Centre for Internet and Society

Will open access replace costly commercial publishing models?

praskrishna — 2012-02-23T09:12:10Z

Cost of research journals going up while funds available are coming down, writes Vasudha Venugopal in an article published in the Hindu on February 19, 2012.

Technology has inherently changed the way science education is propagated. Digital libraries, wikis, webinars, videoconferences, open access and repositories — all seem to be excellent tools for sharing scientific knowledge.

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But with the escalating cost of research journals and the economic and logistical challenges that often accompany attending a conference, the open access model is increasingly being recognised as an alternative to expensive commercial publishing models.

Consider the situation at, say, a biological sciences research firm in Chennai. At least 16 per cent of its total budget is spent on the subscription of journals; more than 50 per cent of that going to the two largest publishing companies. Experts say the cost of journals is increasing at an average of eight per cent a year. Further, many academics do not consider work to have been adequately shared if it has been merely published in over-priced journals.

Boycott

Incidentally, last week, more than 5,700 researchers started boycotting Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, amid growing concerns at cost and accessibility. More than 3,000 academics have signed a petition that claims the publisher charges “exorbitantly high” prices for its journals and criticises its practice of selling journals in ‘bundles,' forcing libraries to buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all.

"Since 1950, the volume of research results started getting too large for the scientific societies, leading to the entry of commercial publishers into the field. The cost per journal and the number of such journals are proliferating, while the funds available are coming down,” says Francis Jayakanth, who has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository, ePrints@IISc, which has more than 32,000 publications by researchers.

India has nearly 53 registered open access repositories that allow users to download and use documents free.

Open access advocates say Indian papers appear in both Indian and foreign journals, roughly in equal proportions, but most Indian journals have a very poor circulation, many of them below 1,500; and most Indian papers appear in low-impact foreign journals. “Most scientists in India are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Others are unable to access what Indian researchers are doing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Thus, Indian work is hardly cited. Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely, both within and outside the country,” says Subbiah Arunachalam, an open access advocate.

Experts say many U.S. universities, including Princeton, MIT and Harvard, have their own repositories. Institutions in India, too, need to set up open-access repositories to ensure their work is available to the public even if it ends up being published in an expensive journal. Even if these are made available in different repositories, one can still access them all if all the repositories are interoperable.

Trustworthy

The established method for an academic to circulate his work is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal of repute, and the reader, too, places some degree of trust in the quality of the work being presented. So will open access, with the huge volume of papers, change that? “Not at all, open access is not vanity publishing or self-publishing or about publications that scientists expect to be paid for. Since every paper is peer-reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Dr. Jayakanth.

Read the article in Hindu. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been quoted in it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models

Will India win net neutrality battle?

praskrishna — 2016-01-11T02:28:44Z

There is more than what meets the eye in Facebook’s ‘noble mission’ of providing internet for all.

The article by Pratap Vikram Singh and Taru Bhatia was published by Governance Now on January 5, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs.

India is gearing up for an era of startups and entrepreneurship and the man pushing it as one of his biggest development and self reliance agenda is none other than prime minister Narendra Modi, who launched the ‘Startup India, Standup India’ campaign this year. Few technology giants, led by the likes of Facebook and some telecom service providers, however, have thrown a technology spanner. It is important to note that a significant number of the startups in India are internet-based – next only to the US and China in having maximum number of tech startups, according to industry body NASSCOM.

For these to flourish and for India to have next Facebook or Google it is important to have an open and neutral internet, believe digital rights experts. A network which doesn’t discriminate between the data packets (smallest unit of information sent in binary format over a network) and provides level playing field for all. “It is critical for the Startup India campaign. If we let the principles of net neutrality be compromised, then it makes it very difficult for entrepreneurs and startups to compete against established players, who can close off the market for upstarts by schemes like differentiated pricing and zero rating (toll free access to websites or apps),” said Vishal Misra, associate professor, department of computer science, Columbia University.

A prerequisite for startups

A few months from now, country’s telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), is going to decide whether internet would remain neutral and whether it will continue to foster innovation. A major threat to net neutrality, according to civil society and digital rights experts, comes from zero rating – toll free access to a few selected websites or apps, a strategy adopted by internet service providers or internet platforms to hook users to those select few sites. For telecom and internet service providers zero rating is a new stream of revenue, a way to secure optimal return on investment from their existing subscriber base – without requiring additional investment. The ISPs are arguing that they should be given more flexibility in managing their network – in a way they should be allowed to assume the role of gatekeeper of the internet.

For ISPs, net neutrality is an obsolete and utopian idea. Facebook, which has grown into a mammoth internet platform since its inception in 2004, has recently joined this bandwagon. Under its Free Basics initiative (erstwhile internet.org), the internet giant provides toll free access to a set of websites (including Facebook obviously!) handpicked by itself to the users. In India so far it has partnered with Reliance Communications.

Facebook by far is the most audacious and aggressive proponent of ‘zero rating’ scheme. From lobbying the prime minister to giving back-to-back ads in television channels and two-page ads in national dailies to circulating a vaguely written letter in support of Free Basics on its social media site, Facebook is pitching for ‘digital equality’ by giving access to 'basic internet’ or say a slice of the internet.

Cautioning against zero rating, Prabir Purkayastha, chairperson, Society for Knowledge Commons, said the way zero-rating is being discussed, it seems Indians are only the consumers of internet, which is not true. “Indians are also the innovators on internet,” said Purkayastha. “Internet has given the innovators the right to connect to the users without having a huge amount of money. This is the character that will be destroyed if zero-rating will be implemented,” he says.

That’s true. Be it US-based Facebook or Google or Indian Flipkart or PayTm or SnapDeal, had it not been for open and neutral internet they wouldn’t have become what are today.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, global public policy director, Access Now, a New York-based firm working for digital rights, said the idea is to prevent a telco or an internet platform from assuming a role of a gatekeeper and control access. Misra, too, has written extensively on the counter-productiveness of zero rating: stifling of innovation and service providers loosing incentive to improve service and keep prices low. Both Misra and Chima testified their views on net neutrality to the standing committee on IT in August after the department of telecommunications submitted an expert committee report on the neutrality issue.

Whither public consultation

To formulate a regulation on how internet will shape up, the TRAI has come out with two consultation papers concerning net neutrality in the last nine months. The first consultation paper on ‘regulatory framework for over the top players (OTTs)’, which came in March, was written in favour of telecom and internet service providers. “It was embarrassing,” said Purkayastha. Over 1.2 million people wrote to the regulator. This was result of the savetheinternet.in campaign ran by free internet activists and lawyers, who were later joined by All India Bakchod (AIB) whose video on net neutrality went viral on YouTube (the video has received three million views in last eight months). This was unprecedented in the history of TRAI consultations. However, the fate of those responses is still unclear.

