Centre for Internet and Society

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

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop in Mangaluru (Coverage in Prajavani)

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:14:22Z

As part of its ongoing partnership with St. Aloysius College, Mangaluru, CIS-A2K along with the Wikipedia community in Karnataka organized a workshop on Kannada Wikipedia. Prajavani reported this in their edition published on July 5, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-july-5-2015-coverage-in-prajavani

Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujire, Karnataka

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:12:41Z

A Kannada Wikipedia workshop is being planned to be organised in Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujire on the 13th August 2015. This is going to be part of the several outreach programmes in the institution.

Topics to be discussed:

What, Why & How of Wikipedia
Basics of Wikipedia markup
Kannada Wikipedia
Editing Kannada Wikipedia
What can be added to Kannada Wikipedia and how to add articles

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-at-shree-dharmasthala-manjunatheshwara-sdm-college-ujire-karnataka

Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Sagara

pavanaja — 2013-08-01T11:45:11Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/KannadaWikipediaWorkshopSagaraJuly282013027.jpg

Kannada Wikipedia edit-a-thon in St. Agnes College, Mangaluru to bridge gender gap in Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2016-01-12T11:22:25Z

As part of a series of workshops to mark the 13th anniversary, Kannada Wikipedia, a Kannada Wikipedia edit-a-thon was organised during this 10th-12th in St. Agnes College, Mangaluru to address the issue of gender gap in Wikipedia.

Totally 24 female students Wikimedians participated in this edit-a-thon. Three female Wikipedia editors from the institution also joined as facilitators. Vishwanatha Badikana, Kannada professor of the institution who is also a Kannada and Tulu Wikipedian inaugurated the event as chief guest. The first day was spent in demonstrating about the Wiki markup. During the following two days the participants created articles about notable writers and other notable women of coastal Karnataka. 25 new articles were created by the participants on the second day. By the end of the last day, 25 more articles were created in sandboxes on the last day by lunch time. They will soon work on the articles and improve before moving them to the article namespace so they become live articles. From the three day long edit-a-thon about 75 new articles are expected to come on Kannada Wikipedia. More details about the edit-a-thon could be read on Kannada Wikipedia event page.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/kannada-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-st-agnes-college-mangaluru-to-bridge-gender-gap-in-wikipedia

Journalism Students of the SDM College Ujire Enrich Karnataka’s Folklore And Folk Art in Kannada Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2015-09-15T09:09:12Z

As part of an ongoing partnership with the Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujjire, with active support from a few Kannada Wikipedia editors, CIS-A2K began an outreach programme so that the journalism students could help many Kannada readers about Karnataka’s rich folklore and folk art.

Both first year and second year students of Master of Communication and Journalism (MCJ) of SDM College participated in this workshop. Out of 35 participants, 11 were female. Students had discussed already about enhancing Kannada Wikipedia articles on folklore and folk art forms of Karnataka. About 20 new user accounts were created and the students have started creating articles in their user sandboxes which they will later move as articles upon enhancement with vital information. Some of the students chose to find existing articles and add more information to them. Long time Kannada Wikimedian S N Vasanthkn. from Dharmasthala helped as resource person to help the new editors with Wikipedia editing. However, as first timers, many struggled with the encyclopedic way of writing and maintaining neutral point of view. These students will be mentored by Vasanth as he is visiting them every Monday.

More details from the event page.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/journalism-students-of-the-shree-dharmasthala-manjunatheshwara-sdm-college-ujire-enrich-karnataka2019s-folklore-and-folk-art-in-kannada-wikipedia

Edit-a-thon to improve Kannada-language science-related Wikipedia articles

pavanaja — 2015-09-04T08:25:51Z

A three-day Kannada Wikipedia edit-a-thon was conducted for science lecturers of institutions who gathered at the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET), Bengaluru this August 18. The idea of this event was to improve science-related articles that are part of the Government of Karnataka's high school syllabus.

During the span of three days the lecturers were taught about basics of Kannada Wikipedia, editing policies, Kannada input, creating and editing articles on Kannada Wikipedia, and they all participated in contributing to about 20 articles science-related article based on topics listed in the high school syllabus (as per the Karnataka state syllabus). Some of the lecturers who were first-timers faced problems with Kannada typing where most others took some time to understand the Wikipedia markup and citations. As this was the first iteration of the project, two more edit-a-thons will follow; one in November 2015 and another one in February 2016. We invite all Kannada Wikimedians to join and mentor these new Wikimedians.

