Centre for Internet and Society

Meet Telugu Wikipedian Surampudi Meena Gayathri – the first South Indian Wikiwoman completing 100Wikidays Challenge

ting — 2017-01-23T11:53:32Z

In December 2016, Ms. Meena Gayathri and her fellow Telugu Wikipedians celebrated the Telugu Wikipedia Day and her accomplishment in the 100Wikidays Challenge – a challenge that requires Wikipedians to create one new article per day for one hundred days in a row. When asked about how it feels to take up the challenge and to become the first South Indian Wikiwoman who completed it, she replied “Like exericing, you would think it is hard to do it every day but if you try, it is really satisfying.” Ms. Meena Gayathri has been one of the few active female Telugu Wikipedians since 2014. Her contribution and passion towards her language and culture have transcended into what she called a “knowledge revolution.”

Ms. Meena Gayathri is an active Telugu Wikipedian who started her 100Wikidays challenge at the end of August 2016. Her motivation came from the support of her family, the satisfaction of creating articles, and her determination to be an inspiration for her fellow Wikipedians. Ms. Meena Gayathri had chosen topics from her interests, including freedom fighters from Andhra Pradesh, wherein articles were present on English Wikipedia but not in Telugu. “I think those are really basic things that Telugu Wikipedia should have but somehow there isn’t” she said. Meena Gayathri reached out to the Telugu community for assistance with MediaWiki’s content translation tools. She also had the support of CIS A2K for books and reference resources. Drawing inspiration from current events and Indian culture, Meena Gayathri also wrote articles on Hindu Goddesses on each the ten days of Dussehra in coordination with the worshiping of a different Goddess on each day of the festival.

The creation of articles on Hindu Goddesses also mark Meena Gayathri’s effort and passion in bridging the Wikipedia gender gap in content coverage. Half way through her challenge, in coordination with the Wikipedia Asian Month in November 2016, she started writing on biographies of Asian women, including female politicians in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. “It’s very interesting” she said, while mentioning her experience in researching and writing about these female figures, “(how) these women, under hard situations… are still securing their positions in the government and in the politics… I want to let people see how they gain and sustain their power as women.” Additionally, Meena Gayathri pioneered a new challenge called “100Women Wikidays Challenge” in which participants would write a woman-related article each day in an endeavor to balance the content gender gap on Wikipedia.

“People said to me that I am the first South India female Wikipedian to complete the 100WikiDays, and the first in the whole world to take up the 100Women Wikidays.”

Her attempt to complete the 100Women Wikidays challenge, however, stopped a few days ago due to the lack of internet connection and time. In fact, this is not the first time that she has faced such difficulty during the completion of her challenges. She described how during a family tour outside of the city, she used to bring a laptop and ensure stable internet connection just so she can wake up as early as possible each day to finish her daily articles for the 100Wikidays. She agrees that women usually seem to be occupied by different responsibilities and activities – family, work, and socializing. She was glad that her family and community have given her full support, materially and mentally, to complete the challenge. When asked about tips on sparing some time for Wikipedia every day, she answered, “The first thing I do in a day… (is to) plan each and every moment of what I need to do in my day. And I maintain a task list in my mind. I will say, just remind yourself twice or thrice a day, remind yourself what you really want to do and you can make some time for Wiki(pedia) too.”

At the end of our conversation, we asked Gayathri to share some advice and encouragement to those who want to take up or are completing the 100Wikidays (or the 100Women Wikidays) Challenge. She answered without hesitation, “I will say, don’t feel afraid, that work you want to do is not that tough after all… It will be satisfying. You are contributing to the knowledge revolution... I think for Telugu, for the online knowledge in our linguistic background, this is going to be history. I will tell them ‘We’re creating a history.’”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/meet-telugu-wikipedian-surampudi-meena-gayathri-2013-the-first-south-indian-wikiwoman-completing-100wikidays-challenge

Making Telugu Suitable for Internet

rahim — 2016-09-06T14:21:49Z

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.

