Centre for Internet and Society

CIS - A2K Work Plan: July 2016 - June 2017

sunil — 2016-04-29T09:36:45Z

One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalyzing the growth of the free and open knowledge movement in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008. Since September 2012, we at CIS-A2K, have been actively involved in growing the movement in India through (i) a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for the period September 2012 - June 2014, (ii) the FDC Grant received for the period July 2014 - June 2015 and (iii) the FDC Grant received for the period July 2015 - June 2016. Based on the productive experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed this work plan for July 2016 to June 2017.

This was originally published on Meta-wiki on April 2, 2016.

We have revised the work plan template taking into account the changed proposal plan sent out by WMF and in light of the feedback that we have received from FDC assessment during last proposal application. The FDC feedback is taken into account at the level of design, RoI and ensuring quality for all our activities.

CIS-A2K responses towards Indic communities concerns

During the last plan period CIS-A2K received the following complaints, suggestions, and feedback. We have attempted to address the concerns under redesigned CIS-A2K 2.0. This table was first prepared during our progress report for the current grant and A2K would like to acknowledge the learnings derived out of the suggestions and feedback it received during the last plan. Please see the table here.

Background to CIS-A2K Program

CIS-A2K is working with the Indic Wikimedia communities since December 2008, when Jimbo Wales came to India and visited Bangalore. In mid-2012 CIS-A2K received a financial grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and since then it has been actively involved in growing the Wikimedia and free knowledge movement in India. Following a grant received from WMF for the period September 2012 to June 2014, CIS-A2K received FDC Grant for the periods July 2014 to June 2015 and July 2015 to June 2016. Based on the 41-month experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has prepared this year's work plan for July 2016 to June 2017.

Objective

CIS-A2K is committed to improve Wikimedia movement in India by supporting Indic Wikimedia communities and working on Wikimedia projects and collaborating with FOSS and other like minded movement partners. It also strives to catalyse the growth of open and free knowledge movement in South Asia and especially in India. Our main objectives are:

Bringing content under Creative Commons and similar free licenses;
Supporting and empowering Indic Wikimedia communities;
Building and maintaining institutional partnerships in order to support the open knowledge movement and creation of open knowledge resources;
Planning and executing Wikimedia projects with wider community participations and effective consultation;
Fostering and enabling an appropriate legal and technological ecosystem;
Building sustainable communities and grooming potential leaders to represent the communities and projects globally.

Context

CIS-A2K has focussed on creating sustainable programmes and capacity development for communities in the last few years. CIS-A2K intends to continue its work during the proposed grant period and would continue to focus on the following Indian language Wikimedia projects: Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, Telugu (Focus Language Areas, FLA). In order to achieve higher RoI, A2K will be including Tulu in its language plan from this plan period.

CIS-A2K will continue to provide general support and service to all other Indian language Wikimedia communities for all Wikimedia projects as necessary and as requested by the communities or individuals from the community through its request page and needs assessment workshops.

Community strengthening initiatives will be prioritised in order to address the poor participation of Wikimedians from Indian sub continent in particular and global south in general. CIS-A2K has rolled out initiatives such as Train the Trainer and MediaWiki training, focused edit-a-thons and GLAM activities.

CIS-A2K and Indian language Wikimedia communities would greatly benefit from collaborating with these initiatives and CIS-A2K during this grant period would attempt to bring these communities closer with a series of interactions, hack-a-thons and training sessions.

Our institutional partnerships have played a very important role in content donation, generation of content, attracting new readers and editors and collaborating opportunities with existing community members. They have provided much needed press coverage towards Indian language Wikimedia projects. The institution partnerships and WEP have been redesigned as per community suggestions.

Methodology

This work plan has been prepared based on an extensive engagement with various Wikimedia movement participants and enthusiasts in India. These include:

Wikimedia community members across all Indic communities: We have talked to a large number of Indic Wikimedia community members and specially community members of our focused language areas;
Institutional Partners of CIS-A2K: We have taken feedback and suggestions from our institutional partners regarding the challenges of conducting WEP;
Like-minded advocates of free and open knowledge;
Surveys and Interviews.

Performance against plans and projected targets

Overall

Kannada

Konkani

Marathi

Odia

Telugu

Progress against goals set

Language Area Work Plans

CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts across four focus language areas Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu during the previous work plans. CIS-A2K proposed and initiated Marathi as a focus language project during the last proposal plan. As A2K's strategy of working with FLA has resulted in community building and sustainable outreach efforts, we intend to work with the nascent Tulu community towards making Tulu Wikipedia live.

The Tulu Wikipedia plan is a 'minimal cost program' and is not budgeted same as the other FLA. A2K has been able to build a strong community in Mangalore for the Kannada and Konkani Wikimedia projects. Tulu community draws its editor base and institutional support from Mangalore, hence A2K's plans towards Kannada and Konkani Wikimedia projects can also have the added dimension of Tulu Wikipedia incubation activities.

Detailed work-plan for each of these language areas may be seen here (in alphabetical order):

Woman's day editathon at Christ University

Some of the key factors that determined the July 2016-June 2017 work plan:

Development of Focus Language Area Plan: A2K's strategy of building a plan along with the consultation of the community and further customised as per the feedback received by communities and FDC Staff have resulted well across five languages. CIS-A2K is pleased to inform that during July 2015-June 2016 it engaged with all the five focus language area plans as it has been able to recruit program officers and program associates for the vacant positions. It is important to note that while we are engaging with Tulu Wikipedia community with intentions of making Tulu Wikipedia live, it is also a 'minimal cost' program. It helps A2K in acheiving higher RoI for monetary resources and optimisation of staff and volunteer expertise.
A2K 2.0 as a response to FDC and Indic Wikimedians' Feedback: As a learning derived out of FDC, WMF Board and Indic Wikimedians suggestions, CIS-A2K has revised its program structure and composition of work. Please find details of revised divisional of responsibilities of A2K team.
Partnership and networking with institutions and groups: CIS-A2K has had the privilege of partnering with educational institutions and developmental organisations. These partnerships and collaborations not only resulted in significant quality-content contributions, but also lead to the diversification and expansion of that particular language Wikimedia community. In order to strengthen the communities, increase participation and conduct GLAM activities and attract content donation A2K would look out for possible institutional partnerships.
Providing sustainability and developing leadership skills: A2K has always worked towards enabling Indian Language Wikimedia communities to achieve sustainability and visibility amongst the global communities. We have been greatly privilege to work with the Focus Language Communities and would like to pass on our learning through collaborations with other language communities, while exiting few of our current FLA programs. Through our skill building initiatives such as Train-the-Trainer, Media Wiki Training and Train-a-Wikipedian A2K has also been able to support growth of a new community of volunteers to support the existing community.

Community Strengthening Initiatives

CIS-A2K started two community strengthening initiatives— Train-the-Trainer and MediaWiki Training to grow and strengthen the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated communities, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The earlier iteration of these two programs played an important role in connecting the Indian language Wikimedia communities and fostering multi-lingual projects. This year also CIS-A2K proposes to undertake these two successful community strengthening initiatives. In mid-March 2016, CIS-A2K conducted a 2-day-long nationwide Wikipedia Education Program review workshop that brought students and faculty members from institutions that are running WEP in partnership with CIS-A2K and several important topics such as structural challenges such as academic schedule, institutional interest, faculty buy-in and more importantly response by the students were discussed. This year also CIS-A2K proposes to conduct such a workshop.

