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Odia Wikimedians User Group/Annual Report/2021-2022

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Executive Summary

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This annual report includes the updates on strategic plans, initiatives undertaken and the impact of the same by the Odia Wikimedians User Group (ODW) between Jun 2021 - May 2022. This report only highlights the current members' direct contributions towards the Odia-language Wikimedia projects (currently Odia Wikipedia, Odia Wikisource and Odia Wiktionary) and indirect contributions, through other Wikimedia projects and to the larger Wikimedia movement, that are tied to the Odia language or topics related to the Indian state of Odisha. Individual contributions not related to the topics above might not be fully captured here considering the limited scope of this report. Note that Odia is spoken by nearly 45 million people that largely reside in the Indian state of Odisha and the Odia-speaking diaspora in India and abroad.

Active editors of Odia Wikipedia during Jun 2021 - May 2022 that saw an average number of 13 active editors (with over 5 edits in a month). Some of the spikes can be seen that are a direct impact of edit-a-thons.
monthly) that saw an average number of 13 active editors (with over five edits in a month). Some of the spikes can be seen that are a direct impact of edit-a-thons.

This year saw major institutional collaborations -- one with the provincial government and another with a digital archive, an increase in focus on COVID-19 and health emergency-related articles, organization and participation in several edit-a-thons among others.

Initiatives

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  • Institutional collaboration led to scanning of 101 titles containing several Public Domain books [more in report]
ODW collaborated with Srujanika, a Bhubaneswar-based nonprofit which had digitized over a million pages of printed Odia-language text by 2017 apart from contributing over three decades for promoting popular science among children and adolescents. A scanner was lent to Srujanika by CIS-A2K through a request from the User Group and Wikimedians coordinated the scanning of 101 titles (7,727 pages in total). The books not only got uploaded to the Internet Archive thanks to the public.resources.org and their Servants of Knowledge project in Bengaluru, the bibliographic data is also available on Wikidata (see an example) so that Wikipedians can use the same for citing by using templates like Cite Q. Books that are in Public Domain will also be used on the Odia Wikisource. Most books include topics related to popular science and social sciences among others. There are also 12 volumes of a popular children's magazine, all from 1955, that was scanned.
  • Release of bilingual COVID-19 Dashboard by the Odisha State Government under Creative Commons License
Based on input from the Odia Wikimedians User Group, the Odisha State Government relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License the COVID-19 Dashboard indicating data and charts related to the essential information about COVID-19. The portal not only has aggregate information about the status quo of COVID-19, vaccination information, access to treatment centres and test results in both English and Odia, but also data about all the 30 districts (administrative divisions) of Odisha.
  • Focus on COVID-19 and overall health-related content
Odia Wikipedia has played a remarkable role in making both locally-relevant health emergency information and medicine-related content available during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, the article with the most comprehensive information about COVID-19 in Odisha has 15,535 words at the time of reporting. During this reporting duration, there has also been significant content growth around COVID-19 and other medicine-related topics.
Odia Wikipedia saw active community participation while returning to the 2022 edition of the annual Feminism and Folklore edit-a-thon. Five Wikimedians created 55 new articles. Most of these articles were biographies of notable women helping bridge the gender gap on Odia Wikipedia.
The Odia Wikipedia community participated in the 2021 Wikipedia Asian Month edit-a-thon. However, the event did not see wider participation and only 11 articles were created during the contest.
Organized by CIS-A2K, two Odia Wikimedians participated and created content related to Mahatma Gandhi during this edit-a-thon.
Odia Wikipedia saw strong community participation in this South Asia-level edit-a-thon contest where six editors created 79 articles, mostly related to notable women from South Asia. This also remains the sprint with the largest number of articles created.

Additional updates

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  • Planning for in-person Wikimania 2022 led to an in-person gathering of the members of the Odia Wikimedians User Group and the Santali Wikimedians User Group in August 2022, right after the reporting period.[1]
  • Odia was included in the Citation Hunt Tool around the 1Lib1Ref Campaign to help flag many articles lacking citations to the editors so that they can add citations from verifiable sources.[2]
  • The number of pronunciations of Odia words reached 55,000.[3][4]

References

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  1. ↑ Team, Wikimania Core Organizing (2022-08-09). "Join Wikimania 2022 in person". Diff (in en-US). Retrieved 2022-09-04. 
  2. ↑ Fontenelle, Giovanna (2022-05-11). "The May round for 1Lib1Ref is back with a more diverse campaign and even more languages!". Diff (in en-US). Retrieved 2022-09-04. 
  3. ↑ Panigrahi, Subhashish (2022-04-25). "Building a Public Domain Voice Database for Odia". Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2022 (Virtual Event, Lyon France: ACM): 1331–1338. ISBN 978-1-4503-9130-6. doi:10.1145/3487553.3524931. 
  4. ↑ Panigrahi, Subhashish (2022-03-10). "Building a 50,000 pronunciation data repository in the Odia language". Diff (in en-US). Retrieved 2022-09-04. 

In news

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