Centre for Internet and Society

Workshop on digital collaborations in Tamil-language, Tamil Virtual University, Chennai

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:13:56Z

A two-day workshop on digital collaborations in Tamil-language has been organised by Tamil Virtual University, Anna University Campus, Chennai. I have been invited to participate in this event on behalf of the CIS-A2K programme.

The discussions are going to be in four major topics:

Digitization:

Books and Digital Library
Manuscripts, Inscriptions, Documents, Paintings and Archival of documents

Research and Development:

Natural Language Process
Video / Speech synthesizer, Spell checker
Corpus and Lexicon

E-learning:

Developing appropriate and region specific syllabus
Mobile computing and applications development

Open source and Outreach:

Tamil computing organisations and Wikipedia
Policy of Open source software

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/workshop-on-digital-collaborations-in-tamil-language-tamil-virtual-university-chennai

WikipediansSpeak with Dr. Kishore Kumar Rai Sheni: Tulu Wikipedia in the making

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:06:49Z

Dr. Kishore Kumar Rai Sheni, Principal, Shri Ramakrishna P.U. College, Mangaluru shares with Dr. U.B. Pavanaja of the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) programme his insights on bringing more contributors of different corners of the society to grow Tulu Wikipedia. Tulu Wikipedia is in Incubator at present and there are a bunch of contributors who are expanding the project to bring it live.

When I caught up with Dr. Kishore Kumar Rai Sheni during an ongoing Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in his college, Shri Ramakrishna P.U. College, Mangaluru, he left me with his wonderful ideas of expanding the Tulu Wikipedia. Back in 2014, with a few sporadic contributors, the Tulu Wikipedia community probably did not exist. After several outreach programmes in and around Mangaluru, it has grown to about an eight-editor community. It could look really tiny today but has potential to grow to a bigger community provided the constant effort by these eight people continue. This edit-a-thon is one of the stepping stones to build this community. About 37 people who hardly know anything about Tulu Wikipedia are participating in this event where six of the experienced editors will support them. The project is all about creating a live encyclopedia on the internet. We have enough and many Tulu authors and teachers who otherwise contribute to the language and literature. The idea is to bring them aboard. In collaboration with three other institutions here; Ramakrishna PU College, Ramakrishna Degree College and Tulu Sahitya Academy, we're trying to bridge the gap of lack of Wikipedia in our language. So far, very little work has been done in documenting the rich Tulu culture in Tulu language. There is no encyclopaedia of any sort in Tulu at this moment. There is also a need to bring the entire world's knowledge to the Tulu speakers. I hope Tulu Wikipedia will be the future to take our language and culture to the world, and fill the gap of knowledge that exists today.

Tulu Wikipedia Incubator is available at https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/tcy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipediansspeak-with-dr-kishore-kumar-rai-sheni-tulu-wikipedia-in-academics

Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore to bring Tulu Wikipedia live

pavanaja — 2015-09-15T09:07:24Z

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon was organised in Mangalore, Karnataka this 14th to encourage more Tulu-language speakers to contribute to Tulu Wikipedia. Tulu Wikipedia is is currently in the Incubator but the enthusiastic editor community is putting their best effort to bring it live out of Incubator. This edit-a-thon is one of the many activities the Tulu Wikimedia community has organised.

30 Wikipedia editors participated and created about 89 new articles. Interestingly, 12 of these 30 participants crossed more than 10 edits. Some of the new participants faced problems with using the input methods and the Wiki-markup. It is important to note that because of the lack of addition of Tulu-alphabet code points in the Unicode chart, and the speakers being well conversant in Kannada, they are using Kannada script for Tulu Wikipedia Incubator project. There is a plan to organise a monthly meetup and/or edit-a-thon to continue the momentum these editors have brought in. Tulu Sahitya Academy has kindly supported the event.

More details in the event page (in Tulu).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-mangalore-to-bring-tulu-wikipedia-live

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: Gender Gap in Indian Language Wikipedias – Projects, Outreach and Outcome

pavanaja — 2016-08-17T02:43:54Z

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.

The submission was included as part of a panel related to the gender gap at the WikiConference India 2016.

