Centre for Internet and Society

8 Challenges for Improving Indian Language Wikipedias

subha — 2016-03-29T17:05:15Z

After more than 10 years in existence, the Indian-language Wikipedias still are not known to many Indian language speakers. Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia in history as a result of thousands of volunteer editors.

The article was originally published in the Wire on March 17, 2016 and later mirrored on Opensource.com on March 28, 2016.

Whereas native-language Wikipedias are becoming game changers in other corners of the world, the scenario in India is skewed. While speaking at the "BHASHA: Indian Languages Digital Festival," a day-long discourse at New Delhi on Indian languages and their state in the new media (especially on the digital platforms), I shared challenges that Indian language Wikipedias are facing.

1. Language communities

Many native Indian language speakers do not know how to search online using language typed in their script. Because Google's home page does not display their language script as an option, people often think that their language does not exist on the Internet. Google now has nine Indian languages. But this does not stop a Santali or Manipuri speaker from searching in Unicode Ol chiki (script for Santali) or in Unicode Meithei (script for Manipuri). Google and other search engines will display content in any script on the Internet, but not knowing this keeps many people off the Internet, which also means off of Wikipedia.

2. Wikipedia's editor community

Wikipedia is created by people like you and me. From writing to editing, everything happens voluntarily. Many people do not understand that they can correct mistakes and help improve Wikipedia articles. The Wikipedia editor communities for several Indian languages are really small. Although these languages are spoken by millions of people, only a handful of editors contribute in editing the Wikipedia in these languages. As of January 2016, the Hindi Wikipedia had only 89 editors, whereas Hindi falls right behind English on the list of top languages by number of native speakers.

3. Language input in computer

A majority of people in India do not know how to type in their own language. Also, there is little documentation for users to learn about language input. Even though many government-run schools in India are seeing more computers and have Internet access, native language input and several other basic computer training are not widely taught in schools in all states. Free software for language input is available, and the challenges of typing in Indian languages (PDF) that existed in the past are mostly resolved.

4. Language input in mobile devices

With more than 1 billion people in India (PDF) with mobile phones, the 15% Internet penetration rate will soon grow at a faster pace. This growth and tough competition is compelling telecom service providers to drop data charges, which will help more Indians get access to the Internet. If these people are not educated about native language input, then they will be stuck inside an English-centric Internet rather than being able to navigate in their own languages. Many Indians who have smartphones need full Indian language support—and especially built-in input methods—to contribute in their own language Wikipedia.

5. Low availability of Indian-language content on the Internet

Lack of native language content on the Internet is a barrier to accessing knowledge. For example, let's look at my state Odisha. The Kerala (Indian state) government's official tourism portal is available in Odia and other Indian languages, but the Odisha government's tourism portal has no information in the Odia language today. Our languages are largely neglected in our own states.

6. Mismatch of conventional and new media

Many conventional media houses still use non-standard variants of ASCII/ISCII script encoding systems instead of adopting the Unicode standard. As a global standard, Unicode can help unify the world and has been available for Indian languages for almost 25 years. But many of our print media have failed to adopt this, and many popular Indian-language newspapers still aren't available in Unicode.

7. Lack of open access

Much information online, including content created by the government, is under copyright licensing. The pay-wall gardens and copyright restrictions keep information closed and prevents people from sharing content. Wikipedia content, on the other hand, is available under Creative Commons Share-Alike licensing, which allows anyone to use the content (and even distribute commercial copies of it). The idea of opening up content under free licenses can help information reach countless additional people.

8. Accessibility

India has more than 60-million people with hearing impairments. Many people with physical disabilities need good text-to-speech and speech-to-text engines. And these software solutions must be free, so that anyone, regardless of their finances, can contribute to Wikipedia in their own languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-source-march-28-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-8-challenges-for-improving-indian-language-wikipedias

8th IBA International Conference

praskrishna — 2016-04-04T15:32:54Z

The 8th IBA International Conference was organized by Indus Business Academy in Bengaluru from March 24 to 26, 2016. The theme of the conference was Taking India to Greater Heights. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a talk on Democratizing of Knowledge Access- Case of Regional Language Wikipedia.

India’s journey since independence has been eventful. The long struggle against colonialism left Indian private capital in a poor state. The Government intervention was essential and hence there was a need for the public sector. Experiments with socialism and national planning turned out to be a mixed success. The 1991 crisis propelled India towards a market driven economy. Politically, its unpopularity reverted India to a state of socialism once again. The 2014 elections have renewed interest in a market driven economy.

Indian achievements have been sizable. The successful Mars Mission, Agni mission, Green Revolution, White Revolution, IT industry growth all demonstrate the positive achievements that India has made in the last 60 odd years. In recent months, across the world, there is a renewed interest in India.

Yet we can hardly be complacent. The lowering oil prices, conflict in the Middle East, slowdown in Chinese economy, fears of Russian expansionism, decline in European growth, concerns about the state of US economy and rising trends in terrorism have created turbulence across different parts of the world. India cannot be immune to these changes.

India’s response can manifest itself in multiple forms. There could be rapid expansion of defence procurement and preparedness both on external as well as internal fronts. It could involve building alliances with countries aligned strategically to Indi’s interests.

It could manifest through the rapid growth of manufacturing sector. The services sector could move higher in the value chain. The spillovers generated by the establishment of industries could spawn a major entrepreneurial ecosystem.

With the UN approval to celebrate International Yoga Day, India’s soft spiritual power is also rising in the horizon. Indian philosophical and ideological thoughts are getting renewed interest across different parts of the world. Indian talent, youth demographics etc. have literally placed India on the centre stage. No doubt, exciting times are ahead.

This Conference aims to deliberate on such changes and suggest ways and means to leverage this growing interest in India and identify the new perspectives emerging in Business, Management, Leadership and Consciousness as a result of these changes.

The schedule for 8th IBA International Conference can be accessed here. More info on the event here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/8th-iba-international-conference

Can Wikipedia revive dying Indian languages?

subha — 2016-02-29T14:54:10Z

Yes, by encouraging content and involvement, Wikipedia language communities keep languages relevant.

The article originally published in the Hoot on February 19, 2016 was also mirrored by Pratham Books on February 22, 2016

As the world gets ready to celebrate International Mother Language Day on Feb 21, it is important ask whether Wikipedia, the free, multi-lingual online encyclopaedia that turned 15 last month, can play a role in helping not just to save some Indian languages from irrelevance but to inject new energy into them.

Indian languages that made an early entry to the Wiki-world back in 2002 - Assamese, Malayalam, Odia and Punjabi - are helping scale up the representation of Indian languages on the Internet. More languages started being added after these initial ones. Today, there are 23 South Asian language Wikipedia projects including the 20 languages listed in the 8^th schedule of the Constitution of India.

Many might not have noticed that the “en” in Wikipedia's URL en.wikipedia.org denotes that the language code of English can be replaced with “or” to visit Odia Wikipedia or “kn” for Kannada Wikipedia.

But the Indian language Wikipedias have a long way to go as compared to many other world languages. There lies a huge gap in the access to knowledge on the Internet. Of 1.26 billion people, only about 15-18% are connected online and that too largely from mobile devices.

Most Wikipedia projects in Indian languages are fairly small but are active and playing an important role. For example, the Tamil and Malayalam Wikipedia communities have played a central part in implementing Wikipedia basics learning in the state-run school syllabus along with many other free software and free knowledge projects to help students learn.