Creating Movement Resources

CIS-A2K has been creating resources to help Indic Wikimedia communities. All the resources are created after assessing the communities' need assessment and close interactions with many of the active community members.

CIS-A2K proposed to create the following resources (this also include printed resources):

Wikipedia editing tutorials
PEG and IEG application handbooks;
Handbook on how apply for various WMF scholarships;
Handbook on best practices for Wiki-events, workshops, meetup, outreach and other programs;
FAQ for content donors –give this job to a law school intern. No need of this handbook to be translated to Indian languages.
Bookmarks creation to increase awareness about Indian Wikimedia Projects;

General Support and Service to the Movement

CIS-A2K regularly supports Indic-language Wikimedia communities to conduct workshops, edit-a-thons and events to improve their projects. All these requests are placed at CIS-A2K request page and fulfilled after extensive community discussion and needs assessment.

Currently CIS-A2K is working on a program named Train-a-Wikipedian (TAW) to identify enthusiastic Indic Wikipedians and train and groom them to develop their editing skills. We'll continue empowering Indic Wikimedia community members through this program.

Learning and Evaluation

Following the Global metrics and discussions some members of the Wikimedia community, the A2K program had put together some evaluation tools to assess the impact of its work during the last year. We have included some more metrics for evaluation this year.

Evaluation tools

Participation

Number of active editors involved
Number of newly registered users
Number of individuals involved

Content

Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia article pages
Number of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects
Number of bytes added to and/or deleted from Wikimedia projects

Reports

CIS-A2K will undertake monthly and annually review of our work using the above evaluation tools. CIS-A2K report activities and progress to Wikimedia foundation in monthly meetings.^[1] CIS-A2K team will also report the successes and learnings to the Wikimedia India & the Global Community. CIS-A2K team will actively review progress of each language area plan in collaboration with the respective Wikimedia community. Based on this feedback we will undertake mid-course corrections, should there be a need. To summarize following reports will be published in the year of 2016 - 2017:

Progress report (for the current grant)
Impact Report (July 2016 - June 2017)
Monthly report to Wikimedia foundation;
Monthly Newsletters
Annual report to CIS

Monthly Review and Learning Sessions

Last year we wrote about conducting monthly review and learning sessions. Currently CIS-A2K is conducting monthly learning sessions to critically reflect on the successes and failures of our work internally. The learnings are shared with Wikimedia Foundation for their feedback and suggestion. We'll continue conducting monthly reviews and learnings and progress will be shared with Wikimedia Foundation. We will try to share the same the Wikimedia India members.

Budget

Please find link to CIS-A2K program budget for proposed grant period July 2016-June 2017 here

Feedback

We appreciate your valuable feedback. However, for the sake of structured engagement by everyone, we request you to consider the following before you share your feedback.

For feedback on the overall A2K Work Plan you can write here.
For feedback on respective Language area plans, please write on the discussion page of the respective language plan.

Alternatively you could also share your feedback over e-mail at tanveer@cis-india.org. Please use the subject line Feedback on Work Plan.
Should you feel the need to discuss any aspect of the plan before sharing your feedback, please write to us and we can set up a telephone/Skype call.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-a2k-work-plan-july-2016-june-2017

CIIPC-NLUD Workshop on Wikipedia Editing and Open Source Knowledge Sources

praskrishna — 2016-11-23T08:04:16Z

Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Competition (CIIPC), National Law university, Delhi as part of its Open Science Project, had organised WikiEdit2016 a two day workshop regarding orientation on editing Wikipedia and hands-on-training session. The event was organized on November 11 and 12, 2016 at National Law University in New Delhi.

Rohini Lakshané and Tanveer Hasan conducted and facilitated this workshop.

The purpose of this workshop was to introduce students to diverse aspects of open knowledge resources and to motivate them to move beyond passive consumption of knowledge and become active producers of knowledge. The participants were briefed about the editing activity earlier, because of which they had come prepared with references for the topic that they had earlier selected. We hope that this group (20 students with majority women editors) would continue to edit Wikipedia with thematic (law) focus and contribute further.

More details on the workshop can be accessed here.

Photo courtesy: Prof. Arul George Scaria, National Law University, Delhi.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/ciipc-nlud-workshop-on-wikipedia-editing-and-open-source-knowledge-sources

CI IP Watch List 2009 - India Report

pranesh — 2009-12-09T10:09:52Z

The India Report of the Consumers International IP Watch List 2009, detailing ways in which Indian copyright laws are beneficial and harmful for creators and consumers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/pranesh/IP%20Watch%20List%20-%20India%20Report.pdf

Chromebook for the Project Tiger- How it is helping me to contribute actively on Wikimedia projects!

Sangram Keshari Senapati — 2018-04-20T06:21:10Z

Project Tiger is a collaboration project of Wikimedia Foundation with Centre for Internet and Society, Wikimedia India and other affiliates of India to improve and create high-quality content in Indic languages like Odia, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi etc.This project helps the active and experienced Wikipedia editors by supporting them with Internet charges for 6 months and Laptops to 50 volunteers to address existing Wikipedia content gaps.

A diverse list of articles related to art, health, culture, and others are provided for Project Tiger Edit-a-thon to bridge the content gap on Odia Wikipedia, and within these 3 months (March, April & May), volunteers who write the most number of articles in their language Wikipedias with the proper guidelines will be awarded prizes worth 3000 INR, 2000 INR and 1000 INR according to their contribution for the month.

I applied for a laptop under this program so that I could contribute more than as usual. I must thank Sailesh Patnaik for guiding me to apply for the laptop. After verifying all the applied list, the final result was out and my username "ssgapu22" was on the 33rd number with other 4 Odia Wikipedia friends.

On 16th March, I received an e-mail from Tito to submit my address to get the laptop. So, I submitted the address of my PG, where I'm staying right now in Bangalore. After 30 minutes, he pinged me on Facebook and called me to the office. So that, I could receive the laptop directly.

I reached there at the CIS-A2K office to receive the laptop. There were Tanveer, Gopala, and Tito and later Ananth joined us. I met them at Mysore for TTT 2018. It was like a reunion with them. After a short conversation with Ravi, I did a live unboxing the Chromebook on Facebook, where I was asked about my experience in the Wikimedia movement and about some features of this laptop.

In that box, there was an Acer Chromebook. I have experience with the Windows OS and Linux OS, but this was little different. Since this has the Chrome browser only and all are available online. So, Tito described some of the features of Chromebook to me.

Now, I must say something about this laptop. It doesn't have any hard disk drive to store movies. So, all the time we hold it must work and all those works could be done in online. So we could focus more on Wikipedia works. The power backup is outstanding, around 10 to 12 hours. So, the power failure doesn't affect the work. And yes, with a short update of Chrome OS, the Google Playsote activated so we could download the play store apps directly.

