Wikipedia:WikiProject Andhra Pradesh/Districts update - 2023

Andhra Pradesh was reorganised with districts count increasing from 13 to 26 on 4 April 2022. Telugu Wikipedia articles were updated in an agile project like manner with the available information with major involvement by Arjunaraoc by August 2022. English Wikipedia articles were updated but did not follow a systematic approach. When reviewed in April 2023, major deficiencies in the article structure, content, links were still found. As English Wikipedia articles have page views of 10-20 times more than Telugu Wikipedia articles, there is a need to update them in a systematic manner. All contributors are invited to participate in this initiative, by contributing to the various tasks, updating status table and/or provide feedback by checking the completed changes and discussing further improvements needed on the respective talk pages.

For model articles, please see Krishna district (diff for the effort in April 2023) (old district page), Tirupati district(diff for the effort in April 2023) (new district page)

History

Analysis of updates during the period from 2022-04-04 to 2023-03-03 was done. Active editors (at least average of 3 edits on a page over one year) ranges from 2 (Parvatipuram Manyam) to 17 (Konaseema). The median count of such editors is 7 and median of total such edits per page is 38 and median count of edits per editor per page is 6. Out of 17 editors, who made at least 3 edits per month, I found that about half of them contributed constructive edits, while the remaining comprised of disruptors/vandalism fighters/copy editors. Only 7 of 26 districts have watchers more than 29. All of these are older districts. Guntur district has highest watcher count at 42. For information Andhra Pradesh article has watcher count of 490 as on 2023-04-17. Newly created district page articles were assessed with Stub, Start or C class.

The first and second sprints were completed in April and May 2023 with only two people contributing valid content, out of 24 human editors. Third sprint during June 2023 had active participation from only one contributor.

Improvements proposed

Article structure update

Proposed article structure slightly modified from Wikipedia:WikiProject Indian districts (See discussion)

Lede
Etymology
History
Geography
Demographics
Administrative divisons
Cities and towns
Politics
Economy
Transport
Education
Culture
Sports
Tourism
Notable people
References

Content improvements

Reformating of Mandal information from wikitable to a basic HTML multicolumn format, which can display multicolumn on desktops with large screen space and change to single column for mobile views.
Historical taluk information was added in several articles without proper citations. This is not useful and needs to be removed, moving any summary of historical taluks information into History section.
OSM based district map to be added in the infobox. Overpass-turbo script based OSM interactive map of mandals is to be added in External links section in place of static OSM maps.
Content updation reflecting the formation of new district and for new districts using the old district information if appropriate.
Tourism section is absent in several new district articles and some old district articles. This needs updation with data from reliable sources and/or info from Telugu wikipedia articles.
Several pages had more citations needed and/or copy edit needed warning notices. These are to be removed after appropriate updates
Official website info in Wikidata needs correction to ".ap.gov.in" from the earlier "nic.in"
Infobox update: Coordinates for the map infobox to be update to that of district headquarters, One photo instead of photo montage. any other useful photos could to be moved to Tourism section.
Tourism, Notable people to be updated into a paragraph format, limiting the selection particularly in Notable people. Citations are required for all sections, except the lede, which should be a summary of the article, though some people would like to have citations in lede as well.
Basic copy editing, as articles some times have poor sentence construction, due to experimentation by newbies without adequate English skills, which was not caught by page patrollers.

Easy to implement improvements

Update Tourism section with info from latest district level E- brochures available at AP Toursim website. Update the status below with {{tick}} before the page name below, when work is completed for a particular page.

Agile project sprints

Sprints discontinued w.e.f July 2023, due to lack of collaborators. Work will be continued and the final report will be updated after all the articles are updated as per the proposal.

Past Sprints

Sprint-202306 (June 2023) Completed, Sprint-202306 report,36.5% complete
Sprint-202305 (May 2023) Completed, Sprint-202305 report,30.76% complete
Sprint-202304 (April 2023) Completed, Sprint-202304 report, 25% complete

Progress status

36.5% on 2023-07-01, progress of 5.8% over month

In the following table, please mark "Update status" using {{taskp}}. Progress is marked with values 25,50,75 corresponding roughly to 1/3, 2/3 and full completion of proposed improvement respectively. Independent check is marked with value 100.

