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Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Project WIN

< Wikipedia:WikiProject India
Project WIN

Small steps towards a big change

Project WIN in five bullet points
  1. Train, mentor and organize (new) editors and encourage them to participate in WikiProject India noticeboard-related and mailing list discussion
  2. Start a few small initiatives and revive Assessment drive; Collaboration of the Month or a few other initiatives;
  3. Encourage these editors by barnstars, Merchandise gifts (rarely, specially during competitions), and making sure that their best works are highlighted by Wikimedia blogs, social networking channels.
  4. Understand and try to solve projects'/editors' problems/channels and issues.
  5. Keep on doing the work.

Project WIN or WikiProject India Nurturing[1] is a project to improve and nurture the WikiProject India (Indian English Wikipedia) community. The project is almost entirely based on the belief that—

An organized community working together can perform much more efficiently than an unorganized one, and if we strengthen a community, it'll definitely improve the entire WikiProject (and also the Wikipedia).

The project will conduct a series of online editing events, and will try to revive a few initiatives and projects like Collaboration of the month.

Objectives

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The objectives of this project are—

  1. support and nurture the community;
  2. engage them in more organized Wikiwork, like WikiProject India article assessment drives, Collaboration of the Month, participation in deletion and other discussion etc;
  3. make sure that their best works are highlighted and recognized;

Ideological point of view

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This project was not started suddenly. We know that for a long time we were facing a number of issues: a number of our on-wiki projects failed, we failed to organize our community, there were not too many active participants in our noticeboard, many non-Indian editors continuously felt that Indic content is a grey area and we ourselves did not know what to do. So it was these necessities which forced us to think an initiative like this.

During the initial planning stage these were the ideological point of views (or more clearly this project was started keeping these things in mind).

  1. address the most critical issues first;
  2. assist and strengthen the real wiki workers;
  3. concentrate mainly (if not only) on online works (actual Wiki-editing) giving more and more focus on on-wiki editors training than workshops etc;
Financial
  1. avoid request grants or support from WMF or anyone unless it is very much needed; specially avoid large grant requests;
  2. avoiding all expenditures which are not urgently needed (requesting to go to a distant place and taking 2000 photographs for Wikimedia Commons may or may not be a good idea, but that should not be a project here);
  3. highest possible transparency in financial transactions and super-special care in reporting, documentation;

Challenges

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The challenges and difficulties are:

  1. Large but unorganized community: The English Wikipedia Indian community, but unorganized;
  2. No popular central discussion place:' The community does not have a popular central discussion place;
  3. Lack of participation in project works: In last couple of years a good number of initiatives have failed or faced difficulties due to lack of participation;

Definition of community

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Here "community" does not mean "only" a handful of people who attend Wikimedia events, seminar, workshops, but here "community" mainly means the large number of editors who generally don't participate in (or don't know about) village pump/noticeboard/mailing list discussions or Wikimedia events. Many of these editors often face difficulties or have questions but don't go to (or don't know about) Help Desks or IRCs. Now, this project will attempt to support and strengthen this larger Wikipedia community.

A central discussion place

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  WikiProject India
General info. (edit · changes)

Articles that need... assessment (3,022) (8,449) • attention (562) • creation • infoboxes (3,005) • maps (905) • photographs (11,086) • reassessment (32) • subprojects (59)

Departments (edit)
Archived Projects (edit)
India article statistics

This list is generated automatically every night around 3 AM UTC here.

India articles by quality and importance
Quality Importance
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
  FA 3 7 35 49 94
  FL 7 9 29 138 183
  A 1 2 2 2 7
  GA 27 62 178 467 1 735
B 134 455 881 1,743 1 160 3,374
C 99 887 2,302 10,168 763 14,219
Start 18 1,015 5,192 63,194 3 2,219 71,641
Stub 1 301 2,393 95,840 2 2,187 100,724
List 24 212 636 5,094 25 192 6,183
Category 18 42,210 42,228
Disambig 788 788
File 3 1,529 1,532
Portal 88 88
Project 208 208
Redirect 2 115 421 6,135 3,786 10,459
Template 5 6,394 6,399
NA 1 58 101 160
Draft 1 17 804 822
Assessed 316 3,066 12,070 182,931 55,939 5,522 259,844
Unassessed 1 1 98 2,900 3,000
Total 317 3,067 12,070 183,029 55,939 8,422 262,844
WikiWork factors (?) ω = 1,031,024 Ω = 5.40

This table is now up to date again.
It is updated by a tool on the toolserver; it will not work if the toolserver is
having problems. If this chart is showing much more than zero,
then the table will be updated slowly or not at all.

Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales says—

Wikipedia is something special. . . It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.

Similarly, to make a community more organized, we feel, it is absolutely necessary to have a place where "we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. "These are the two places which are generally used as the central meeting places in WikiProject India

In this Project WIN, our primary and the first work will be to bring more and more editors to our noticeboard (and mailing list). This will have the following benefits:

  • Central discussion place: The editors will get a place to discuss Indian-related topics or ask question;
  • Active watchers and India experts: We'll get more active watchers and India-experts in the board, which is badly needed at this moment;
  • Reaching more editors: It'll also help to reach a larger number of editors. It'll be very helpful, when the project will announce something or will start a new initiative.

Motivation

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It is very important to motivate and encourage editors or find them a reason to join initiatives and the noticeboard. And for this, the project has its own rewards and encouragement structure which includes—

  1. Barnstars.
  2. Merchandise gift (T-shirts, hoodies, badges, stickers etc.) in competition.
  3. Publicity and visibility of events and deserving editors;

(It does not include any financial reward)

Footnotes

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  1. ^ Call it either "Project WIN" or "WikiProject India Nurturing"
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