Abstract
The term “Wikipedia” is one of the most frequent words that pop up in the minds of all the academicians and the researchers across the globe as it serves to be one of the most important data sources. Wikipedia is one of the projects of “Wikimedia”. The Wikimedia project includes Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, and Wikidata. All these projects are successfully done and still being enhanced by the consistent efforts of volunteers from all parts of the world. This article elucidates the experiences of such volunteers, Info-Farmer and Neechalkaran who have been contributing to the Tamil Wikimedia projects for more than 12 years. This article focusses on bringing out the challenges and problems faced by most of Tamil Wikimedia contributors who are called, “Tamil Wikimedians”. The article also insists about the benefits of being part of Tamil Wikimedia. The prime aim of this article is to encourage more volunteers to contribute to Tamil Wikimedia.
Keywords
1 Wikimedia Project- an Introduction
Jimmy Wales established the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida, as a nonprofit organization to support projects like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other crowdsourced Wikis that had previously been hosted by Wales’s for-profit business, Bomis [1]. Wikimedia generates most of the funds through millions of small contributions made by Wikipedia readers, which are gathered via email campaigns and annual fundraising banners posted on Wikipedia. Grants from different tech firms and charitable organizations supplement these.
Over the course of its existence, the foundation has expanded quickly. It had approximately 550 employees and contractors by 2021, annual sales of over US$160 million, annual expenses of over US$110 million, and a growing endowment that in June 2021 exceeded US$100 million. Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Wikimedia works to create a society in which every single person can freely share in the totality of knowledge through a variety of projects, chapters, and the support system of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. “To enable and engage people across the world to gather and generate educational information under a free license or in the public domain, and to communicate it efficiently and internationally,” is the purpose of the Wikimedia foundation [2].
The Foundation offers the organizational and technical framework necessary for members of the public to create multilingual Wiki material in order to fulfil this purpose. The content on the Wikis is not created or edited by the Foundation. The Foundation works with a global network of volunteers and connected groups, including Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, user groups, and other partners, and pledges in its mission statement to make helpful material from its projects freely accessible on the internet forever.
The “strategic direction” of the Wikimedia Foundation, created in 2017 for the next 15 years, is that by 2030, “the Wikimedia Foundation will become the core infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”. The Attribution and Share-alike Creative Commons licenses, version 3.0, govern the redistribution of content on the majority of Wikimedia project websites. 11 Wikis owned and run by the foundation have content that is created and maintained by unpaid volunteers. Contributions are open to the public, and creating a named user account is not required. These Wikis adhere to the free content model, with knowledge distribution as their primary objective. Apart from Wikipedia, there are numerous Wikimedia projects such as, Wiktionary which is an online dictionary and thesaurus, Wiki books, an open source book collections, Wiki quotes that aggregates quotations, Wiki source which is a digital library, Wikidata is operating as a language server for more than 357 languages contributed by people around the globe and provides an open platform to upload knowledge which becomes an important resource in libraries across the world. [3,4,5].Wiki commons that is resource for multimedia files etc. [1, 6, 7]. These open source repositories are indeed a treasure to pull data to build AI enabled applications.
Since the Wikimedia is contributed by humongous people around the globe, there exit many challenges for the Wikimedia foundation in maintaining the quality of the content. The contributions come from both registered and anonymous users. In order to keep track of quality content, trust models have been suggested by researchers [8]. Also [3] discusses about various factors that influences the contributions like the Government policies in that particular country, the internet structures and the norms, people’s preferred languages, the culture etc. This paper tries to narrow down this to a particular language, Tamil and makes an attempt to bring out the opportunities and challenges by the Tamil contributors spread across the globe.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes about the Tamil Wikimedia project and the veteran contributors, Sect. 3 briefs about the opportunities and Sect. 4 describes the challenges faced the Tamil contributors and finally Sect. 5 gives the conclusion.
2 Tamil Wikimedia Project
Tamil language is one of the oldest languages that belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is the 19th most spoken language in the world. Tamil literatures has a great history of spanning for more than 2000 years [9]. Kudos to the Tamil Wikimedia community who are spread world-wide and yet have contributed to almost all Wikimedia projects. For instance, Tamil Wikipedia has more than 20,000 registered users and ranks 5th in India and 69th in the world based on the count of articles in Wikipedia [10]. This stands as one of the strong reasons behind the numerous research and applications that has emerged in Tamil computing which is on par with the state of the art in the field of Natural Language processing. Though contributors are spread world-wide, 94.3% of the Tamil Wiki contributors are from India, 4.3% are from Sri Lanka and the rest from the other countries. The beauty of Wikimedia is that anyone with passion to contribute can be part of it. Tamil Wikimedia is mostly contributed by students. The contributions also come from women that are in career breaks and also from retired people. Not only Wikipedia, Tamil Wikimedia also covers all the flavors of it like Tamil Wiktionary, Tamil Wikiquotes, Tamil Wikidata, Tamil Wikicommons, Tamil Wikisource and Tamil Wikibooks
An example of how Tamil Wiktionary looks like is given below. A word, its meaning, usage and references are given by the contributors. The below example shows Tamil Wiktionary information for the Tamil letter, “”. Though it is a Tamil letter, it has its own beautiful meanings.
