Wikipedia Asian Month — 2016 iteration starts on 1 November

 

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Wikipedia Asian Month (WAM) is a month-long online edit-a-thon where the participants create or expand Asia-related articles on Wikipedia. The main rules of this initiative are: a) the articles must be created or expanded during the mentioned period (i. e. November), b) new articles must not be stubs and should be at least 3,000 bytes and around 300 words in length, c) the article must follow Wikipedia guidelines such as Neutral point of view, notability, verifiability, copyright etc.

The first iteration of Wikipedia Asian Month was conducted between 1-30 November 2015 and saw enthusiastic participation from Asian Wikipedia communities. These are some statistics from the last iteration of WAM:

• 1,286 editors from 43 different communities participated in 2015 edition of WAM. The following Indic Wikimedia communities participated in the challenge- Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

• 6,096 articles were created or expanded over-all, and of these 4,306 articles followed all the suggested rules.

• During the Asian Month, 42,067,774 bytes were added on Wikipedia.

• 190 new editors participated in this challenge.

Now after the successful first iteration, the organizers of Wikipedia Asian Month are all set to kick off the second iteration of the event. This year's WAM edition will be organized between 1–30 November 2016. Before the beginning of this event, we have taken an interview of Addis Wang, a primary organizer of the event.

CIS-A2K: So, you are all set for another edition of Wikipedia Asian Month. Are you excited?

Addis Wang: Yes. I’m excited to see our Asian community collaborate together once again and looking forward to make more contributions in this years’ edition.

CIS-A2K: Tell us a few things you learnt during the last edition of WAM? Are you going to  bring any changes this year?

Addis Wang: The most important thing we will change from the experience of last year is speeding up the postcard processing. We did not start collecting address until we had all the language communities finish the analysis of contributed articles. So this year, we will have multiple rounds of address collection to ensure most people receive their postcards by the end of the year. We will also ask local communities who are making the postcards to finish the process before the end of the November, and be prepared to send postcards in early December.

CIS-A2K: 2016 edition of WAM will start soon. How are the responses so far? Do you feel that this edition will be bigger than the earlier one?

Addis Wang: I think we will have a bigger Edit-a-thon in term of number of new articles, and number of editors participating. Supporting communities were comparatively less than the number of active editors during last WAM. Increasing the number of supporting communities is also one of our goals and we are working to get more communities involved.

CIS-A2K: That’s a good point. How are you going to support such communities?

Addis Wang: We provide easy set-up guideline so there is not much work needed to do to organize the Wikipedia Asian Month. We are also using Central Notice so there will be a good opportunity to get publicity, and opportunity to engage both old and new editors. Making and sending Wikimedia souvenirs could be difficult for many communities, but they can easily achieve these by joining the Wikipedia Asian Month.

CIS-A2K: Let’s talk about Indic Wikipedia communities. You saw very enthusiastic participation from Indic Wikipedia communities, is it not?

Addis Wang: Yes! As the one of the largest Wikimedia community in the Asia, and maybe the most diverse comunity in the world, Indic community is highly involved into the Wikipedia Asian Month since the idea was proposed during Wikimania 2015. In the last year edition, India is the country that received most postcards sent by Wikipedia Asian Month. Also, Wikipedian Asian Ambassadors of English Wikipedia, who created most articles during the Asian Month, are from India.

CIS-A2K: Thanks Addis for your time. We wish you all the best.

Addis Wang: Thank you.

 

Collaboration attribution: Tanveer Hasan

Image source: Wikimedia Commons