By getting this laptop, I started working on this and all those online works are done easily. Previously, when I was using other laptops, the works took longer than as usual since the slow processing, but here that problem avoided. Finally, this laptop would definitely help me with the Wikipedia works. Since I'm working on the #1WikiYear project on Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource on a particular subject after contributing to my #1WikiYear project, I also write an article for the Project Tiger from the list.

Link to Sangram Keshari Senapati blogpost

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/chromebook-for-the-project-tiger-in-a-collaboration-with-google-by-wikipedia

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship

manasarao — 2017-12-14T08:55:05Z

The Centre for Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge program, in partnership with Christ University, is announcing its annual internship program for the 1200 students enrolled in the Wikipedia Education Program. The Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University, now in its fourth year, is an effort to bring together educators and students to use Wikipedia as an educational implement. CIS-A2K conducts the internship activity for passionate Christ University students to improve the quality of the articles created or edited by their fellow WEP peers. The internship will largely involve improving upon the articles created by their peers as well as gathering community consensus based on which these articles would be moved to the main namespace.

The students will be working on Wikipedia over the course of 21 days in developing upon the content created by Christ University Wikipedia Education Program participants. The fledgling articles currently housed in the individual “sandboxes” of the WEP participants will be improved upon by the interns through addition of detailed content, images and info-boxes.

The students are selected based on three main criteria: fluency of language(written and spoken), knowledge of Wikipedia and its processes, and their personal interest levels. The applications are open from 13 to 17 December, 2017. Interested students can apply here:

https://goo.gl/forms/Ffxh3T3DRZz8Q25F3

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/christ-university-wikipedia-education-program-internship-1

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship

Manasa Rao and Ananth Subray — 2017-07-05T09:33:19Z

CIS-A2K’s Wikipedia Education Program with Christ University, Bangalore is coming to an end after another year of intense classes, certificate courses and an internship at The Centre for Internet and Society. The internship activity in particular has successfully managed to engage students beyond classroom hours. The selection of 12 students for the internship program was based on their penchant for the language as well as their interest in the wiki world.

The internship was structured into three stages. Firstly, the students were asked to develop stub articles. The aim of this activity was for students to learn searching skills. As a result, over 1500 articles were developed with qualitative work.

Secondly, the students were asked to create new articles from scratch. They searched for the topic on the Wikipedia, ascertained whether the article exists or not and later researched further on the content of the articles. As a result, the students were able to create 1400+ articles

Finally, the students were asked to draft policy pages for their respective language Wikipedia. They went through the policy pages in different languages including English and were asked to create similar policy pages for Kannada Wikipedia.

Unlike previous years, the activities during the internship program were tailored to suit the individual capabilities of the students, taking into consideration the suggestions from community members. The students were of the opinion that in addition to rekindling their love for the language, the internship program also enabled them to develop their overall knowledge of various subjects. The students felt that their vocabulary and typing skills also improved. However, the students were of the opinion that they could have been taken a level or two higher from article writing and introduced to other Wikimedia projects and topics related to the overall movement. The CIS-A2K WEP Program hopes to incorporate these suggestions for the upcoming year while also trying to increase the number of days of the internship in order not to tax the students.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/christ-university-wikipedia-education-program-internship

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Faculty Orientation Report

Ananth Subray — 2017-08-03T04:45:38Z

Christ University faculty were given an orientation for the upcoming year on the Wikipedia Education Program

Report on Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Faculty Orientation

Participants:

Rathi MT
Shivaprasad
Sebastian K A
Naga Lakshmi
George Joseph

This faculty training aimed to get more involvement of faculty in Wikipedia and teach them how to use the Dashboard tool for evaluation and monitoring of the work done by the students. The following things which are required for the students to complete their assignments weretaught to the faculty during the orientation; so that students' doubts could be immediately resolved by the faculty:

Google forms and sending confirmation emails.
Linking of email to Wikipedia account( helps to recover the password).
Basic editing of Wikipedia and Wikisource.
Enabling of the keyboard if students have disabled in preferences.
Usage of Visual editor.
Usage of referencing tool.
Editing toolbar.
Dashboard tool.

After the orientation, we were discussing the possible events which we can do for the current year and the faculty was interested in doing the following:

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon for the language faculty of different colleges in Karnataka.
Hack-a thon with help of computer science department at Christ University.
Photo walk/Photo contest with the help of media studies Christ University.
WEP review.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/christ-university-wikipedia-education-program-faculty-orientation-report

Christ (DU) students enrolls for 3rd Wikipedia certificate course

Ananth Subray — 2018-09-23T04:04:48Z

Students of Christ (Deemed to be University) enrolled themselves for the third Wikipedia certificate course for the academic year of 2018-19, to understand the usage of Wikimedia projects.

A group of 37 students from Christ University in Bengaluru (Bangalore) India have enrolled themselves for a Wikipedia certificate course for the academic year of 2018-19. As an active step towards enabling the awareness on content editing and contributing skills on Wikipedia in vernacular languages, Christ (Deemed to be University), in collaboration with the CIS-A2K started the certificate this course for students in 2016. The Wikipedia certificate course is conducted after normal working hours for a total of 45 hours and carries 2 credits for the academic records of the University.

The objective of this certificate course is to enable students to acquire skills working along with Wikimedia projects which involve both technically equipping and holistic through its instruction. The course consists of three major components, the first step is an introduction to the concept of Wikipedia, which incorporates the history of online encyclopedias and the evolution of Wikipedia as one of the largest online encyclopedias available on the Internet. It also involves looking for resources for drafting articles on User sandbox and moving articles to the main space. The second step teaches students on how to edit and publish articles on Wikimedia projects, also adding tables and references, and also includes introduction to common templates, wikification of articles, legal aspects, policies, and guidelines, and how to identify vandalism and tackle it. The third step discusses Wikipedia’s notability and social significance, which lets the students understand Wikipedia in a critical and evaluative manner, where topics such as its ethics, existence as a social community, existence as a democratic project, How Wikipedia is used by students, teachers librarians and journalists.

Learning outcomes of the course: Create and edit wiki articles of good quality, with references, illustrations and templates etc, Capacity to teach Wikipedia with peer groups, without any fear. Discuss what is a reasonable source critical approach for using Wikipedia as a reference. Outline the common criticism of Wikipedia's reliability and discuss how the reliability problems can be tackled.

The Wikipedia Certificate Course syllabus can be accessed here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/christ-du-students-enrolls-for-3rd-wikipedia-certificate-course

Changing Wikipedia’s (and society’s) male bias is work in progress

praskrishna — 2016-10-04T23:02:56Z

Shyamal Lakshminarayanan was on the trail of Maude Lina West Cleghorn, a little-known amateur British entomologist who lived in Calcutta in the early 1900s.

The blog post was published by Factor Daily. Original can be read here.

Shyamal, an independent researcher and one of India’s most active Wikipedia contributors, had come across references to her while reading about Hugh Cleghorn, one of the pioneers of forestry in India. Shyamal (he prefers to be referred by his first name)’s interest in the female naturalist had also been piqued by his own passion for entomology, or the study of insects — he has authored and edited several Wikipedia articles on insects, such as this one on “ant”.