Row numbers are static. Other columns are sortable. This allows ranking of any column.

page_title	DHS released in 2022 available?	Update status	Remarks
Alluri_Sitharama_Raju		○Y
Anakapalli		○Y
Anantapur	Yes	◕Y	District handbook of statistics area and population differ from the press releases in April 2022, Prese release info used in the article for these.
Annamayya	Yes	◕Y
Bapatla	Yes	◕Y
Chittoor	No	◕Y
East_Godavari
Eluru		○Y
Guntur		○Y
Kadapa	Yes	◕Y
Kakinada		○Y	Adminstrative divisions format updated, but alphabetical ordering yet to be done
Konaseema		○Y	Adminstrative divisions format updated, but alphabetical ordering yet to be done
Krishna	Yes	◕Y
Kurnool	No	◕Y
NTR		◕Y
Nandyal	Yes	◕Y
Nellore	Yes	◕Y
Palnadu	Yes	◔Y	Admin division reformatting completed
Parvathipuram_Manyam		○Y	Adminstrative divisions format updated, but alphabetical ordering yet to be done
Prakasam	Yes	◑Y	copy edit, bullet point conversion to paras required.
Sri_Sathya_Sai	Yes	◑Y	copy edit, bullet point conversion to paras etc required.
Srikakulam		○Y	Adminstrative divisions format updated, but alphabetical ordering yet to be done
Tirupati	No	◕Y
Visakhapatnam		○Y	Adminstrative divisions format updated, but alphabetical ordering yet to be done
Vizianagaram		○Y	Adminstrative divisions format updated, but alphabetical ordering yet to be done
West_Godavari		○Y	Adminstrative divisions format updated, but alphabetical ordering yet to be done

Further work required

Updating Economy section: For old districts, Info as of 2013-14 only is available in article. this content is being moved to History as sub section, for the present. For new districts, new district wise GSDP figures are not yet available.
Adding Geographic location by filling the directional details into the template in the External links section.

Learnings

While researching the content, I found that Krishna district website content has suggested mention of visiting wikipedia for more information (archive time stamp 2022-06-18). While that shows the brand value of Wikipedia, Krishna district page did not have sufficient quality to earn that recommendation. Only when more wikipedians get involved in Andhra Pradesh district pages, the quality can be improved.
Other than an anonymous contributor who stopped vandalising the changes being implemented after two weeks of warnings/engagement and is supporting with minor contributions, no other contributor has joined the initiative till 3 weeks of launch. Even that contributor is blocked on 2024-04-23.
As of 2024-04-27, the participation in this is by two editors.
I have tried to improve Andhra Pradesh and few pages linked from it. I found that South coastal zone, though in a proposal stage, was depicted as if it is reality.
From an analysis of signedup members activity in 2022, there were only 12 people who contributed to wikipedia on an average of one edit per month and the top contributor contributed on a average of 4 per month. (See Wikipedia:WikiProject Andhra Pradesh/active in enwp 2022. This shows that several people who contributed to district pages in 2022, did not sign up as Andhra Pradesh Wikproject members. There were only two members who were common to both. This gives a clear picture of interest in AP district pages in the year 2022
Analysed contributors to Andhra Pradesh (article) in 2022 and found that there were only seven people who contributed 12 or more edits. one of them is an IP editor.
Analysed top contributors to all Andhra Pradesh project articles in the month 202304 with atleast 30 edits, found about 4 people out of 22 interested in Andhra Pradesh topics excluding film articles.
As per WP India signed up members page, around 400 are active as of 2023-05-04.
For WikiProject Indian districts, only 29 articles out of 737 reached quality level of B or above i.e 3.9%. A sample review of article that was submitted for GA review is useful to understand the expectations.
It is challenging to find information for Education, Economy sections when the District handbook of statistics is not yet released as per the change in boundaries. Socio Economic Survey 2022-23 could be useful in some cases.

Resources

District handbook of statistics are available for most of the new districts and some old districts from the district official websites.
- Example:CPO (2022). District Hand Book of Statistics – 2020 Krishna district (PDF).
Socio economic survey 2022-23 (PDF). AP government. 15 March 2023. has some updates as per the reorganised districts. Unfortunately, copying for suitable adaptation is not working, as the PDF file did not use unicode font.

Utilities/tools

Quarry queries help understand activity levels on a project. Fork and run these if required for latest data.

FAQ

Why is this unlike a traditional WikiProject?

Traditional WikiProject Andhra Pradesh seems to be not suitable for improving district pages, as the number of active editors is much less(See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Andhra_Pradesh/2006-2022_assessment). This model is useful when lots of people collaborate, as it involves lot of overhead of planning, tracking and metrics updation. This initiative is more agile like, with no expectation of continuous active contributions. Tracking also is simple with tools using quarry or media action API. All the discussion items on talk pages are expected to be addressed. Formal peer review can be tried out for sample articles. Similar approach was tried on Telugu Wikipedia in 2022 with the participation mainly by two-three people. Exploring whether this initiative on English wikipedia will lead to more participation.

References