Draft Recommendation #5: Develop innovative, community-based ways to bring Wikimedia "home"
Draft Recommendation #5: Develop innovative, community-based ways to bring Wikimedia "home"
Utarshraj Atmaram [[1]] was so inspired by the Britain Loves Wikipedia project that he went ahead and set up this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_India/India_Loves_Wikipedia.
Getting Indian Wikipedians (and potential Wikipedians) involved in a fun, interesting and practical exercise such as this is an excellent way forward. One of the big problems with being Indian and being a Wikipedian is that there's not enough on Wikipedia and it's sister projects that reflects our immediate physical world. A New Yorker, for instance, would instantly feel at home by the sheer depth, range and quality of information on/around New York City that is available. Not so for a user from an average Indian city. To a large extent this is chicken-and-egg; to some extent it's because of a relatively more prevalent internet and a different history of interaction with the internet in rich countries as opposed to not-so-rich ones. But - to mix metaphors - someone needs to set the ball rolling, and it has to be us.
Obviously, there's no sense in pigeon-holing Indian Wikipedians to topics that are explicitly "Indian." Yet, there is real interest among many to contribute on topics that are, and there is a way in which we as a community can facilitate this. Adding photographs to Wikimedia Commons is just one such way. Projects can be devised that tap geographical identification (increasing information on cities in India, or specific states, among other ideas). Projects can be equally about getting people with a common professional purpose together to describe their world (doctors, historians, nature enthusiasts, etc.) or about having people with an interest in archival literature find out-of-copyright texts and add them to Wikisource. The possibilities are limitless.
Developing innovative, community-based ways to bring Wikimedia "home" could be something that an Indian chapter integrates into it's broad mission, but it's also something that the Wikipedian community at large could take up at any point, precisely in the manner described earlier.