Many Indian languages are in the pipeline to become active Wikipedia projects under the scope of Incubator Wikipedia. Maithili Wikipedia and Goan Konkani Wikipedia are two that have gone live in recent years. There are many more to come and it is certain they will help to ensure that languages do not fade or become irrelevant.

Dying Indian languages mapped over map. Source: UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger

According to UNESCO, 197 of a total of 1652 Indian languages are dying. Given that there is more and more encyclopedic content in Indian languages, Wikipedia will definitely save some from extinction by bringing more content in varied subject areas, bringing readers to Wikipedia, and attracting more contributors to bring information online in the respective language.

Two other ways that it help keep them alive is, first, the fact that the media uses freely-licensed content from Wikipedia and refers to citations on Wikipedia and secondly, the fact that more Wikipedia content also means more digital activism. Often languages become extinct because of verbal-only usage. That’s where language digital activism can help to keep going. Hebrew, for instance, has risen like a phoenix for this reason.

Apart from Wikipedia, there are many other sister projects (also known as Wikimedia projects) such as Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary, Wikisource, a free library, Wikimedia Commons, the world’s largest media repository of freely-licensed multimedia files, and Wikidata, a big data project that connects all the Wikimedia projects.

The English Wikipedia has crossed the 5 million article mark. With a population of over 354 million online users, India still has a long way to go in increasing Indian language content on the web. The Government of India's new campaign Digital India aims at digital literacy and the availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages. This is closely aligned with the Wikimedia movement's goal to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

In addition to Wikipedia, many other open educational resources and free knowledge projects that are not already a part of the Digital India campaign signal the need for the government campaign to be more collaborative and open.

Community-government collaborations like the NROER project to make NCERT books under Creative Commons licences and the IT@School project in Kerala to provide education using free and open tools, have gained massive traction and helped more Indian language content come online.

Many of the Malayalam Wikipedia editors in Kerala have worked with the IT@School project to help school children edit and enhance Wikipedia articles and digitise old public domain text. The Wikipedia Education Programme, a global pedagogic programme running in over 87 countries to use Wikipedia as a tool for academic assignment and assessment, has been able to bring a paradigm shift in several languages such as Arabic and Spanish.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-hoot-feburay-19-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-can-wikipedia-revive-dying-indian-languages

Looking ahead to the future of the Kannada Wikipedia: Vasanth S.N.

subha — 2016-02-29T14:15:41Z

Vasanth S.N. has edited the Kannada-langauge Wikipedia since 2006. As part of the WikipediansSpeak series, I caught up with Vasanth to learn about his contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia, which just celebrated its 13th anniversary. In the discussion Vasanth shares his long time involvement in the Wikimedia movement, and what drives him every day to edit Wikipedia and helping other fellow Wikimedians.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Hi Vasanth, thanks for agreeing to share about yourself. Can you tell me little about yourself and how you started contributing to Kannada Wikipedia?

Vasanth S.N. (VSN): I grew up in a small town in the Indian state of Karnataka. After completing my PG Diploma in Human Resources studies from Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) I started working at Dharmasthala temple in Karnataka where I have been working over last 35 years. As a student, I was voracious reader of Kannada-language books. Science, art and culture were my favorite subjects back then. I started contributing to Kannada Wikipedia back in 2006. Shushrutha, a scientist based outside India helped me with several technical needs like creating templates in Kannada Wikipedia. With his help, I contributed to articles related chemical elements. He helped a lot in importing templates then. These days another Wikipedia editor Omshivaprakash is helping in importing templates and several other technical needs I have, thanks to Pavanaja who is also helping and encouraging me regularly.

SP: What are you currently working on?

VSN: After the 14 volume Kannada encyclopedia “Kannada Vishwakosha” got relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license by Mysore University, we have started digitizing it on Kannada Wikisource. I am taking the digitized articles from here to Kannada Wikisource. I first check for the English Wikipedia article, use some of the updated content from there with citations, and wikify the Kannada Vishwakosha articles to create articles on Kannada Wikipedia.

SP: What are the kind of challenges you generally face?

VSN: Something that really bothers me is the low participation of Kannadiga s in contributing to Kannada Wikipedia. I wish there could be more discussions in the village pump and collaborations between fellow editors. Many of the long time Wikimedians like Radhatanaya, who is probably over 70 years old, need more support with complex Wikipedia policies, and more appreciation. And so are B.S. Chandra from Sagara, Karnataka and many other editors so that every single editor feels to be an important aspect of the community. We also have to bring back editors like Tejas Jain who were active some time back but have slowed down over time. I feel bad that we are lagging behind our neighboring Wikimedia communities like Tamil and Malayalam. When we cannot scale up too fast, a valuable resource like Kannada Vishwakosha that I mentioned before would be really useful in populating Kannada Wikipedia with good quality article. The Vishwakosha is not just compiled by subject experts but has been updated over time. I am more than happy if more editors are willing to join use this encyclopedia as a resource and I am sure we could create over 14,000 articles that a handful of editors like me will take over years to complete otherwise. However the community is skeptical about just one citation but i think we could always rely on English Wikipedia and search for more resources for additional citations.

SP: What do you suggest we—all the Wikimedians, the Wikimedia India chapter, and us (CIS-A2K)—should work on?

VSN: I feel that we are focusing so much only on cities and there might be potential editors in rural areas. But may be reaching out to people who have access to computer and internet is a low hanging fruit as compared to outreach in rural Karnataka. There are over 46,000 state-run schools and many have computers. Taking Kannada Wikipedia to select schools with the facilities needed might result in bringing in flesh blood to the community. I also think that the veteran professors and educators could help grow Wikipedia by correcting articles and wikifying if not writing articles. There might be collectives of such people that I do not know of but in my opinion, it is worth trying. I tried to request some professors in Ujjire, Karnataka to help with correcting over 60 articles related to plant varieties of Karnataka but could not get much help. But that is just one failure and should not stop reaching out to more professors. And if a collective of professors does not exist we could find a common area of interest and create a group.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society

This post is part of the WikipediansSpeak series, which aims to chronicle the voices of the Wikipedia community. You can find more of these posts on the Wikimedia Commons. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section below.

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-february-28-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-looking-ahead-to-future-of-kannada-wikipedia

Community Digest—Estonians working on a new feedback system for Wikipedia articles

subha — 2016-02-27T06:30:41Z

Community digest is a weekly publication on Wikimedia Blog. This week, I have authored a section on the Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary that is being celebrated today. It includes a small section from a longer interview with Kannada Wikipedian Vasanth S.N. The two blogs on creating Odia-language character encoding converters I had written before in the Huffington Post and the DNA are also featured in the digest.

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog here.

Sites that rely on the cooperation of people need to be able to easily exchange information. When there are some problems with an article, you could always add some templates to specific places or point to them on talk page—but that can sometimes be painful and time consuming.

The problem can grow even greater when articles are written inside a Wikipedia Education Program. You may need to follow up with hundreds of students and provide them feedback so that they can easily understand what should they fix. This can be a rather tricky job when dealing with people who have never before written to Wikipedia.

For example, in Estonia we have a course called “Estonian Composition and Conversation” in the University of Tartu, where there are on average more than 200 students per year writing articles on Wikipedia. We are keenly interested in providing good quality feedback, but with that number of students and with the use of the usual wikisystem, that is hard to achieve.

