Malayalam Loves Wikimedia

Malayalam wikimedians have launched a new program to attract more Malayalam speaking people to wikimedia movement.

Malayalam loves wikimedia logo

As mentioned in my previous blog post, Malayalam wikimedians were able to convince a major political party of Kerala (LDF) to join the wikimedia movement by changing the license of their website to a free license. That helped us to get many free images for wikimedia.

This week we have launched the Malayalam Loves wikimedia (മലയാളികൾ വിക്കിമീഡിയയെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു) program to attract more Malayalees to wikimedia. We named it this way with a purpose.

We know about the xyz city Loves wikipedia (for example, London Loves wikipedia, Bangalore Loves Wikipedia) type of programs that were conducted in the past across various parts of the world. In most cases, these type programs were associated with a city. On some chosen dates wikipedians from that city go around the city to capture different images of the city and upload it to a location (commons, ficker, and so on) in some free license.

But Malayalam community is not yet big enough (even though it is one of the biggest language wiki community from India) to conduct such a program in a particular city. The reason for that is the fact that the concentration of Malayalam wikipedians in a selected place is very less. So we dropped the idea of xyz…city Loves wikipedia program and launched a different program which is very similar to that.

To include all the interested Malayalees in this program we named the program as Malayalam Loves Wikimedia. The duration of this program is 2 weeks 2011 April 2 – April 17.

The major reason for conducting this program now is because of the Assembly election in Kerala. Kerala is going to polling booth on April 13 to elect its new government. We know that this is the perfect time to capture the images of the notable politicians and important personalities of Kerala. The duration is kept as 2 weeks so that we can cover some major events and more people will be able to contribute to it.

When we started this program we thought that we will be able to donate around 500 free images to wikimedia commons through this program. But the program already surpassed our expectation! Within 4days itself we have already donated more than 400 free images to commons. All the images uploaded through this program are available here.

We are happy to inform that many non-wikimedians are also coming forward to donate images to wikimedia. They were all waiting for some oppurtunity like this to contribute to wikimedia. When they got it they are utilizing it. Some of them started uploading images as soon as we announced the program, that is, even before April 2

We hope other Indian language wiki communities will be able to launch similar programs in the near future.

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