Submissions/Gujarati Wiki Community BIAS (Building, Integrating and Sustaining)

This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.

74

Title of the submission: Gujarati Wiki Community BIAS (Building, Integrating and Sustaining)

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): Presentation

Author of the submission: Dhaval Sudhanva Vyas

E-mail address: dsvyas@gmail.com

Username: Dsvyas/Dsvyas

Country of origin: United Kingdom

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): None

Personal homepage or blog: http://dsvyas.wordpress.com

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal): Gujarati Wikipedia has crossed the mark of 22,000 pages just recently. This is a journey travelled by the community. Being an active admin there on such a thriving and rapidly growing project, I have experienced a lot about community building. It's in fact not only about building the community, but also to keep it integrated and sustain the spirit within the community. When I performed my first edit in December 2007, there was no active user there and Gujarati Wikipedia had the article count was less than 300. Slowly after my joining, community started growing. Today in this just over 4 years' time, we have a strong community of more than 30 active users, with a few who joined wiki just after I did; the community that quickly reaches to a consensus; the community that has had difference of opinions but today is united; the community where everyone care about others. I will like to bring some of the cases that I dealt with. These were the sensitive issues somehow being different sociological groups involved. We have users from all the backgrounds, as Gujarati is a mother tongue of nearly 50 million people and one of the 50 most spoken languages of world. We have a representation of all the major religious groups and both genders as well, to say that we have at least a couple of active female contributors. Though the representation of female editors or ethnic minority groups is not proportionate, there are users from all walks of life. For building the community I have adopted various ways, conventional and non-conventional. BEing an only active admin on gu.wiki, I take it as my moral duty to keep the community integrated. We have started online web meetings on skype, so that users can verbally interact with eachother and we can have a virtual platform to share ideas, clear doubts, etc. Time to time challenges have come to face rigourous vandals, where community remained united and went on strengthening itself. I am going to share some stories of how conflicts arises in small and growing community, how they are resolved, and that shall tell the secret of building community. I will be even speaking about the efforts I have put in retaining the users and making the community sustainable.

Track: WikiCulture and Community / Research, Analysis, and Education

Length of presentation/talk: 25 Minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes (depending upon scholarship)

Slides or further information (optional): Will share later

Special request as to time of presentations: None

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 16:21, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
~Should be interesting to find out how you helped to build a Wikipedia from the ground up. Graham87 (talk)