So we needed a solution.

When using the usual method (the talk page), you need to point out where are all of the mistakes located and then express your concerns about them. With a lot of comments, that does get rather messy and it’s hard to understand where are those comments directed to; it’s not an ideal medium for feedback in massive scale and not that useful for neither the students nor the person giving feedback. So the goal was simple: to ease the process of giving feedback to students who write wikiarticles as their coursework.

What we did was to create a system called WikiComment.

What does it do? Well, at first it allows to add comments to exact letters/sentences/paragraphs to speed up the commenting process and make it easier to locate the issues. In addition to adding comments, it also provides various highlighting options and a possibility to strike through text. Secondly, it allows for better monitoring of the articles of interest. That means the wikiComment user has information about which pages have been modified and he or she can easily check if the changes have solved the marked questions.

We hope that this will make it easier to focus on text and to the quality of writing.

Obviously WikiComment could be used outside the education initiative and in many other ways as well, but that is just how it all started. For example we’ll soon add support for sites like Meta-Wiki, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wikinews, and Wikiquote, among others. Having a discussion about some details in grant request or talking about local tourist sites may have just become easier. But to really optimize the system and to make it as good as possible we’ll need your feedback, so please go on and test that site—if you have any suggestions, just let us know.

Ivo Kruusamägi, Estonian Wikipedian

In brief

Kannada Wikipedia anniversary: The Kannada Wikipedia is all set to celebrate its 13th anniversary. 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—there were about 700,000 pageviews in December 2015. 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. Since its inception, the project 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 16 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. To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians are gathering at Saint Aloysius College Mangalore, Karnataka this 14th. The larger community, including long time Wikipedians and new members like the students faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs, will gather and participate in a day-long edit-a-thon and chalk out plans for the future.

Innovation and revolution in the Odia language: Wikimedian Subhashish Panigrahi has written two pieces recently. In dnaindia.com, he described a Unicode converter that in revolutionizing Internet access in the Odia language; in the Huffington Post, he wrote about why contributing and adding to Wikipedias in Indian language is so important.

Coming together across the divide: Saanjh (ਸਾਂਝ سانجھ), a Punjabi word which means collaboration, was an online edit-a-thon between the Gurmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia and Shahmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia in January 2016. The plan came together after two editors, one from each side, met at Wikimania 2015. Organized by the Punjabi Wikimedians User Group, 23 editors participated; you can read more about their story on Meta.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate, Wikimedia Foundation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-community-digest-estonians-working-on-new-feedback-system-for-wikipedia-articles

International Mother Language Day

praskrishna — 2016-02-27T06:17:37Z

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

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

Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER

subha — 2016-02-27T06:00:20Z

My submission titled "Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER" under the theme of "Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education" has been selected for the OER16 conference to be held in Edinburg, Scotland from 19 to 20 April 2016.

GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) is a global initiative for making cultural data open targeting galleries, libraries, archives and museums in particular. GLAM projects are run in collaboration with these cultural institutions where the artifacts and other institutional collections get all sorts of digital treatment, from digitizing manuscripts and books to creating meta data and developing tools to automate and ease the life of contributors, building and 3D models of artifacts and creating multilingual virtual museum experience by using Wikipedia.

These institutions historically being the reservoir of knowledge need more attention with more digital innovation coming in day by day. There being a synergy between the fundamental focus of OER and GLAM initiative, it leaves scholars and GLAM and/or OER practitioners to explore this area that is currently not widely covered. GLAM projects are centered around data mining, digitizing and publishing the work in both machine and human readable forms. The output of all the GLAM projects could directly contribute to creating OERs classifying and customizing the OERs for different age groups and people with accessibility needs. This, in return will also benefit the GLAM projects and institutions for both expanding their reach and replicating these initiatives. The presentation will be around the best practices of several GLAM initiatives and how these projects could lead to create useful OERs. I will also shed some light on the methodology of creating OERs during the development of a GLAM project.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cultural-institution-aka-glam-for-more-oer

କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟର ଯୁଗରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା

subha — 2016-03-14T07:27:05Z

In 2013, the Centre for Internet and Society commissioned a project to create a typeface and input methods for for Ol chiki script that is used to write in the Santali language. Santali is one of the many victims that has large number of native language speakers but really low activism to preserve the language though it is not yet among the 196 endangered languages as identified by UNESCO.

The article was published in Odia newspaper Suryaprava on February 22, 2016.

On the day of the International Mother Language Day, it is important to look outside and draw inspirations from several success stories of digital activism for languages. Hebrew, an ancient language that was almost dead for over 1500 years was revived from ashes like phoenix. Even after being honoured with the classical language status in the same category of Sanskrit and Tamil, Odia has not seen much progress in the digital sphere. It has not yet being used for governance and judiciary even though the Orissa Official Language Act exist officially since 1954. Almost all of the newspapers do not have their content available in the Unicode standard. Large amount of Odia-language content could otherwise have influenced Google to include Odia along with the other nine Indian languages in their home page. The writer was privileged to be asked for advising on enlisting the online resources available in Odia language for the first Unicode-based Odia portal by the government "odia.odisha.gov.in". There is a huge gap in the way knowledge is disseminated in Odia. Odia Wikisource and Odia Wikipedia are trying to fill this gap to some extent where the former project has over 290 volumes of digitized text and the latter has over 11000 encyclopedic entries in Odia. Odia Wikisource is creating the next level of the book scanning work done by Srujanika, a Bhubaneswar-based non-profit that has scanned over 150000 pages from many Odia books. Similarly, Odia Wikisource is aiming to be to what Purnachandra Bhasakosha, a lexicon published in 1930s with thousands of lexical and encyclopedic entries, meant to the contemporary Odia society. But all of these are not enough until there is much awareness in the government front that could lead more policy-level reforms and a better governance in the native language.

