Wikipedia:WikiProject India/Project WIN

P roject   WIN Small steps towards a big change

Project WIN or WikiProject India Nurturing is a project to improve and nurture the WikiProject India (Indian English Wikipedia) community. The project is almost entirely based on the belief that— "An organized community working together can perform much more efficiently than an unorganized one, and if we strengthen a community, it'll definitely improve the entire WikiProject (and also the Wikipedia)."

The project will conduct a series of online editing events, and will try to revive a few initiatives and projects like Collaboration of the month.

Objectives
The objectives of this project are—
 * 1) support and nurture the community;
 * 2) engage them in more organized Wikiwork, like WikiProject India article assessment drives, Collaboration of the Month, participation in deletion and other discussion etc;
 * 3) make sure that their best works are highlighted and recognized;

Ideological point of view
This project was not started suddenly. We know that for a long time we were facing a number of issues: a number of our on-wiki projects failed, we failed to organize our community, there were not too many active participants in our noticeboard, many non-Indian editors continuously felt that Indic content is a grey area and we ourselves did not know what to do. So it was these necessities which forced us to think an initiative like this.

During the initial planning stage these were the ideological point of views (or more clearly this project was started keeping these things in mind).
 * 1) address the most critical issues first;
 * 2) assist and strengthen the real wiki workers;
 * 3) concentrate mainly (if not only) on online works (actual Wiki-editing) giving more and more focus on on-wiki editors training than workshops etc;


 * Financial
 * 1) avoid request grants or support from WMF or anyone unless it is very much needed; specially avoid large grant requests;
 * 2) avoiding all expenditures which are not urgently needed (requesting to go to a distant place and taking 2000 photographs for Wikimedia Commons may or may not be a good idea, but that should not be a project here);
 * 3) highest possible transparency in financial transactions and super-special care in reporting, documentation;

Challenges
The challenges and difficulties are:
 * 1) Large but unorganized community: The English Wikipedia Indian community, but unorganized;
 * 2) No popular central discussion place:' The community does not have a popular central discussion place;
 * 3) Lack of participation in project works: In last couple of years a good number of initiatives have failed or faced difficulties due to lack of participation;

Definition of community
Here "community" does not mean "only" a handful of people who attend Wikimedia events, seminar, workshops, but here "community" mainly means the large number of editors who generally don't participate in (or don't know about) village pump/noticeboard/mailing list discussions or Wikimedia events. Many of these editors often face difficulties or have questions but don't go to (or don't know about) Help Desks or IRCs. Now, this project will attempt to support and strengthen this larger Wikipedia community.

A central discussion place
Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales says— "Wikipedia is something special. . . It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others."

Similarly, to make a community more organized, we feel, it is absolutely necessary to have a place where "we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. "These are the two places which are generally used as the central meeting places in WikiProject India In this Project WIN, our primary and the first work will be to bring more and more editors to our noticeboard (and mailing list). This will have the following benefits:
 * WikiProject India noticeboard and
 * Mailing list.
 * Central discussion place: The editors will get a place to discuss Indian-related topics or ask question;
 * Active watchers and India experts: We'll get more active watchers and India-experts in the board, which is badly needed at this moment;
 * Reaching more editors: It'll also help to reach a larger number of editors. It'll be very helpful, when the project will announce something or will start a new initiative.

Motivation
It is very important to motivate and encourage editors or find them a reason to join initiatives and the noticeboard. And for this, the project has its own rewards and encouragement structure which includes— (It does not include any financial reward)
 * 1) Barnstars.
 * 2) Merchandise gift (T-shirts, hoodies, badges, stickers etc.) in competition.
 * 3) Publicity and visibility of events and deserving editors;