Shyamal couldn’t find out much about Cleghorn’s personal life in the usual sources — official journals dating back to the 1920s and books on entomology written in that period — but he could see that her work had been meticulous and of a high quality, especially her studies of insect pollination and the longevity of certain insects. It was odd: Cleghorn is a Fellow of the (Royal) Entomological Society, the Linnean Society, and the Zoological Society of London.

Intrigued, he wrote to Lynda Brooks at the Linnean Society of London and Ann Sylph at the Zoological Society of London, requesting them to check their archives for more information on Cleghorn, mentioning that he was planning to write a Wikipedia entry on her. The information available was limited: Brooks wrote back to say that while she had been able to confirm that Cleghorn had indeed been elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society (named after Carl Linnaeus, the father of the scientific system of naming all living beings, a system still in use) on December 4, 1913, and that she had been nominated by Isaac Henry Burkill (Director of the Botanic Gardens, Singapore); David Hooper (Economic Botanist to the Botanical Survey of India); and Lawrence Lewton-Brain (Director of Agriculture, Federated Malay States). Brooks was also able to dig up some scattered information such as her address in Calcutta and an obituary in the Journal and proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, following her death in 1946. “I’m afraid we have no portrait and no manuscript material,” wrote Brooks to Shyamal.

An entry in the journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal shows Cleghorn attended the meeting and exhibited a live specimen of a rare Indian toad (archive.org)

The trail went cold, and although Shyamal had perhaps shown more interest in this long-dead amateur naturalist than anyone else in over 50 years, he did not have enough information to merit a Wikipedia entry. “Bad luck… sometimes I am forced to relegate my research to my blog… because there is no chance that it can survive on Wikipedia if there are not enough sources to cite,” he says. His post on Cleghorn can be read here.

Minding the gender gap in Wikipedia

It is a well-known fact that women in fields like science, technology, computing, sport, and even writing are under-represented on Wikipedia. Although such assessments are largely subjective, it is common to find substantial articles on male scientists and achievers who are far less significant than female achievers in the same field, while the latter are completely absent from Wikipedia’s pages. Articles on women scientists also tend to be largely written from a male-centric point of view, such as linking back to her male colleagues or co-workers, while such courtesy is hardly extended to the female counterparts.

The overwhelming reason for this is most WIkipedia editors and contributors are male — and when I say ‘most’, I mean more than 90%.

In fact, Wikipedia itself has taken note of this. “It is among the most frequent criticisms of Wikipedia, and part of a more general criticism about systemic bias in Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, agrees with this criticism and has made an ongoing attempt to increase female editorship of Wikipedia,” the Wikipedia page titled ‘Gender Bias on Wikipedia’ notes.

The overwhelming reason for this is most WIkipedia editors and contributors are male — and when I say ‘most’, I mean more than 90%.

One of the attempts involves ‘Women’s History Month’, which is celebrated around the world in March, and is marked by Wikipedians everywhere by organising edit-a-thons and workshops. Since 2013, these events have been conducted in India as well, spearheaded by veteran Wikipidians such as Rohini Lakshané, currently working as a program officer on the Pervasive Technologies Project at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), and Bishakha Datta, a well-known film-maker and journalist who was appointed as the first Indian board member of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2010 (she served till 2014).

Creating lasting change in any culture is an ongoing process, and while Lakshané and Datta are still active in some projects aimed at reducing the gender gap in Wikipedia, a new generation of activists has also got involved in projects that aim to create better gender parity in the mammoth online encyclopaedia — both in terms of the number of female editors as well as the number of pages dedicated to women achievers.

One of the most successful projects to have come out of the ongoing efforts since 2013 is the Wikipedia Women in Science project organised by IndiaBioscience, a non-profit organisation within the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) that aims to increase the visibility of science in society by being a hub for policy discussions and science communication. IndiaBioscience has been organising a series of public events — workshops and edit-a-thons — to raise the profile of women scientists in Wikipedia. The edit-a-thons usually encompass a short tutorial on editing Wikipedia, an informal interaction over tea/coffee with a woman scientist, and participants creating and completing Wikipedia profiles of women Indian scientists, working alone or in groups.

Experienced Wikipedia editors like Shyamal have also been a part of these events, to help attendees go through the process of creating articles and correctly fulfilling Wikipedia’s strict criteria for inclusion.

L Shyamal takes new editors through the paces of creating and editing articles during the edit-a-thon at IISc in July 2016

While there were two events in 2014 in Bangalore, in 2015 there was an online event, and in July this year, one of the biggest gatherings took place at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus, says Harini Barath, Program Manager (Science Communication), IndiaBioscience, and one of the organisers of the edit-a-thons. There might be another event in October, and they plan to involve college students, Barath says.

But what’s actually been achieved through these events, besides raising awareness about the crying lack of attention given to female Indian scientists? “When we started, many of the Wikipedia pages for women scientists were stubs,” says Barath. These included articles on prominent and well-known scientists such as sociologist and anthropologist Irawati Karve, botanist E.K. Janaki Ammal, and chemist Asima Chatterjee (these scientists now have robust pages, thanks in part to their inclusion in an influential book, Lilavati’s Daughters, an anthology of biographical essays of Indian women scientists published in 2008 by the Indian Academy of Science, Bangalore). In fact, Lilavati’s Daughters also inspired a separate edit-a-thon in August 2013, during which many of the scientists’ profiles on Wikipedia were edited and updated, and many were translated into Indian-language Wikipedia articles.

“When we started, many of the Wikipedia pages for women scientists were stubs,” says Barath.

Since 2014, the India Bioscience edit-a-thons have, in some way, been carrying this work forward. They started with a list of names of women scientists whose pages had to be added or updated, and over the next few events, more than 50 new articles of varying length and detail have been created by volunteers. When they were making the list, there were names that were missing that stood out, says Barath. “These included female scientists at the top level, some who were directors of institutes. Most people in the research community would know about them. But they didn’t have a Wikipedia page,” she adds.

Take neuroscientist Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath, founder Chair of the Centre for Neuroscience, IISc Bangalore, and the Founder Director of the National Brain Research Centre, Gurgaon. She didn’t have a Wikipedia page till 2014, when her profile was added during one of the edit-a-thons organised by India Bioscience. Or take the example of Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, the first woman director of the Indian Statistical Institute, and a brilliant computer scientist specializing in computational biology, evolutionary computation, pattern recognition, machine learning and bioinformatics. Her page was created by an extremely prolific editor with the appropriate username ‘Fluent Flux’ in October 2014 as part of the edit-a-thon.

Some of the other scientists whose profiles were created or filled in with details at these events are:

Aditi Pant: An Indian oceanographer. She was a part of the Indian expedition to Antarctica in 1983 and became the first Indian woman to visit Antarctica (along with Sudipta Sengupta).

Bimla Buti: Indian physicist, specializes in the field of plasma physics. She was the first Indian woman Physicist Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA).

Rashna Bhandari: Head, Laboratory of Cell Signalling at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad.

Shobhana Narasimhan: Professor of Theoretical Sciences and Dean of Academic Affairs at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru. Her main area of interest is computational nanoscience.