Full text in Odia

୨୦୧୩ ମସିହାରେ ଭୁବନେଶ୍ୱରସ୍ଥିତ କିସର ମିଳିତ ସହଯୋଗରେ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ବୈଷୟିକ ସୁବିଧା ପରିଚାଳନା କରୁଥିବା ସଙ୍ଗଠନ ଉଇକିମିଡ଼ିଆ ଫାଉଣ୍ଡେସନରୁ କିଛି ପାଣ୍ଠି ଅନୁଦାନରେ ସାନ୍ତାଳୀ ଭାଷାର ଲିପି ଅଲ ଚିକିକୁ କମ୍ପୁଟର ଓ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ କରିବାର ଏକ ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ ଆରମ୍ଭ ହେଲା । ବେଙ୍ଗାଳୁରୁ ସ୍ଥିତ ସେଣ୍ଟର ଫର ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟ ଆଣ୍ଡ ସୋସାଇଟିରେ ଏହି ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପର ରୂପରେଖ ତିଆରି କରାଗଲା । ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ ଆରମ୍ଭ ହେବାବେଳକୁ ଆମେ ବିଭିନ୍ନ ବ୍ୟକ୍ତିବିଶେଷ ଓ ସଙ୍ଗଠନମାନଙ୍କ ସଙ୍ଗେ ଯୋଗାଯୋଗ କରି ଜାଣିବାକୁ ପାଇଲୁ ଯେ ଚାରିଟି ଦେଶ ଓ କେବଳ ଭାରତର ସାତଟି ରାଜ୍ୟ ୬୩ ଲକ୍ଷରୁ ଅଧିକ ଲୋକଙ୍କ ଦ୍ୱାରା କଥିତ ସାନ୍ତାଳୀ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଇଉନିକୋଡ଼ ଫଣ୍ଟ ଖଣ୍ଡିଏ ମଧ୍ୟ ନାହିଁ । ବହି ଛପା ପାଇଁ ଯାହା ବ୍ୟବହାର ହେଉଛି ତାହା ଆନ୍ତର୍ଜାତିକ ମାନକ ଇଉନିକୋଡ଼ରେ ହୋଇନଥିବାରୁ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରିବା ଦୂରୁହ । ଏହାର କିଛି ସମୟ ପରେ ଗୁଗୁଲ ତିଆରି ନୋଟୋ ଫଣ୍ଟ ଆସିଲା ହେଲେ ସେଇଟି ତିଆରିରେ ନାଁ ସାନ୍ତାଳୀ କହୁଥିବା ଲୋକଙ୍କୁ ପଚରା ଉଚୁରା କରାଗଲା ନାଁ ତିଆରି ପରେ ତାଙ୍କ ସହ ଆଲୋଚନା କରି ଭୁଲ ସୁଧରାଗଲା । ଆଦରରେ ଗୁରୁ ଗୋମକେ ବା ରଘୁନାଥ ମୁର୍ମୁଙ୍କ ତିଆରି ଅଲ ଚିକି ଲିପିରେ ଲେଖିବା ପାଇଁ ଏବେ ନୂଆ ଫଣ୍ଟଟିଏ ସଜବାଜ ହେଉଛି ରତର ଦିନ ଧରି ସାନ୍ତାଳୀ ଭାଷାକୁ ଜାବୁଡ଼ି ଧରିଥିବା ଅଗଣିତ ଲୋକଙ୍କ ପାଇଁ । ଏଥିରେ ସାନ୍ତାଳୀ ଭାଷାରେ ବିଶାରଦ ଓ ସାହିତ୍ୟ ଏକାଡେମୀ ସଦସ୍ୟା ଡ. ଦମୟନ୍ତୀ ବେସ୍ରାଙ୍କଠାରୁ ସାନ୍ତାଳୀ ପତ୍ରିକା "ଫଗୁଣ"ର ଜନ୍ମଦାତା-ଜନ୍ମଦାତ୍ରୀଙ୍କ ମତାମତର ଫଳ । ଇଉନିକୋଡ଼ରେ ଫଣ୍ଟ ହେଲେ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଜ୍ଞାନ ବାଣ୍ଟିବା ଆଉ ଆହରଣ କରିବାର ବାଟ ଖୋଲିବ । ପର ସଂସ୍କରଣକୁ ଅପେକ୍ଷା ନ କରି ଆବଶ୍ୟକ ପଡ଼ିବା କ୍ଷଣି ନୂଆ ନୂଆ ବିଷୟ ଓ ଘଟଣା ବାବଦରେ ଜାଣିହେବ । ଏ ବିଷୟ ଅବତାରଣାର ଉଦ୍ଦେଶ୍ୟ ଏକ ଭାଷାରେ କେବଳ ସାହିତ୍ୟ ନୁହେଁ କି କଥନ ନୁହେଁ ବରଂ ସେ ଭାଷା କହୁଥିବା ଲୋକେ କିପରି ନିଜ ନିଜ ଭିତରେ ସୁବିଧାରେ ସହଜରେ ଭାବ ଦିଆନିଆ କରିପାରିବେ । ଯଦି ଭାଷାଟିଏ କେବଳ ସାହିତ୍ୟ ଚାଷର ମାଧ୍ୟମ ହୋଇ ଲେଖକ ଓ ପାଠକଙ୍କ ଭିତରେ ବାନ୍ଧି ହୋଇ ରହିଗଲା ତେବେ ସେ ଭାଷା ନୁହେଁ । ଆଉ ଭାଷାକୁ ଜ୍ଞାନର ଓ ଶାସନର ଭାଷା କରିବା ଲାଗି ଲୋଡ଼ା ଆଧୁନିକ ବୈଷୟିକ ଜ୍ଞାନକୌଶଳ । ତେବେ ପ୍ରତିଟି ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଆଜିର ଦିନ ହେଉଛି ଜ୍ଞାନକୌଶଳର ମାପକାଠିରେ ନିଜ ଭାଷାକୁ ମାପିବା ଓ ବାକି ଭାଷା ସଙ୍ଗେ ତଉଲିବାର ଦିନ ।

