Last modified: 2011-12-03 06:19:28 UTC
This is to request a new mailing list for "wikimedia-in-eng" Indian Wikipedians / Global Wikipedians wokring on India related content on English Wikipedia, is a larger community by itself. While wikimediaindia-l is the main mailing list of Wikimedia Community in India, a larger discussion of English Wikipedia/ns in India or WikiProject India on en.wiki is out of scope on wikimediaindia-l and its subscribers. While most of the Indian language Wikipedias have their separate mailing lists, co-ordination & collaboration among the Indian Wikimedians contributing to English Wikipedia has become the most difficult. English Wikipedia mailing list "wikien-l" is too boarder scope of discussing them. In this context, there have been large number of requests for creating a mailing list for Indian Wikipedians / Global Wikipedians wokring on India related content on English Wikipedia. We are aware that we have "too many lists", but that is expected as the communities grows in size and creation of separate lists is justified as long as we have enough activity on/around it. We believe, India-related content and community of Indian Wikipedians on English Wikipedia is as equally important to grow as Indic language Wikipedias. The other reason is to reduce en.wiki related noise on the primary community list of wikimediaindia-l, which doesnt make sense for many of its subscribers. We would like to clarify. 1) wikimediaindia-l remains the the most important mailing list and primary platform for the Wikimedia India community to interact each other. 2) This new mailing list is not for replacing on-wiki discussions. We have put this proposal on wikimediaindia-l ( India community list) which largely echoed the support and a consensus was reached to go ahead with the filing of this request. Some of the discussion & support on the list http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005298.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005301.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005310.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005311.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005317.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005340.html
I'm just curious why there's a need to segment the list, and not just use Wiki-EN for this?
See Description from me, above :)
Several reasons. One is of course that we expect a whole lot of India related discussion to take place, which could swamp the present non-country specific threads. People may not like a whole new class or tone of posts suddenly introduced and it may be objected to by the present members. Secondly, the reverse could also happen, the cultural takeoff for Indian wikipedians, values and modes of wiki-behaviour being different, imho some diffident Indian wikipedians may not post. We see this in Wikimedia India list. Many Indic language wikipedians, perhaps because of their poor grasp of English, do not subscribe to it preferring to stay on in their home turfs. It is likely that in a similar way, some may stay away from an international list. Thirdly, it is our stand to the Indian Community that English Wikipedia is not something about the rest of the world but as much part of the Indian scene, i.e. an Indic language wikipedia alongwith the rest. In the WikiConference India 2011 in Mumbai last month, I was asked to give a status report on WikiProject India on English Wikipedia, as if it were an indic language wikipedia like the rest. With 90K articles, WikiProject India on en:WP is second only to Hindi Wikipedia in size. It is probably much larger due to cryptic articles - articles about India without the project banner on their talk pages, or even having red-link talk pages. We have restarted the Collaboration of the Month and swamped the India-list already. A community wide series of outreach activities in English Wikipedia are planned for the year. Cleanup activity coordination is on. So on and so forth. Subprojects like GLAM in India and Offline English Wikipedia are areas of growth which could find a home here till they grow in future to deserve list of their own. All these imho suggest a fresh start on a new list rather than piggyback on the existing list.
Wouldn't just -en be better than than -eng?
I am ok either way, but ISO codes are set to change from -en to -eng very soon :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3
Who will be the list moderators, please? If you'd like to send me their email addresses by email (philippe(at)wikimedia.org), I'll get this started.
You can add me and Ashwin Baindur ( both on cc list) as the list admins for now.
Done. :)
Thanks a ton, Philippe :)