2.1 Veteren Tamil Wikimedia Contributors
Tamil Wikimedia has witnessed many contributors who have been part of it for more than a decade. The details of these veteran contributors are given in this link https://tinyurl.com/2feb37e3. Many of these contributors have also become trainers and they conduct training programs, hackathons and conferences to encourage more contributors. Guruleninn, Info-farmer, Nandhini Kandhasamy, CR Selvakumar, Neechalkaran, NSE_Mahalingam_VNR, Sivakosaran, Fahimrazick and Sridhar_G are few of the trainers who have taken great initiatives in encouraging the next generation to involve more in Tamil Wikimedia project and keep the chain going.
2.2 Being Part of Tamil Wikimedia
To be a contributor in Wikimedia, no previous experience is needed. One can contribute by writing new articles or new information. They can also improve the existing articles and information on Wikimedia by editing. People who are good coding can also contribute to Wikimedia by building open-source tools and APIs. These codes can help writers and editors to contribute to Wikimedia with much ease and also to build API which can pull data from the Tamil Wikimedia which can further be used to build many benchmark datasets for various tasks such as Machine Translations, text to speech, text classification etc. A Python code written by Info- Farmer in Tami for formatting text in shown below.
The volunteers can also seek the help of veteran editors in tea house. In tea house, the veteran contributors will answer the contributors’ queries and help them feel comfortable with their contributions. This link https://Wikimediafoundation.org/participate/ has necessary data about Wikimedia foundation which will help us to adapt to our language.
3 Opportunities in Tamil Wikimedia
The contributors get the wonderful opportunity of being part of world largest multilingual encyclopedia. The Wikimedia foundation provides three types of funding opportunities to those who contribute to Wikimedia namely, Rapid Fund, Conference and Event Fund and general support fund [11]. Rapid funds are given to individuals who take initiatives that are completed quickly and done at low-cost by individuals, teams, or organisations working on Wikimedia projects. Event funds are given to support for organizing local, regional, and topical conferences that bring together Wikimedians for experience sharing, skill building, and networking, including funding, and general support fund is given to people, teams, or affiliates who have created bigger projects, programmes, or a strategic plan that needs ongoing funding over time to be successful. Tamil Wikimedians can get funding by contacting appropriate contact persons who are allocated region wise. Further information can be obtained from https://meta.Wikimedia.org/Wiki/Grants:Regions/South_Asia.
Though these funding schemes are applicable to the Tamil Wikimedians who have been working consistently for longtime, the student volunteers may readily get the benefit out of being part of Tamil Wikimedia by getting internships and take part in Hackathons veteran Tamil Wikimedia contributors host internship programs and Wikimedia hackathons. Many former contributors have been competitive exam aspirants as well. The student contributors can get the opportunity to interact with them and the students can enrich their soft skills as they will be interacting in workshops and conferences with veteran Tamil Wikimedians and also with fellow- student Tamil Wikimedians. Students get access to all contents of Wikimedia including multimedia files those who have the goal of becoming a programmer there is a lot of scope for them to learn and gain experience as it is an open source tool [12, 13, 14, 15]. Furthermore, they can get a chance to win in Google summer code, as Wikimedia foundation is one of the partners. Also, the opportunity provided by the Wikimedia does not have a bias towards any gender and it fits with Tamil Wikimedia too [16].
4 Challenges in Tamil Wikimedia
Though there have been tremendous contributions coming from Tamil Wikimedians, still there are challenges that when solved can significantly increase the contributions in Tamil Wikimedia to a greater extent [17, 18]. The Tamil Wikimedia project needs more publicity as many are still unaware of this project. Many tools that can make the contribution easier are either unaffordable or not available to Tamil Wikimedians. Also, the lack of awareness of the existing tools is one of the reasons for low participations. Tamil Wikimedians at time face difficulties while coining terms for new technological concepts, dealing with various Tamil dialects and Tamil transliterations. Also, most of the Government data and references works are not in unicode format. So the contributors are unable to cite from online resources. Many formatting issues exist in Tamil like when working with texts that are in double columns using OCR.
Apart from these the ratio between the contributors and editors has huge variation, (i.e.) the contributors are coming mostly from India and Sri Lanka, while the editors are coming from rest of the world. Adding to this as the users are from diverse culture, country and setting up common policy is difficult and following up with the content vandalism from anonymous users, paid users become a daunting task. However, the veteran Tamil Wikimedians are constantly taking efforts to overcome these issues by publicizing more by conducting more events, workshops and conferences and reaching out to the government to seek support for sorting out the prevailing challenges.
5 Conclusion and Future Scope
This article is an attempt to create an awareness about Tamil Wikimedia project and the opportunities and challenges involved in it based on the experiences shared by Info- Farmer and Neechalkaran, who are one of the veteran contributors to Tamil Wikimedia projects. Also, this article aims to encourage more contributors for Tamil Wikimedia projects and get benefitted. The next generation computational research and developments (R &D) in Tamil language mainly rely on the open-source data repositories like Wikimedia. The more contributions to these projects will strengthen such R & D attempts. We hope this article creates a huge positive vibe resulting in many voluntary contributions to Tamil Wikimedia projects.
The Wikimedia foundation has many futuristic goals like giving recognitions to the contributors apart from monetary benefits which may attract more academic collaborations by forming reputation systems [19]. Wikimedia foundation is also planning to host collaborative databases and more tools which may have more flexibility in contributing and editing.
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Navaneethakrishnan, S.C., Thangasamy, S., R, N., Info-farmer, Neechalkaran (2023). Exploring the Opportunities and Challenges in Contributing to Tamil Wikimedia. In: M, A.K., et al. Speech and Language Technologies for Low-Resource Languages . SPELLL 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1802. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33231-9_18
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