Srikanth, I find it a bit difficult to believe that the reason you said is
the only reason why English editting stopped. It must be a combination of
many things-
* Retirement and reduction of editting by long term editors
* For some reason, the same pleasure no longer felt in editting.
* Hostile atmosphere, lots of rules & edit-warring.
* Switching part of effort to Indic, Commons, GLAM, Outreach etc.
* Lesser recruitment of newbies.
etc
Anyway, whatever be the causes, I think you and I and all of us agree that
we need to make WikiProject India a happening place again.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan <
parakara.gh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hisham,
> Do note, we had ALL that till two years ago.
> Since the offline meetups have begun, a lot of English editors have now
> reduced editint to concentrate on outreach activities and all.
> --Re,
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Hisham <his...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Nov 28, 2011, at 9:26 AM, Ashwin Baindur wrote:
>>
>> This is a letter to all Indian editors of the English Wikipedia
>> requesting discussion, cooperation and help.
>>
>> Recently I was asked to give a three to four minute presentation on the
>> state of WikiProject India on English Wikipedia for the session on state of
>> Indic Wikipedias at the recently concluded WikiConference in Mumbai. At
>> first I thought nothing about the matter, but as I was compiling the
>> report, I came across statistics which would horrify any of us.
>>
>> To begin with, as of time of writing this post, WikiProject India has a
>> total of 90,021 articles. This is a very large number and second only to
>> Hindi Wikipedia's 100,588 articles. Since all these English articles cover
>> only India or some aspect of its geography, history, culture or its people,
>> this set of 90,000+ articles is important to all Indians, representing the
>> largest core of knowledge about India on any Wikipedia project.
>>
>> But all of this is not high quality stuff. User:Svick on English
>> Wikipedia provides a useful service to WikProjects on English Wikipedia. He
>> provides a WikiProject-wise listing of articles which have improvement tags
>> such as {{unreferenced}}, {{cleanup}}, {{copyedit}} and so on. In his
>> report for WikiProject India, at the following url:
>>
>>
>> http://toolserver.org/~svick/CleanupListing/CleanupListingByCat.php?project=India
>>
>> you will find that of the 79435 articles in this project which were
>> assessed by Svick, a total of 52077 articles or 65.6 % are marked for
>> cleanup, with 86271 issues in total. These are tagged with 82 different
>> types of tags, the most populous being :
>>
>> * Articles with unsourced statements (6815)
>> * Articles lacking reliable references (1989)
>> * Articles needing additional references (4840)
>> * Articles lacking sources (8970)
>> * BLP articles lacking sources (1297)
>> * Articles needing cleanup (2751)
>> * Articles containing potentially dated statements (9317)
>> * All articles needing coordinates (14571)
>> * Articles to be expanded (1020)
>>
>> Besides this, there are 40,338 articles unassessed for importance and
>> 20,527 for quality, making a backlog of 60,865 assessments.
>>
>> In addition, of the 90,000+ articles, there are 43,843 stubs and 10,986
>> start class articles. All these need to be developed in time also.
>>
>> Besides these are a very large number of cryptic articles, articles
>> pertaining to India but not tagged on the talk page with the WikiProject
>> banner. The articles themselves sometimes need more cleanup tags than are
>> marked at present.
>>
>> You may have read Sven Manguard's special opinion editorial in the
>> Signpost some time ago
>>
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-10-31/Opinion_essay
>>
>> wherein he has drawn attention to the hundreds of thousands of articles
>> needing cleanup and improvement on Wikipedia as a whole. That is exactly
>> the issue with WikiProject India, as of now.
>>
>> To me it appears that - Something needs to be done URGENTLY.
>>
>> My own suggestion is that this can easily be tackled if all of us do a
>> little bit every day. Many hands make light work. There are about 450
>> active editors listed on the WikiProject members page. If each of us
>> decided to do just one cleanup task each day, then we can do away with
>> 1,64,500 odd problems in a year. Over time, these issues will fall to
>> negligible levels.
>>
>> Please reply to this thread with your views. Firstly, do you agree with
>> me. Is there a problem or am I sensationalising the case? What exactly are
>> the issues and how do we resolve them. Can we as Indians rise to the
>> challenge and bring down these backlogs to manageable levels. Please give
>> us any ideas, inputs, insights or critiques that may occur to you.
>>
>> Many thanks for your note, Ashwin. I think this is a really important
>> discussion and I agree wholeheartedly with you about the need to do
>> something, and the need to do it urgently!
>>
>> I notice your initiative to Collaboration of the Month on a select set of
>> nominated articles - and that's fantastic. That's exactly the kind of
>> stuff that needs to be done.
>>
>> Here are few thoughts that I had
>>
>>
>> - We need to create a sense of community and collaboration. It would
>> really be nice if as many interested editors as possible sing up. One
>> comment I've heard from some wikimedians is that there isn't enough
>> collaborative editing. Can we create some vehicle for this? For
>> instance,
>> can we take some time out in community meetups and do a little bit for one
>> or more of these articles? Can we create some kind of mini-events
>> equivalent to hackathons? For instance, can we create an Edit Utsav every
>> (just throwing this out as an example) on Sunday afternoons every week?
>> - We need to make a start - no matter how small Even if you choose
>> to do 2 articles per month for Collaboration of the Month, that's great
>> and
>> we should take it from there and slowly build up.
>> - We need to create excitement and momentum. For this to happen, we
>> need to be generous in our celebration. I think every article that
>> interested editors work on as part of your Collaboration of the Month
>> should be celebrated - on this mailing list, on the WP:INDIA talk page, on
>> various social handles (let's shamelessly exploit Tinu's vast fan
>> following
>> here) and maybe even in the press.
>> - We need to have something to work towards (in your parlance, a
>> beachhead... :-)). I have an idea. There are a bunch of discussions
>> happening on various offline initiatives. One challenge that these will
>> face will be to select a reasonable set of acceptable quality articles on
>> India. I don't know what that number should be or how long it should take
>> - but whatever the determinations are on both of these, what if you have
>> these work with the offline initiative (which I also know is also very
>> dear
>> to your heart.)
>> - We need to magnify an already big message. One common refrain I've
>> heard from many who are interested in editing Wikipedia is the equivalent
>> of "everything is covered; I don't know what to edit". Asking folks in
>> India to edit about India is a powerfully relevant message - and one that
>> they are likely to intuitively connect with. ..and as you've outlined,
>> there is no shortage of articles - many of great importance / relevance.
>> Maybe this could be a message covered in every outreach sessions that
>> community folks undertake? [Edit] India!
>>
>>
>> In all of this, do let me know if there is anything we can do to help and
>> we'll do our best.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> hisham
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
> Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
>
>
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