Submissions/Moving the needle forward on Wikimedia Indic language contributions

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no. 1058

Title of the submission

Moving the needle forward on Wikimedia Indic language contributions

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Alolita Sharma (WMF)

E-mail address

asharmawikimedia.org

Username

Alolitash

Country of origin

United States of America

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Wikimedia Foundation

Personal homepage or blog

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Alolitas

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

The largest Indic language Wikipedia is the Hindi Wikipedia with only about 110,000 articles. Yet there are 200+ million native speakers of Hindi worldwide. Every Indic language Wikipedia repeats the same saga of minimal representation in the online world versus the millions of native users for each language.

So what is the “magic mix” that drives contributors in Indic communities to engage and stick around on Wikimedia projects. Online open knowledge and open source communities share many common characteristics which drive collaboration and contribution. They share similar problems of engagement too.

This talk will examine factors that motivate contribution in Indic open knowledge communities including technology (language tools and assets such as fonts and input methods), economic, education, gender and cultural influences. It will also look at challenges that exist to initial and sustained engagement that impact Indic language contributions. Case studies of Devanagari based communities such as Hindi, Marathi, Rajasthani, Newari, Nepali, Bihari (Bhojpuri, Maithili), Kashmiri and Sanskrit will be reviewed for motivations, challenges and solutions (what has worked) to grow contributions. Sustainable solutions including building healthy contributor communities that are incentivized to engage as well as measuring successful engagement will also be discussed.

Track

WikiCulture & Community

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional): Slides

Special requests

Interested attendees

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Alolita Sharma
Runab WMF (talk) 04:44, 20 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Kartik Mistry
Ocaasi (talk) 23:34, 7 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Anish Patil