In December the regulator brought another paper. This time it was titled ‘regulation on differential pricing’. Contrary to the initial paper, this paper is far more objective and reasonable, said Nikhil Pahwa, founder, MediaNama portal and a key volunteer behind savetheinternet.in campaign. The regulator has sought comments on its second paper by December 30 and counter-comments by January 7. Till the time a final call is taken, the telecom regulator has instructed Reliance Communications, Facebook’s India telecom partner, to put Free Basics on hold.

The savetheinternet.in campaign has formulated the responses to the new consultation paper and has made it available for everyone favouring net neutrality to send it to the TRAI. The AIB team has released another video titled ‘Save the Internet - 2 – Judgement Day’, which has been viewed close to one million times in just four months.

The neutrality debate started in India in December 2014 when Airtel, country’s largest telco, announced – although it later backtracked – that the company would charge consumers more for using VOIP services, on top of the data charges. Later, it went on to launch Airtel Zero, wherein it struck deal with online services providers for user access at zero rate. Facebook had already introduced internet.org by then. While it was initially led by civil society, the debate was later joined by politicians – Naveen Patnaik, M Chandrashekhar, Jay Panda, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal – who strongly came out in support of net neutrality.

Facebook has termed its zero rating platform as a philanthropic activity intended to connect billions of unconnected population so that they can access education, health and employment related information. It has urged users to sign a petition, cautioning them against "a small, vocal group of critics" lobbying to prevent 1 billion people from accessing 'affordable internet'. Under Free Basics, Facebook claims, it doesn't charge app developers and includes them if they comply to its 'objective tech specs'.

Free Basics: A camouflage?

Critics, however, call it a walled garden. In providing free access to close to a hundred websites it continues to play the role of a gatekeeper. It is not the poor who decide what to access but Facebook! While it says that it is not making money out of Free Basics as it doesn't display ads in the Free Basics version of Facebook, it keeps the option of monetisation open in the future.

“It [Free Basics] has been camouflaged as charity," said a senior TRAI official, in an off the record conversation. While speaking to the Guardian on Facebook’s zero rating in December, Tim Berners Lee, founder of world wide web (www), said, “In the particular case of somebody who's offering... something which is branded internet, it's not internet, then you just say no. No it isn't free, no it isn't in the public domain, there are other ways of reducing the price of internet connectivity and giving something... [only] giving people data connectivity to part of the network deliberately, I think is a step backwards.”

Speaking in favour of zero rating, Payal Malik, associate professor, economics, Delhi University, said that it is wrong to assume that all consumers will get hooked to zero rated sites. “In a way you are saying that all humans have same preferences and likes and dislikes, which is very unlikely,” said Malik.

Experts representing telecom industry argue that the net neutrality regulation should be geography specific and the telecom players should be given more flexibility in dealing with the network. Mahesh Uppal, a senior telecom consultant and director, ComFirst India, while speaking at a round table discussion in Delhi, said that a majority of population in the West including countries opting for strict net neutrality – including Netherlands, Slovenia and the US – are already connected. "The data connectivity is primarily through fixed lines - copper, co-ax cable or optical fibre wired — wherein it is easier to add capacity to meet traffic growth. However this is difficult to do so for wireless networks," said Uppal. In developing countries, including India, mobile telephony and internet majorly runs on wireless. Hence, he argued, telecom and internet service providers should be given flexibility to zero rate. For Uppal, if zero rating or sponsored content is implemented properly “it can be one of the ways to scale up internet access” to the unconnected regions.

Neutrality proponents, however, differ. “It is basic economic theory, and zero rated sites get a price advantage. There are studies that show customers stay within the world of zero rated sites and never venture outside or are aware of the full internet,” professor Misra said.

Zero or equal rating?

So is there a middle ground? Are there ways to increase access without tampering with open and neutral character of the internet? Experts believe there are. Some of the solutions are not completely black and white, but in between. While there is a fierce opposition to zero rating, it might work, according to Sunil Abraham, executive director, centre for internet and society (CIS), if provided with an amount of equal rating (giving free data pack to users so that they can access any site or app they want).

Mozilla Foundation advocates equal rating. The foundation has sought to create such an alternative in Bangladesh and countries in Africa within the Firefox OS ecosystem. The foundation has tied up with telecom operator Grameenphone in Bangladesh to provide 20 Mb data per day for free to users, in exchange for viewing an advertisement. The model could be easily replicated in India, said Pahwa of MediaNama.

For African countries, the foundation has partnered with Orange. Both allow Africans to purchase $40 Firefox OS smartphones that come packaged with free three to six months of voice calling, text, and up to 500 Mb of monthly data. Purkayastha of Knowledge Commons said that zero-rating plan by telecom operators only makes sense when government services are provided for free through it. “That is the form of zero-rating I would support.”

There are a few platforms which are reimbursing data in megabytes to users accessing partnering apps. The user can then use the free data pack to access any other site or app. Some of them include: mCent, Gigato and DataMi. mCent, owned by Boston-based firm Jana, is a pioneer in this area. It is being used by 30 million users cross 98 countries. In India, according to Jana, one out of every 10 internet users has subscribed to mCent.

Yes, it does violate neutrality as it puts those app providers not having enough money at a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis to those having deep pocket to reimburse data to users. “I think it’s a grey area,” said professor Misra. On the surface it seems to be just like Free Basics, however, Gigato (or mCent) is making no pretense that what they are doing is philanthropy of increasing access, said professor Misra, adding that it is still acceptable as user will have the data to venture out of the walled garden. The senior TRAI official too finds it acceptable. “In my opinion, Facebook should become like Gigato,” he said.

If the regulator is going to protect consumers’ right and also not stifle startups and entrepreneurism, it will have to ensure some broad, core principles of the internet. It will have to prevent both the ISPs and the internet platforms from becoming gatekeepers. It must not allow any throttling, blocking, fast and slow lanes, discrimination based on price or quality of service and distortion of level playing field. How and whether TRAI is going to do these would be clear in a few months.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/governance-now-pratap-vikram-singh-and-taru-bhatia-january-6-2015-will-india-win-net-neutrality-battle

Will Aadhaar leaks be used as an excuse to shut out scrutiny of welfare schemes?

Anumeha Yadav — 2017-05-20T07:09:51Z

Aadhaar data of all 23 crore beneficiaries of Direct Benefit Transfer schemes could be publicly available, says a report by Centre for Internet and Society.

The blog post by Anumeha Yadav was published on Scroll on May 20, 2017.