Many activities are being made to bridge the gender gap in Indian language Wikipedias. These are aimed both at improving the ratio of female to male editors and increasing women related content in Indian language Wikipedias. Some of the notable projects are Art+ Feminism editathon, Lilavati’s daughters editathon, International Women’s day or month editathon, editathon to add articles about woman writers of coastal Karnataka. Sizeable number of students who are part of the Wikipedia in Education Program which are being run at many educational institutes of India are female. Some of these students continue editing and contribute to Wikipedia. Some female students worked as interns and have contributed by improving the quality of articles written by their peers. Outreach is one of the regular activities of taking Wikipedia to people. Outcome of the projects and the data on retention of the participants of outreach activities as regular contributing Wikipedians, survival of the newly created editors for short and long periods are documented and will be presented at the conference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-gender-gap-in-indian-language-wikipedias-2013-projects-outreach-and-outcome

UTF-8, Indic and Stub Length Article in Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2016-10-20T02:26:29Z

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.

See the original blog post at Dr. Pavanaja Blog

This lead to continued discussions in a closed chat group on how do we decide the winner. People thought it is very simple to announce the winner just based on highest number of bytes added. On first look, it looked very trivial and a simple case. I pointed out during the discussions about the encoding used in Wikipedia is UTF-8 and it uses different number of bytes for English and Indian languages. Before giving more details I would like to draw your attention to a simple experiment.

I typed Kannada letter ಅ (a) in my Sandbox in Kannada Wikipedia and saved it. Then I checked the RecentChanges page in Kannada Wikipedia. That showed that I have added 3 bytes to my Sandbox page. But I had added just one Kannada character. I did the same experiment in English Wikipedia. I just added one letter, the English letter “A” to my Sandbox in English Wikipedia and checked the number of bytes added. It showed just one byte.

What is going on? Here is the explanation. There are different ways Unicode text can be stored. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are the prominent ways. UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for all characters. UTF-32 uses 4 bytes. UTF-8 is a special kind of encoding. It uses series of single bytes to represent Unicode data. The first character, called Byte Order Mark (BOM) indicates what encoding is being used. Unicode website has more details on these. UTF-8 was mainly used for web as the networking devices used on the initial days of Unicode could handle only 8 bits (1 byte) of data. In other words, UTF-8 was used for backward compatibility with ASCII, the original 8-bit encoding used prior to the advent of Unicode. Even today the default encoding used by HTML is UTF-8.

Does these answer our original question? Not yet. I said UTF-8 uses series of single bytes. It uses 1 byte for English, 2 bytes for European languages and 3 bytes for Indian languages. That is the reason why we saw 3 bytes for one Kannada character.

This pops up another interesting question regarding the definition of a stub article in Wikipedia. As per Wikipedia, an article which has less than 2048 bytes is considered as a stub article. Go to any language Wikipedia’s search page and type Special:ShortPages to get the list of all articles which are having less than 2048 bytes. If we convert this into number of characters it turns out to be 2048 for English but about 682 for Indic. That means the length of a stub article will be different for English and Indian language Wikipedias. Should we have a different yardstick for the definition of a stub article for Indian language Wikipedias then? I think yes.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/utf-8-indic-and-stub-length-article-in-wikipedia

Upload More Kannada Articles on Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2015-09-13T06:09:34Z

Uploading information in Wikipedia helps to develop language, said Indian Languages Programme Manager U B Pavanaja here on Saturday. The article was published in Indian Express (Mangaluru edition) on July 5, 2015.


Above: A scanned version of the article that appeared in Indian Express on July 5, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/indian-express-july-5-2015-upload-more-kannada-articles-on-wikipedia

University of Mysore Re-releases Kannada Vishwakosha (Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons Free License

pavanaja — 2014-07-24T07:03:45Z

The University of Mysore and the Centre for Internet and Society co-organized the Open Knowledge Day in Mysore on July 15, 2014. On this occasion Mysore University released six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under the Creative Commons (CC) license.

