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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.
CIS Submission to TRAI Consultation on Proliferation of Broadband through Public WiFi Networks
The Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) is grateful for the opportunity to comment on this Consultation Paper (“Paper”). The comments were prepared by Sunil Abraham, Sharath Chandra Ram, Vidushi Marda, and Thejaswi Melarkode. Special thanks to Shyam Ponappa and Arjun Venkatraman for their inputs and feedback.
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.
Policy Brief on the Report of the UN Group of Governmental Experts on ICT
In light of the complex challenges and threats posed to, and by, the field of information telecommunications in cyberspace, in 1998 the draft resolution in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly was introduced and adopted without a vote (A/RES/53/70) ]. Since then, the Secretary General to the General Assembly has invited annual reports on the issue.
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.
Do I Want to Say Happy B’day?
When it comes to greeting friends on their birthdays, social media prompts are a great reminder. So why does an online message leave us cold?
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.
Book Review: Apocalypse Now Redux
My review for Arundhati Roy and John Cusack's new book that captures their encounter with Edward Snowden, 'Things that can and cannot be said' is now out. It's an engaging, if somewhat freewheeling, political critique of the times we live in.
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.
101 Ways of Starting an ISP:* No. 53 - Conversation, Content and Weird Fiction
This essay by Surfatial is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. It argues that the internet has created a space for philosophical questioning among contemporary Indian participants which can develop further, despite common assertions that online spaces are largely uncivil and abusive. It actively explores how anonymous and pseudonymous content production may offer a method for exploring and expressing the internet in India, with a certain degree of freedom, and how spam-like methods may prove effective in puncturing filter bubbles.
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.
Analysis of the Report of the Group of Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security and Implications for India
This paper analyses the report of the Group of Experts and and India’s compliance with its recommendations based on existing laws and policies. Given the global nature of these challenges and the need for nations to holistically address such challenges from a human rights and security perspective, CIS believes that the Group of Experts and similar international forums are useful and important forums for India to actively engage with.
DIDP Request #28 - ICANN renews Verisign’s RZM Contract?
Our request to ICANN was related to our (mistaken) assumption that Verisign and ICANN had signed an agreement for Root Zone Maintenance and had recently renewed it. In that context we had asked for information such as documents reflecting the decision making process, copy of the current RZM agreement, public comments and an audit report of Verisign’s RZM functions.
