Centre for Internet & Society

Where is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Headed?

by Anubha Sinha

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the Asian answer to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is still being furiously scripted.

Read more →

A workshop to improve Telugu Wikipedia articles on Nobel laureates

by Pavan Santhosh

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.

Read more →

Methodology: Statements of Working (Form 27) of Indian Mobile Device Patents

by Rohini Lakshané

In India, if a patent is not locally worked within three years of its issuance, any person may request a compulsory license, and if the patent is not adequately worked within two years of the grant of such a compulsory license, it may be revoked. In order to provide the public with information about patent working, India requires every patentee to file an annual statement on “Form 27” describing the working of each of its issued Indian patents. We conducted the first comprehensive and systematic study of all Forms 27 filed with respect to mobile devices. We tried to empirically establish the extent to which patentees and licensees comply with the statutory requirement to declare information about the working of their patents. Research assistance was provided by interns Anna Liz Thomas and Nayana Dasgupta.

Read more →

Making Telugu Suitable for Internet

by Rahmanuddin Shaikh

In brief, the article speaks of steps in making a language other than English suitable for Internet and computers, what input methods, fonts and content are available in Telugu as on date and what challenges are ahead in making language fully available on Internet and in computers.

Read more →

Wikiwomen’s Meetup at St. Agnes College Explores Potentials and Plans of Women Editors in Mangalore, Karnataka

by Ting-Yi Chang

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.

Read more →

3 Copyright Tips for Students and Educators

by Subhashish Panigrahi

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.

Read more →

Meet the Newly Born Tulu Wikipedia, the 23rd in a South Asian Language!

by Subhashish Panigrahi

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.

Read more →

Community Digest: Tulu Wikipedia Goes Live after Eight Years in Incubator; News in Brief

by Subhashish Panigrahi and Ting-Yi Chang

Eight years after being created in the Wikimedia Incubator, the Tulu-language Wikipedia is now live as the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia.

Read more →

Preserving Languages and Cultures in India: The Birth of the Tulu Wikipedia

by Subhashish Panigrahi

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.

Read more →

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଓସିଆର: ଛପା ଲେଖାର ଛବିରୁ ଡିଇଟାଲ ଲେଖା

by Subhashish Panigrahi

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.

Read more →