Images of the edit-a-thon can be found on Wikimedia Commons Category “Kannada Wikipedia Workshop for DSERT Bengaluru Aug 18-20 2015”. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja and Tito Dutta from CIS-A2K conducted the workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/edit-a-thon-to-improve-kannada-language-science-related-wikipedia-articles-1

Edit-a-thon to improve Kannada-language science-related Wikipedia articles

pavanaja — 2015-09-04T09:06:17Z

A Kannada Wikipedia edit-a-thon is planned to improve science-related articles that are part of the Government of Karnataka's high school syllabus.

More details are available in the project page in Kannada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/edit-a-thon-to-improve-kannada-language-science-related-wikipedia-articles

Converting from nonUnicode (Nudi, Baraha, ...) font encoding to Unicode Kannada

pavanaja — 2016-10-23T15:36:25Z

People have been using computers for typing and printing Kannada text for more than 25 years. Most of the usage of Kannada on computers was limited to the DTP arena.

People made use of packages like PageMaker (Version 6.5 or 7) to type and compose pages. Even now, many people still use these packages for Kannada DTP work. The text entered into these packages is stored as font glyph codes rather than character encodings. Non-Unicode truetype fonts like Nudi, Baraha, ShreeLipi, Akruti, etc, are some of the most popular fonts being used.

The system does not understand these characters as Kannada characters. Any text based operations like search, replace, sorting, spell-check, text-to-speech, etc, are not possible with this kind of text. Employing Unicode for all digitisation works of Kannada text solves this problem. Usage of Unicode for Kannada has become prominent only recently. All websites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Wikisource, etc, want the text only in Unicode. There is still a large amount of text entered and stored with old non-Unicode font based encodings. These are mostly present in the form of PageMaker files. This blog post explains the process of converting the text present in PageMaker into Kannada Unicode text.

The Kannada and Culture Department of the Government of Karnataka have released Unicode complaint open-type fonts and Unicode based software for Kannada under GPL. These are available for free download on their website (http://kannadasiri.co.in/index/software). Download and
install “Ascii to Unicode Kannada Converter” from this page. This software works only in Windows. Now you are ready to convert the text from PageMaker file into Unicode.

Open the PageMaker file. Select the Text tool depicted by a big “T” shaped icon. Click anywhere in the text area. Select the entire text (Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C). Now open Notepad and paste this text into that (press Ctrl-V). The text will appear gibberish in Notepad. Don’t worry about it. Save the file as plain text file (.TXT file). Remember where you have saved the file.

Now run the “Kannada ASCII Unicode Converter” software. In the first textbox enter the name of the ASCII file to be converted (the file you just saved from Notepad). In the bottom textbox enter a filename for the Unicode text file that will be created by the software. Select the default “GOK (Kuvempu Nudi Baraha)”, or other encoding as the case may be, as the encoding from which the text has to be converted. Click on the button written “ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿ”. It will show the progress of conversion.

Once the conversion is complete, it will display an appropriate message to indicate completion of the conversion. If you open the text file created by the software, it will have the text converted into Unicode. This text can be used in Wikisource, Wikipedia, etc.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/converting-from-non-unicode-nudi-baraha-font-encoding-to-unicode-kannada

CIS Signs MoU with Mysore University

pavanaja — 2014-05-05T06:29:37Z

CIS-A2K signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the University of Mysore for converting to Unicode and re-releasing their encyclopaedia under Creative Commons License. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja on behalf of the CIS-A2K team signed the MoU.

Registrar and VC Prof. K.S. Rangappa was present on the occasion. The signing of the MoU took place on February 22, 2014. As part of the MoU CIS will convert and upload the encyclopaedia into Kannada Wikisource and then it will be moved to Kannada Wikipedia.


Above: Dr. Pavanaja with Prof. C. Basavaraju and Prof. K.S. Rangappa at Mysore University on occasion of signing the MoU.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/cis-signs-mou-with-mysore-university

CIS Signs MoU with Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara College

pavanaja — 2014-05-27T10:56:52Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College on April 21, 2014. On behalf of CIS, Dr. U.B.Pavanaja signed the MoU.

As part of the MoU, CIS and SDM College will work together to introduce "Indian Language Wikipedias in the Indian Under Graduate and Post Graduate Classroom" at the SDM College, Ujire. This will help the students to develop the following skills:

Writing skills (ability to write in an objective fashion;
Digital information literacy skills;
Ability to critically engage with a concept/theme;
Language proficiency skills.

CIS and SDM college will co-design and jointly develop and implement relevant training programs to achieve this.

Click to download the MoU here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/cis-signs-mou-with-sdm-college