Access to Knowledge Blogs

User:AshLin aka Col Ashwin Baindur (retd) gave a Plenary Speech(in absentia) on Strategy at the Wikimedia Movement Strategy Salon, held in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh on 27 August 2017. It is reproduced here with permission:

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and my dear Wikimedia friends and colleagues,

 I am deeply honoured to be asked to say the opening words for the Movement Strategy Salon being held today at Vijayawada. The problems of ill health prevent me from coming to be with you as I most dearly wish, but I do hope my few words and thoughts will make do instead. Let me introduce myself. I happen to be a retired army officer but I see myself as a citizen of the world, as a Wikipedian whose cherished dream is to make Jimmy Wales dream come true.

“Imagine a world where the sum of all knowledge is available to all mankind!”

 The occasion for this conclave or salon is timely. The twenty first century paradigm of Open Culture, of sharing and collective intelligence are well established. Crowdsourcing, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and so many other important global resources are proof.

 Education has received a huge fillip by the vastly increased amounts of data and knowledge on the Internet. Open sourcing has made its mark in the software side of the business world. Just as has open access publishing in Academia.  Society as a whole has gained by all these manifestations of open culture.

 And today, we are gathered here to begin thinking on the directions for the future of the Wikimedia movement in India.

 What does this mean in our case? India is a country of many languages, dialects, people, communities, religions, tribes. Along with this are the collective efforts of 1.3 billion people to make a secular, democratic, economically strong nation. The ability to share learning, understanding, experiences are key to this process. And for this, collaboration is a vital necessity.

 As of now the Wikimedia effort in India consists of a potpourri of projects, encyclopedia, quote, text repository and the use of Wikimedia Commons as a media repository. We have to grow this into a large, useful and versatile resource in each of our Indic languages.

 The Wikimedians, a small band of volunteers to date, must take along the entire society of India so that we have betterment as a nation by first creating and using these resources. And today’s conclave with kindred souls from society, academia, industry.. is a beginning in this regard.

 Now we are here to think what directions this Movement must take. I am envious that I can’t be part of this process with you. However, as a retired military person, let me say a few words on strategy and how it is decided.

 All planning occurs at three levels. The most basic of activities to be done are referred to as tactics. Tactics are governed by operational planning which comprises of a worked out plan of how to achieve the overall plan or the goal.

 The deciding of this overall plan or goal is referred to as strategy.

 To be more specific..

 “a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty..”

 And when we do this for a long period of the future, it is more appropriately termed as ‘grand strategy".

 For this we have to ponder - What is our aim? What are our strengths? What are our challenges? What are our opportunities? What are our resources and what are our constraints? What path should we take to achieve our aim?

 These are to be reduced into a few directions which are broad based, actionable and full of potential. A good strategy must open huge opportunities, new fields, new possibilities.

 The  is not easy to do or quick to make. It will take more than one session, more than one day, week or even a month to get our strategy right.

 Most important of all is that we learn to think in the new paradigm of sharing and open culture. We should leave behind the mindset of scarcity, possessiveness and personal benefit and embrace the values of the common good, creation of opportunities and innovation.

 On our success in making a good strategy, depends the fate of millions of our children and youth who will either benefit from our decisions or lose opportunities if we are not wise and generous. We have to believe in the future. We have to want to make that future great for our nation.

 I wish you the very best in this endeavour. I repeat, that I am envious that I can't be with you today. I pray that the things we decide from today onward in this process of grand strategy for the Wikimedia movement in the decades to come.

 At the very end, I would like to thank the Wikimedia movement in India, CIS-India, the organisers of this salon and of course, my young friend Krishna Chaitanya Velaga for this opportunity.

 Jai Hind!

I'm User: Krishna Chaitanya Velaga from English Wikipedia; fortunately and unfortunately my user name and my real name share the same text. I have been contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects since December 2014. I work primarily on Indian military history related topics and articles. Initially, I was focused on creating articles rather than assessing them. My wiki journey can be best described in two parts, before and after Train The Trainer 2017.

The latter part of 2016 proved to be a critical period of my Wiki journey. I was credited with my first good article, first featured A-class article and list, first featured list and, several Did You Know credits on English Wikipedia. Later on, I was awarded the “Military history newcomer of the year” for 2016. I was the first Indian to receive the award. Additionally, I was selected to be the “Featured Wikimedian of Month for January 2017” by Wikimedia India.

As of January 2017, I have been contributing for nearly two years, and as far as I have observed the military history topic area of India is one of the most neglected areas. With two well known military historians from India, Srikar Kashyap Pulipaka (User:StrikeEagle) and Colonel Ashwin Baindur [retd.] (User: AshLin) on a semi Wiki break, I was left to be the only regular contributor. In an attempt to encourage more Wikipedians to work on this area, Indian military history work group emerged as an initiative by the Military history project. The work group closing in on a year since its inception, has more than twenty-five members at present. As the founder of the group, I aspire to incubate the group into an independent task force under Military history project. One of the major problems I faced while working on the military history articles was regarding images. Though the images were accepted on Commons, they were rejected at advanced levels of assessment i.e. A-class review, FAC, FLC etc. One of the primary reasons for the problem is the unclear copyright statement presented on the official websites of the armed forces and various uniformed services. I had been thinking for a long while to resolve this issue and TTT provided me with the path to finds a solution for this. Train the Trainer (TTT) is one of the best initiatives by Centre of Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge. It is a three-day residential program to enhance the trainer in experienced and well established Wikipedians through the length and breadth of India. Prior to TTT 2017, I have only been involved in online activities of Wikipedia, predominantly contributing to Indian military history topics. I hardly knew about the offline community of Wikipedia i.e. the grant structure of Wikimedia Foundation, conduction of edit-a-thons, meet-ups, program affiliates etc. Not only this, but also the Wikipedian contacts I had were very sparse. Though I was selected to attend TTT 2016, I could not attend to academic constraints. During TTT, I had rich exposure to the wider Indian Wikimedia community and that of Indic language projects. TTT also cleared many of the misconceptions I had of Wikimedia, some them include the use of Harvard referencing style, importance of offline events, etc.