Kannada Vishwakosha brought out by the University of Mysore can easily be termed as the best encyclopaedia in Kannada. It has been modelled after the famous Britannica encyclopaedia. Mysore University Vishwakosha has 14 volumes having a total of 13802 pages. The very first volume was brought out in the year 1969 and the final volume was released in 2004. Many famous Kannada authors, scientists, academicians and stalwarts from other fields have worked on creating this encyclopaedia. The print volumes of the first version of the encyclopaedia are out of stock now. Recently UoM has started revising and reprinting the encyclopaedia. So far 4 volumes have been revised, enhanced and published.

UoM believes in Open Access to Knowledge. It has put up the research outputs from its departments online for free access to the public. UoM has done these as a subscriber to the idea of Budapest Open Access Initiative. The Open Access Institutional Repository, of UoM, covers scholarly publications covering journal articles, conference papers, books, book reviews, presentations, reports and patents ever since UoM was established in 1916. Extending the philosophy of open knowledge to the Kannada encyclopaedia published by UoM becomes a natural extension. UoM is in the verge of celebrating its centenary soon and has taken many initiatives in that direction.

CIS-A2K has been in negotiations with UoM towards releasing of its high quality Kannada Vishwakosha (Kannada Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons license. CIS and UoM signed a MoU on February 22, 2014. Here is the relevant extract from the MoU: "They will work together to digitize all encyclopaedic publications for which the copyright is owned by UoM, and re-release them under the Creative Common license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). The digitized content will be made available for everyone through free content distribution platforms like Wikipedia and Wikisource. The digitization will be done employing the global standard Unicode so that the content has longevity, is universally portable and is easily searchable. Both parties have joined hands to undertake the above in order to enhance digital literacy in the Kannada language and facilitate collaborative production and free dissemination of knowledge in Kannada to the students, academics, researchers and the wider public. The parties also believe that by reintroducing the knowledge in digital and openly accessible formats could significantly enhance the production of knowledge in Kannada and give a new lease of life to Kannada language in the digital era. The parties will co-design and jointly implement relevant programmes to achieve this objective." As part of this MoU, UoM agreed to release the first six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under CC.

Volume numbers 1, 2, 4 and 6 of Kannada Vishwakosha of UoM have been revised and published recently. A project page has been created in Kannada Wikipedia for this project. Kannada Wikipedians joined hands in the project. The project involved extracting the text from the soft copies of the files, converting them into Unicode, extracting articles from these files and uploading them to Kannada Wikisource.

A team of interns from Christ University had a major role to play in this development. These were students from the Wikipedia in Education Program that was conducted in Christ University during the academic period of 2013-14. These students took active part in the current project and uploaded about 1200 articles so far (till July 21, 2014).

Media Coverage

The event attracted very good media coverage. Leading English and Kannada dailies like Andolana Kannada, City Today, Deccan Herald, Hosa Diganta, Kannada Jana Mana, Kannada Prabha, Rajya Dharma, Samyukta Karnataka, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Udayavani, Vijaya Karnataka, and Vijaya Vani published about this. Scanned versions of the published articles can be downloaded here.

Other Links:

UoM Kannada Vishwakosha conversion project page in Kannada Wikipedia - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivwp
Articles from UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreuniv
Category UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivws
For pictures from the Open Knowledge Day event in Mysore - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mysore_University_Open_Knowledge_Day

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/university-of-mysore-releases-kannada-vishwakosha-under-cc-license

Tulu Wikipedia Workshop cum Editathon at Udupi

pavanaja — 2014-10-31T14:54:07Z

A three-day programme was held at Udupi from October 15 to 17, 2014 with an aim to increase the presence of Tulu in the online world. The first day comprised the inauguration programme and a workshop to understand the Wiki markup. The next two days were devoted to the edit-a-thon where participants added articles to Tulu Wikipedia.

The team comprised 18 girls from the Government PU College, Udupi and some other women. The event was organised by Tulu Sahitya Academy and sponsored by MGM College, Udupi and the Regional Research Centre, Udupi. Janaki Brahmavar, Chairperson of Tulu Sahitya Academy, presided over the function. She spoke about the efforts being made to add Tulu in Unicode. Jayakar Shetty, President Tulu Okkoota, expressed his happiness over the fact that it was a batch of about 20 girls who participated in the workshop cum edit-a-thon. There is a grouse that male editors far outnumber females in editing Wikipedia. This could be one instance where only female editors actively added articles to Tulu Wikipedia over three days. The programme was well covered by the print and television media. The good news is that the girls who participated in the edit-a-thon have continued adding articles. As on October 26, 2014, the total number of articles in Tulu Wikipedia has gone up to 574.