Click to download the file here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ammanudi-september-6-2016-making-telugu-suitable-for-internet

International Mother Language Day

praskrishna — 2016-02-27T06:17:37Z

On 21 February 2016, Eenadu published a special story on the occasion of International Mother language day in Hyderabad edition. The special story covered Wikipedians effort to develop Encyclopedic content online and also about multi-lingual (English-Telugu) Wikipedians meetup organized in December 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/eenadu-february-21-2016-international-mother-language-day

Improving Telugu Village Articles

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-11-26T02:27:39Z

Telugu wikipedians on 6 October 2016 held a discussion on improving the quality of Telugu articles. The event was organized by IIIT, Hyderabad, CIS-A2K and OpenGeo.

A possible collaboration between Wikipedia and free and open source enthusiasts and environmental groups was explored at the meeting. Subodh Kulkarni and Pavan Santhosh made a presentation about Wikipedia. The participants were from different groups such as SOUL (Save Our Urban Lakes), OpenGeo.org (organization that works for open source mapping) and Sweccha (organization working to expand free software movement in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh).

Prof. Madhav Gadgil moderated a discussion on how these organizations could collaborate for different Wikimedia projects. The discussion primarily revolved around improving ongoing Telugu village articles.

Prof. Gadgil stressed on compiling articles using reliable and verifiable sources. He also urged the participants to upload geo-tagged photos to Commons especially photos of lakes of which the authorities have denied existence. The discussion also focused on the synergy between OpenGeo and Wikipedia.

Post-lunch, Prof. Gadgil delivered a lecture on “Human Knowledge: An Evolutionary Perspective in IIT”. Prof. Gadgil explained that the next big leap in evolution of human knowledge is free knowledge in which everyone can contribute and utilize which was Wikipedia. He urged the scholars and students to contribute to Wikipedia which is the future for knowledge society.

Telugu and English wikipedians including Vinay, Lubna Sarwath, Undavalli Ravikumar, Raju and many more participated in the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/improving-telugu-village-articles

Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise: January iteration

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-15T17:47:50Z

The January iteration of the Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise took place online.

The Google-translated Telugu articles prioritization is an online exercise intended to prioritize and improve over 1,900 machine-translated articles on Telugu Wikipedia. This project began from 2009- 2011 when Google translation project took place on Telugu Wikipedia in several rounds. Jointly organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K, this exercise saw the participation of 1 female Wikipedian and 4 male Wikipedians.

12 machine translated articles were improved and 39 have been deleted due to their poor quality. In addition to this, 42 articles have been prioritised for further improvement. Says Telugu Wikipedian User:Meena gayathri.s, "people who wanted to improve Google-translated article waited [for a] long time to get a priority list of articles to be improved and in that aspect, this exercise is very useful."

Several such iterations are planned for the coming months. The meta page for the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/google-translated-telugu-articles-prioritisation-exercise-january-iteration

Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise: February iteration

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-18T05:02:13Z

The February iteration of the Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise took place online.

The Google-translated Telugu articles prioritization is an online exercise intended to prioritize and improve over 1,900 machine-translated articles on Telugu Wikipedia. This project was initiated in 2009 when Google translation project took place on Telugu Wikipedia in several rounds. Jointly organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K, this exercise saw the participation of 2 Wikipedians.

47 out of 116 articles have been prioritised for further improvement. Says Telugu Wikipedian User:Meena gayathri.s, "I improved Machine translated articles earlier and my major problem is whether my contribution is being channelled properly or not. I always used to think if we can have a list of articles that separates articles that needed to be improved from that of deleted; it will help a lot in this heavy task. This exercise is helping in the same aspect and that is why I'm contributing to this in every iteration."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/google-translated-telugu-articles-prioritisation-exercise-february-iteration

Expanding the World of Telugu Wikipedia – CIS-A2K and ALC join hands

T Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik — 2014-09-30T05:11:29Z

Students and faculty of Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada aim to enhance Telugu Wikipedia through increased contributions to Wikipedia and make it available under free license.

The Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in its quest to catalyze the growth of open knowledge movement in Indic languages recently added another feather to its cap by signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Andhra Loyola College (ALC) in Vijayawada on August 14, 2014 to work collaboratively to improve Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu Wikisource. College Principal Fr. G.A.P. Kishore, Vice-Principals Fr. P. Anil Kumar and Fr. Rex Angelo, correspondent Fr. Raju signed the agreement with CIS-A2K programme director T. Vishnu Vardhan.

The MoU signed with ALC is for a period of five years and encompasses four activities: Open knowledge creation in Telugu across various disciplines on Telugu Wikipedia: ALC faculty and students will be trained by CIS-A2K staff and interested Telugu Wikimedians to understand the principles that govern Wikipedia in order to generate quality entries. Faculty from Botany, Physics, Statistics, Ethics, Religion, Telugu Literature, and Music will work with CIS-A2K. Each of the faculty in the coming months will come up with a plan to generate open knowledge in Telugu in their respective disciplines. Content donation and digitization on Telugu Wikisource: ALC through its networks will help CIS-A2K to bring Telugu content under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. The Telugu department of the college expressed keen interest to work with CIS-A2K in digitizing historical Telugu content and to make it available on Telugu Wikisource. Various competitions will be planned in the future. Creating a free software environment at Andhra Loyola College: 400 machines within various labs on the campus will be converted into FOSS systems with free and open source software including support for Telugu and other Indic languages. It should be noted that all the existing computers of ALC are run on proprietary software. As a pilot initiative CIS-A2K has already converted 30 systems in a lab and named it as Loyola FOSS Lab. CIS-A2K to revise the FIT (Fundamentals in Information Technology): A mandatory course for all undergraduate students which will introduce students to FOSS, Openness and Wikipedia. This is an outcome of the FOSS orientation done by T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahimanuddin Shaik during the two workshops that were held at ALC.

CIS-A2K will put every effort to involve Telugu Wikimedians and FOSS community in taking this collaboration with ALC forward. CIS-A2K will also create a project page on Telugu Wikipedia to actively document and publicly share the detailed plans and progress. More updates will also be shared on this website.


Above: Representatives from ALC and CIS-A2K seen during the signing ceremony.

The signing of the MoU was done at a public event in the presence of students, faculty and management of ALC and various representatives from media. The media covered this event enthusiastically. The Hindu coverage can be found here and Eenadu article coverage is here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/expanding-the-world-of-telugu-wikipedia-cis-and-alc-join-hands

English Wikipedia and the Telugu Wikipedia joint meetup and edit-a-thon: Sakshi

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:31:25Z

The article was published in Sakshi on December 20, 2015. A scanned version of the article is given below.

On December 20, 2015 English Wikipedia and the Telugu Wikipedia joint meetup and edit-a-thon were conducted on Golden Threshold, Hyderabad.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/english-wikipedia-and-the-telugu-wikipedia-joint-meetup-and-edit-a-thon-sakshi

English Wikipedia and the Telugu Wikipedia joint meetup and edit-a-thon: Andhra Jyoti

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:33:09Z

The article was published in Andhra Jyoti on December 20, 2015. A scanned version of the article is below.

On December 20, 2015 English Wikipedia and the Telugu Wikipedia joint meetup and edit-a-thon were conducted on Golden Threshold, Hyderabad. Andhra Jyoti covered the programme.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/english-wikipedia-and-the-telugu-wikipedia-joint-meetup-and-edit-a-thon-andhra-jyoti

English and Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Hyderabad

Pavan Santosh — 2015-12-31T07:49:19Z

After a long time, a collaborative Telugu and English Wikipedia edit-a-thon is being organised in Hyderabad on December 20.

