A2K signed two MoUs with two educational institutes from Odisha for collaborative educational resource building and harnessing academic resources to enrich Odia Wikipedia, other Indic language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. It also organized few outreach in these institutions to assess the institutional framework for potential Wikipedia Education Programs. CIS-A2K supported Odia Wikipedia 10 (Odia Wikipedia's 10 year celebration), a two day long community-led event that was organized at Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) and Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal. Most of the active community members participated for this event that helped to plan for the further activities and how the community could support new editors. The community met executives from Eastern Media Limited and furthered discussions on free-licensed media release. They also met the commissioner and chief secretary of Department of Mass Education for free-licensed text book release, inclusion of Wikipedia in syllabus and inclusion of Wikipedia article links in publications by the department. Odia community organized another two day long event Odisha Dibasa 2014 (Odisha's statehood day). With CIS-A2K's explicit request, copyright of 14 books (13 in Odia and 1 in English) were migrated from "All rights reserved" to CC-BY-SA 3.0 license by the copyright holders. Both the events had huge media coverage and brought attention from various segments of the Odia speaking community in general, academic, scholar and research community in particular. An advanced Wikipedia training session was organized for the editors in which some of the experienced Wikimedians shared learning, demonstrated advanced tools, gadgets and brainstormed about the future activities. CIS-A2K's Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource were discussed with the community during various community meetups. The community also unanimously decided to focus on development of the experienced editors by forming two city based user groups in Bhubaneswar and Nalconagar.

Key Highlights

CIS-A2K signed two MoUs with Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (an educational institute for indigenous students from the east) and KIIT University (a deemed university offering engineering, management, law and humanities undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs) based in Bhubaneswar for collaborative educational resource building and harnessing academic resources to enrich Odia Wikipedia and other Indic Wikimedia projects. CIS-A2K also co-organized few outreach events in these institutions to assess the institutional framework for potential Wikipedia Education Programs. Experienced Wikimedians based locally helped as mentors.
Odia Wikipedia 10: CIS-A2K supported the community and engaged in the discussion about the need for open-licensed content, potential projects for free content release and implementing long term outreach like Wikipedia Education Program. During the event Wikimedians also visited Eastern Media Ltd. (EML) (Odia newspaper The Sambad, a radio station and a television channel are housed at EML) to discuss about releasing archived and commercially less viable text/audio/video content owned by EML under Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses. They met the also discussed about releasing government text books and adding links to Odia Wikipedia articles in publications released by the department of mass education with its chief commissioner. Read the Wikimedia blog report for more details.
Odisha Dibasa 2014 was organized by the community in which CIS-A2K played a key role in negotiating with three copyright holders: Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa trust to re-license Odia author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty's 11 books under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty to re-license 3 of their books (2 in Odia and 1 in English) under the same license. CIS-A2K also supported on the logistics, merchandize and financial end for the event. To highlight community's effort there was ample effort from the program to bring wide media coverage which has resulted in 8 print and 12 web coverage in 5 languages. The details of the event are captured as a Wikimedia blog.
Experienced Wikimedians conducted an advanced Wikipedia workshop on the second day of this event at the KIIT University, Bhubaneswar। There were discussions on WikiData, other advanced technical aspects; use of various gadgets, proper categorization, WikiLove feature, user rights modification, citation for biographies of living persons with secondary sources and copyright, issues with it and uploading images and other media files on Wikimedia Commons, notability, referencing and creating citations for the notable topics, work plan for the year, failure of program projects, collective learning and the dos and don'ts of community building.

Statistical analysis

Note: Please note that the statistics for Mar 2014 have not been published yet. For the purpose of creating these charts data points of the previous month (Feb 2014) were used for Mar 2014 too. Charts along with descriptions will be updated as soon as new data is published.

Total Editors

There has been more or less a steadiness in the growth in the total number of editors and not anything significant.

New Editors

It is important to note that there were not many activities during January and February for new editors apart from the on-wiki and social media support. However, two of the media coverage in newspapers boosted the creation of new editor accounts and edits.

Active Editors

During various important activities like Odia Wikipedia's 10th anniversary there is a significant growth in January in the number of active editors. There is decline in February though it more than the average of the previous months.

Very Active Editors

The total number of very active editors has remained in the range of 1-4 in the last one year. Though there is a decline in the numbers it is of very active editors from 3 to 2 in December - January and 2 to 1 in January - February, it is difficult to assess the future trends.

No. of Articles

There is a growth in total number of new articles created though it is significantly high. There might be a significant high growth for March as the activities went high.