In the past three months, there have been several reports about caches of Aadhaar data being publicly displayed on government websites across the country.

Personal information associated with the biometric-based 12-digit unique identification number, which the government wants every Indian resident to have, is mandated to be confidential under the Aadhaar Act, 2016.

But exactly how much Aadhaar data has been compromised by negligent government departments?

On May 2, researchers at the non-profit Centre for Internet and Society released a comprehensive report on the extent of the data breaches. They documented four government portals using Aadhaar for making payments and found that sensitive personal and financial information of nearly 13 crore people was being displayed on them, including details of about 10 crore bank accounts.

Two of the portals, for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the National Social Assistance Programme, belong to the Union rural development ministry. The others are run by the Andhra Pradesh government for the workers’ insurance scheme Chandranna Bima and for filing Daily Online Payment Reports of MNREGA.

The researchers estimated that Aadhaar data of all 23 crore beneficiaries of the central government’s various Direct Benefit Transfer schemes could be publicly available. This means nearly a fifth of India’s population is potentially exposed to irreversible privacy harm, and financial and identity fraud.

The Unique Identification Authority of India, the agency which manages the Aadhaar database, however, and had earlier denied any breach of confidential data, has now reportedly said that such a data leak could only be the result of a potentially illegal hack attack and asked CIS to provide details of the persons involved in the data theft.

The rural development ministry, on its part, has changed how its MNREGA database is accessed, redacting Aadhaar numbers and bank account details of the beneficiaries. Senior officials of the ministry, however, denied making systemic changes in the wake of the Centre for Internet and Society report.

“The researchers claimed that financial information of over 10 crore individuals was available publicly, on pension and MNREGA portals,” said Nagesh Singh, additional secretary in the ministry, “but bank account details were displayed only on two state department websites of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as these states are far advanced in transparency practices.”

“For all other states,” Singh added, “financial information and Aadhaar numbers were removed or masked last year. For pension schemes we masked the data in June 2016, and for MNREGA this data was removed in December. Even if any data was showing, it would only be for the particular block the resident is in, not for any other state workers.”

All this was done, he said, “because the UIDAI communicated to us that this information is sensitive and should not be displayed and the Aadhaar regulations prohibit display of Aadhaar numbers”. The Aadhaar (Sharing of Information) Regulations were introduced last September.

Contrary to Singh’s claims, social activists outside Andhra Pradesh and Telangana confirmed they could access bank account details of MNREGA workers until May 3. Only on May 4, two days after the Centre for Internet and Society report was released, did the details stop showing on the Management Information System.

“We could no longer access the electronic muster roll, and it started returning error messages,” said Ashish Ranjan of Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan, a registered union of unorganised workers in Araria, Bihar. But until early May, he added, the Management Information System allowed anyone in any state to access the personal information of workers, even from other states.

Activists and beneficiaries relied on this system for two things. “Several of the new bank accounts have errors, and accessing this information directly helped get the discrepancies corrected without going to block level officials,” Ranjan explained. “It also helped track where the wages of workers were stuck.”

When activists asked why the data was no longer accessible, Ranjan said, rural development department officials said the Management Information System was changed “on the directions of the Supreme Court and the Union cabinet secretary.”

“This has been the pattern with the MNREGA MIS for long,” Ranjan said, referring to the information system. “Senior officials change access to a feature as they wish without clear processes or explanations.”

James Herenj, an activist with NREGA Watch, a non-profit which monitors the implementation of MNREGA in Jharkhand, had the same experience. “Bank account details were removed from the website last week,” he said, “this is a problem as we can no longer help MNREGA workers get data entry errors corrected.”

The Centre for Internet and Society researchers too contested the rural development ministry’s claim that Aadhaar numbers and bank account details were displayed only on Andhra Pradesh and Telangana government websites. They released a video clip showing them accessing bank account details and Aadhaar numbers of 801 MNREGA workers of Agara panchayat in Bengaluru through an internet search on March 25.

Screenshot of a Chandigarh Union Territory website displaying Aadhaar information.

Consent, please?

The Aadhaar Act, 2016 requires both government and private agencies to take informed consent before using a person’s Aadhaar for authentication, but there is little evidence that consent is sought before Aadhaar is seeded with personal and financial information.

Indeed, when the Supreme Court first permitted the voluntary use of Aadhaar for MNREGA in October 2015, Aadhaar numbers of 2.36 crore workers had already been seeded to their bank accounts, without the consent of over 99% of them.

The rural development ministry’s data shows that until June 2016, only about 4,10,000, or less than 1% of the 10.7 crore MNREGA workers, had agreed to Aadhaar-based payments. The ministry worked around this by organising “consent camps” to retrospectively collect proof of consent.

Poor standards

Writing in The Economic Times, Ram Sewak Sharma, chairperson of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and former director general of the Unique Identification Authority of India, argued that the reports about “Aadhaar leaks” on government websites failed to account for provisions of the Right to Information Act, 2005. Section 4 of this law provides for proactive disclosure of government decisions while Section 8 mandates public authorities to publish all information on welfare schemes, including details of beneficiaries.

This has created a situation, Sharma pointed out, where the transparency law may require even Aadhaar numbers of beneficiaries to be made public even though the Aadhaar Act mandates them to be confidential.

Right to Information activists, however, said the authorities were anything but devoted to the transparency law. Crucial information they seek on the efficacy of Aadhaar in welfare schemes is routinely denied.

“The government is willfully manipulating information systems to subvert details of biometric failures,” said Amrita Johri, a member of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information and an activist with the Right to Food campaign, which has petitioned the Delhi High Court against Aadhaar being mandatory for food rations. “We have come across instances of ration cardholders being turned back because of fingerprints being falsely rejected, or network failure, but on the Delhi government’s website, this is shown as the beneficiaries not having come to the ration shop at all.”

“Similarly, the government claims it has removed bogus ration cards through Aadhaar,” Johri added, “but they do not show any administrative action if such bogus cards were really found through Aadhaar even though Section 4 of the RTI Act requires disclosure of such decisions.”

Jharkhand Directorate of Social Security displayed Aadhaar numbers, bank accounts numbers and transaction details of over 15 lakh pensioners.

Johri is concerned that the “Aadhaar leaks” could become an excuse to deny people “other useful information”. “When we requested officials to display how many biometric transaction were not successful, they told us that in a few days, they will remove the entire MIS as there had received orders from the food ministry to not display demographic data associated with Aadhaar,” she said. “But we pointed out that it was the creation of a single identification number that is the problem. Why should information on all other government schemes be removed?”

The Centre for Internet and Society report points out that while the law now makes Aadhaar numbers confidential, the government has failed to specify data masking standards. Section 6 of the Aadhaar Regulations lays down that no government or private agency should publish Aadhaar numbers unless they are redacted or blacked out “through appropriate means”.