Suniti Solomon: She was an Indian physician and microbiologist who pioneered AIDS research and prevention in India after having diagnosed the first Indian AIDS cases in Chennai in 1985. She founded the Y R Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education in Chennai. She died in 2015.

You may notice that many of these profiles on Wikipedia do not have images, and Barath says finding the scientists’ photographs is one of the most challenging aspects of the project. Wikipedia has strict rules about image licensing and reuse, and most Indian institutes, which do have profile pages of the scientists, do not explicitly give permissions for reuse under Creative Commons licenses. And unless they do so, editors can’t use these images in their profiles.

The idea of representative power

In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a global editor survey, which indicated that only 8.5% of contributors to Wikipedia were women. Not much has changed in the intervening years, and most surveys show that the percentage of female editors and contributors is anywhere between 8.5% and 16% globally.

Editors of Tulu Wikipedia at St Aloysius College in Mangalore (August 2016).

According to Ting-Yi Chang, a researcher with the University of Toronto who is currently on a one-year internship with CIS in Bengaluru, the same survey showed that in India the percentage of female editors is around 3%. Chang has been studying and writing on the gender gap issue in Wikipedia and other online communities, and her primary role in India is to work with the CIS group Access to Knowledge (“A2K”; funded by the Wikimedia Foundation) to raise awareness of Indic language Wikipedias and the gender gap among editors in India. She says that “access, self-consciousness (for being minority/female), and the idea of representative power are the main barriers in the Indian context.” “Although one may say that the three barriers can also be imposed on male users, we have to consider the societal setting and how male and female live and think differently,” says Chang. “In terms of access (to required device/facility and internet), it is possible that female members in a family can be denied the access to say, a laptop, when male members enjoy more privileges. At the same time, females are usually more self-conscious about their surroundings when accessing facilities in a public space.” She adds that access to personal leisure time is another factor. Even outside of Wikipedia, women tend to avoid being “visible” online, and this is by no means an Indian problem, she adds. “We need to ensure a female-friendly place in our communities, and by having more women joining now we are also opening up more opportunities for the future. The idea of representative power means that women need to have the confidence and courage to edit whatever they think they can contribute. Although one may say this is more of a personal mindset problem, we also need to realise that in societies where women are not encouraged to be outspoken and assertive (and again this is not just in India), we tend to refrain from making public statements even when we know that we know better.” One encouraging fact is that several of the Indian language Wikipedia entries have seen greater women’s participation. Take, for instance, the Tulu language Wikipedia, which went live in August 2016, becoming the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia. There is a fair mix of women among its 200-odd editors, primarily because of the involvement of educational institutions and workshops conducted in colleges, such as St Aloysius College in Mangaluru. The internet was supposed to be the ultimate leveller — a truly egalitarian zone because men and women had equal access to it from the same time. However, it has developed to become deeply sexist in some ways — more so in certain communities and online groups. Why is the internet not as equal in terms of gender as it could have been? Chang says that her research on this topic, including reading the works of people like Dr Tanja Carstensen, a sociologist and researcher with the Work-Gender-Technology research group at the Hamburg Institute of Technology, shows that sexism in our online communities is not a product of the internet; it probably should not be counted as a “failure” of the internet either, but it is a reflection of society — an “intensification even, as the anonymity and informality of internet that change the way humans interact with others.” “In other words, perhaps we have to realise that the internet being patriarchal and unequal is not a surprise, but sadly the default… I see ourselves in the second stage of Carstensen’s summary (internet as platforms of feminist voices and debates) and Wikipedia can be a great catalyst in this movement. We need knowledge based on an equal standard in order to make our online space more aware of its sexism. When the idea of feminism can spread through the internet, through Wikipedia, when people start taking this issue more seriously, there will be more awareness of how the web can and should become for women,” says Chang.

According to Ting-Yi Chang, a researcher with the University of Toronto who is currently on a one-year internship with CIS in Bengaluru, the same survey showed that in India the percentage of female editors is around 3%. Chang has been studying and writing on the gender gap issue in Wikipedia and other online communities, and her primary role in India is to work with the CIS group Access to Knowledge (“A2K”; funded by the Wikimedia Foundation) to raise awareness of Indic language Wikipedias and the gender gap among editors in India. She says that “access, self-consciousness (for being minority/female), and the idea of representative power are the main barriers in the Indian context.”

“Although one may say that the three barriers can also be imposed on male users, we have to consider the societal setting and how male and female live and think differently,” says Chang. “In terms of access (to required device/facility and internet), it is possible that female members in a family can be denied the access to say, a laptop, when male members enjoy more privileges. At the same time, females are usually more self-conscious about their surroundings when accessing facilities in a public space.” She adds that access to personal leisure time is another factor.

Even outside of Wikipedia, women tend to avoid being “visible” online, and this is by no means an Indian problem, she adds. “We need to ensure a female-friendly place in our communities, and by having more women joining now we are also opening up more opportunities for the future. The idea of representative power means that women need to have the confidence and courage to edit whatever they think they can contribute. Although one may say this is more of a personal mindset problem, we also need to realise that in societies where women are not encouraged to be outspoken and assertive (and again this is not just in India), we tend to refrain from making public statements even when we know that we know better.”

One encouraging fact is that several of the Indian language Wikipedia entries have seen greater women’s participation. Take, for instance, the Tulu language Wikipedia, which went live in August 2016, becoming the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia. There is a fair mix of women among its 200-odd editors, primarily because of the involvement of educational institutions and workshops conducted in colleges, such as St Aloysius College in Mangaluru.

The internet was supposed to be the ultimate leveller — a truly egalitarian zone because men and women had equal access to it from the same time. However, it has developed to become deeply sexist in some ways — more so in certain communities and online groups. Why is the internet not as equal in terms of gender as it could have been?

Chang says that her research on this topic, including reading the works of people like Dr Tanja Carstensen, a sociologist and researcher with the Work-Gender-Technology research group at the Hamburg Institute of Technology, shows that sexism in our online communities is not a product of the internet; it probably should not be counted as a “failure” of the internet either, but it is a reflection of society — an “intensification even, as the anonymity and informality of internet that change the way humans interact with others.”

“In other words, perhaps we have to realise that the internet being patriarchal and unequal is not a surprise, but sadly the default… I see ourselves in the second stage of Carstensen’s summary (internet as platforms of feminist voices and debates) and Wikipedia can be a great catalyst in this movement. We need knowledge based on an equal standard in order to make our online space more aware of its sexism. When the idea of feminism can spread through the internet, through Wikipedia, when people start taking this issue more seriously, there will be more awareness of how the web can and should become for women,” says Chang.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/factordaily-shrabonti-bagchi-october-5-2016-changing-wikipedias-and-societys-male-bias-is-work-in-progress

Changing Usage Models: Desktops to Ubiquitous Cloud-Based Mobile Computing (Interviews with Semiconductor Industry - Part 1)

maggie — 2014-12-26T12:08:34Z

This is the first of a four-part blog series highlighting findings from a small sample of interviews with fabless semiconductor industry professionals in Taiwan. These industry insiders was approached for the intent of understanding expert knowledge on the process of integrated circuit design. However, the conversations resulted in leanings far beyond that scope. This post explores the trends of personal computing technology, which provides the pretext for the narrowing of the Pervasive Technologies project scope to a focus on the mobile phone.

