Two-year priorities, goals, and milestones for WMF in India

The global priorities of Wikimedia are as follows:

1. Increase Reach

2. Improve Content Quality

3. Increase Participation

4. Stabilise Infrastructure

5. Encourage Innovation

The interplay between the above priorities have been visualised as below:

Short term relation between priorities; aimed for preventing the participation crisis

Mid term relation between priorities; aimed for a stable Wikimedia

Long term relation between priorities; aimed for a steady balanced Wikimedia.

(Pics: Saeed.Veradi)

These pictures are different for the specific case of India. Notably, the feedback from participation to the remaining

factors is pertinent even in the short term. Content, participation, and readership would be the top priorities in that order.

Pic: User:Dschwen

For India, for each of the priority areas, there would be goals arrived from data. Some goals will span multiple priority

areas. Following will be a starter set of goals:

1. Wikipedias in all the 22 Eighth Schedule languages1

2. Mobile, offline (CD and print) availability of at least eight projects

1 Bodo, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Manipuri and Santali in incubation

3. 5 Indian language Wiktionaries, 5 Indian language Wikisources, 3 Indian language Wikinews projects, and 2

Indian language Wikipedias should reach the top 15 rankings globally

4. Top-7 and bottom-3 Wikis should move one notch higher in the three-phase early lifecycle

5. Indian community and content on English Wikipedia should grow by 300%. Content from the top-5 Indic

Wiktionaries should be added in English Wiktionary and linked.2

6. The reputation of Wiki projects (manifest in press mentions, search rankings, academic and blog citations)

should improve by 300% in India.

7. Implementation of 4 GLAM projects

8. Toolserver for India, dedicated MediaWiki community working on India-specific problems, one globally

applicable software extension to MediaWiki ecosystem

9. One innovation in process or interwiki collaboration

10. One innovation in project funding

11. Demographic spread – improving women’s participation to at least 20% nationally

12. Regional spread – studying Bishnupriya Manipuri Wikipedia and using the findings to improve at least two

wikis from the highly literate parts of North-East India3

13. Donation targets using data extrapolation

14. Successful bid for Wikimania 2013

What are the factors to be considered in picking pilot projects?

The six Ps:

* Performance (how full) – the current health metrics

* Potential (how empty) – the above relative to the online literate

population

* Possibilities (opportunism) – unforeseen opportunities

* Press or imperativeness – criticality of the condition, will it die?

* People – Community volunteers availability

* Phase – initial analysis on data from eight wikis (Tamil, Bengali,

Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi, Marathi, Kannada and Malayalam) shows a 3-

phase growth cycle. Intervention that vaults a Wiki from one to the next

phase is desirable.

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Method of operation:

Different wikis demand different approaches. Wikis in early stages can use a funnel strategy4 while established wikis

can benefit from orchestrated outreach programmes. Fledgling wikis under incubation need a “bamboo forest seeding

strategy.” However, for each pilot, some steps will be common viz. identifying the ecosystem players like content

donors, funding sources, technical support, finding a regional anchor, devising a three-month to six-month plan, and

implementing it.

Exploratory: WMF in India for beyond India

2 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:EDIT (reciprocal entry making provision)3 Not all north-easter states are similarly endowed4 http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proposal:SEO_Market_and_Contributor_Funnel&oldid=74248