But this is too vague, the report points out. “In some instances, the first four digits are masked while in others the middle digits are masked,” Srinivas Kodali, one of the authors of the report, explained, “which means someone with access to different databases can use tools for aggregation to reconstruct information hidden or masked in a particular database.”

Kodali said that for information other than Aadhaar numbers, each ministry and department is required to classify the data that is sensitive, restricted or open, which they have failed to do. “The National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, 2012 requires securing information of sensitive and restricted data but it does not recommend the ways to do it,” he said. “The standards around information disclosure and control do not exist, and the Ministry of Statistics expert committee on this was unable to suggest one last month.”

“Even for MNREGA data,” Kodali continued, “the Ministry of Rural Development’s chief data officer should have classified the financial information as restricted or open when the database was first created. But did they do this.”

Nagesh Singh, the additional secretary, however said his ministry “does not have a chief data officer to do this”. “The ministry’s economic advisor is the official responsible for categorising data and advises us on this,” he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/scroll-may-20-2017-anumeha-yadav-will-aadhaar-leaks-be-used-as-an-excuse-to-shut-out-scrutiny-of-welfare-schemes

WikiWars - A report

nishant — 2010-10-06T11:21:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, hosted WikiWars – an international event that brought together scholars, researchers, academics, artists and practitioners from various disciplines, to discuss the emergence and growth of Wikipedia and what it means for the information societies we inhabit. With participants from 15 countries making presentations about Wikipedia and the knowledge ecology within which it exists, the event saw a vigorous set of debates and discussions as questions about education, pedagogy, language, access, geography, resistance, art and subversion were raised by the presenters. The 2 day event marked the beginning of the process that hopes to produce the first critical reader – Critical Point of View (CPOV) - that collects key resources for research and inquiry around Wikipedia.

The debates around Wikipedia, the de facto dynamic knowledge production system online, are very fairly divided into two competing camps. There is a group of people who swear by Wikipedia – celebrating its democratic processes of knowledge production, ease of access, and the de-canonisation of knowledge to produce the ‘WikiWay’; And then there is a group of people who swear at Wikipedia – raising concerns over authenticity, reliability, vulgarisation of knowledge and the de-hierarchisation of knowledge systems that Wikipedia seems to embody. The debates between the two groups are often passionate and situated in wildly speculative and often personal interests and investments in Wikipedia and the Web 2.0 Information Revolution that it seems to be a symptom of. The debates also play out in various international locations, most of them relying on personal anecdotes, experiences and half hearted data that does not stand the tests of rigour.

WikiWars, then, concentrated on things which are about Wikipedia but also not about Wikipedia. In many ways, as Geert Lovink, the Director of INC suggested, WikiWars was a recognition of the fact that Wikipedia has come of age and can now be systematically and philosophically examined as a work in progress that has long-term implications about our future. It was the ambition of the Editorial team (consisting of Geert Lovink, Sabine Nerdeer, Nathaniel Tkacz, Johanna Niyesito, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah) to veer away from the recognised battle-lines drawn in, around and about Wikipedia, and instead examine the fault-lines that run under many of our assumptions, prejudices and imaginations of Wikipedia. And Wikiwars, through careful screening and invested interests, became one of the first platforms in the world to initiate a critical discourse on Wikipedia, seeking to engage with its histories, it contemporary manifestations and practices, and the futures that it seeks to inhabit.

The different presentations brought in located debates, theoretical and philosophical concepts and personal experiences to build frameworks that explain and contextualise Wikipedia as one of the most contested spaces online. The eight panels across two days dealt with four major thematic areas which need to be summarised in brief:

1. Education, Pedagogy and Knowledge: At the very basis of Wikipedia (and other structures like it) is the question of knowledge production, the possibility of using it as an educational tool and the potentials it has for introducing new pedagogies and learning practices in and outside of institutionalised education. Presenters from various disciplines engaged with these questions in interesting ways.

Usha Raman from Teacher Plus in Hyderabad, brought in the question of primary education, the need for teacher training programmes and the ways by which infrastructure development needs to be thought through when talking of Wikipedia and education in the Indian context. The necessity of locating Wikipedia in a much larger debates on learning were also echoed by Noopur Rawal and Srikeit Tadepalli, students from Christ University who brought their experience of Wikipedia and the expectations from classroom education and learning in their presentation.

In the same field, but from a different approach, a panel examined Wikipedia as a site to critique Western Knowledge production systems. Stian Haklev and Johanna Niyesito concentrated on the questions of language and knowledge production. Haklev made an impassioned argument deconstructing the utopian idea of Wikipedia’s multilingual dreams and instead made a call for recognising the black-holes when it comes to non-English production and consumption of knowledge on Wikipedia. He further explored the implications that linguistic imbalance has on the very governance structure of Wikipedia and its communities. Niyesito challenged the ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ image that Wikipedia has built for itself and posited the idea of Wikipedia as a translingual space where different languages and cultures negotiate common understandings and processes of producing knowledge. HanTeng Liao explored knowledge production through the market economy of key-words to see how the linguistic biases of search engines that harvest these keywords, determines the access and visibility of different Wikipedia pages.

Resistance, Diversity and Representation: While these questions were present as undercurrents to most of the presentations at WikWars, they were perhaps most fiercely present in the debates that followed the presentations by Eric Ilya Lee (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), YiPing Tsou (National Central University, Taiwan), William Beutler and Eric Zimmerman (IDC, Israel).

For Lee and Tsou, the responses to the Chinese language Wikipedia from popular media and personal experiences, were demonstrative of the fact that the lack of diverse means of representation and participation lead to a strong resistance of Wikipedia in Taiwan. Beutler looked at the heavily contested editorial space and policies of Wikipedia to make a point about how lack of effective governance systems based on mutual tolerance and diversity lead to stressful and often traumatic experiences for users who might not be represented through the mainstream ideas and ideologies of an English speaking populace.

Zimmerman took a startling position, calling for a regime of attribution and dissolving the pseudonymous structures of knowledge production in Wikipedia in order to build designs of trust and verification into the system, thus leading to better and more credible research tools and representations.

The tone of debates was altered with presentations by Mark Graham (Oxford Research Institute) and the team of artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildal, the team responsible for the Wikipedia Art Project. Graham showed the complexity of visualising space and how the production of space (or physical geography) on Wikipedia often reflects the virtual density of access and presence online. Showing a nuanced set of images that help mapping these new geographies for a richer diversity and representation, Graham showed how systems like Wikipedia ‘cannot know what they cannot know’ despite the reliance on the wisdom of crowds.

