Draft proposal: Wiki Takes Leicester

This page is a place to expand upon this idea. For discussion, please use the talk page.

On 23 October Stevie Benton and Wikimedia volunteer Dhaval Vyas met in the Wikimedia UK office to explore potential projects that we could collaborate on. The projects would have a focus on reaching out to editors and potential editors in the Gujarati language. This is indicative of the chapter's desire to expand its outreach activities into languages other than English and Welsh.

There are around 200,000 Gujurati speakers in the UK, mostly in large urban centres of population, particularly London, Manchester and Leicester. The Gujarati Wikipedia has over 23,000 articles but few editors in the UK. However, there are large numbers of students in the UK from India. This group would be a good focus for outreach efforts. There is also potential for any Gujarati outreach effort to act as a cross-generational project as many UK Gujarati speakers are older first generation immigrants, while their children and grandchildren may have some understanding of the language but perhaps a better grasp of the technology. Dhaval believes that a cross-generational approach to a project would work well.

After exploring some thoughts and ideas we both felt that a Wiki Takes style event (a la Chester and Coventry) would be effective here. We settled on Leicester for the initial event as it has a significant Gujarati speaking community and a well established Indian community with a long and fruitful relationship with the city itself. Indian culture and communities have influenced the local culture and architecture so lends itself to a Wiki Takes event, potentially with an Indian theme.

The idea of a parallel session was discussed which focused on a Wikipedia training session focused on teaching people how to edit the Gujarati Wikipedia. Dhaval is keen to be involved in this. He mentioned that there is a group of people who may be interested in this called the Gujarati Literary Group. Dhaval will be able to make an introduction.

This event will, in some ways, serve as a pilot from which we can learn about how to successfully deliver outreach projects and initiatives in non-English / Welsh languages within the UK.