Bengali Wikipedia Meetup – Kolkata

On October 11th, 2015 (Sunday) happened Bengali Wikipedia Meetup at Oxford Bookstore Kolkata. This meetup started around 11 am and ended around 7 pm, community members and others were on present that day. It was a great discussion  lots of topic  discuss in a perfect way.  Attendees were Bodhisattwa Mandal, Arindam Maitra, Kalyan Sarkar, Biswarup Ganguly, Jayanta Nath, Rudra Pratap Sinha, Arnab Dutta, Rangan Datta, Sandip Sarkar, Santanu Chandra, Sujay Chandra, Sukanta Pal, Sumita Roy Dutta and Tito Dutta.

We started informal discussions then slowly slowly all participants came at venue. After that we discussed lots of topics. In this meetup many important point came out. I would like to highlight some topic in brief.

GLAM Project: 

Rangan da Started with discussing Glam scope in Kolkata. He talked on St. John’s Church 

Jayantanath noted Kolkata,  Bengal related articles are unexplored on both English and Bengali Wikipedia. 

Social media and documentation: Jayanta da suggested documenting stuff.

OCR SESSION: 

Jayanta  taught and discussed OCR using on Wikipedia and its usage. Explains how to use Google OCR by converting PDF files into PNG by Adobe Acrobat Writer and then uploading the PNG files on Google OCR. Furthermore, Jayanta explains how Wikisource works and how it differs from Wikipedia. The first scanned file on Bengali Wikisource with validation was bengali novel Chander Pahar. Jayanta explains how to update with new editions of new books when he answered to Bodhisatta’s question. Any author who has died before 1965, their works can be used in Wikisource and is copyright free, said Jayanta and also elaborated on Public domain.

AWB:

Jayanta after explaining OCR, he describes about AWB and bots. He describes why bot is necessary, however, why it should not be used in typo fixing. He explains the the difference between semi-automated and automated tools. He shows how to download and use it on Linux/Ubuntu using Wine on virtual box. He shows vividly how to use it on Windows XP/7, on Bengali Wikipedia. Furthermore, he explains how to automatically save pages using AWB.

Edit-a-thon: 

Bodhisatta suggested to conduct once in a month or two offline edit a thon, the topic would be selected earlier, before the edit a thon start. Kalyan noted, Edit a thon to multiple the number of new users will be a net positive. Arnab Dutta and Bodhisattwa will enlist the dates of possible online editathons.

Wikipedia Asian Month – Announced by Bodhisattwa , meta link shown.

Wiki conference India 2016 :

Bidding process started, announced by Bodhisattwa, asked if Kolkata community is interested. Jayanta Nath and Santanu Chandra disagreed. Rudra and Tito wanted to start a bid. Community was silent or not interested.

Assessment process:

Partha Sarathi Banerjee discussed a new assessment system for Bengali Wikipedia, Community was asked to look into the page and discuss accordingly. Few points came out. Kalyan Sarkar suggested to create sub pages of the assessment pages, to which Partha Sarathi agreed. Idea of having Images in articles as criteria of high quality was discarded. Partha Sarathi was asked to carry on the work.

Commons tools: 

Biswarup-da showed usage of following Commons tools – Commonist and Vicuna. He also showed his panorama uploads in Commons.

Creation of blog for Bengali Wikipedia – point of contact, regular blogging – Sukanta has been given the responsibility Card.

Tanmay bir gave some proposal those are related with the outreaching.  He proposed that we have to organise workshop and seminar with colleges and universities. In that case we have to get down some step to cooperate with istitutional frame. He also added that the workshop and seminar are also important out side the west bengal like Jarhkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Andaman and Tripura because a large number of Bengali inhabitants are living there.  his proposals are  

1.       Bengali Wiki campus 

                                    a. Calcutta university, Education Deptt. Alipore campus

                                    b.Manbhum college, Purulia

                                    c. Shilllong womnes’ college, Meghalaya

                                    d. Tinshukia  Colege, Assam

                                     e. Cotton college/University, Assam

                                     

2. International level seminar, workshop & meet up in collaboration with Bangladesh community

                                    a. Shidhu Kanhu Birsha University, Purulia

3.  Bengali wiki island

                                    a. A five days program of seminar, workshop & photo venture  in

                                    Andaman Nicobar Island. 

Lastly  he talked about  the necessity to complete the style of manual for Bengali  wiki’s articles, that is necessary to keep a high standard. Photographs clicked by Biswarup Ganguly.

At the end of the day it was fruitful meetup, lots of thing discussed through this meetup. It will helps community to grow in a perfect way and also creating a road map of future project. Thanks a lot each one of you for making this event grand successful. More pictures you can find here and commons.

Hope you enjoyed reading my blog 🙂

Cheers!

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