Tulu is one of the Dravidian languages spoken primarily by people from the south coast of Karnataka and north coast of Kerala[1]. As per the Census of 2001, there were 1,722,768 Tulu speakers [2]; figures of 2011 census are still not available. There are a lot of Tulu-speaking people residing outside Karnataka and Kerala in Mumbai, Goa and Gulf countries. It is estimated that the total number of Tulu-speaking people is more than 2.5 million. There has been a long-standing demand to include Tulu in the 8^th Schedule of the Constitution of India[3], [4]. Tulu had its own script long ago, it is not in use. Currently, Tulu is written in the Kannada script. Tulu has a vast vocal tradition, and there is a huge collection of knowledge that is transferred across generations orally. Efforts are being made to document this vocal tradition. The history of Tulu literature has already been documented in Kannada. Recently, the Karnataka government introduced Tulu as an optional language for schools in Mangalore and Udupi districts. However, these students don't have many books to read apart from the prescribed textbooks. There are some Tulu books in the creative writing domain, but there is hardly any book of an encyclopaedic nature in Tulu language which the students can refer to. This is where Tulu Wikipedia becomes extremely significant.

Tulu Wikipedia has been in incubation since 2007[5]. Some editing activities in Tulu Wikipedia were carried out during 2007-08. But the initial momentum gradually subsided, and most editors stopped editing. Tulu Wikipedia thereafter went into a dormant status. During the Alvas Vishwa Nudisiri Programme at Moodabidre in December 2013, Dr BA VivekaRai, former vice-chancellor of Kannada University, who was the President of the cultural and literary meet, dwelt at length on the importance of implementing Tulu language in technology. This was followed by a talk by Dr UB Pavanaja, a member of the CIS-A2K team. He continued from where Viveka Rai left off, and talked about bringing world knowledge in Tulu, rejuvenating Tulu Wikipedia, and pressuring the state and Union governments towards including Tulu in the 8^th Schedule of the Constitution.

Subsequently, a workshop on editing Tulu Wikipedia was held at Mangalore on January 19 this year under the leadership and initiative of Dr BA VivekaRai. This was followed by another edit-a-thon at Mangalore on April 5 and another workshop at Udupi on May 25. All these efforts have given a new impetus to Tulu Wikipedia. The number of articles in Tulu Wikipedia was 147 as in March 2014, which went up to 365 in July. The Tulu Sahitya Academy realised the importance and pitched into the effort of making it live.

[1] http://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/dravidian

[2] http://www.censusindia.gov.in/%28S%28i4hlwuf0ltgmdnejdawhdr45%29%29/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_Online/Language/partb.aspx

[3] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/requests-to-include-38-languages-in-constitution-pending-govt/article58221.ece

[4] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mangalore/Include-Tulu-in-8th-Schedule-demands-forum/articleshow/38992142.cms

[5] http://tools.wmflabs.org/meta/catanalysis/?title=Wp%2Ftcy&cat=0&wiki=incubatorwiki#overview_edits

Media Coverage

http://www.mangaloretoday.com/newsbriefs/Wikipedia-can-establish-Tulu-in-a-wider-way.html

http://v4news.com/enliven-the-tulu-viki-fidia-first-and-then-add-tulu-to-the-8th-schedule-dr-ug-pavanaja-bangalore-rep-in-udupi/

http://www.mangaloretoday.com/newsbriefs/2-Day-Workshop-on-Tulu-in-internet.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/tulu-wikipedia-workshop-cum-editathon-at-udupi

Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:06:28Z

This edit-a-thon is aimed to encourage more Tulu speakers to contribute to Tulu Wikipedia which is currently in incubator. The edit-a-thon is being organised by the Tulu Wikimedia community in Mangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/tulu-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-mangalore

Shri Kagodu Thimmappa inaugurating the workshop

pavanaja — 2013-08-01T11:19:00Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/KannadaWikipediaWorkshopSagaraJuly282013008.jpg

Reading Devanagari script based sites like Konkani Wikipedia in Kannada Script

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:14:43Z

This is a small hack to read websites with Devanagari script (used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Maithili and a few more languages) based sites like Konkani Wikipedia in Kannada script.