Owing to the experience I decided to act on the problem. There is a heavy need of images related to the uniformed services. So I discussed my idea with Ravi Shankar Ayyakannu (User:Ravidreams), coordinator of Wiki Loves Food and Manager for Strategic Partnerships in Asia under Global Reach Team. Initially, I thought of naming it Wiki Loves Armed Forces, Wiki Loves Security Services etc. But with an intention to widen the scope, it was named as Wiki Loves Uniformed services. Once finalized, I started creating necessary pages and templates on Commons. Simultaneously, I worked on forming the core team of coordinators and judges. I chose Suyash Dwivedi (User:Suyash.dwivedi) and Mourya Biswas (User:Mouryan) to be the Coordinator and Assistant Coordinator respectively, with myself as the Lead Coordinator. The jury included Col. Ashwin Baindur [retd.], Diego Delso (User:Poco a poco), Col. Ravi Shankar Vasireddy [retd.] (Off-community) and Sirkar Kashyap Pulipaka. After having done these tasks, I moved on to file a detailed rapid grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation. The grants team was very responsive and the grant was approved in a week. This initiative gained good global support including the foundation’s staff, who were happy to see a new Wiki Loves initiative budding. However, till now there aren't as many images as expected. To increase awareness about the program we’ve decided to implement a new strategy of conducting photo walks with government permission. Apart from that we’re also in contact with the Indian Navy to donate their images to the contest. The deadline may extend for about a month or so depending upon the stats. Personally, I see great potential for this project, but the problem is one of Wikipedians' response. I hope this initiative will be a great success and will be taken up by fellow Wikimedians from others countries. I conclude by thanking CIS-A2K for conducting innovative workshops and Wikimedia India for their support to the project since its inception. I also thank each and every unacknowledged finger behind this great initiative.

Krishna Chaitanya Velaga

Lead Coordinator

Wiki Loves Uniformed services (India) 2017

CIS-A2K’s Wikipedia Education Program with Christ University, Bangalore is coming to an end after another year of intense classes, certificate courses and an internship at The Centre for Internet and Society. The internship activity in particular has successfully managed to engage students beyond classroom hours. The selection of 12 students for the internship program was based on their penchant for the language as well as their interest in the wiki world.

The internship was structured into three stages. Firstly, the students were asked to develop stub articles. The aim of this activity was for students to learn searching skills. As a result, over 1500 articles were developed with qualitative work.

Secondly, the students were asked to create new articles from scratch. They searched for the topic on the Wikipedia, ascertained whether the article exists or not and later researched further on the content of the articles. As a result, the students were able to create 1400+ articles

Finally, the students were asked to draft policy pages for their respective language Wikipedia. They went through the policy pages in different languages including English and were asked to create similar policy pages for Kannada Wikipedia.

Unlike previous years, the activities during the internship program were tailored to suit the individual capabilities of the students, taking into consideration the suggestions from community members. The students were of the opinion that in addition to rekindling their love for the language, the internship program also enabled them to develop their overall knowledge of various subjects. The students felt that their vocabulary and typing skills also improved. However, the students were of the opinion that they could have been taken a level or two higher from article writing and introduced to other Wikimedia projects and topics related to the overall movement. The CIS-A2K WEP Program hopes to incorporate these suggestions for the upcoming year while also trying to increase the number of days of the internship in order not to tax the students.

A Marathi Wikipedia edit-a-thon was held at Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science, Satara. The aim of the workshop was to edit and improve articles on Marathi Wikipedia under the theme "Environment and Local Biodiveristy". Participants were given an orientation on how to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science is housed under the Rayat Shikshan Sanstha, a century-old organization with the largest network of schools and colleges across Maharashtra. The management and local environmental group, Drongo, took the initiative to organize this thematic workshop in Satara, an area rich in terms of biodiversity in the Western Ghats. Noted ecologist and scientist Prof. Madhavrao Gadgil addressed the workshop as a resource person along with Prof. V.Y. Deshpande of the Institute. A total of 23 members from various like-minded organizations participated in the workshop.

Image by सुबोध कुलकर्णी/ CC-BY-SA 4.0

Tallapaka Pada Sahityam, a compilation of over fourteen thousand Telugu compositions is now available on Wikisource. Tallapaka Annamacharya was a 15th-century Hindu saint and composer who was renowned for singing in praise of Lord Venkateswara. The Tallapaka lineage began with him, giving rise to many bards in the Telugu language from the family. The Tallapaka Pada Sahityam is a compilation of three generations of Tallapaka poets: Tallapaka Annamacharya, Tallapaka Peda Tirumalacharya, and Tallapaka China Tirumalacharya. This compilation, published by Annamayya Library, Guntur has been uploaded by the library on Wikisource as part of their efforts to digitize the library archives. These lyrical works, dealing with a variety of themes, are of immense literary and cultural significance to Telugu speakers the world over.

Owing to the large size of the file donated by the library, the works need to be separated into 29 volumes. These separated files would be uploaded and indexed on Commons as well. A Unicode version of the work needs to be published and proofread in addition to their print version. Telugu Wikimedians are also exploring the possiblity of re-licensing recitations of the poems by literary connoisseurs. On 9 June, an orientation of these activities was conducted for long time Telugu Wikipedia, te:user:శ్రీరామమూర్తి, who has begun publishing Unicode text and proof-reading on Telugu Wikisource.

The link to the work is here:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Tallapaka_pada_sahityam.pdf