ସାନ୍ତାଳୀର ସ୍ଥିତି ତ ଗୋଟେ ପ୍ରକାର । ହେଲେ ଏ ଦେଶରେ ଆହୁରି ୧୯୬ ଗୋଟି ଭାରତୀୟ ଭାଷା ମରଣମୁଖୀ । ଏ ଭାଷା କହୁଥିବା କିଛି ଲୋକ ରହିଛନ୍ତି ଆଉ ସେମାନେ ଦିହୁଡ଼ି ଆଗରେ ଦିକି ଦିକି ଜଳୁଥିବା ତାଙ୍କ ଭାଷାକୁ ଦେଖି ଭାବୁଥିବେ ଯେ ଆମେ ସେ ଦିହୁଡ଼ି ସଙ୍ଗେ ମିଶି ଗଲେ ବରଂ ଭଲ । ଉତ୍ତର ଭାରତରେ କିଛି କାଳ ରହଣି କାଳରେ କେବେ ଅଙ୍ଗିକା ତ କେବେ ଦେହାତି ପୁଣି କେବେ ଠେଟି ଆଦି ଭାଷା କହୁଥିବା ଅନେକ ଲୋକଙ୍କୁ ଭେଟିବାର ସୁଯୋଗ ମିଳିଥିବା । ତାଙ୍କୁ ବହରେଇ ଫୁସୁଲେଇ ପଚାରିଲେ ସେମାନେ ଲାଜେଇ କହନ୍ତି ନିଜ ଭାଷାର ନାଁ । ହେଲେ ପୁଣି ବୁଲିବାଲି କରି କହନ୍ତି, "ଆମ ଭାଷା ହିନ୍ଦୀ, ହେଲେ ଘରେ ଆମେ ଅମୁକ ଭାଷାରେ କହୁ" । ପୁରୁଣା ପିଢ଼ି ସରିସରି ଆସୁଛନ୍ତି । ଆଉ ନୂଆ ପିଢ଼ିଠାରୁ ଭାଷାର ବ୍ୟବହାର ବି ସରିସରି ଆସୁଛି । ଏମିତି ମରି ମରି ଆସୁଥିବା ଭାଷା କହୁଥିବା ଜଣେ ପାଠୋଈଙ୍କ ମତରେ ଯଦି ଜଣେ ନିଜ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ନିଜେ ଚିନ୍ତୁନି ତାହେଲେ ବାକିମାନେ ଚିନ୍ତି କରିବେ କଣ । ତାଙ୍କ କଥା ବି ସତ । ହେଲେ ପେଟର ଭୋକ ଆଗେ । ଭୋକ ମାରିବା ପାଇଁ ମଣିଷ ବାର ବେପାର ତେର ଧନ୍ଦା କରେ । ତେଣୁ ଭାଷାର ବିକାଶରେ ସାଧାରଣ ମଣିଷଟିଏର ଭୂମିକା କେତେ ଏକଥାଟି ଭାବିବା ନିହାତି ଜରୁରୀ । ମରୁ ମରୁ ବଞ୍ଚୁଥିବା ଏକ ଭାଷାର ଉଦାହରଣ ନିଆଯାଉ । ପୃଥିବୀର ଏକ ପୁରୁଣା ଭାଷା ଭିତରୁ ଗୋଟିଏ ଭାଷା ହେଲା ହିବ୍ରୁ । ହେଲେ ଏ ଭାଷାଟି ୧୫୦୦ ବର୍ଷରୁ ଅଧିକ କାଳ ଦରମଲା ରହି ଫିନିକ୍ସ ଚଢ଼େଇ ଭଳି ପାଉଁଶ ତଳୁ ଉଠିଲା । ଏବେ ଏ ଭାଷାଟି ପାଖାପାଖି ୯୦ ଲକ୍ଷ ଲୋକଙ୍କ ଦ୍ୱାରା କଥିତ କିନ୍ତୁ ଏ ଭାଷାରେ ଦେଶର ଶାସନ ଚଳେ ଆଉ କମ୍ପୁଟର ଅପରେଟିଂ ସିଷ୍ଟମ ଓ ମୋବାଇଲ ଇଣ୍ଟରଫେସରେ ଦିଶେ । ଏସବୁ ପଛରେ ରହିଛି ବିଜ୍ଞାନ ଓ କାରିଗରୀର କରାମତି । ଯଦି ଦେଶର ଶାସନ ନିଜ ଭାଷାରେ ହୁଏ ତେବେ ଶାସନ ପାଇଁ ଦରକାରୀ ସବୁ ଉପାଦାନ ନିଜ ଭାଷାରେ ତିଆରି ହୁଏ । ଆଉ ଏ ଉପାଦାନମାନ ତିଆରିବା ଲାଗି ଶିକ୍ଷା ବ୍ୟବସ୍ଥା ଗଢ଼ାହୁଏ । ପିଲେ ଚାକିରି କରନ୍ତି । ଆଉ ଭାଷା ଶାସନର ଭାଷା ହେଲେ ଶିକ୍ଷା ଓ ଜ୍ଞାନର ଭାଷା ହୋଇ ଭାଷା ଭାତ ଦିଏ । ନିଜ ନିଜ ସଙ୍ଗେ ଯୋଡ଼ା ଏ ରଥ ଚକର ଗୋଟେ ଅର ହୁଗୁଳା ହେଲେ ଆରଟି ଭୁଷୁଡ଼ି ପଡ଼ିବ । ଆଉ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଏ ଅର ଭିତରୁ କେଉଁ ଅର କେମିତି ରହିଛି ଆଉ କଣ ମରାମତି ହେବ ଆମକୁ ବେଳ ହୁଁ ଭାବିବାକୁ ପଡ଼ିବ ।

ଅପ୍ରିୟ ସତ କଥା ହେଲା ଶାସ୍ତ୍ରୀୟ ମାନ୍ୟତା ମିଳିବାର ଦୁଇ ବର୍ଷ ବିତିଗଲା ପରେ ବି ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଏବେ ଯାଏ କୋର୍ଟ କଚେରିର ଭାଷା ହୋଇପାରିଲା ନାହିଁ । ସରକାରୀ ସ୍ତରରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆର ବ୍ୟାପକ ବ୍ୟାବହାର ବଦଳରେ ହିନ୍ଦୀରୁ ଉଧାରି ଆଣି ପାଳିତ ହେଉଛି "ରାହଗିରି ଦିବସ" । ସିନେମାରେ ବି ସେଇଆ । ଆଉ କାହା ସଙ୍ଗେ ମିତ ବସିବାରେ ଆପତ୍ତି ନାହିଁ ହେଲେ ନିଜ ପରିଚୟ ହାରି ସେ ମିତ ବସିବାରେ କି ସୁଖ । ସରକାରୀ ସ୍ତରରେ ବିଭିନ୍ନ ରାଜ୍ୟର ଯେଉଁଭଳି ତାଙ୍କ ୱେବସାଇଟସବୁ ତାଙ୍କ ରାଜ୍ୟ ଭାଷାରେ ତିଆରି ଆମର ସେମିତି ହୋଇନାହିଁ । ନିକଟରେ odia.odisha.gov.in ନାମରେ ସାଇଟଟିଏ ସରକାର ତିଆରି କଲାବେଳେ ଲେଖକକୁ ସେଥିରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର କମ୍ପୁଟର ଓ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଥିବା ବିଭିନ୍ନ ସାଜସରଞ୍ଜାମ ବାବଦରେ ପରାମର୍ଶ ଦେବାର ସୁଯୋଗ ମିଳିଥିଲା । ଏ ସଜସବୁ ଖୋଜିବା ବେଳେ ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ ଥିବା ୱେବସାଇଟ ବାବଦରେ କିଛି ତଥ୍ୟ ଆଖି ସାମନାକୁ ଆସିଥିଲା । ଗୁଗୁଲ ସର୍ଚରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଆସୁନଥିବାର ମୁଖ୍ୟ କାରଣ ହେଲା ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଲେଖାର ଅଭାବ । ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ କେଇ ଶହ ଖବରକାଗଜ ଦୈନିକ ଛପାଯାଉଥିଲେ ହେଁ ମୁଖିଆ କାଗଜମାନନଙ୍କ ୱେବସାଇଟରେ ଇଉନିକୋଡ଼ ମାନକରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଲେଖା ନାହିଁ । ଲେଖାସବୁ ଅଣ-ମାନକ ଲିପି ଏନକୋଡ଼ିଂରେ ରହିଛି କିମ୍ବା ଛବି ଭାବେ ରହିଛି । ଫଳରେ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଖୋଜିଲେ ଲେଖାଯାକ ମିଳିବ ନାହିଁ । ସେମିତି bhulekh.ori.nic.in ଭଳି ଓଡ଼ିଶା ସରକାରଙ୍କ ସାଇଟଟିରେ ଅଣ-ମାନକ ଫଣ୍ଟରେ ତିଆରି ହୋଇଥିବାରୁ ସଧାରଣ ଲୋକେ ସରକାରୀ ନଥିପତର ଖୋଜି ପାଇପାରୁନାହାନ୍ତି । ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଯେତେକ ଆନ୍ଦୋଳନ ଏବେ ଚାଲିଛି ସବୁ କେବଳ ସାହିତ୍ୟ ଓ ଶାସନକୁ ନେଇ କିନ୍ତୁ କେଉଁ କେଉଁ ଉପାଦାନକୁ ନେଇ ବାକି ଜାଗତିକ ଭାଷାଏ ଆଗକୁ ବଢ଼ିଛନ୍ତି ଆଉ ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ କି କି ଚିଜ ନିହାତି ଲୋଡ଼ା ତା' ଲାଗି ଆକଳନ ଲୋଡ଼ା । ଭାରତରେ ୧୯୫୫ ଆଗର ପ୍ରାୟ ବହି କପିରାଇଟ ବାହାରେ । ଏ ବର୍ଗରେ ଥିବା ଓଡ଼ିଆ ବହିସବୁ ଧୀରେ ଧୀରେ ଉଇଙ୍କ ଆହାର ହେବା ଉପରେ । ଭୁବନେଶ୍ୱରର ସୃଜନିକା ଅନୁଷ୍ଠାନ, ରାଉରକେଲା ଏନଆଇଟି ଓ ପ୍ରଗତି ଉତ୍କଳ ସଂଘ ଉଦ୍ୟମରେ ହୋଇଥିବା ଉଦ୍ୟମ ଫଳରେ ଦେଢ଼ ଲକ୍ଷରୁ ଅଧିକ ପୃଷ୍ଠା ସ୍କାନ କରାଯାଇଛି । ଏଥିରୁ କିଛି ଏବେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାର ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପରେ or.wikisource.org ୱେବସାଇଟରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ । ଏଥିରେ ସ୍ୱେଚ୍ଛାରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଠକମାନେ ନିଜ ପସନ୍ଦର ବହିସବୁକୁ ଡିଜିଟାଇଜ କରି ସ୍କାନ ଛବିରୁ ଲେଖାରେ ରୂପାନ୍ତର କାମ ଆରମ୍ଭ ହୋଇଛି । ଏଥିସହିତ ସମ୍ପୂର୍ଣ୍ଣ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଗବତ ଭଳି ଆମ ଭାଷାର ସମ୍ପତ୍ତି ଧୀରେ ଧୀରେ ଏଥିରେ ଆସିବାକୁ ଲାଗିଲାଣି । ଏଥି ସହିତ ଜଗତଯାକର ଜ୍ଞାନକୁ ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ ଲେଖିବାର ଉଦ୍ୟମ କରିଥିବା ଗୋପାଳ ପ୍ରହରାଜଙ୍କ ଭାଷାକୋଷ ତିଆରି କାମକୁ ଏବେର ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ ମାଧ୍ୟମରେ ଆଗକୁ ନେବାର ଉଦ୍ୟମ ହେଲାଣି । ଏଯାବତ ୧୧ ହଜାରରୁ ଅଧିକ ଲେଖା ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆରେ or.wikipedia.org ୱେବସାଇଟରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ । ସାମୁହିକ ଉଦ୍ୟମ ଛଡ଼ା କିଛି ବ୍ୟକ୍ତିବିଶେଷ ଓ ସଙ୍ଗଠନ ମଧ୍ୟ ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ କିଛି ୱେବସାଇଟ ଆଗରୁ ବଖଣାଯାଇଥିବା ଫାଙ୍କା ଥାନ ପୂରଣ କରିବା କାମରେ ମଧ୍ୟ ଲାଗିଛନ୍ତି । ତେବେ ଆଉ ଭାଷା ସଙ୍ଗେ ଓଡ଼ିଆକୁ ସମକକ୍ଷ କରିବା ଲାଗି ଆହୁରି ଅନେକ ଉଦ୍ୟମ ଲୋଡ଼ା । ବିଶେଷ କରି ସରକାରଙ୍କ ପାଖେ ସଚେତନତା ଲୋଡ଼ା । କେବଳ କୋଟି କୋଟି ଟଙ୍କାର ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ ନୁହେଁ ବରଂ ଘରର ମୂଳଦୁଆ ଗଢ଼ା କାମ ପାଇଁ ଅଧକ ଉଦ୍ୟମ ନିହାତି ଲୋଡ଼ାପଡ଼ିଛି ।