Konkani Wikipedia finally went live in this June after being in Incubator for nine years. Konkani language is written using five different scripts; Devanagari (official script for Konkani in Goa), Kannada, Latin, Malayalam and Persian. The current Konkani Wikipedia is available at https://gom.wikipedia.org where “gom” is for the Goan variation of Konkani.

There is a significant Konkani population in coastal Karnataka and to a small extent in northern Kerala that use Kannada script for writing Konkani. Many of these people might be facing issues with reading the Konkani articles in Devanagari script in the Goan Konkani Wikipedia which brings the need for making the Wikipedia available in Kannada and other scripts that Konkani uses.

There are various ways to go about it. Some of the Wikimedia projects like the Serbian and Chinese Wikipedia already had this issue and had multi-script transliteration as a solution. Transliteration between Devanagari and Kannada scripts could be transliterated in multiple ways and below is one of them.

Noted typographer K. P. Rao who is known for creating fonts for almost all the Indian scripts has recently come up with a solution for Devanagari⟷Kannada transliteration by creating a new font “Devama” that has Devanagari Unicode encodings with Kannada glyphs. The font has the rendering logic as per Kannada rules which means if we set this fonts for any text typed using Devanagari script, it will display it in Kannada script. This will help anyone who can read Kannada script to read something written in Devanagari. Mr. Rao has generously released “Devama” under Open Font License (OFL) ver. 1.1. The source file for the font is currently available at https://github.com/pavanaja/DevamaNew for anyone to use and modify with attribution.

How to use the font:

Download and install the font as a .zip file.
Unzip the file and find the “Devama.otf” file. Install it. (the installation will vary based on your operating system, check a how-to guide to learn).
Now inorder to make the font working you need to change the browser settings. (check here for Firefox and Chrome browser settings). You need to set “Devama” as the display font for Devanagari script.
In Mozilla Firefox:

Select “Options” from Tools menu. It will open a new tab. Select the “Content” tab. Click on the button “Advanced...”. Select Devanagari from the drop-down list from “Fonts for” and set “Devama” as the font for all options. Click on “Ok” and close the dialog box. Now reload the Konkani Wikipedia to check if it is working or not.

Not just Konkani Wikipedia, any other site in Devanagari script (used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Maithili, Bihari and a few other Indian languages) could also be read in Kannada. This might be useful for those who could read in Kannada and have problems reading in Devanagari.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/reading-devanagri-konkani-wikipedia-in-kannada-script

Querying Wikipedia Data

pavanaja — 2016-10-21T14:51:01Z

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.

Originally published blog can be accessed here.

However, as already mentioned in that blog, the number of bytes for Indian languages to be considered as stub should be actually 2048*3 = 6144 bytes employing the same criteria. How to find the list of articles fulfilling this condition?

This brings us to the topic of querying Wikipedia data. Wikimedia Foundation Labs has put up a website wherein one can run SQL queries on Wikimedia data. The URL of the website is quarry.wmflabs.org. When we open the website, we get a textbox wherein one can type the SQL query which will run on Wikimedia data. In this example I will consider Wikipedia only. But the queries can be run on the data of other Wikimedia projects like Wikisource, Wikidata, Wiktionary, etc.

One has to login with his/her Wikimedia login. After logging the SQL query can be typed in the textbox and the Submit Query button has to be clicked. The result of execution of the query on Wikimedia data will be displayed. In this blog I will throw more light on Kannada Wikipedia. The database for Kannada Wikipedia is called knwiki_p. Complete list of databases can be obtained by running the SQL query “show databases”.