Since the mid-1990s, the dissemination of information communications technologies (ICTs) has been hailed as the solution to bridging the digital divide. This rationale led to a multitude of programs, including One Laptop per Child, the Aakash tablet, and most recently, Modi's 'Digital India' campaign, to ensure all Indians have a mobile phone by the year 2019.

The Pervasive Technologies project looking at Access to Knowledge has come to understand that mobile phone technology have become ubiquitous, with 79% of internet users accessing the internet through mobiles in 2014. Particularly for low-income consumers, those who do not have access to computing rely on their mobile phones for accessing tools ranging from the common email, text messaging, calling; and the more advanced and revolutionary - mobile banking (e.g. m-PESA), crowd-sourced environmental protection (e.g. SpillMap), and more.

The evolution to the ubiquity of mobile technology was a valuable learning gained from recent interviews in Taiwan with professionals from the fabless semiconductor chip design industry. A senior executive with over 20 years experience in the field provided some insight to trends/changes in personal computing technology upon inquiring about the recent trends and changes within the industry.

One significant change that has been occurring is the usage model of consumers. Desktops and even laptops are not fully mobile since they cannot be used in one's hands. As broadband have become more pervasive, smartphones and tablets have resulted in new usage models where computing can be done virtually anywhere. People now tend to vale this more than the desktop experience.

The 'cloud' has also changed computing because the performance requirements for PC processors and other technologies no longer have to be as advanced. In addition, there has been a big shift from desktop content creation to mobile computing. This has mostly been catered towards content consumption (e.g. accessing email, viewing photos, using social media, etc.).

As a result of changing usage models and cloud competing, there has been a general industry shift away from computers. The PC market has slowed down, and the smartphone and tablet markets have exploded. They are generally cheeper, don't have as many bugs, and are much more convenient. Previously, the big names were desktop providers HP, and Dell; but now "there's less sex appeal around it… we're not excited by it.. it's the smartphone that's very exciting". The tech revolution has brought to light exciting smartphone brands like HTC, Samsung, Google and Apple.

In addition to big name smartphone brands, smaller, low-cost manufacturers like Xiaomi are developing a new business model through service, or application shopping. Prices of smartphones are continuing to decrease, so manufacturers using this model are looking to sell their hardware with smaller margins, and profit mainly through software. According to Digi-Capital, an investment bank for mobile apps and games, by 2017, mobile apps could reach $70 billion in annual revenue. Thus, greater affordability for the physical devices are naturally occurring within the market due to changing business models.

Accessibility of mobile phones through decreased costs are also supplemented by the trend of technology becoming much more open in the past 10-20 years. "One of the biggest challenges in the last 10 years is that you've got open source, you've got open hardware…things like the maker movement….", including Arduino, Linux, and others. There is a general market trend of consumers wanting to know more about their products.

However, one interviewee believed it was still much too closed, likening today's lack of openness to selling a vacuum cleaner without the user guide explaining how it works. "It's basically the same as buying a Hoover for home, and you don't get the user manual. How am I supposed to change the bag inside? They're not going to tell you."

When asked if this demand for more openness will change the industry, he responded: "There is a demand, there is a lot of demand, but very little supply. There is demand from the outside, and those within the company. We have to convince our departments to be more open. We have to convince the engineers. It's a lot like convincing politicians, there is no immediate reward."

Given these trends, it was of one interviewees' belief that increased accessibility of technology through both decreased cost and increased availability may not necessarily lie in the legal environment or the policy sphere, but rather requires patience for the industry to adapt to a changing marketplace.

Understanding the modes and mediums which information, culture, and ultimately knowledge is accessed is fundamental to the Pervasive Technologies research as an Access to Knowledge issue. Thus, getting a grasp on technological trends, and being able to predict upcoming business models was a very valuable learning.

Guha, Romit, and Anandita Mankotia Mankotia. “PM Modi’s Digital India Project: Government to Ensure That Every Indian Has Smartphone by 2019.” The Economic Times 25 Aug. 2014. Web. 2 Sept. 2014.

See the research proposal for the Pervasive Technologies project here: http://cis-india.org/a2k/pervasive-technologies-research-proposal.pdf

“Smartphone Users Worldwide Will Total 1.75 Billion in 2014.” eMarketer. N.p., 16 Jan. 2014. Web. 3 Sept. 2014.

Takahashi, Dean. “Mobile Apps Could Hit $70B in Revenues by 2017.” VentureBeat. N.p., 29 Apr. 2014. Web. 7 Sept. 2014.

This will be further explored in the last blog post of this series.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/interviews-with-semi-conductor-industry-professionals-in-taiwan-1

Changing the typographic landscape of a country: one letter at a time

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:06:51Z

My interest in designing typefaces in Indian scripts grew out of years of disappointment with the way most Hindi books I came across looked. Apart from a few exceptions, they looked like poor cousins of English books. Whether it was a children’s story book or a novel or magazine, there was usually the same drab typeface.

The blog post by Pooja Saxena was published in Storyweaver on December 1, 2016.

Some letters didn’t look like what we were taught in school, on others the matras (vowel marks) didn’t arch at the right places. Overall, the books and the letters inside them had an air of neglect. They looked old and completely unexciting. When I first learned that designing typefaces was a real job, I thought here was the opportunity to change all that.

Cambay, Devanagari typeface designed by Pooja Saxena for Google Fonts

Changing the typographic landscape of a country as diverse as India is not a one-woman job, but every now and then a project comes by that has the potential to make a small difference. Two years ago, as a result of a conversation with Subhashish Panigrahi, the Access to Knowledge programme at the Centre for Internet and Society commissioned a Ol Chiki typeface family. The Ol Chiki script, about which I knew precious little at the time, is used to write the language Santali, which is spoken by over six million people in India and its neighbouring countries. At the time that we started working on this project, there was no Unicode compliant typeface available in the script, making it impossible for it to be used on computers and cellphones, and online in a consistent and future-proof way. We hoped to change that by designing a small, but useful typeface family (it comes in regular, bold and italics) along with input methods and keyboard layouts that would allow a person to type Ol Chiki text easily.

Guru Gomke, Ol Chiki typeface designed by Pooja Saxena with research inputs from Shubhashish Panigrahi,for the A2K Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society.

This project was especially challenging because not only was Ol Chiki a completely unfamiliar script to me and Subhashish, but there was limited material available for us to consult. While designing a typeface in a script one reads and/or writes, or is at least familiar with, one’s experience with those letters can act as a guide. By writing them and seeing them printed in different fonts, in many people’s handwriting — some good, some bad — and on hand painted signs, one develops an instinct for identifying which parts of a letter make it recognisable. That way we know what parts of the letter can be exaggerated, and what others can be played down without compromising legibility. For an unfamiliar script, this visual vocabulary and the traditionally correct way of writing letters must be learned. Manuscripts, printed documents, handwriting manuals and samples, metal type, linguistic information about the script, feedback from native readers — all form parts of a puzzle that needs to be put together to design a competent typeface.