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/suryaprava-subhashish-panigrahi-february-22-2016-article

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଏକ ଅନୁଶୀଳନ

subha — 2016-02-27T04:28:20Z

It has not yet being used for governance and judiciary even though the Orissa Official Language Act exist officially since 1954. Almost all of the newspapers do not have their content available in the Unicode standard. Large amount of Odia-language content could otherwise have influenced Google to include Odia along with the other nine Indian languages in their home page. The writer was privileged to be asked for advising on enlisting the online resources available in Odia language for the first Unicode-based Odia portal by the government "odia.odisha.gov.in". There is a huge gap in the way knowledge is disseminated in Odia. Odia Wikisource and Odia Wikipedia are trying to fill this gap to some extent where the former project has over 290 volumes of digitized text and the latter has over 11000 encyclopedic entries in Odia. Odia Wikisource is creating the next level of the book scanning work done by Srujanika, a Bhubaneswar-based non-profit that has scanned over 150000 pages from many Odia books. Similarly, Odia Wikisource is aiming to be to what Purnachandra Bhasakosha, a lexicon published in 1930s with thousands of lexical and encyclopedic entries, meant to the contemporary Odia society. But all of these are not enough until there is much awareness in the government front that could lead more policy-level reforms and a better governance in the native language.

The article was published in in Odia newspaper the Samaja on February 21, 2016. Full text in Odia below:

ପୃଥିବୀର ଏକ ପୁରୁଣା ଭାଷା ଭିତରୁ ଗୋଟିଏ ଭାଷା ହେଲା ହିବ୍ରୁ । ଏ ଭାଷାଟି ୧୫୦୦ ବର୍ଷରୁ ଅଧିକ କାଳ ଦରମଲା ରହି ଫିନିକ୍ସ ଚଢେ଼ଇ ଭଳି ପାଉଁଶ ତଳୁ ଉଠିଲା । ଏବେ ଏ ଭାଷାଟି ପାଖାପାଖି ୯୦ ଲକ୍ଷ ଲୋକଙ୍କ କଥିତ; ପୁଣି ଏ ଭାଷାରେ ଦେଶର ଶାସନ ଚଳେ ଆଉ କମ୍ପୁ୍ଟର ଅପରେଟିଂ ସିଷ୍ଟମ ଓ ମୋବାଇଲ ଇଣ୍ଟରଫେସରେ ଦିଶେ । ଏସବୁ ପଛରେ ରହିଛି ବିଜ୍ଞାନ ଓ କାରିଗରୀର କରାମତି । ଯଦି ଦେଶର ଶାସନ ନିଜ ଭାଷାରେ ହୁଏ ତେବେ ଶାସନ ପାଇଁ ଦରକାରୀ ଉପାଦାନସବୁ ନିଜ ଭାଷାରେ ତିଆରି ହୁଏ । ଆଉ ଏ ଉପାଦାନମାନ ତିଆରିବା ଲାଗି ଶିକ୍ଷା ବ୍ୟବସ୍ଥା ଗଢ଼ାହୁଏ । ପିଲେ ଚାକିରି କରନ୍ତି । ଭାଷା ଶାସନର ଭାଷା ହେଲେ ଶିକ୍ଷା ଓ ଜ୍ଞାନର ଭାଷା ହୋଇ ଭାତ ଦିଏ । ନିଜ

