Tuesday, August 17, 2010

DYK there is more to know about #India ?

With the English language #Wikipedia being very popular in India, it is no surprise that there are an increasing number of articles on the Indian subcontinent. Many of these articles contain facts that are not generally known and for this reason there is now a DYKIndia account.

As the software used to populate this channel can be found on github, it is possible to have a DYK feed for other purposes, other countries, other languages as well. There have been discussions on how to improve the existing software and, quoting is much nicer then paraphrasing:

  1. This can be on any subject and can be used by many projects like History, Medicine, Countries, etc if there are people to manage the tweet queue.
  2. It would make more successful if the "manual tweet queue" maintenance process is done away with and ask WP:DYK to provide short version of hooks as well going forward. -- Need to go through a proposal i guess. Will be working on this in sometime after gauging the success of this. But counter arguments also came for this and sometimes its better if its manual.
  3. Similar app can also used to tweet daily DYKs on a hourly basis and can be face of "Whats new on Wikipedia" in social media.
  4. Possibility of exploring usage of this into Indian languages,challanges like char limit, availability. Need to work on this as well.
  5. Possibility of tie-up with mobile operator and making it as a VAS, where in operator gets money, we get outreach / publicity -- Can be taken as a chapter outreach activity once that is formed.

The one thing that is explicitly missing is the use of this software for DYK for other languages. I learned from Srikanth Lakshman that he intends to start with DYK in Tamil; there are already 100+ DYK available :)

The one that that this DYK activity implicitly does is help realise the aim of the Wikimedia Foundation to double our reach in five years. This kind of outreach by the community itself making use of modern social media is going to make a big difference.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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