Stern and Kildall, in giving an account of their project which used Wikipedia’s policies to undermine and challenge it, show how the institutionalisation of a space and its ‘canonisation’ can quickly lead to a new set of problems where the space becomes the very thing it had set itself against.

3. Politics of Free, Open and Exclusion: The rhetoric of free and open have been built into all popular discourses around Wikipedia. However, the presentations at WikiWars showed that these need to be taken with at least a pinch of salt and further examined for what they signify. Alok Nandi of Architempo made a dramatic and creative revisit of these guiding principles of Wikipedia. He showed how an inquiry into rituals of participation, distortion and access on Wikipedia can promote, not merely looking at the politics of exclusion but also at the politics of inclusion and the problems therein.

Dror Kamir’s evocative narrative of ‘Your side, my side and Wikipedia’ illustrated how the question of boundaries, of knowledges, of facts and truths get distorted as language, community, nationality, etc. come into play in recording and documenting knowledge on Wikipedia. Concentrating on conflict zones in the Middle East, he talked about the lack and perhaps the impossibility of producing neutrality the way in which Wikipedia demands of its users. These ideas resonated with the propositions that ShunLing Chen from Harvard had floated in the opening panel to explore the ‘boundary work’ of Wikipedia and how it defines and produces itself in relation to external forces and controversies. These discussions on the politics of presence, absence, inclusion and exclusion were further layered by presentations by Linda Gross, Elad Weider, Heather Ford and Nathaniel Tkacz who produced a critique of the Free and Open, taking a cautionary step away from accepting these as inherently good.

While Gross explored the structure of egalitarianism that Wikipedia builds for itself, Ford presented an analysis of the licensing regimes of the knowledge produced within Wikipedia and the problems they pose to traditional knowledges and non-mainstream information. Weider, trained as a lawyer, critiqued the neo-liberal discourse around Wikipedia and tried to correlate the communities with markets. Tkacz’s historical overview of Free and Open, resulted in a compelling inquiry into the very structures that inform the shape and functioning of objects like Wikipedia.

Twitter: #WikiWars http://twitter.com/wikiwars and www.twitter.com/jackerhack/wikiwars

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/

CPOV blog : http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/

The videos fom the Wikiwars event are embedded below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep

WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 in Hong Kong

praskrishna — 2013-08-29T05:31:59Z

WikiSym + OpenSym took place in Hong Kong on August 5-7, 2013. The event emphasized the open collaboration aspect of WikiSym both for researchers as well as practitioners. The event was organized by the International Symposium on Open Collaboration. T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge and Subhashish Panigrahi participated in this event.

See the event details posted on wikisym.org and also read the blog entry posted by Dirk Riehle on opensym.org.

A Short Report on WikiSym + OpenSym 2013

WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 took place at Hong Kong’s Cyberport facility. 98 registered participants from around the world enjoyed a two-track program centered on the common topic of open collaboration. Four keynotes and invited talks covered topics of open access, open educational resources, Wikipedia research, and open science. Open access, open source, and traditional wiki research contributed several sessions. A main thread was Wikipedia research, which was strongly represented at the conference, perhaps not surprisingly given that we had co-located WikiSym with Wikimania, the Wikipedia user conference. Social media coverage was strong, as can be seen from Twitter and Google Plus searches.

A host of community events, including demos, posters, and workshop on the topic of open collaboration rounded out the program. Even though most participants were international’s, events on open data in business and the GLAM sector added a local flavor to the event. Participants also got a taste of the richness of the city of Hong Kong, for example through the conference banquet at Top Deck, a restaurant ship that provided an enjoyable mingling opportunity and an excellent food to conference participants.

All tracks and events are supplemented by an open space track. Open space is a technique for organizing events to allow otherwise passive participants to become an active part of the conference. Open space is like an “unconference”, just more organized and much more effective. Open space has a long and distinguished history at WikiSym. Using open space, WikiSym + OpenSym activates not only traditional speakers but every participant, creating the desired synergy between all strands of open collaboration researchers and practitioners.


Some of the event participants, photo by Subhashish Panigrahi

Finally, a few links of WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 reporting from this blog:

The proceedings are available from the event’s website.

Sponsors of WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 were the Wikimedia Foundation, Google, InvestHK, Cyberport, and EuroCham Hong Kong. The event was held in-cooperation with the ACM SIGWEB and SIGSOFT and was fiscally sponsored by The John Ernest Foundation.

Next year’s conference, OpenSym 2014, will be held in Berlin, Germany, on August 27-29, 2014. Please see here for the initial call for submissions (papers).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikisym-opensym-2013-hong-kong

Wikisource Handbook for Indian Communities

Admin — 2018-09-19T01:52:09Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/files/wikisource-handbook-for-indian-communities

WikiSangamotsavam 2016

manasa@cis-india.org — 2017-02-06T12:47:54Z

The Malayalam Wikipedia community jointly held its anniversary celebrations and annual gathering in Kasaragod district, Kerala from 26 to 28 December, 2016. The Centre for Internet and Society was invited to partake in the event.

The Malayalam Wikipedia community held its fifth annual gathering, WikiSangamotsavam, in Kasaragod, the northernmost district of the state of Kerala. The culturally diverse district is a melting pot of seven actively spoken languages- Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, the Beary dialect, Tamil, Marathi and Konkani. It was a three day affair from the 26th to 28th December 2016, with the third day’s WikiVoyage incubator session fittingly held on a houseboat out in the Bekal lake! The event commemorated the regional Wikipedia’s completion of 14 years which fell on the 21st of the month. The community aims to build advanced technical support for its members in the next year.

The first day was marked by a seminar by Mr. Sathyaseelan, a differently abled Wikipedian who demonstrated(video from previous meetup here) how to convert voice to text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) methods for visually challenged Wikipedians. This was followed by a session on Open Street Mapping by the newly elected Malayalam Wikipedia administrator Ranjith Siji. In a one-on-one sit down, Ranjit candidly spoke about the technical challenges that the Malayalam Wikipedia and the wider Wikipedia community faces today. He opines that the existing mobile support for editing wikis is proving insufficient and more robust apps need to be developed to make Wikipedia more mobile ready for on-the-go editors. He’s taking this up as his personal mission for the upcoming year. In light of using freely reusable data, Ranjit says, “collaborative editing must also be enabled as groups can work together to improve local knowledge.”

