Online edit-a-thon on incidents in Telugu

Long time Telugu Wikipedians Venkata Ramana, Ravi Chandra, Dr. Rajasekhar, Kodihalli Muralikrishna and Pranay Raj organised an online edit-a-thon during May 1-May 7 to chronicle events of all kinds—from social to political and everything old and new—that are notable. I (Pavan Santosh) also joined them all in organising this event. 25 articles were created during the event and over the campaign week. The articles were enhanced with more citations and information.

We reached out to two of the organisers to learn about this project and below are what they had to say.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Can you please share how you came up with the idea of organising this event? What are the future plans to take this project to the larger Telugu Wikimedia community?
Ravi Chandra (RC): The idea of organizing an edit-a-thon for events on Telugu wikipedia came up when I was chatting with Pavan Santhosh about the progress of Telugu Wikipedia. He had also heard similar comments from other Wikipedians. We knew that we were concentrating more on people, places and movies in general. We wanted to pick up a topic which we have not focused much in the past. That's how it was born.

SP: Did you see anything in particular lacking in Telugu Wikipedia that helped start this project?
RC: I think the biggest challenge in our community is the lack of editors. The kind of articles we created during this event could have been written better by history scholars from different universities of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana. I feel that we should reach out to more people from diverse background so that we get more contributors.

Pavan Santhosh (PS): Why did you participate in this edit-a-thon?
Venkata Ramana (VR): I joined in this event to improve articles in Telugu WIkipedia especially related to incidents.

PS: Where do you see one such initiative adding value to Telugu Wikipedia?
VR: There are several articles related to incidents in English Wikipedia, that too related to India. But there is a gap in Telugu Wikipedia. For example, Karamchedu massacre is one of the very important incidents in the Dalit history and there was no article in Telugu Wikipedia until this edit-a-thon happened. Similarly, this event kickstarted chronicling of several such important incidents in Telugu Wikipedia.Within a short span of one week we have covered some of the very significant incidents.

PS: What was your collective learning? Can you please share some of your future plans?
VR: Edit-a-thons like this help community recognise some major gaps in content. And community members feel encouraged to work together to fill the gaps. I have seen the impact of edit-a-thons based on incidents, movies and now Punjab. Going forward, we are planning to conduct a few thematic edit-a-thons as this edit-a-thon and a few ones in the past have proved to be very effective on community building.