To get the list of tables in Kannada Wikipedia, the following SQL queries have to be executed:

use knwiki_p;
show tables;

To know the scheme of any table, run the query desc <tablename>;. For example, to know the details of the table by name, issue the query desc page;. The fields which are of importance in the current case is page_title and page_len. The following query will list all articles in Kannada Wikipedia which are having less than 6144 bytes.

use knwiki_p;
select page_title, page_len
from page where page_len < ‘6144’ and page_namespace = 0 and page_is_redirect = 0 order by page_len ;

Some other useful queries are listed below:

Query	What it does
Select Count(*) from page where page_namespace = 0 and page_is_redirect =0;	Number of articles without redirect
Select Count(*) from page where page_namespace = 0 and page_is_redirect =0 and page_len < 6144;	Number of articles which are having bytes less than 6144
select * from user where user_name Like “P%”;	List all users whose username starts with letter “P”
select user_id, user_name, user_editcount from user where user_editcount >3000 order by user_editcount desc;	List all users with editcount more than 3000
SELECT page_namespace, page_title, page_len FROM page WHERE page_len > 175000 AND page_title NOT LIKE “%/%” ORDER BY page_namespace ASC;	List of long articles (articles having bytes more than 175000)
SELECT rc_title as title, rc_comment as comments, count(*) as Edits FROM recentchanges WHERE rc_namespace = 0 GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 3 DESC LIMIT 100;	Most edited 100 pages during past one month
SELECT log_title, COUNT() FROM logging WHERE log_type=”thanks” GROUP BY log_title ORDER BY COUNT() DESC LIMIT 100;	Who have been thanked most

Useful links -

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/querying-wikipedia-data

Not many contributors for Kannada-centric Wiki page

pavanaja — 2015-09-13T05:42:46Z

Wikipedia, which has over 60,000 contributing editors in India, has only 33 Kannadigas contributing to the Kannada section, said Pavanaja U B, programme manager, The Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru.

The article was published in the Times of India (Mangaluru edition) on July 5, 2015.

At the inaugural of the two-day workshop on 'Kannada Wikipedia' organized for students by the department of Kannada at St Aloysius College on Saturday, he said, "Wikipedia, which has over three crore articles, has 18 lakh editors spread across the world. While there are 33 editors for Kannada, only eight are involved actively," he said, adding that Wikipedia at present has about 20,500 articles in Kannada.

On the objectives of the workshop, Pavanaja said, "We have plans to train 25 Kannada students from St Aloysius College in uploading and updating Kannada articles in Wikipedia. Those 25 students will train 500 more Kannada students in the college and thereby increase the number of articles uploaded to Kannada Wikipedia. It will be a part of their academic assignment."

Pavanaja told students to cross-check each article before uploading to Wikipedia. "Students should adopt a research methodology to prepare articles for Wikipedia. One must study the subject in detail and then upload it to Wikipedia. It does not require scholarly knowledge," he added.

Wikipedia, which is a collaborative encyclopedia, has 23 Indian languages including Kannada and Tulu, he said. "Though Tulu articles were being published from 2007, there were only 135 articles uploaded to Wikipedia. Later, after 2013, many volunteered to upload articles and at present there are more than 800 articles in it. We have plans to increase the number of Tulu articles," he added.

"It is very easy for one to become a Wikipedia editor. Those who want to become the Kannada Wikipedia editor may create a login after opening kn.wikipedia.org and go through the tutorial files. Writing suitable articles for Wikipedia will neither fetch you money, nor name in it. It is selfless social service and necessary for the protection of language," Pavanaja said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-times-of-india-july-5-2015-not-many-contributors-for-kannada-centric-wiki-page

Localisation experiences in Kannada and Tulu Wikipedias

pavanaja — 2016-10-06T01:51:02Z

It has become a fashion to talk about the digital divide in India. These talks are going on for more than 2 decades now. Nevertheless there is no doubt about the need of taking the benefits of Information Communication Technology (ICT) for common man.

Originally published in my blog on October 4, 2016

FUELling Indic computing

The statement “ICT for common man has to be in his language” is always relevant. Many state governments and the central government of India are spending lot of money towards E-Governance. Of late many private vendors also have realised the importance of localising their applications into Indian languages. Be it a web based or mobile app based solution providing it in Indian language will increase the user-base by huge magnitudes.

