 Welcome. I am Siva Kosaran from Jaffna Sri Lanka presenting in the topic of my experiences organizing Tamil Wikipedia 16 years celebrations. We celebrated that in 2019. So, here I am presenting my experiences, the teams experiences so that it can be useful for other communities, medium or small size communities. So, once again welcome you all. That's the Tamil word for welcome. That's an introduction. So, that's the Tamil Wikipedia logo. So, for whom is this presentation? This is for medium or small size media groups particularly wanting to organize gatherings like right now with the pandemic on. I think the gatherings are not supported by the grants committee. Still, this will be helpful for other communities. What I mean by medium and small Wikipedia groups is that the large Wikipedia groups probably have had enough gatherings that they may not make this useful. So, that's one. Then even for other groups that have had some, already had some gatherings, this learning experiences can help. So, a brief introduction to Tamil Wikipedia. Tamil Wikipedia was started in 2003. So, it's edited by Tamils in India, Sri Lanka and other countries. So, primarily Tamil is a language spoken in the southern part of India and then in the northern part of Sri Lanka. In addition, there are Tamil speaking community in Singapore, Malaysia and several other countries. In addition to those native Tamils, there are expatriates from both India and Sri Lanka because of the internal conflict in Sri Lanka. A lot of people have migrated to other countries to the west, to the Australia and all these places. These western countries where internet is available easily. So, they have started contributing to Wikipedia from other countries also. So, there are about close to 140,000 articles in Tamil Wikipedia that ranked 58. So, it's a healthy Wikipedia. In addition to Wikipedia, even other Wikimedia like Wiktionary, Wikisource and all that have a good level of resources in Tamil. About 100 active contributors contribute every month like, so it's a very active Wikipedia. So, in this background, we celebrated the 10th anniversary in Chennai that was in 2013. That was a huge success. So, I was able to attend that and then the community in India and Sri Lanka wanted the 15th year celebrations to be held in Sri Lanka because so that the community from India can learn about the background of Sri Lankan community. These two communities, although we speak Tamil, the common language, the dialects slightly differ. Because of that, there are sometimes when in discussions, in article discussions, some communities, community members don't understand what the other mean to say. So, in this background, the Indian community was persistent that we should have this 15th year celebrations in Sri Lanka. What the issue in hosting that in Sri Lanka? The primary issue is that a small community in Sri Lanka. So, it's the community, although the contributions from Sri Lankans is big, the community that lives in Sri Lanka is quite small. And then there is a long travel needed for the Indian community. Not just the Indians, even if anyone coming out from Sri Lanka. They need to land in Colombo and travel to Jaffna. It's about a 10-hour trip by road. There was no airport at Jaffna at that time. So, that meant the grants committee was not recommending that. There is a restriction where the hosting place, the venue should be reachable easily. But after the recommendation was made, I communicated with the community. And then we assured that the Indian contingent is ready to travel that long distance for 10 hours. So, and then the another challenge was that we were trying to host that event in 2018. But we needed to apply for the grant well early, at least an year ahead. But we missed that deadline. So, we submitted the request and we were able to secure funds for the event in 2019. So, it was celebrated as the 16th year anniversary celebrations. So, this is the event outline. On day one, we had presentations by community members. So, basically that's kind of gave us the path we have come through. And also it was an opportunity for all these different level of contributors to present what they have done, things like that. And then it was a two-day event. On the day one evening, we had a formal celebration where we had this celebration that was partnered with the Jatna Tamil Sangam. That's the Jatna Tamil Society. We were able to partner with them and do a formal celebration. A formal celebration in the sense that we had a welcome speech and a keynote speak by a professor of University of Jatna. And then we had this cultural dance. Then we had had a couple of contests held on the eve. We had a new user contest and then a continuing user contest to expand and create articles. So, from those two contests, we had the presentation. We had gifted the certificates during that celebration. So, that went well with the partnership of Jatna Tamil Society. And then on day two, we had a cultural trip. The grants committee says that the cultural trip needed to be restricted to half a day. So, we were able to manage to see some important places within Jatna in a half-day trip. And then the day two evening, we had discussions like round table discussions with groups discussing the issues faced by the community and how we can move forward. So, that event was a pretty good one that went really well. Of course, there were some things that didn't go well. One of the things is that because of the small community, they were exhausted coming to this point. Then this is an image of the participants of the formal celebrations where there are Wikipedians and then staff from the University of Jatna Tamil Sangam and all that. So, it was a huge success. And then this is what we call as what we think as success is that this event helped to make the communities from India and Sri Lanka understand the differences better. So, I had said that there were some issues while we were discussing some people. Particularly the Indian community said after visiting Sri Lanka, they are able to discuss things with better understanding when Tamils from Sri Lanka, even they live in Sri Lanka or outside, they can communicate better. They can understand the things better. So, that's a big positive. And then we established collaborations with the Jatna Tamil Sangam. That's the Tamil Society. And then another like-minded group called Tamil Aritham. With the help of Tamil Aritham, we had a couple of introduction sessions to Tamil Wikipedia at school level. But this could not be continued due to the pandemic. We will have more such sessions once the country is open. Everything is back to normal. We hope, pray that happens pretty soon. And then the shortcomings, the team was small. So, it's after the event, the team was exhausted. That was expected and the grants committee kept mentioning that. But it was something that we needed to do. So, it's like it takes time to get back to contributing to Wikipedia. But that happens. And another issue was that because of a lot of things needed to be done, the travel back from Jatna to Kalambu to catch the bus, catch the flight was not planned well in time. So, a last minute arrangement made the travelers feel a little bit difficult to travel. So, that was one of the issues that we faced. And then, so, what are the learnings? I'm coming to see the learnings. Okay, start early. So, you need to start early. So, it's like at least a year and a half ahead. And then, the team is small. What you need to do is, you have to plan things that can be done remotely that can be assigned to the online team. So, things like booking the flights. That was a mistake. The kind of the team that arranged the function here tried to book the flights. And then, actually, it was given, the option was given to the participants, but a lot of participants didn't want to do themselves. So, instead, we could have assigned someone offline to book the flights and all that. So, that was one thing that can be done. In addition, even things like printing and certificate, designing a certificate, those things can be assigned to online team so that the team that works at the site is much comfortable doing that. And then, the most important thing is that get help from established like-minded groups. So, if you make partnerships, things like what we had with the Tamil Sangam, so if you are able to make partnerships, that will help a lot. So, that were the learnings. So, this is all my presentations. If you have questions, I see a question where it says, what are the biggest blockers to organizing events like this? Okay, the biggest blocker I see is if you have a good team at the venue. So, it's like if the team is small, that's somewhat difficult to organize. So, once you find a good team, that should be, I mean, events like this is easy. So, the first thing we should identify is the team that can do the work that's needed. So, that's important. Okay, I see another question where it says, are you planning to repeat this new event? Okay, well, we would like to have 20th year celebrations, supposedly in India because it's that now. So, once this event is over, I mean, since already the team is very small, we could think of something similar in 10 years time, but the next event should be in India. That's probably 2023. Okay, I think the session went well, except that it seems my screen wasn't moving. So, it's like you couldn't see some of these slides, but I'll be sharing my slides, you can see them in the event page. So, thank you all for joining. Thank you again.