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Kannada Wikipedia Education Program at Christ university: Work so far
As you know we are working closely with Christ university in Bengaluru for the Education Programs in Kannada Wikipedia and Kannada Wikisource, we worked on redesigning the programme for this academic year 2016-17 based on the lessons learned from the earlier intervention.
Wikipedia Asian Month — 2016 iteration starts on 1 November
The second iteration of Wikipedia Asian Month (WAM), a month-long edit-a-thon to create and improve Asia-related articles on Wikipedia, is going to start on 1 November 2016. In this blog post we'll revisit the stats of the 2015 iteration of the event. We'll also talk to Addis Wang, an organizer of WAM, to know more about their progress and preparation.
Should Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published
We raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. Indian authors have used 488 OA journals levying article processing charge (APC), ranging from INR 500 to US$5,000, in the five years to publish about 15,400 papers.
Adopting ORCID as a Unique Identifier will Benefit all Involved in Scholarly Communication
ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a nonprofit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as digital object identifiers (DOIs) and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.
Open source in everyday life: How we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in Bengaluru
The free and open source software (FOSS) enthusiasts just celebrated the Software Freedom Day (SFD) on September 17 all across the world. This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in the Indian city of Bengaluru. The group consisted of open source contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map, and users of FOSS solutions.
How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias
Mobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like India in which only a handful of journals are available in Indian languages, open access to research and educational resources is hugely important for populating content for the various Indian language Wikipedias.
How Long Have Banks Known About The Debit Card Fraud?
The recent security breach in an Indian payment switch provider, confirmed earlier this week by the National Payments Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL), has forced domestic banks into damage control mode over the past few days.
What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India
The number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.
RBI Directions on Account Aggregators
The Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) Directions for account aggregator services in India seem to lay great emphasis on data security by allowing only direct access between institutions and do away with data scraping techniques.
Querying Wikipedia Data
Recently I wrote a blog about the stub article length of Wikipedia articles. I mentioned the difference in actual number of characters and the number of bytes used to define stub articles between English and Indian language Wikipedias. One can open any language Wikipedia, type Special:ShortPages in the search box to get the list of articles which have less than 2048 bytes.
MLATs and the proposed Amendments to the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act
In continuance of our blog post on mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs), we examine a new approach to international bilateral cooperation being suggested in the United States, by creating a mechanism for certain foreign governments to directly approach the data controllers.
UTF-8, Indic and Stub Length Article in Wikipedia
One of the activities conducted as part of Wiki Conference India 2016 was the Punjab Editathon. It was about adding articles related to Punjab to Indian language Wikipedias and English Wikipedia. There was also an announcement made about some award for highest contribution.
(Lack of) Representation of Non-Western World in Process of Creation of Web Standards
World Wide Consortium (W3C) as a standard setting organization for the World Wide Web plays a very important role in shaping the web. We focus on the ongoing controversy related to Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and found that there was a serious lack of participation from people from non-western countries. We also found serious lack of gender diversity in the EME debate.
Technical Alternative to Encrypted Media Extensions
This post is an analysis of the various technical alternatives to EME (encyrpted media extensions) that have emerged from the discussions at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These alternatives and the proposed EME specification along six dimensions are examined.
Digital Native: The Future is Now
The digital is not just an addition but the new norm in our lives, and it might not be all good. There used to be a popular joke among technology geeks when Bluetooth arrived on our mobile devices — everything becomes better with Bluetooth.
Love in the Time of Tinder
Service providers and information aggregators mine our information and share it in ways that we cannot imagine.
Request for Specifics: Rebuttal to UIDAI
Responding to the Unique Identification Authority of India’s article that found “serious mathematical errors” in “Flaws in the UIDAI Process” (EPW 12 March 2016), the main mathematical argument used to arrive at the number of duplicates in the biometric database is explained.
IANA Transition: A Case of the Emperor’s New Clothes?
Transparency is key to engaging meaningfully with ICANN. CIS has filed the most number of Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP) requests with ICANN, covering a range of subjects including its relationships with contracted parties, financial disclosure, revenue statements, and harassment policies. Asvatha Babu, an intern at CIS, analysed all responses to our requests and found that only 14% of our requests were answered fully.
Why Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up
In an important development, the US Federal Trade Commission has filed a complaint against the India-based OMICS group for harassing authors to publish in its journals.
A Market Structure for Digital India
If delivery is priced below cost, communications services will be unsustainable and ineffective. The stress in the telecom sector is evident from the data. The market capitalisation of listed telecom operators has been stagnant since the 3G auction in 2010, while the government collected Rs 2.83 lakh crore of non-tax charges from them.
