Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Cycle 3/Odia Wikimedians User Group Salon
Information
[edit]This salon was organized on July 30 by the Odia Wikimedians User Group which brought together all the active Wikimedians from the Indian city of Bhubaneswar, three Wikimedian-coordinators, and three non-Wikimedian experts that have contributed largely on community engagement, media research, and publication.
Making Wikimedia community a more inclusive place by bringing in more students, veterans especially educators, opening the influx of knowledge from other language Wikimedia community members are some of the areas most participant unanimously aspired to change.
- Sections
- A - Direction: Improving the content quality by regular engagement with the community—we have to care for our readers that are seeking important and factual information on Wikimedia projects.
- B - When new contributors always tend to be in a hurry to create more content, existing and experienced ones always have to redirect them to better the quality of their contribution.
- Priorities
- 1 - There are many local challenges related to technological infrastructure (Wikipedia editing app is buggy and crashes even more for many non-English Wikipedias), partnerships (Wikimedia communities and affiliates are yet to partner with the government departments that have resources but are creating more mess by adopting proprietary and outdated technology).
- 2 - Relicensing government websites so that we can get (reliable) data directly both as source and citations
| Section | Priority | Summary Statement | Overall sentiment | Keyword or phrase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 1 | Need for app development for editing Wikimedia projects: Local technical challenges like problematic Wikipedia app needs to be fixed as a significant portion use mobile devices to edit. Neither the official Wikipedia app on Android nor the Desktop mode in phone is stable. | supportive | App editing challenge |
| B | 2 | Low quality Wikipedia content because there are only a handful of citable sources that exist on the Internet when it comes to regional topics. Partnership with mediahouses, publishers and other content producers is a top priority | concern | Grow citable resources of local relevance |
| A | 2 | Building educational resources for new contributors, welcoming back inactive old contributors, and diversifying the community by bringing veterans (people who have access to educational resources, computer, and are retired from jobs) | supportive | Stronger community support |
Detailed notes (Optional)
[edit]If you have detailed notes in addition to the summary, you may add them here. For example, the notes may come from an in-person discussion or workshop. If your discussion happened on a wiki or other The participants—Wikimedians, Wikimedian-facilitators, and ie.
Observations
[edit]The participants—Wikimedians, Wikimedian-facilitators, and invited experts—together participated in a brainstorming exercise. They documented the findings in three major areas—Challenges, Current state, and Future plans.
| Areas | Challenges | Current state | Future plans |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tech | Building new tools and templates | Many essential templates are yet to be imported, need for special templates for some local content | Developing OCR |
| Rendering issues | Multiple standards are in practice across fonts that lead to rendering issues, many mobile devices do not have Odia support yet | ||
| Know-how about other regional Wikimedia projects not available in Odia | |||
| Mobile editing is extremely troublesome | Odia and most Indic tools have serious issues with Wikipedia app while editing | Different app for Odia and/or other Indic-language WIkimedia projects | |
| Input tools | Loading time is slow, UI is not new user friendly | ||
| Community | Low quality articles in Wikipedia is drowning community's name | % stub articles really high | Collaborate with state archive and other news paper archives to increase Odia-language citations for Odisha/Odia-related content that are not covered well in national/global media |
| Active contributors not growing substantially | The number of active contributors across projects remain more or less the same except exceptional hikes during campaigns/editathons | Learning from other language communites and diversifying community by bringing veterans | |
| Awareness | inactiveness of some admins | Supported encouragement for users | |
| Communications gap in community | Reaching to new authors for new books | ||
| Social media engagements | Relicensing governement websites so that we can get data drectly | ||
| Support to existing active community members | Contacting book collectors | ||
| Home-coming of old contruibutors | |||
| #images in articles | Activity of contributors declining | Cover different areas and follow up activities | |
| Content | Lack of online/other resources of local importance | Historical resources of local importace like history Odia cinema not available | Updating policies with time |
| Lack of high quality instructional videos for new users | Currently videos do not have voiceovers | Documenting community's work | |
| Quality of content | A lot of projects of local importance are not documented | Categorize and enrich wikipedia content by readers | |
| Growth in # articles | Low basic Wikimedia policy training for Wikimedians | Collborating with potentials stake holder | |
| Many projects in incubation | 1-2 Incubator projects have enough interest | ||
| Partnership | Official redtape | Permissions not available for photography in GLAM institutions | Partnership with govt organisatioin (For preloading Kiwix and other free software to meritrious students) |
| Difficult to explain why community's work is important | Increasing the number of readers / number of views of pages | Partnership with GLAM organizations (Odia newspapers have collection from 1965) | |
| Collaboration with private and government entities | Partnership with local mediahouses for media equipments to create video tutorials | ||
| Others | Computer literacy | Bringing a language parity in Wikipedia's content as some articles might not be written in a language easy enough for general public | |
| Social media | |||
| Transcribing old manuscripts |