The second day began with a formal opening ceremony by P. Karunakaran, Member of Parliament for the Kasaragod constituency. He spoke on the importance of furthering the cause of knowledge in India’s most literate state. Then, the Malayalam Wikipedia community sat down for a transparent round table discussion on progress made and targets to be set for 2017. The community noted the success of programs and activities like Ente Gramam (which encouraged members to detail information regarding their village/ ancestral village), Olympics month, Wikipedia Asian Month, Wiki 100 Days, etc. The Wiki 100 Days in particular led to the creation of close to 80 articles a day in Malayalam Wikipedia. The number of articles also saw a surge post the Wiki Conference India 2016 held in Punjab. The discussion mulled on the aspects that need to be improved upon such as selected articles and selected photos on the Main Page which see unenthusiastic voting numbers amongst the community members. Manoj K, an active community member, proposed the strategy of targeting groups of editors(old/new) with niche knowledge of a specific subject or focus area. He related his own experience in this regard: “I’m part of many bird watching and environmental clubs and I talk to them about Wikipedia so that they can use their knowledge about conservation or birds to edit or create those specific wikis.” He also identified challenges that were administrative in nature. “When offline events increase, online participation tends to decrease due to the leg work involved”, he observes. In addition, he feels grant writing and documentation training would also benefit the community. He added that religious vandalism of articles on monuments by fringe groups is also an issue faced by the community.

Anil Kumar, another long time Wikipedian, spoke of the general increase in awareness regarding editing Wikipedia in smaller towns and districts in Kerala. He pointed out that reviving School Wiki would further increase awareness and, subsequently, participation. The Kerala government’s IT@School project is now leading the efforts behind reviving School Wiki which aims to document (in Malayalam) details of all the schools in the state. K. Anvar Sadat, the Executive Director of IT@School spoke to the Malayalam Wikipedia community in a video message enumerating the benefits of a detailed statewide school database. The community also aims to complete their target of 50, 000 Wikipedia articles by the end of the year. The second day came to a close with a seminar on mangalamkali, a local folk dance in the district by Master Ramachandran.

Ranjit Siji further outlined the agenda for 2017 saying that data scraping of public records onto Wikipedia and a tool to maintain edit-a-thons will be a key focus for the community this year. He said, “when data can flow from public record to a wiki, it makes editing much easier and accessible even for new editors.”

When asked Manoj added that the community plans to conduct more online and offline events for community bonding. He said, “monthly meetings and edit-a-thons will keep the community active.” 2017 will also see Wikipedians in the community being rewarded through recognition of their pioneering efforts, he said. However, he emphasised the need for public and social media branding of future events. The final day of the annual gathering was held on a houseboat in Nileshwar. Wikipedian Sajal Karikkan gave a presentation on the Malayalam WikiVoyage project, still in incubation, where users could provide travel guidance about areas they are most familiar with. It was enthusiastically received by the community members. While the event was timed between Christmas and New Year, it did see some enthusiastic participation. However, the community did lack significant participation of women to bridge the gender divide(see chart below). Smitha, a long time Wikipedian and oceanographer feels that working women find it harder. She says, “they simply don’t have the time with their work and family commitments.” With the community planning to create mobile apps for editing in Malayalam, this could be sufficiently addressed through focused efforts to involve more women.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikisangamotsavam-2016

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller

praskrishna — 2012-12-18T06:51:46Z

The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore is hosting a talk by Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation at its office in Bangalore on November 12, 2012, from 11.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m., followed by a lunch discussion.

Talk Summary

Wikipedia's technology platform is rapidly changing, with improvements being deployed every day. Unlike other top websites, Wikipedia is run by a non-profit (Wikimedia Foundation) and all its technology is open source, ready to be improved and extended by you.

Learn about the recent and coming technology changes to Wikipedia and Wikimedia's other projects: the new Visual Editor, improvements to mobile sites and apps, Wikidata, and projects with mysterious codenames like "Echo", "Milkshake", "Agora" and "Flow". Learn how to get involved and ask anything you'd like to know about Wikipedia.

Erik Moeller

Erik Moeller is the Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation, overseeing a department of about 70 people. Erik has been involved in Wikipedia since 2001 and joined the staff of Wikimedia in 2008. He previously worked as a journalist and project manager.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-state-of-tech-talk-by-erik-moeller

Wikipedia writes a new script

praskrishna — 2013-09-04T06:27:27Z

Wikipedia is available in over 30 Indian languages. Add Konkani to that list. The Centre for Internet and Society has just completed a programme of training students to write for Konkani Wikipedia.

The article was published in the Goan on August 24, 2013.

They sat listening to Subhashish Panigrahi, learning how to seamlessly flow from English to Konkani. Panigrahi walked around the room, 40 sets of eyes and ears followed him eagerly, latching on to his every word. Then the team moved into a small conference room at the new Central Library, where they sat down to work on a few articles in Konkani. The reason: Because Wikipedia has a new language – Konkani.

When on February 4, 1987, Konkani in Devnagri script was declared the official language of Goa according to the Goa Daman and Diu Official Language Act, 1987, little did the officials know that one day, one of the largest web-based encyclopaedias would want the encyclopaedia to be available also in Konkani for the 30, 00000 or so Konkani language speakers over the world.

Wikipedia, a multi-lingual, web-based, free content encyclopaedia is available in over 30 Indian languages and several languages of other nations. The project to begin a Konkani Wikipedia began in 2006. “Sadly, even after seven years of inception, Konkani Wikipedia has only 90 articles,” says Nitika Tandon, of the CIS-A2K (Centre for Internet & Society, Access to Knowledge) team. The CIS is a movement for open access to web-based information. “Rather than being open receivers of knowledge, we want people to be active producers of knowledge,” she adds. The CIS has selected five Indian languages to uplift and Konkani is one of them.

Carlos Fernandes, the Curator of the Central Library said, “We supported it because this will maintain the culture and develop the language using technology. Articles in Konkani language will be available to people all over the world and thus should one want to research something in Konkani, his search will not be limited to the books of the library.” Another project by the CIS team to make Konkani more well-known is digitising the 4-volume Konkani encyclopaedia published by the Goa University. “This encyclopaedia will be uploaded by this team and will be available under the creative commons licence,” says Dr Gopakumar, the university Librarian.

The programme covered aspects like how Wikipedia works, how to edit articles, how to type in Devnagri, how to create a new article, etc. “We are learning how to about editing and writing in Wikipedia. The 40 students are of MA part 2, and the group is divided into two. The first 20 will work on the first two days and the others will work on the last two,” says Fr Luis Xavier Gomes who is doing his MA in Konkani at Goa University. Fr Gomes will be writing on Konkani tiatr and Konkani cantar after having researched and referenced about the same.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/thegoan-joyce-dias-august-24-2013-wikipedia-writes-a-new-script

Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh

Subhashish Panigrahi — 2012-10-04T12:08:03Z

A Wikipedia workshop was organized in Chandigarh by the British Library over two days on August 24 and 25, 2012. Bipin Kumar, Head of British Library and Christina, Deputy Manager had pivotal roles in designing this workshop with support from Piyush, a wikipedian.