ସଙ୍ଗେ ଯୋଡ଼ା ଏ ରଥଚକର ଗୋଟେ ଅର ହୁଗୁଳା ହେଲେ ଆରଟି ଭୁଷୁଡ଼ି ପଡ଼ିବ । ଆଉ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଏ ଅର ଭିତରୁ କେଉଁ ଅର କେମିତି ରହିଛି ଆଉ କ’ଣ ମରାମତି ହେବ ଆମକୁ ବେଳ ହୁଁ ଭାବିବାକୁ ପଡ଼ିବ । ଅପ୍ରିୟ ସତ କଥା ହେଲା ଶାସ୍ତ୍ରୀୟ ମାନ୍ୟତା ମିଳିବାର ଦୁଇ ବର୍ଷ ବିତିଗଲା ପରେ ବି ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଏବେ ଯାଏ କୋର୍ଟ କଚେରିର ଭାଷା ହୋଇପାରିଲା ନାହିଁ । ସରକାରୀସ୍ତରରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆର ବ୍ୟାପକ ବ୍ୟବହାର ବଦଳରେ ହିନ୍ଦୀରୁ ଉଧାରି ଆଣି ପାଳିତ ହେଉଛି ‘ରାହଗିରି ଦିବସ’ । ଚଳଚ୍ଚିତ୍ରରେ ବି ସେଇଆ । ଆଉ କାହା ସଙ୍ଗେ ମିତ ବସିବାରେ ଆପତ୍ତି ନାହିଁ ହେଲେ ନିଜ ପରିଚୟ ହାରି ସେ ମିତ ବସିବାରେ କି ସୁଖ! ସରକାରୀସ୍ତରରେ ବିଭିନ୍ନ ରାଜ୍ୟର ଯେଉଁ ଭଳି ତାଙ୍କ ୱେବସାଇଟସବୁ ତାଙ୍କ ରାଜ୍ୟ ଭାଷାରେ ତିଆରି ହୋଇଛି ଆମର ସେମିତି ହୋଇ ନାହିଁ । ନିକଟରେ odia.odisha.gov.in ନାମରେ ସାଇଟଟିଏ ସରକାର ତିଆରି କଲାବେଳେ ଏହି ଲେଖକକୁ ସେଥିରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର କମ୍ପୁ୍ଟର ଓ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଥିବା ବିଭିନ୍ନ ସାଜସରଞ୍ଜାମ ବାବଦରେ ପରାମର୍ଶ ଦେବାର ସୁଯୋଗ ମିଳିଥିଲା । ଏ ସାଜସବୁ ଖୋଜିବା ବେଳେ ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ ଥିବା ୱେବସାଇଟ ବାବଦରେ କିଛି ତଥ୍ୟ ଆଖି ସାମନାକୁ ଆସିଥିଲା । ଗୁଗୁଲ ସର୍ଚରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଆସୁ ନଥିବାର ମୁଖ୍ୟ କାରଣ ହେଲା ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଲେଖାର ଅଭାବ । ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ କେଇ ଶହ ଖବରକାଗଜ ଦୈନିକ ଛପାଯାଉଥିଲେ ହେଁ ମୁଖ୍ୟ ଖବରକାଗଜର ୱେବସାଇଟରେ ଉଇନିକୋଡ ମାନକରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଲେଖା ନାହିଁ । ଲେଖାସବୁ ଅଣ-ମାନକ ଲିପି ଏନକୋଡିଂରେ ରହିଛି କିମ୍ବା ଛବି ଭାବେ ରହିଛି । ଫଳରେ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଖୋଜିଲେ ଲେଖାଯାକ ମିଳିବ ନାହିଁ । ସେମିତି bhulekh.ori.nic.in ଭଳି ଓଡ଼ିଶା ସରକାରଙ୍କ ସାଇଟଟିରେ ଅଣ-ମାନକ ଫଣ୍ଟରେ ତିଆରି ହୋଇଥିବାରୁ ସାଧାରଣ ଲୋକେ ସରକାରୀ ନଥିପତ୍ର ଖୋଜି ପାଇପାରୁନାହାନ୍ତି । ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଯେତେକ ଆନ୍ଦୋଳନ ଏବେ ଚାଲିଛି ସବୁ କେବଳ ସାହିତ୍ୟ ଓ ଶାସନକୁ ନେଇ କିନ୍ତୁ କେଉଁ କେଉଁ ଉପାଦାନକୁ ନେଇ ବାକି ଜାଗତିକ ଭାଷାଏ ଆଗକୁ ବଢ଼ିଛନ୍ତି ଆଉ ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ କି କି ଚିଜ ନିହାତି ଲୋଡ଼ା ତା’ ଲାଗି ଆକଳନ ଲୋଡ଼ା ।

ଭାରତରେ ୧୯୫୫ ଆଗର ପ୍ରାୟ ବହି କପିରାଇଟ ବାହାରେ । ଏ ବର୍ଗରେ ଥିବା ଓଡ଼ିଆ ବହିସବୁ ଧୀରେଧୀରେ ଉଇଙ୍କ ଆହାର ହେବା ଉପରେ । ଭୁବନେଶ୍ୱର ସୃଜନିକା ଅନୁଷ୍ଠାନ, ରାଉରକେଲା ଏନଆଇଟି ଓ ପ୍ରଗତି ଉତ୍କଳ ସଂଘ ଉଦ୍ୟମରେ ହୋଇଥିବା ଉଦ୍ୟମ ଫଳରେ ଦେଢ଼ ଲକ୍ଷରୁ ଅଧିକ ପୃଷ୍ଠା ସ୍କାନ କରାଯାଇଛି । ଏଥିରୁ କିଛି ଏବେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାର ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପର or.wikisource.org ୱେବ୍‍ସାଇଟରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ । ସ୍ୱେଚ୍ଛାରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଠକମାନେ ନିଜ ପସନ୍ଦର ବହିସବୁକୁ ଡିଜିଟାଇଜ କରି ସ୍କାନ ଛବିରୁ ଲେଖାର ରୂପାନ୍ତର କାମ କରିପାରୁଛନ୍ତି । ଏଥି ସହିତ ସମ୍ପୂର୍ଣ୍ଣ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଗବତ ଭଳି ଆମ ଭାଷାର ସମ୍ପତ୍ତି ଧୀରେଧୀରେ ଏଥିରେ ଆସିବାକୁ ଲାଗିଲାଣି । ଏଥି ସହିତ ଗୋପାଳ ପ୍ରହରାଜଙ୍କ ଭାଷାକୋଷ ତିଆରି କାମକୁ ଏବର ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ ମାଧ୍ୟମରେ ଆଗକୁ ନେବାର ଉଦ୍ୟମ ହେଲାଣି । ଏ ଯାବତ ୧୧ ହଜାରରୁ ଅଧିକ ଲେଖା ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିିଡିଆରେ or.wikipedia.org ୱେବ୍‍ସାଇଟରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ । ସାମୂହିକ ଉଦ୍ୟମ ଛଡ଼ା କିଛି ବ୍ୟକ୍ତି ବିଶେଷ ଓ ସଙ୍ଗଠନ ମଧ୍ୟ ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ କିଛି ୱେବ୍‍ସାଇଟ ଆଗରୁ ବଖଣାଯାଇଥିବା ଫାଙ୍କା ଥାନ ପୂରଣ କରିବା କାମରେ ମଧ୍ୟ ଲାଗିଛନ୍ତି । ତେବେ ଆଉ ଭାଷା ସଙ୍ଗେ ଓଡ଼ିଆକୁ ସମକକ୍ଷ କରିବା ଲାଗି ଆହୁରି ଅନେକ ଉଦ୍ୟମ ଆବଶ୍ୟକ । ବିଶେଷକରି ସରକାରଙ୍କ ପାଖେ ସଚେତନତା ଲୋଡ଼ା । କେବଳ କୋଟିକୋଟି ଟଙ୍କାର ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ ନୁହେଁ ବରଂ ଘରର ମୂଳଦୁଆ ଗଢ଼ା କାମ ପାଇଁ ଅଧିକ ଉଦ୍ୟମ ନିହାତି ଲୋଡ଼ାପଡ଼ିଛି ।