The story of Ol Chiki script is fascinating. The script is less than a century old, and was devised by Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who wanted to create a script that could accommodate all the features of the Santali language — something that the scripts used to write Santali so far had failed to do. Legend has it that he based the design of the letters on objects commonly found in the everyday environment of the Santals. Even though the script was created between 1920 – 1940, the Santal community has many myths about how it was created. One says that the script came to be at the time when the Earth itself was created, another says that the script was given as a divine gift to a learned man, Pandit Raghunath Murmu. It is after Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who is reverentially called Guru Gomke, that the Ol Chiki typeface that I designed was named. You can find out more about the Ol Chiki typeface and input methods project here.

Custom lettering for the Tamil branding of the Coovum Art Festival, designed by Pooja Saxena

If you’re interested in Indian type design and le ering, consider following the work of these exceptional designers — Noopur Datye, one of the co-founders of type design collective, Ek Type, who has designed custom typefaces TV channels like LifeOK; Kimya Gandhi, who is partner at Mota Italic, and recently designed an inventive Devanagari handwriting font; or Lipi Raval, whose flamboyant Gujarati typeface Mogra is a complete head-turner.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/story-weaver-december-1-2016-pooja-saxena-changing-the-typographic-landscape-of-a-country

Centre should partner local communities in 'Digital India': Expert

praskrishna — 2015-01-16T02:34:54Z

The central government needs to partner communities at the grassroots level and integrate the country's vernacular component to make the Digital India initiative a success, an expert said here Friday.

The blog entry originally published by IANS was mirrored in Zee News on January 9, 2015. T.Vishnu Vardhan was quoted.

"Whatever money it (Centre) is spending on culture, heritage conservation and preservation etc., it is always a very centralised activity.

"It is very, very essential to partner local communities," T. Vishnu Vardhan, programme director (Access to Knowledge), The Centre For Internet and Society, Bengaluru, told IANS here.

Vardhan was attending the 10th anniversary celebrations of Athe Bengali Wikimedia community at the Jadavpur University here.

Aiming to turn the country into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy, the Narendra Modi government has envisaged the Rs.1 lakh crore Digital India project.

Global IT giant Microsoft and Google have offered to help with the programme.

Vardhan said that while going forward with the project, the Centre must integrate the vernacular components. Else it will be restricted to Delhi and metro cities. Access to culture on digitised platforms should not be limited, he observed.

"The current government talks about Digital India. But when you talk about digital India, the key thing that one needs to take into consideration is not the India but the Bharat -- the vernacular imagination of India, the regional imagination of India.

"Otherwise whatever grand plans they have will only be limited to Delhi and other metropolitan cities," said Vardhan.

He suggested that the central government take note of examples like Wikipedia's regional language domains to further the Digital India project.

"Wikipedia or wikisource where you put up the original prints source in digitised form and make it searchable... these are the examples that the government should look at because these are done with the help of local volunteers who come from the remotest regions," said Vardhan.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/zee-news-january-9-2015-centre-should-partner-local-communities-in-digital-india

Celebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013

subha — 2013-04-16T12:48:40Z

Wikipedia Club Pune, a local community based outreach user group in Pune has recently organized Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 to spread words about “Spoken Wikipedia”, a project to add recorded audio for Indic language Wikipedia articles which will help the disabled to access Wikipedia and “Bridging Editor Gender Gap.”

On January 12 and 13, 2013, I was in Pune to participate in the Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013, a two day event organized by Wikipedia Club Pune to promote Wikipedia as an effective means of education, to empower and reach out to India, to bring the country under a spotlight through Spoken Wikipedia, and to bridge the gender gap of Wikipedia editors. Here is a summary of the activities.

Day 1

On the first day, January 12, more than 100 people including students from almost 10 different schools, housewives, working professionals and free and open source activists participated. The opening ceremony began with talks from Abhishek Suryawanshi, founder member of Wikipedia Club Pune, Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, Rishi Aacharya, Principal, PAI International Learning Solutions, and social activist Ms. Vibha.

Before the formal opening Abhishek spoke for a while about the Spoken Wikipedia project which is one main agenda of the two days event. He explained about the need of spoken wikipedia, especially for people with disabilities and how effective it would be when it spreads in 20 Indic languages. In the past wikipedians in Pune gathered and recorded articles in various Indian and international languages.

Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President, Wikimedia India Chapter introduced the chapter's role for Wikimedia movement to the audience. He spoke about the chapters' in few of the national events/projects like Wiki Loves Monument, GLAM project in Crafts Museum, Delhi and many other outreach events. There were few announcements about the chapter on the MoU to be signed from the chapter with district collector of Kanyakumari, the India Chapter being partner to Springfest, IIT, Kharagpur, Commons day celebration in February and GNUnify 2013, Pune.

Vibha, a social activist based in Delhi spoke about gender discrimination in many aspects of our social and professional life. Access to knowledge for free could bridge this and Wikipedia, being so known universally and accessed by millions of people every day could be the best platform for this.' says Vibha.

Rishi Aacharya, Principal of PAI International brought the vedic saying "Ya vidya sa vimuktaye" to explain the real meaning of knowledge which is free of its existence in an Indian context. He spoke about open source movement and Wikipedia's part in it.

After the formal opening there was a Q&A session for the participants to clarify various questions they had about Wikipedia. Then they were explained about the three parallel sessions: An Open Discussion about Gender Gap, Workshop for Indic Languages, and Spoken Wikipedia. The session on gender gap was attended by many school students. Vibha and some activists coordinated this event. In the Workshop for Indic languages and Spoken Wikipedia, wikipedians helped participants for the workshop with basic editing and the participants edited Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia. Articles from various medical subjects of common interest were chosen. There were three medical professionals to support with the medical terminologies for editors contributing to Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia.

At the end of the day there were separate wrap up tracks to summarize the learning of whole session. All of the participants gathered together to educate each other about the work they have done. Many of the participants spoke about their experience and learnings. Plans for the next day was announced. Wikipedians gathered for a group photo and socialized after the closing talks.

Day 2

The second day, January 13, of the Wikipedia Summit in Pune was a sequel of the activities which happened on the first day. More than 40 students took part in this session. Vibha, Srishti and team were coordinating the gender gap track. Many topics related to Gender Gap, gender based discrimination, Role of gender gap in occupation, Gender gap in Wikipedia, Participation of Woman editors on Wikipedia were discussed.

One of the participating Wikipedians recording his voice for a Marathi article	Spoken Wikipedia is a project to bring out editors who are willing to contribute to Wikipedia by reading the Wikipedia articles, recording them and the uploading them to WikiCommons. These recorded audio could be used for articles on various Indic Wikipedias and would be really useful for users with disabilities. The first workshop was aimed for contribution for articles related to common diseases. "Those who are blind and unable to read can listen to the articles and get information. This will be beneficial to a lot of people", says Atharva, a school student who has contributed to an article about Rabies on Marathi Wikipedia.

Participants of the Spoken Wikipedia session worked on the articles on Hindi and Marathi Wikipedia and moved them from sandboxes to article namespaces. After all of the articles were created they recorded them. They formed groups of 3-4 members and worked together. One of them would search information mainly from the English Wikipedia articles and some of the available Marathi (or Hindi), some others would translate and the other member would record it using a mobile phone. That was a great team effort.