This Sunday, the Telugu and English language Wikipedia editors are organising a unique edit-a-thon at Golden Threshold, Abids. The event is aimed at translating many English Wikipedia articles related to Telugu language and culture to Telugu and vice versa. Theatre scholar and Telugu Wikimedian Pranay Raj Vangari and English Wikimedian Srikar Kasyap are organising this event with support from Centre for Internet and Society. Telugu speakers who contribute to English Wikipedia are going to contribute to Telugu Wikipedia. “The event is scheduled at 10 am and over a dozen articles are planned to be created during the sprint”, explains Vangari. Kashyap adds saying, “the Wikimedians are also planning to share best practices of the two communities which will benefit everyone”. The event is open to all and newbies will be oriented with the basics of Wikipedia editing and enriching the knowledge pool in Telugu and other languages on the Internet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/english-and-telugu-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-hyderabad

Emphasis on developing vernacular encyclopaedias

praskrishna — 2014-04-15T10:22:04Z

emphasis-on-developing-vernacular-encyclopaedias.

This article published in the Hindu on March 30, 2014 quotes Rehmanuddin Sheikh.

It is imperative to make efforts to develop encyclopaedias in all vernacular languages, S. Rehmanuddin, programme officer, Centre of Internet Society - Access To Knowledge, said.

In a guest lecture on Telugu Wikipedia organised by the Computer Science department in JNTU College of Engineering, Pulivendula, he explained the way Wikipedia works - the wiki model and the Wiki mark-up language.

Students were also told about the workings of the media wiki framework, which forms the backend of Wikipedia and several similar projects.

Head of Computer Science, A. Suresh Babu, explained that the guest lecture was organised to enlighten CSE students about Wikipedia, the largest encyclopaedia ever.

It is the biggest multilingual textual source with over three crore articles in 287 languages including Telugu, students were told.

It has over four million articles on various topics ranging from arts to mythology and science to advanced computing, he added.

He explained to the participants about Media wiki API that would help them understand web services and create applications based on the API data.

IT will help them to create data-driven projects in future, he said.

Automation of tasks in the form of running bot scripts were also demonstrated during the lecture.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-march-30-2014-emphasis-on-developing-vernacular-encyclopaedias

Discussion on Creation of Social Media Guidelines & Strategy for Telugu Wikimedia

manasarao — 2017-10-24T14:42:24Z

Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online.

An online discussion of guidelines and policies for the various Telugu Wikimedia social media handles was conducted. User:Pavan santhosh.s suggested a set of strategies and guidelines that can be taken into consideration for an official Social Media Policy of Telugu Wikimedia Projects. These suggestions included defining objectives, guidelines (with do's and don'ts) and strategies for the Social Media Policy. User:Ravichandra supported the idea and suggested another objective(showcasing best quality works of Wikipedia). User:Viswanadh added some strategies (such as writing a series of posts about technical aspects that help Wikipedians). User:Pranayraj1985 suggested some don'ts in handling Wikipedia pages as well as handles while User:Rajasekhar1961 expanded the strategy to other sister projects(Telugu Wikisource and Wiktionary). Finally, User:Chaduvari suggested not to name any page as official to avoid possible conflicts. User:Swaralasika announced consensus and User:Pavan santhosh.s created a page based on the discussion in order for the community to reflect.

User:Pranayraj1985 said, "there are pages & groups for Telugu Wikipedia in Facebook for years. We are using them as major social media promotion channels. I(Pranay) am publishing content related to Telugu Wikipedia in those channels. Some of the community members also been admins of page and group. But once or twice, in Facebook page and group, unrelated posts were published and I informed this to Wikimedians active on Facebook and removed those posts. I am glad that this discussion happened and community came up with guidelines and strategy now. This is very much needed.

The guideline page can be found here.

Although the event was successful in creating guidelines, none of the input included women's voices as there were no female participants. Here's hoping there is a diversity of voices in future discussions.

