Hello beautiful people, here is the 2nd blog of Wiki Advanced Training, when I met Mallikarjuna at his office.

I have to go to Ranchi from Kempagouda International Airport, Bangalore along with two other Kannada Wikimedians Mallikarjuna and Bikash Hegde. Today, I had some work at Kartik Nagar, so I went there with Nikas's Cycle. 

When I was there, I got a call from Mallikarjuna, but at that moment, I couldn't take that call. After finishing my work, I called back to him and he asked about my location so we could plan for our journey easily. And when he told me about his office location, I got surprised, because, I was there only at that moment. 

So, I went to his office, then met his boss Praveen too. It was a pleasure meeting with his boss and their marketing manager Sanjeeb. At his office, we have discussed some other things also. Previously I had met Mallikarjana on 27th May at the CIS-A2K office, when I was there for the Project Tiger offline edit-a-thon.

Today, we have discussed our route, Timing, etc for the Airport, about prework. Finally, we had decided to meet Vikas and him at the Airport. And returned back to my room. It wasn't a plan to meet him, so I hadn't taken my camera with me and missed the chance to capture these.

Hello everyone, here I'm starting the series of blogs for Wiki Advance Training which would start officially from 29th July at Ranchi. But we have to reach by 28th evening and in the evening, the meeting would be the introduction, prework, etc. 

So, we received an e-mail from Krishna Chaitanya Velaga about the prework. The prework was about understanding about "Copyrights and Free Licences", "Neutral Point of View" and "The Wikipedia Library".

Since those works weren't easy for me and I needed a good understanding of everything, I met Tito da Today at the CIS-A2K office, Bangalore. Since it's Saturday, the office was closed and he came for me only.

After that, we had a quality time to discuss about the prework, tasks, etc. Then we were about to leave, but it started raining heavily. He also had to go to Hyderabad through the bus, so we came to Marathahalli by auto. After dinner, the rain started again and the bus also came 15 minutes late. He was waiting for the bus in the rain. When he called to the bus conductor, he replied in Telugu or Kannada, we couldn't understand. Then, after 2 calls, he answered in Hindi.

In that heavy rain, finally the bus came to us, and he boarded the bus at 9.15 PM. During the waiting, the rain stopped and I came to my room. At the time of dinner, we had only 40 minutes so we couldn't get the chance to capture a photo.

This is all about today, keep in touch for further updates.

Project Tiger, a collaboration of Wikipedia with Google to add and improve the Indic Wikipedia articles. As previously, I have shared two blogs about the Chromebook unboxing and the Offline Edit-a-thon in Bangalore. But this blog is for the overall status of the Project Tiger.

First of all, I would share my experiences with this project. I'm writing for Odia Wikipedia since December 2014, but from 8 March 2017, I'm writing regularly for the Wikipedia and then Wikisource regularly. So, for the project Tiger, Google had donated laptops and internet connections for the volunteers and hence I've applied for the Laptop. And the 1st laptop I've received from CIS-A2K office on the very first day.

Before getting the laptop, I had started writing for the Project Tiger, since it was started from 1st March. But I have to write an article for the 1 Wiki Year which has the theme about Odia Film Industry and I didn't wish to break that routine before completing the wiki year. With some other works for our Magazine, Shubhapallaba (Previously Nabapallaba) whose 2nd edition was going to release on 1st April, I had managed to write 8 articles only. 

In the April, we had released our magazine, but we had to change its name, logo, website, everything. So again couldn't contribute properly and wrote only 11 articles. But the work for the wiki year was going regularly in Odia Wikipedia as well as in Odia Wikisource. Finally, the last month May had come and I wished to write more, but a small problem arose for which I didn't write for the 1st 15 days. After that, I had tried to write some articles from the list.

In the meantime, CIS-A2K had organized an offline edit-a-thon in Bangalore on 27th May 2018, where I wrote 4 article only. And the month ended with 23 articles only. For the project Tiger, I've created 42 articles in these 3 months. And Odia Wikipedia had created 84 articles with 6 users. Harihar Prasad Satpathy sir had created 26 articles, Dr. Subash Chandra Rout sir had created 13 Articles and Bikas Ojha, Prateek Pattnaik & Gayatree Tripathy had created 1 articles each. And some also read the message of Jimmy on the main page and entered their name but never write an article and some entered some random article in the fountain tool.

Now come to the other communities. Panjabi Community and Tamil Community had created lots of articles and crossed 1000 whereas we had struggled for 100. Charn Gill from Panjabi Community had created 431 articles in these 3 months. Jagmit Singh Brar and Dsesringp from Panjabi and Tamil community respectively crossed 300 articles during these 3 months. And others also worked hard for this project. For the full details about other communities and the users who created lots of articles checks this link below. Thanks to Ravishankar for organizing this and motivating to write.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project_Tiger_Editathon_2018

It was 23rd May, I got a call from Gopala, a member of CIS-A2K team Bangalore about an edit-a-thon on 27th, Sunday. And after that, when I opened my WhatsApp, I got the message from Anant, another member from the CIS-A2K team to sign up for the edit-a-thon. After that, I just opened the page and entered the 4 tildes (~) to sign up. The edit-a-thon was at the CIS-A2K Bangalore office from 10am to 4pm. 