The session on Day 1 was conducted by Subhashish Panigrahi and the session on Day 2 was conducted by Subhashish and Piyush.

Day 1: Introductory Session

There was news coverage about this session in the Hindustan Times. Members of the British Library (members above 16 years) were informed about the event through the British Council's mailing list. About 32 participants attended this session on Day 1. These included people from different age groups and backgrounds. Amazingly there were more elderly folks than the youngsters! Most of them were from Ludhiana, Mohali and Panchkula (Mohali and Panchkula are two nearby cities).

Subhashish gave the welcome address and asked the participants to introduce themselves and speak about their Wikipedia experience and interaction as a user. Many of them asked questions in the beginning itself which was quite beneficial as we got to spending some time to know each other. The participants were taken through the presentation by questioning about "Who edits Wikipedia and why they edit it", and since the participants continued asking a lot of questions in between, the intro session was longer. Most of them were still not believing that Wikipedia articles could be edited by common men like them. So Subhashish decided to do some vandalism. One of the participants volunteered for creating her user account, and the year when Chandigarh was declared as being the "cleanest city" of India was changed. She then corrected it. Subhashish explained how experienced editors correct such mistakes. The participants were briefed about a few formatting options like bold, italics, hyperlinking and creating heading levels, etc., and showed the "help" tab through which they could learn more. Majority of them had doubts about the credibility and they brought examples of many articles having wrong information. So the rest of the session was spent discussing about the low visibility being one of the reasons of articles with wrong information and how more editor contribution is essential for articles in the Indian context. The participants were also shown articles with "cleanup / more citations needed" maintenance tags and told how they could be improved.

Day 2: Editing Workshop

Ten participants from the previous day (including a sports-blogger, a techie, four students, a ELT trainer, a pediatrician and a lady from Ludhiana who created her user account on Day 1 and brought her father for Day 2) came over for this workshop. There were four new student participants as well. Subhashish and Piyush spoke briefly about what is intended for the editing session. All the participants created their user accounts. Some of the participants helped the ones who were new to create their user accounts. The participants chose various articles including articles of local importance such as Banka Bihari Temple in Chandigarh, paratha (few of the participants raising queries on why it is not spelt "paraNtha", Assam tea, and so on.

Figure 1: Above is a picture of participants doing Wiki editing

The audience listened patiently and asked interesting questions like "what is there for me", "what we are going to do next", etc. They all gathered together for a photoshoot, discussed on setting a wiki club to stay connected and agreed to continue editing after the session is over. The participants were also excited to hear that the Chandigarh British Library Wikipedia Club would be India's third Wikipedia club.

Figure 2: Above is a picture of the participants on Day 2

Meeting with British Library Staff

After the session got over there was a meeting with British library's Deputy Manager Christina and IT Head Varinder. We were joined by a columnist from Tribune and one participant. We explained how the wiki club will function and how it would help them as well. Being a library they could involve many of their members in this. A woman editor from Ludhiana has showed interest for conducting workshops in her town. There was a sports-blogger and techie who explained how the local blogger community (over 125+ bloggers) meet up regularly and blog actively. This is a community we could explore more to promote Wikipedia amongst techies. We found that the British Library was quite open to ideas and showed interest for this collaborative model. The participants also asked about defining positions for the wiki club so that people having different interest could take up the lead for different activities.

Post event steps:

Emails with thanks and appreciating their interest were sent to the participants.
Formal opening of the club was done on Wikipedia and participants and new editors have been informed.
Help/support desk on Facebook was set up to provide online support.
Press releases were sent to newspapers.
Distributing work among new editors has begun.
Discussion for next meetup and keeping them updated on regular basis is being implemented.

Meetings were also held with the curator of Chandigarh museum and with Sheetal Prakash, former professor in Public Administration at Punjab University who could help us in reaching out to Punjabi media.

Note: Although the workshop was conducted prior to the grant period, the report was written in the month of September, and hence, we are featuring this.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/report-of-the-wikipedia-workshop-in-british-library

Wikipedia workshop at Sinhgad Institute of Technology and Science, Pune

garule — 2016-02-26T10:10:11Z

The goal of this Wikipedia workshop is to increase awareness about Wikipedia and equip its participants with the rudiments of contributing to Wikipedia, and to introduce it as a concept to them. The participants will be learn about Wikipedia and its sister projects. Furthermore, they will be encouraged to contribute in these projects.

Planned activities:

To introduce Wikipedia to the new editors and get them accustomed to the environment.
To promote Marathi Wikipedia and elaborate the use and contribution towards Wikipedia in other Indian languages.
To have an open discussion among the editors the free knowledge movement in general and Wikipedia in particular.
Experienced editors from the Marathi Wikipedia community will demonstrate and educate the participants.
To spread the awareness of Wikipedia as a powerful tool.

We are expecting about 30-60 students to participate in this event. Friends from Hamara Linux also are planning to join in this workshop and mentor the participants.

Wikipedia WikiMeetup at Bangalore

praskrishna — 2016-08-12T13:31:04Z

Bangalore based Wikipedians will gather for a meeting at the Centre for Internet and Society on Sunday, August 14, 2016 at 3.00 p.m.

Anyone interested in Wikipedia (user, contributor or curious about it). Wikipedians from any part of India or the world and anyone who is interested in Wikipedia! Meetup is open to members of all Wikimedia projects and Wikipedians from all languages. All are welcome, and we are especially interested in seeing newcomers to join the experienced Wikipedians/Wikimedians.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/wikipedia-wikimeetup-at-bangalore

Wikipedia turns 11 today

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T09:41:30Z

The world's largest free encyclopaedia turns 11 on Sunday. To mark the occasion, the Wikipedia community will host events in seven cities across the country. The community is also celebrating the first anniversary of the Wikimedia India chapter.

On this occasion, the India chapter will launch a new portal (www.wikimedia.in) for easy access to Wikimedia sites in the Indian languages. Wikipedia is currently available in 21 Indian languages.

The India chapter is focussed on creating greater awareness of Wikipedia in Indian languages and to increase the volunteer editor base and Indian content through its initiatives. “The portal will make it easier to locate Indian language Wikipedias and other projects,” said Arun Ram, executive committee member of Wikimedia India.

The Bangalore event, open to all Wikipedia users, contributors and enthusiasts, is being held at the Centre for Internet and Society at Domlur (Bangalore).

