WikiProject India Nurturing/Work plan

Project WIN

These are the proposed Project WIN work plans/activities—

For the community

The Indian English Wikipedia community is very large, and editors from all over the world work on Indian articles/content. Unlike a few other Indian communities, the Indian English community is unorganized. Thousands of WikiProject India articles are edited everyday. Our attempt will be organizing the community. To organize the community we'll do these things:

Community organization

Communication: We'll communicate and keep in touch with as many as editors possible. We'll communicate them on their talk pages (or the talk pages or help pages where they are communicating or asking for help.
WikiProject India noticeboard and mailing lists: We'll encourage editors to participate in WikiProject India, activities and discussions (eg. noticeboard, policy or deletion discussions). This is the WikiProject India noticeboard — the central and the main noticeboard where we talk on WikiProject India-related things on-Wiki. This is also the noticeboard where editors from other WikiProjects come to seek help from "India-experts". Unfortunately the noticeboard is not a very active one. Regularly questions and threads remain unanswered. We have studied and found that there not too many regular participants in this noticeboard. So, it is very important that we try to encourage editors to regularly participate in the noticeboard discussions. We may introduce special barnstars or competition like "Noticeboard star of the month" if needed. Mailing list is also a very important channel. The things mentioned about #WikiProject Indian noticeboard, are applicable for the mailing lists too (except the competition).
Welcoming committee: There is a Welcoming committee on the English-Wikipedia. Our attempt will be to— either create a welcoming committee task force under the WikiProject India to welcome promising new editors; or communicating/co-ordinating with the Welcoming committee to find out ways to get more attention towards this sub-continent editors or both.
Editor retention project: Similar to the Welcoming committee, there is another project WikiProject Editor Retention. Here too, we'll— either create an editor retention task force under the WikiProject India; or communicating/co-ordinating with the team to find out ways to get more attention towards this sub-continent editors; or both
Barnstar awarding team: Barnstar is a custom on Wikipedia to reward editors for their hard work and diligence. But there is an issue: a good number of editors (specially those who prefer to work silently) do not get this reward sometimes. We'll try to make sure that deserving editors get rewarded.

Addressing gender-gap issue

We'll also try address the gender-gap issue. The English Wikipedia article on Gender gap informs—

Gender bias on Wikipedia, also known as the gender gap or gender imbalance, is the finding that between 84 and 91 percent of Wikipedia editors are male, which leads to systemic bias.

The situation is more or less similar (or worse) in the Indian WikiProject. We'll try to address this issue in two ways

Existing female editors: Our general ways of encouraging editors (eg. welcoming, barnstar, editor retention works) will be same for the female editors too.
New female editors: We'll contact various institutions and explore (their) institutional partnerships to try to get new female editors on board.

Eliminating Indophobia or Anti-Indian sentiment

Several times a few editors talked about Indophobia. People have felt or discussed that they were being mistreated as they were from the Indian sub-continent. Please see Wikipedia:Systemic bias. Unfortunately there is not an clear study or document on this, and all the discussions have been done haphazardly.

Content improvement

Reviving or improving existing projects

There are a few projects/departments like [[:en:Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Assessment|assessment drive], ]collaborations of the month, deletion sorting (India). We'll participate and encourage editors to participate in these projects and activities.

Edit-a-thon and other events

We'll organize edit-a-thon, article creation week and other theme based editing events.

Globalization of local policies

There are a few policies like en:WP:INDICSCRIPT, decided by the Indian community and applicable only on Indian content. Now, it was found that it is very difficult to follow local-level or project-specific guidelines and policies. Our attempt will be to—

globalize some of these guidelines policies; or
find out other ways so that these guidelines become more impactive.

Resources

We'll attempt to create movement resources in 2 ways—

Help pages, support pages, essays, blog posts

We'll create or improve help pages or support pages specifically for Indians. We'll also write essays/user essays and blog posts discussing activities, achievements and issues faced by the community

Library network

During India Community Consultation, October 2014, it was proposed to create Library support network - for print only resources across India. Please see 1.1.11 here. This library network might be very helpful for us to organize the existing community and involve new editors in our project. We'll attempt to get very actively involved in this project. However, without support of WMF and other chapters, it'll be almost impossible for us to do this all alone.

The Wikipedia Library, Resource exchange

We'll promote The Wikipedia Library and Resource exchange among Indian editors, and will try to make sure that more and more editors are benefited from this projects.