Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia Bangladesh collaboration
At the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin Stevie met with representatives from Wikimedia Bangladesh to discuss the potential of collaborating on a Bengali language project.
As an initial action this page has been created to exchange ideas and suggestions and work towards developing a collaboration.
The first idea was working together to reach out to existing Wikipedians who edit in Bengali Wikipedia. East London, especially, has a rich Bengali culture and heritage and a significant Bengali community. By working together Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia Bangladesh hope to connect members of the Bengali Wikimedia community and host an initial workshop, with a view to closer collaboration in future.
Wikimedia Bangladesh have been invited to comment on this page and co-develop a project. Watch this space for further developments and please do get involved in the discussion to help shape any resulting project.
London training session
Editathons and meetups are useful in various ways, they enable us to access experts outside Wikipedia, give existing editors the opportunity to learn editing techniques and shortcuts from each other, they help build up a community and they can even be used as outreach to potential editors.
We do a lot of outreach events in the UK and we usually only promote them on our mailing lists and via watchlist notices to the English language Wikipedia. We could easily promote London ones to people on the Bengali Wikipedia who edit from UK IP addresses.
At the London meetup we have discussed doing outreach events to linguistic minorities in London, for example we could run an introduction to Wikipedia session at a library in Tower Hamlets, we have a number of experienced trainers who would be very happy to help make it happen, and we have a lot of experience of some of the essentials like setting up mobile WiFi hotspots and bringing spare laptops from the chapter. But we feel we really need a Bengali speaking editor to lead the event.
Also our offices in Old Street, London are very close to the main centre of the Bengali community in the UK, we would be happy to hold a meeting here one evening and promote it with a Watchlist notice on the Bengali pedia, we can even set up a skype session to Bangladesh. Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) (talk) 20:11, 15 April 2014 (BST)