Access to Knowledge Blogs
Wikiwomen’s Meetup at St. Agnes College Explores Potentials and Plans of Women Editors in Mangalore, Karnataka
Karnataka is known for its diverse linguistic cultures. Aside from Kannada, many are native speakers of Konkani, Tulu, and other languages. A small Wikiwomen's meetup was held on Saturday, August 27th at St. Agnes College, Mangalore, to invite female Wikipedians from the region. Many of them were new to the online encyclopedia but demonstrated strong interest in learning and contributing more Indic language content online.
A workshop to improve Telugu Wikipedia articles on Nobel laureates
Many articles about Nobel laureates are missing in the Telugu Wikipedia. Recently undergraduate students from four different disciplines of the Andhra Loyola College (ALC), Vijayawada gathered to create and improve articles related to Nobel laureates.
3 Copyright Tips for Students and Educators
Copyright is a really complicated topic, and when it comes to online use of creative works, accidentally crossing the line between fair use and a copyright violation is easy. How do you know what is copyrighted? Recently Frederico Morando (Creative Commons, Italy) and I presented a training session on understanding copyright policies at Wikimania 2016, which was originally proposed by Wikipedian User:Jim Carter. We covered topics such as fundamentals of copyright, exclusive rights, Berne convention, copyleft, Creative Commons licenses, Public Domain, fair use, and copyfraud.
Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses
A campaign has been started to relicense Telugu-language books of several noted authors from "all rights reserved" to Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) license.
Meet the Newly Born Tulu Wikipedia, the 23rd in a South Asian Language!
The Tulu language Wikipedia became the latest entrant in the family of 294 world-language Wikipedia projects after the project went live from Wikimedia Incubator earlier this month.
Community Digest: Tulu Wikipedia Goes Live after Eight Years in Incubator; News in Brief
Eight years after being created in the Wikimedia Incubator, the Tulu-language Wikipedia is now live as the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia.
Preserving Languages and Cultures in India: The Birth of the Tulu Wikipedia
After eight years of effort and outreach, the Tulu language Wikipedia has gone live. Wikimedia contributors play a key role in preserving languages and cultures, and tools like the Wikimedia Incubator help new projects like the Tulu Wikipedia get started.
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଓସିଆର: ଛପା ଲେଖାର ଛବିରୁ ଡିଇଟାଲ ଲେଖା
Though not an open source solution, Google's OCR works really well for Odia and other Indian languages. My column in the Odia daily the Samaja that was published last Saturday briefs about how the OCR works and has a step-by-step process to use it. There is also a little bit of background of Tesseract-based OCR that Debayan Banerjee worked in the past and Nasim Ali from the Odia Wikimedia community is currently working.
Training-the-trainer programme and Mediawiki training at Pune
A two-day long train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training programme was organised during May 28-29 in Pune to better capacity of Wikimedians both technically, and outreach and community building.
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: Gender Gap in Indian Language Wikipedias – Projects, Outreach and Outcome
India is not much different from the global statistics when it comes to gender gap issues in Wikipedia. Indian language Wikipedias are known to have similar ratio of male to female editors.
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: We, Men, Women: Collective Learning in Bridging Indic Wikipedia Gender Gaps
There is no denying that non-English Wikipedias are disproportionally underrepresented in scholarly focus despite the significant role of an open knowledge society can play in smaller linguistic groups – local collaboration and communication, knowledge dissemination, as well as preservation of local language resources.
WikiConference India 2016 Submission: How to better tell your Wikimedia Community Story using Media as a Tool
The Wikimedia community has constantly struggled to a) reach out to masses and tell them about their contribution, and motivate people to contribute to the Wikimedia projects. Media plays a very important role in spreading the word about Wikimedia projects and the contributor community, and at times, encouraging the audience to contribute.
US Copyright law faces constitutional challenge
In a major international development, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit to strike down the provisions on Digital Rights Management(DRM) in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In this post, I discuss DRMs, the EFF lawsuit, and then draw upon the differences between the US and Indian copyright regime on DRM protection.
South Asia's Largest Wikimedia Conference Kicks Off in India
Wiki Conference India 2016, the largest gathering of the contributors of Wikipedia (the multilingual online encyclopaedia) and its sister projects called Wikimedia projects, begins August 5 in Landran, in the Indian state of Punjab.
Community digest: Konkani language speakers are separated by scripts but unite by Wikipedia; news in brief
Konkani-language Wikipedians on what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers who speak in different variations of the same language and write in different scripts.
The largest Wikipedia gathering in South Asia kicks off
Wikimedia Conference 2016Wiki Conference India 2016 (WCI), the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia, will be held during August 5-7 this year in Chandigarh, India.
Tools orientation for Telugu Wikimedians of Hyderabad
To help Wikimedians learn about essential tools that are used across Wikimedia projects, a tools orientation session was organised during the monthly meetup on July 10 at Hyderabad.
USTR elaborates the Two Dozen Digital Rules of Club TPP
Members of the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are now scrounging the world to include more countries in its fold. The Digital 2 Dozen(D2D) is a bite-sized document which packs the TPP into 24 key tenets. The D2D, aggressively championed by the US as the path forward for the global digital economy poses some critical questions for India: first, how will India position itself against US pressure in the larger scheme of US-India foreign relations, and how much is it willing to concede its policies in the name of trade; second, how will reduced barriers and establishment of a level field for Indian and foreign IT and internet companies alike, hurt Indian consumers and businesses? This week, the Deputy US Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Holleyman discussed the Digital 2 Dozen document with Ambassador Shyam Saran (Chairman, RIS). The exchange was moderated by Samir Saran (Observer Research Foundation). I attended the discussion and this post is a summary of the key points.
Letter to MPs on Concerns on Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
The Centre for Internet and Society sent a letter to Members of Parliament on July 27, 2016 to appeal to re-examine the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
Edit-a-thon at DSERT Bengaluru to improve Science-related articles in Kannada Wikipedia
We have been working with the Department of State Educational Research and Training of Karnataka (DSERT), a Government of Karnataka-run research and training institution headquartered in Bengaluru. With the hope of expanding the reach of Science-related content in Kannada Wikipedia, we organised an edit-a-thon spanning over three days from the 11th January through the 13th.