With input from Pavan Santhosh S., Telugu Community Advocate, CIS-A2K.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/discussion-on-creation-of-social-media-guidelines-strategy-for-telugu-wikimedia

Digitisation sprint at Andhra Loyola College Vijayawada to bring more books on Telugu Wikisource

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-02-12T11:29:10Z

This 12th, A digitisation sprint is being organised for student Wikipedians of Andhra Loyola College Vijayawada. Students will learn about scanning books, will use OCR engine and digitise books on Telugu Wikisource. The event is organised by CIS-A2K where Telugu Wikimedian Viswanadh will be participating to mentor the new Wikimedians.

Telugu Wikisource, a free online library in Telugu-language. Currently there are about 8 volunteers, known as Wikisourcers, who find Telugu-language text that are available under free licenses like Public Domain or Creative Commons licenses, digitise them and make the books available on the project. Their effort has brought about 29,680 pages of digitised text from old and new published works of different genres ranging from popular science and religious literature to literary contributions of notable authors of the states of Andhra and Telengana.

35 student Wikipedians of the Andhra Loyola College will be participating in this event and will learn about scanning of books, converting text from scanned images using OCR engine and digitising books on Telugu Wikisource by typing and proof-reading. At least 150-200 folios are expected to be digitized on Telugu Wikisource. Most importantly, this activity will also help bring 5-10 new Wikisourcers to Telugu Wikisource. As this is just a two-day long event, more follow up sessions will be conducted over time with the same set of students to help them learn better about the technical process involved and overall digitisation.This is the first of its kind in the institution where the students will not just learn about digitisation of books but will participate in a live contribution and make more Telugu books available online.

"Introducing Student Wikisourcers to Telugu Wikisource will help in developing the project. Also this is a very timely activity because even few days delay might result in really low participation as exams are coming up. "
— Viswanadh (User:విశ్వనాధ్.బి.కె.) ,Telugu Wikipedian (comment from Telugu Wikipedia Village Pump)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/digitisation-sprint-at-andhra-loyola-college-vijayawada-to-bring-more-books-on-telugu-wikisource

Developing Open Educational Resources in Indian Languages

Sohnee Harshey* — 2016-06-10T01:50:22Z

The Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), has been involved in organising workshops on developing open educational resources (OER) in Indian languages with undergraduate and postgraduate students across various partner institutions. The objective of these workshops is to introduce students to: a) tools of collaborative knowledge production on the Internet, and b) methods for generating new online content in Indian languages.

During November 2015 - February 2016, four such workshops have been organised at TISS’ Mumbai and Tuljapur campuses, Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women's Studies Centre (KSPWSC), Pune University, and at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.

A one and half day workshop was organised at KSPWSC, Pune during January 22-23, 2016. A total of 20 students attended this workshop along with three faculty members from the Centre. This workshop is a part of CILHE's ongoing and sustained engagement with KSPWSC to generate and strengthen content pertaining to women's studies on the Marathi Wikipedia.

Pune
On Day 1, after the opening address by Dr. Anagha Tambe from KSPWSC, Sohnee Harshey from CILHE, TISS spoke about the importance of creating open educational resources in Indian languages for social sciences and humanities. She sought responses from participants about the nature of their engagement with their research areas—which languages they used while collecting data, whether they had accessed reading material in languages other than English, and what were their sources of information. All the participants had used languages other than English in their learning process, some had even accessed Indian language Wikipedias, and all of them felt the need for more resources in Indian languages—especially in simpler and more accessible formats. Tanveer Hasan from CIS then spoke about the utility of Wikipedia for knowledge consumers and its immense potential for students to become knowledge producers, especially in the Indian languages.

