2019:Community Growth/Growing Wikidata in Emerging Communities (India as a case study)

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Community Growth/Growing Wikidata in Emerging Communities (India as a case study)

Description

Wikidata is the youngest of all Wikimedia projects but it has gained a lot of attention due to the nature of the project and its importance in future technologies. Being one of the youngest projects, many of the emerging communities don’t have strong Wikidata presence. The same used to be the case with India a couple of years back.

Before 2017, there were only a few Wikimedians in India who had knowledge of Wikidata and were actively contributing to the project. More than 70% of the existing Wikimedians didn’t know about editing Wikidata. After a series of workshops across India by Asaf Bartov, creating awareness about the project among the Indian community. Later on, several outreach efforts have been taken up by individual Wikimedians, affiliates and CIS-A2K. WikiProject India and its portals, and its ally projects tried to pull of efforts to improve content around specific topics but were only limited to a few users. In spite of several outreach activities and continuously showcasing them to grow interest, we are still struggling to establish an active contributor community.

The session will retrospect and share our learnings on the background of activities, the problems faced and the ways adopted to overcome them (also welcome suggestions from the participants at this points), and feature some of the unique activities and experiments by the Indic Wikidata contributors. We will also speak a little about our plans for the future.

Relationship to the theme

The organisers of the community growth space believe that the space will address the following Sustainable Development Goals:

• SDG4 Quality Education: Wikidata editors will have a better understanding of data modelling and breaking down information into bits. Contributing to Wikidata helps students gain essential digital literacy in the 21st century.
• SDG10 Reduced Inequalities: Wikidata has broader notability guidelines than Wikipedia. So bringing underrepresented communities, groups, and knowledge, becomes comparatively easy.
• SDG 17 Partnership for Goals: Wikidata opens up to a new track of partnerships, such as libraries, metadata repositories etc.

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

Relationship to the space

The organisers of the space and the community have identified a number of topics they wish to address in this space. Please explain how your proposal its into these topic areas. As a reminder, the proposed topics are listed at 2019:Community Growth

This session will address the topics of the Growth space in the following manner: The session on growing the Wikidata community, with focus on India, and the challenges faced by us in the process. We will also open the floor of comments and suggestions by the community on this matter.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

• Participants will be able to build a broader understanding of various outreach activities that can be planned around Wikidata.
• Participants will gain knowledge to exercise similar efforts in their communities, especially in emerging communities.
• Participants will gain knowledge about the challenges they might face if they want to develop an active editing community on a project.

Session leader(s)

• Krishna Chaitanya Velaga (User:KCVelaga) – kcvelagagmail.com
• User:Bodhisattwa – bodhisattwa.rgkmcgmail.com

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Conference presentation

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room: a classroom with projector + screen
• Audience: People interested in the outreach of Wikidata to new contributors.
• Recording: Yes
• Time requested: 45 min

Relationship with the organisers of the space

The organisers of the community growth space wish to provide any necessary support to presenters and participants that they may need and also wish to have an active role in shaping the content of the space to maximise the benefit of all attendees. Please let us know if you would appreciate any help, and if you consent to constructive suggestions from the organiser team that would allow the largest amount of people to share and benefit from each other's contributions.

• I would be interested in receiving help in shaping my submission: YES.
  • In particular, I would need the following type of help or advice: none
• I consent to the organisers of the space contacting me to discuss alternative ways to present my knowledge (for example, merging two proposals into a common presentation, a panel debate instead of a lightning talk, etc.), or ways to modify and improve my proposal (for example by ensuring a gender diversity on panels) : YES
• If my proposal is not selected for a presentation, I would be interested in presenting my proposal in the form of a poster in the Community Growth space: NO
• I consent to my proposal being proposed to organisers of other spaces if it would be a good cross-over topic or if it fits better into the other space's scope: YES