This brings us to the issue of standardisation of terminologies used in localising the ICT applications into Indic. How does one write frequently used terms in Indic? Is there any standard? For example, how to write “Exit” in Kannada? Should I use “ನಿರ್ಗಮನ” or “ಹೊರಗೆ”? Enter FUEL Project. This project aims at standardising the Frequently Used Entries in Localisation. The project aims at having a consistency among the terms used across all applications, apps and websites. FUEL Project is run by volunteers. Corpus of translations of the terminologies is developed by contributions of enthusiastic people in true opensource spirit.

FUEL project has been organising annual conferences referred as Globalisation Internationalisation Localisation and Translation, in short GILT Conference. This year’s GILT Conference was held at New Delhi, India, during Sep 24 & 25, 2016. This year’s conference had general users, media persons and writers who are nothing but the normal consumers of the output of FUEL usage apart from the techies. There was a track exclusively dedicated for Mozilla localisation. The detailed agenda and speakers list is available here.

Localisation experiences in Kannada and Tulu Wikipedias

I have been a Wikipedian for more than a decade. I have contributed to Kannada Wikipedia ever since it was started way back in the year 2004. Tulu Wikipedia went live recently which was in incubation from 2008. I have been contributing to Tulu Wikipedia as well. I presented a paper at FUEL GILT Conference titled “Localisation experiences in Kannada and Tulu Wikipedias”.

Kannada and Tulu belong to Dravidian family of languages. Geographically and politically they both belong to Karnataka. Both languages share a lot of things and there are many common words used in both languages. At the same time Kannada and Tulu have their own distinct identities. One striking feature is that Tulu has less Sanskrit words compared to Kannada. Tulu had its own script and grammar but over the years the usage of Tulu script has been discontinued. Nowadays most Tulu people use Kannada script. This has led to the usage of many Kannada words in place of original Tulu words.

Kannada has an established history of science and technology writings as well as localised software applications. Naturally a well-developed glossary is available. It was somewhat easy to localise the strings used in Mediawiki, which is the platform used to host Wikipedias, into Kannada, which very fall under FUEL category. In Kannada, we have been using these formulas while creating technical glossary –

Create altogether new term
Translate the English term
Transliterate the English term, i.e., write the English term in Kannada script

Depending on the situation, one of the 3 paths is followed. The same philosophy is extended for localising the strings used in Mediawiki. In many situations, we have either a part translation available or a similar example available in Kannada which made the localisation of Mediawiki not so difficult.

Tulu Wikipedia was in incubation since 2008. It became live on Aug 05, 2016. One of the main requirement to make it live was to have major strings translated into Tulu. Most of the commonly used strings have been translated now. But the case of Tulu is not so simple which has no history of science and technology writing. It was quite difficult to localise most of the strings. At many places Kannada strings have been used. Many more strings are yet to be localised. In case of Tulu, we have been using these formulas for Mediwaiki translations –

Create altogether new term in Tulu
Use more of Kannada words in the localised string
Transliterate the English term, i.e., write the English term in Kannada script. Since Tulu is using Kannada script, the strings thus used will be the same for Kannada and Tulu

The questions and answers just after the presentation had some very interesting questions from other language Wikipedians as well as people from other walks of life who are into localisation. I could benefit by interacting with others and by gaining insights into some unexplored areas by me. Interactions with other participants which also included some Wikipedians continued after the presentation. Overall it was quite useful spending of two days. Looking forward for the next event like this.

Acknowledgements

Kannada and Tulu Wikipedians
Dr Vishwnatha Badikana – Tulu translations
Bharathesha Alasandemajalu -Tulu translations
Wikimedia Foundation for sponsoring the travel

Links:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/pavanaja.com-english-fuel-gilt-kannada-tulu

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop in Mangaluru (Coverage in Udayavani)

pavanaja — 2015-09-13T06:17:49Z

As part of its ongoing partnership with St Aloysius College Mangaluru, CIS-A2K co-organized a workshop with the Kannada wikipedia community on Kannada Wikipedia. Udayavani covered this in their edition on July 5.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-july-4-2015-coverage-in-udayavani