Besides Bangalore, events are being held in Ahmedabad, Cuttack, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune, all centres where Wikipedia editors or contributors are present in sizeable numbers.

‘Deepen engagement with students'

In order to address the complaint raised by the industry about students' “poor employability”, the Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce organised a seminar in Bangalore on Wednesday.

A recent survey by the World Bank indicated that there was a “severe mismatch” between the skill sets required by the IT-ITES industry and what was available in graduates from Indian institutions.

S. Sadagopan, director, Indian Institute of Information Technology, said the level of engagement of the academic institutions with the students needed to be “reoriented and deepened”. “Equally important is the responsibility of the recruiters in changing their recruitment processes,” said Prof. Sadagopan. He added, “The question is, are you giving the recruits a challenging job?”

Award for networking major

Cisco announced that its Networking Academy has won the prestigious eINDIA 2011 jury choice award for the ‘Best ICT Enabled Skills Development Initiative'.

The award was conferred on Cisco Networking Academy in recognition of its efforts toward enabling students to develop valuable information, communications and technology skills for increased access to opportunities in the global economy, a release from the networking major said.

Speaking on the occasion, Bina Raj-Debur, regional head, Social Innovation Group, India and South Asia, said: “We are proud to receive this prestigious award. It is testimony to the continued efforts of the Networking Academy programme to make a positive difference to the skills-building efforts of the nation and the communities in which we live and operate. At Cisco, we aim to enhance the employability of youth through technology, enabling them to harness the enormous opportunities in the ICT domain. We are very pleased that our efforts have been recognised by industry and society alike.”

Help with transition to IPv6

Global IT major Hewlett Packard (HP) has signed a partnership agreement with the Government of Karnataka and the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, to conduct a pilot project that will help organisations in Karnataka through a smooth transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).

The current version of IP addressing, IPv4, is reaching its theoretical maximum of about four billion Internet addresses. IPv6 is the new Internet addressing protocol with the capacity to support 340 trillion addresses, a press release from HP said. This allows for the dramatic expansion of connected devices from computers and smart phones, to household electronics, industrial appliances, vehicles and commercial systems.

IPv6 also provides for improved quality and new applications like IP TV, telephony and ecommerce. The pilot project aims at identifying major challenges in IPV6 adoption, developing solutions to meet these challenges and actively promoting IPV6 adoption.

The news was published in the Hindu on 15 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-turns-11-today

Wikipedia Training in Telugu for Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad

praskrishna — 2013-09-06T05:51:49Z

CIS-A2K is conducting a Wikipedia training programme in Telugu for the faculty of Dr. B.R.Ambedkar Open University (Dr. BRAOU) in Hyderabad on September 5 and 6, 2013.

This is done as part of the "ICT and eContent" workshop organized by the Centre for Staff Training and Development of Dr. BRAOU for their faculty. T. Vishnu Vardhan Program Director, CIS-A2K has been invited to teach a module on "Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era" as part of which this Wikipedia training programme was also organized.

Details in Telugu originally published in the metapage on Wikipedia is reproduced below:

వికీపీడియా:శిక్షణ శిబిరం/హైదరాబాద్/హైదరాబాద్2

--14.139.86.130 05:32, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)పరాంకుశం వెంకట రమణ==తేదీ - స్థలం== సెప్టెంబరు, 5 2013; డాక్టర్ బి.ఆర్. అంబేద్కర్ సార్వత్రిక విశ్వవిద్యాలయం

సమయం
పొ. 10.00 నుండి మ. 1.00 వరకు

నిర్వహణ సంస్థ/లు

CISA2K డాక్టర్ బి.ఆర్. అంబేద్కర్ సార్వత్రిక విశ్వవిద్యాలయం, హైదరబాద్ వారి సంస్థాగత భాగస్వామ్యంతో. ఈ శిబిరం Centre for Staff Training and Development (Dr. BRAOU) వారు 10 రోజులపాటు విశ్వవిద్యాలయం యొక్క ఉపాధ్యాయుల కొరకు నిర్వహించిన ‘ICT and e-Content Development’ Workshop లో భాగంగా నిర్వహించబడినది.

నిర్వాహకులు

విష్ణు (చర్చ)

--Elkasudharani (చర్చ) 05:37, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)==Dr.BRAOU లోని కార్యక్రమ సంధానకర్తలు==

ఘంటా చక్రపాణి (డైరెక్టర్, Centre for Staff Training and Development, డాక్టర్ బి.ఆర్. అంబేద్కర్ సార్వత్రిక విశ్వవిద్యాలయం)

--14.139.86.130 05:35, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)

శిక్షణ శిబిరానికి హజరైన సభ్యులు

--Pallavisudheer (చర్చ) 05:31, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)

సరోజ --Drgsaroja (చర్చ) 05:27, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)
--Rajani nellutla (చర్చ) 05:29, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)
--Kiranmayi.ys (చర్చ) 05:30, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)
--Vasuvaddanam (చర్చ) 05:31, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)

--Gpushpa (చర్చ) 05:32, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC) --Drgsaroja (చర్చ) 05:34, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)

--Boju srinivas (చర్చ) 05:36, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)
--Shridhevie (చర్చ) 05:37, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)

పై వరసలో పేరు చేర్చండి లేక సంతకం చేయండి>

--[[--14.139.86.130 05:35, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)]]
--Elkasudharani (చర్చ) 05:37, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)
--Pvramana24 (చర్చ) 05:37, 6 సెప్టెంబర్ 2013 (UTC)

నివేదిక

చిత్రమాలిక

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-training-in-telugu-for-b-r-ambedkar-open-university

Wikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants

subha — 2013-07-17T06:33:20Z

On May 13, 2013, the Access to Knowledge team led by Subhashish Panigrahi conducted a Wikipedia Introductory Session at the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi for the consultants working for Data and India portal. This session was aimed to emphasize how these portals and their useful data could be used on Wikipedia to create good quality articles.

Recently Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge team was invited to demonstrate the usefulness of Wikipedia for the consultants of National Informatics Centre (NIC) working for the Data.gov.in and the National Portal of India at NIC's New Delhi office. Data portal being one of the very important open data portal of the Government of India has worked immensely to populate over 2400 datasets from 32 departments participating in it.¹

Many of the data need to be transcribed in popular medias especially on web. Wikipedia being world's largest online encyclopedia could be one such primary platform to use these useful data. Subhashish from A2K team explained the usefulness of Wikipedia for the people associated with this project. The session went with discussing about policies, Manual of style and Five pillars of Wikipedia followed by a demonstration of editing articles on English Wikipedia. Post editing session there was a discussion session about the notability and how to check accuracy of articles by using valid references.

1 http://bit.ly/11DMH5w

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-introductory-session