So, I tried my best to reach on time, but as usual, I took the bus from Marathahalli Bridge around 10 am and reached there at 10.30 since Sunday has less traffic during the morning. And when I reached there, some are there in downstairs. Thankfully the introduction round started after I reached there and Tito da explained a little about the Project Tiger and the rules, article list, etc. But I have those ideas since I'm writing from March and this Chromebook was given for the project. And we started writing from the given topics.

We are from different communities like Telugu, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Bengali, Odia, English, Kannada, etc. Dr. Manavpreet Kaur, from the Panjabi community, also joined online (I got to know in the evening when she replied to me for the status I put on WhatsApp). I just wrote the unfinished articles which I had started on the previous night. And during the editing process, we took a small tea/coffee break. As usual, I prefer tea.

Then we again busy with the writings and I have finished those three articles about R. Madhavan, Imran Khan, and Dookudu movie from the list. Around 12.50 pm, we went out for lunch and had our lunch at an Andhra style hotel which is near to the office. Again, I forgot the name of the hotel. I just forgot my camera on that table, so I could capture those moments. But there, the love for Aloo (Potato) was there. Yes, we would definitely save Aloo rather than the world.

After lunch, again we started editing. in that next half, I just created one article which is about Preity Zinta. And a piece of good news we got at that time is, Tamil and Panjabi community crossed 1000 articles for the Project Tiger. After that, we had finished the edit-a-thon with 20+ new articles and prepared to return. But before return, I just finished the article of the day for the 5th Round of 100wikidays or the 319th day of my 1WikiYear, since the IPL final was in the evening.

Finally, at 4.45 pm  I just returned back to my room by an Auto. Thanks to Tanveer da for booking that auto for me, since I don't have an ola/uber app on my phone.

On 28 July 2014, I joined Wikipedia​ and created an article in English which deleted within 30 to 40 minutes. Then I created another article on 20th August which was my 1st English Wikipedia Article.

Then on 10 October 2014, I've created the 1st Odia Wikipedia​ article on Odia Wiki, but that also deleted due to lack of reference. So, on 15 December 2014, I had translated my 1st English Wikipedia article to Odia and that is my 1st Odia Wikipedia article.

Last year on 25th May 2017, I had reached the 1,000 edits on both Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource on a single day. But these #100Wikidays work, #AsiaMonthEdiatho, #WomensMonthEditathon helped me to reach the 10,000 edits milestone in these 11 Months.

I would give a special thanks to Subhashish Panigrahi​ and Mrutyunjaya Kar​ for teaching me to create good articles on Wikipedia. And Sailesh Patnaik​ for inspiring me to write for #100wikidays challenge.

Project Tiger is a collaboration project of Wikipedia with Google to improve the articles of Indic Wikipedia projects like Odia, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Panjabi, etc. For this project, Google would help the writer by donating Internet charges for 3 months and Laptops to 50 volunteers. And within these 3 months (March, April & May), those who write the highest articles with the proper guidelines would be awarded by 3000 rupees and the lowest two others would get 2000 and 1000 accordingly.

So, I've applied for a laptop, so that I could contribute more than as usual. I must thank Sailesh Patnaik for guiding me to apply for the laptop. After verifying all the applied lists, the final result had out and my username "ssgapu22" was on the 33rd number with other 4 Odia Wikipedia friends.

On 16th March, I got an e-mail from Tito da to submit the address to get the laptop. So, I've submitted the address of my PG, where I'm staying right now in Bangalore. After 30 minutes, he pinged me on Facebook and called me to the office. So, I could receive the laptop directly.

So, I reached there at the CIS-A2K office to receive the laptop. There were Tanveer, Gopala, and Tito da and later Ananth joined us. I met them at Mysore for TTT 2018. It was like a reunion with them. After a short conversation with Ravi, I unboxed the laptop and Tito da did the live telecast on Facebook. But in the video, I was looking very bad, but somehow they tolerate that.

In that box, there was an Acer Chromebook. I had experience with the Windows operating system and Linux OS, but this was a little different. Since this has the Chrome browser only and all are available online. So, Tito da described some about the Chromebook to me.

Now, I must say something about this laptop. It doesn't have any hard disk drive so we couldn't store the movies. So, all the time we hold it must work and all those works could be done online. So we could focus more on Wikipedia works. The power backup is outstanding, around 10 to 12 hours. So, power failure doesn't affect the work. And yes, with a short update of Chrome OS, the Google Playsote activated so we could download the play store apps directly.

By getting this laptop, I started working on this and all those online works are done easily. Previously, when I was using other laptops, the works took longer than as usual since the slow processing, but here that problem avoided. Finally, this laptop would definitely help me for the Wikipedia works. Since I'm working on 1WikiYear in Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource on a particular subject. So, after completing those works I have to write an article for the Project Tiger from the list.