In order to familiarize the participants with social sciences (specifically women's studies) terminology in Indian languages, an exercise was conducted, wherein they were asked to describe a concept (from a given list) without using the term itself. The idea behind this was to highlight what function a concept performs in a sentence and in the language context, and what assumptions are made while using this concept. This was followed up with another exercise where the participants were encouraged to choose two concepts and explain their denotation and connotation. This was done in order to familiarise them with the web of other concepts in which a concept is located. The concept of ‘labour’ or ‘shram’ (in Marathi) was chosen for discussion.

On Day 2 of the workshop, Abhinav Garule, Programme Associate with A2K-CIS, introduced the participants to the basics of Wikipedia editing through a hands-on activity. They navigated through both the English and Indian language Wikipedias to see how the edit, talk, and view history functions work, what the key characteristics of a good article are, and how one can read more about a certain topic through interwiki and external links and categories. This was interspersed with recalling the exercises done on the previous day and comparing the critical thinking process involved.

Since one of the simpler ways to populate Indian language Wikipedias is through translation of existing content in English, participants were encouraged to try this with an entry of their choice. They were asked to also list difficulties that they faced in the process of translation. At the end of this exercise, a range of ‘problems’ like lack of appropriate terminology for complex concepts, the dangers of oversimplification, differences between languages in terms of the structure of sentences, and lack of references in Indian languages, were highlighted by the participants. While they were still thinking about these problems, another challenge was put forth for them to look at two conflicting or opposing references for a topic (for example, a movie review, or reporting around an event) and come up with a ‘neutral’ write-up about it. Questions of what constitutes a valid reference, issues of plagiarism, personal opinion, codes of civility on Talk pages formed part of this discussion.

Following this, the participants chose one topic (each) on which they wished to create a Wikipedia article in an Indian language. Most of the participants worked on the Marathi Wikipedia. They worked in groups of 3-4 to edit and create a range of articles including ones on patriarchy, colonialism, masculinity, family, and tribes, among others. A total of 12 entries were created in this workshop. Participants also explored Wikimedia Commons, Meta, and Wikisource as allied repositories. The students have now become active as knowledge producers and will join the existing group of editors at KSPWSC in the wiki-sprints to generate new content every month.

Hyderabad:

Similar exercises were also conducted during the two-day workshop at EFLU, Hyderabad in February 2016. The participants worked on the Malayalam, Telugu, and Hindi Wikipedias. Articles were written on geographical entities like Tamil Eelam and West Godavari district, on academic figures like M.S.S. Pandian and Maxine Berstein, academic and literary works such as My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk and Towards a World of Equals by Susie Tharu, among other topics. Since creating an article from scratch also involved deliberation regarding issues of translation, and the limits of concepts and their meanings in the Indian context, it is hoped that these new editors will find it useful for their own research to think critically about the process of generating content on the Indian language Wikipedias.

* Sohnee Harshey works at the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Article edited by Subhashish Panigrahi of CIS-A2K.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/developing-open-educational-resources-in-indian-languages

Creating Free Software Environment at Andhra Loyola College

rahim — 2015-05-27T00:54:42Z

Andhra Loyola college has signed an MoU with CIS-A2K and as part of it CIS-A2K team has provided a free and open software environment at Andhra Lyola College's Computer Center. Thirty machines have been installed with free software Operating system and some useful applications such as GIMP, Inkscape, firefox, libreoffice, etc.

Principal, Vice-principal, management and faculty at Andhra Loyola College expressed interest in upgrading their lab computers to latest software without having the glitches of piracy issues. The obvious solution to this was to install Linux based free OS like Ubuntu/Debian

Program Director of CIS-A2K advised to have this process done in a pilot manner instead of forced imposition on faculty and students to use a totally new working environment. So, 30 machines from PG lab were selected for this purpose.

These machines were installed with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS edition. In addition to the default available Libre office, firefox and terminal, Tools like Gimp, inkscape, apache web server were also installed.

Each of the faculty and students present at the installation time were evangelized about Free Software and its wise uses in the long term.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creating-free-software-environment-at-alc