Over 25 voluntary organizers joined hands for making this a success. There were about 120 participants. At the end of the day participants from both the sessions gathered. Many of the participants and organizers shared their experiences and learnings. The program was concluded with socializing, taking group pictures, promises to stay in touch and taking active part in more Wikipedia activities.

This event was co-hosted by Centre for Internet and Society with a financial support of ₹ 21,600 granted by Kusuma Foundation.

Also see:

Wikipedia Summit Pune: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune
Wikipedia Club Pune: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune
Pictures: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune
Spoken Wikipedia Project: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India
Pune Club facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013

Celebrating the 13th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia

subha — 2016-05-23T09:08:23Z

The Kannada-language Wikipedia, arguably the largest online encyclopedia in Kannada language, celebrated its 13th anniversary on February 14, 2016 in Mangalore.

To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians gathered at St. Aloysius College Mangalore, Karnataka. The larger Kannada Wikimedia community including long time Wikipedians and new members like the students, faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs gathered, participated in a day long edit-a-thon and chalked out plans for the future. The event is organised by the Kannada Wikimedia community and Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, Wikipedian and Assistant Professor of Kannada department at St. Aloysius College coordinated the event locally.

117 people gathered in the event out of which 96 were active editors of the Kannada Wikipedia community. Noted Kannada-computing researcher Kinnikambla Padmanabha Rao (widely known as KP Rao) addressed the public event and engaged with the audience about defining Kannada Wikipedia’s role a large role in widening Kannada’s presence on the Internet. The local organisers also took the event participants through a heritage walk in the heritage village of Pilikula Nisarga Dhama, an open library of the rich cultural heritage of Karnataka. The heritage walk resulted in over 300 image uploads on Wikimedia Commons ranging from the life and culture of coastal Karnataka to select rich heritage of the state. 20 new editors also participated in the event and they were oriented on basics of Wikipedia editing and Creative Commons licenses.

Triveni.K, one of the participants who is now pursuing her MSc. at Christ University, explains this event as a great learning platform for even core Wikipedia policies in details apart from many other Wikipedia policies she learnt here. “I’m little occupied for my exams but when it is over, I will be back on Wikipedia”, shares Triveni.

Prior to the event, four edit-a-thons were organised in four different cities of Karnataka. Themes chosen for the cities were Kannada literature in Mysore, Mechanical Engineering in Sagara, Science-related articles in Bangalore and article on notable female of the coastal Karnataka region in Mangalore. Follow up edit-a-thons were organised after the anniversary celebration with the same themes that were there in the previous session for the first three places where the follow up edit-a-thons in St. Aloysius College and St. Agnes College were both on medicinal plants.

The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on 12 June 2003 with a message “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning “Welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia” in Kannada). However it took over a year -- on July 12, 2004 the first article about a city Shimoga was created. Over the last decade Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for the Kannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name -- needless to say that 705,199 unique visitors read the articles every month as per the December 2015 statistics. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (February) being the highest and 22 (May) the lowest and 80 being the count in last December. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. The project since its inception has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles. The biggest hurdle, as explained by Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig, has been cleaning up the articles created by paid translations of Google when Kannada Wikipedia along with many other Indian language Wikipedias were used as testing grounds for improving Google Translate, a multilingual machine translation tool. Vasanth S.N., a Kannada Wikipedian who has cleaned up over 60 such articles prefers to use an existing good quality encyclopedia like the 14 volume Kannada Vishwakosha, published by Mysore University and relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the university, as a resource to create and improve articles.

The 14th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia was another milestone in the long journey of Kannada language and there are many more to come. More about the event could be read on the event page on Kannada Wikipedia.

Ananth Subray, Programme Associate, CIS-A2K contributed to this blog.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kannada-wikipedias-13-year-old-journey-of-knowledge-sharing

Celebrating 13 Years of the Kannada-language Wikipedia

subha — 2016-06-18T16:20:37Z

The Kannada-language Wikipedia celebrated its 13th anniversary on February 14 in Mangalore. To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians gathered at Saint Aloysius College, Mangaluru on May 14.

The article was published in DNA on May 22, 2016.

The larger community including long-time Wikipedians and new members like the students faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs gathered to participate in a day long edit-a-thon and chalk out plans for the future. The event was organised by the Kannada Wikimedia community and Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, Wikipedian and Assistant Professor of Kannada department at St. Aloysius College, who coordinated the event locally.

Prior to the event, four edit-a-thons were organised in four different cities of Karnataka. The local organisers also took the participants through a heritage walk in the village of Pilikula Nisarga Dhama, an open library of the rich cultural heritage of Karnataka. Prior to the event, four edit-a-thons were organised in four different cities of Karnataka. The local organisers also took the participants through a heritage walk in the village of Pilikula Nisarga Dhama, an open library of the rich cultural heritage of Karnataka.

117 people gathered at the event out of which 96 were active editors of the Kannada Wikipedia to celebrate thirteen years of Kannada Wikipedia, arguably the largest online encyclopedia in Kannada language. Noted Kannada-computing researcher Kinnikambla Padmanabha Rao (widely known as KP Rao) addressed the public event and engaged with the audience about defining Kannada Wikipedia’s large role in widening the language’s presence on the internet. The heritage walk resulted in over 300 image uploads on Wikimedia Commons ranging from the life and culture of coastal Karnataka to select rich heritage of the state. 20 new editors also participated in the event and they were oriented on basics of Wikipedia editing and Creative Commons licenses.

Much before the event, preparation was begun to organise four different thematic edit-a-thons; Kannada literature in Mysore, Mechanical Engineering in Sagara, Science-related articles in Bengaluru and article on notable women of the coastal Karnataka region in Mangaluru. Follow up edit-a-thons were organised after the anniversary celebration, based on the same themes in the first three places.

Triveni K, one of the participants who is now pursuing her M.Sc at Christ University, called this event a great learning platform for learning core Wikipedia policies in detail. “I’m little occupied for my exams but when it is over, I will be back on Wikipedia”, shares Triveni.

The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on June 12, 2003 with a message saying “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning ‘Welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia’). However it took over a year, July 12, 2004, before the first article, about a city Shimoga, was created. Over the last decade, Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for theKannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name. 7,05,199 unique visitors read the articles every month as per the December 2015 statistics. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (in February) being the highest, 22 (in May) the lowest and 80 being the count in December 2015. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University, Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. The project since its inception has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles. The biggest hurdle, as explained by Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig, has been cleaning up the articles created by paid translations of Google when Kannada Wikipedia along with many other Indian language Wikipedias was used as testing ground for improving Google Translate, a multilingual machine translation tool. Vasanth SN, a Kannada Wikipedian who has cleaned up over 60 such articles, prefers to use an existing good quality encyclopedia like the 14 volume Kannada Vishwakosha published by Mysore University and relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the university, as a resource to create and improve articles.

The 14th anniversary was another milestone in the journey and there are many more to come. You can read more about it here on Kannada Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dna-may-22-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-celebrating-13-years-of-kannada-language-wikipedia