News Clipping

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/b13b21b3cb3fb06-b2db3eb37b3e-b2ab3eb07b01-b0fb15-b05b28b41b36b40b33b28

ମାତୃଭାଷା ଦିବସ: ଆଜିର ସମସ୍ୟା ଓ ଆହ୍ୱାନ

subha — 2016-02-26T16:52:36Z

The article was published in the editorial section of Odia newspaper the Sambad on February 21, 2016. This piece explains about the challenges of expanding a knowledge base in Odia language and helping it grow beyond just the literature and to a language of knowledge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/b2eb3eb24b43b2db3eb37b3e-b26b3fb2cb38-b06b1cb3fb30-b38b2eb38b4db5fb3e-b13-b06b39b4db71b3eb28

The Intellects holds 2nd International Conclave of Odia Language

praskrishna — 2016-02-27T05:35:17Z

The Intellects, a Delhi-based progressive forum of intellectuals, held the 2nd International Conclave of Odia Language at the India International Centre in New Delhi today.

Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event and won an award. Look for the coverage by Odisha News here.

The seminar had the title of ‘Aamari Bhasha Pathe’. The conclave was inaugurated by eminent Novelist and Writer Dr. Bibhuti Pattnaik and Rajya Sabha MP Baishnab Charan Parida among others. In the inaugural session, the speakers, including Shri Baishnab Parida, Dr. Natabar Satpathy, Dr. Amarendra Khatua, Poet Sankarshan Parida, Dr. Iti Samanta, Smt. Mamata Mohapatra, Mr. Subhasish Panigrahi stressed on the need of promotion of Odia language and its development on the global arena. They highlighted various angles of Odia language, its history and the challenges it faced apart from outlining the modalities to give it a big boost.

In the second leg, a Poets’ Conference was held. Dr. Jagannath Prasad Das, Dr. Amarendra Khatua, Poet Sankarshan Parida, Dr. Anita Panda, Poet Gajanan Mishra, Smt. Yashodhara Mishra, Poet Manas Ranjan Mohapatra and many other recited poems.

In the last leg, Kendra Sahitya Akademi President, Dr. Vishwanath Tiwari and Sir Mark Tully (former Bureau Chief of BBC, New Delhi), graced the occasion among others. Several eminent personalities were honoured and received the awards from The Intellects.

Ama Gourav Samman – Shri Bibhuti Pattnaik

Amari Bhasha Pathe Samman:

Shri Baishnab Parida
Dr. Amarendra Khatua
Smt. Kunu Dash
Dr. Iti Samanta
Dr. Natabar Satpathy
Shri Gajanan Mishra
Shri Sankarshan Parida
Smt. Mamata Mohapatra
Shri Kulamani Biswal

Yuva Prerana Samman:

Shri Subhasish Panigrahi
Shri Manoranjan Mohanty
Shri Subhranshu Panda

Swabhimani Odia Sanghthan Samman:

Biswajit Dash (IPROCH)
Sanjeev Mohanty (Odisha Forum)
Bijaya Kumar Dash (Sukha Dukha Prakashan)

Shri Debendra Rout, Chairman of The Intellects and Parambrahma Tripathy, Secretary (Literature), The Intellects, organised the event successfully with all their hard efforts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/odisha-news-february-22-2016-intellects-holds-second-international-conclave-of-odia-language

ಪ್ರಶಾಂತವನ

praskrishna — 2016-03-20T04:32:04Z

ಮಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಸಂತ ಅಲೋಷಿಯಸ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಎರಿಕ್ ಮೆಥಾಯಿಸ್ ಸಭಾಂಗಣದಲ್ಲಿ ನಡೆದ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ೧೩ನೇ ವರ್ಷಾಚರಣೆಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಒಂದು ವರದಿ

The blog post was published in Prashasti Prashantavanam on February 21, 2016.

ಲಾಸ್ಯ ಶೆಟ್ಟಿಯವರ ನಿರೂಪಣೆಯ ವರ್ಷಾಚರಣಾ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ಶುರುವಾದದ್ದು "ಹೊಸ ಹಾದಿಯನು ಹಿಡಿದು ನಡೆಯಣ್ಣ ಮುಂದೆ.." ಎಂಬ ರೋಹಿತ್ , ಗೋಪಾಲಕೃಷ್ಣ ಮತ್ತು ತಂಡದವರಿಂದ. ಮುಂದುವರಿಯುವುದಕ್ಕೆ ಮುಂಚೆ ವೇದಿಕೆಯನ್ನು ಅಲಂಕರಿಸಿದ ಗಣ್ಯರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಒಂದೆರಡು ನುಡಿಗಳನ್ನಾದರೂ ಹೇಳಲೇಬೇಕಾಗುತ್ತೆ.ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿ ಬಳಸುವವರಿಗೆಲ್ಲಾ ಅದರಲ್ಲಿನ ಕೆ.ಪಿ.ರಾವ್ ಕೀಲಿಮಣೆಯ ಪರಿಚಯವಿದ್ದೇ ಇರುತ್ತೆ. ಕನ್ನಡವೊಂದೇ ಅಲ್ಲದೇ ಅನೇಕ ಭಾರತೀಯ ಭಾಷೆಗಳ ಭಾರತೀಯ ಭಾಷೆಗಳ ಲಿಪಿಗಳನ್ನು ಗಣಕಕ್ಕೆ ಅಳವಡಿಸಿದ ಗಣಕ ವಿಜ್ಞಾನಿ ನಾಡೋಜ ಕೆ.ಪಿ ರಾವ್ ಅವರು ಇಂದಿನ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಅತಿಥಿ.ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ಮತ್ತೊಬ್ಬ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಅತಿಥಿ ಶ್ರೀ ವಸಂತಕುಮಾರ ಪೆರ್ಲ. ಇವರು ಮಂಗಳೂರು ಆಕಾಶವಾಣಿ ನಿಲಯ ನಿರ್ದೇಶಕರು ಮತ್ತು ಕನ್ನಡ ಪದಗಳ ಸೃಷ್ಠಿಗಾಗಿ ಪದಾರ್ಥಚಿಂತಾಮಣಿಯಂತಹ ಮುಖಹೊತ್ತಿಗೆಯ ಗುಂಪುಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಂಡವರು. ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ಮೂರನೇ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಅತಿಥಿ ಪಿಲಿಕುಳ ನಿಸರ್ಗಧಾಮದ ಕಾರ್ಯನಿರ್ವಹಣಾಧಿಕಾರಿ ,ಮಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಹಿಂದಿನ ಪ್ರಭಾರಿ ಜಿಲ್ಲಾಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳಾಗಿದ್ದ S.A ಪ್ರಭಾಕರ ಶರ್ಮ ಅವರು, ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ಅಧ್ಯಕ್ಷತೆ ವಹಿಸಿದ್ದು ಸಂತ ಅಲೋಷಿಯಸ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಪ್ರಾಂಶುಪಾಲರಾದ ರೆ| ಫಾ| ಸ್ವೀಬರ್ಟ್ ಡಿ’ಸಿಲ್ವ ಅವರು. ಇದಲ್ಲದೇ ವೇದಿಕೆಯನ್ನಲಕಂರಿಸಿದ ಗಣ್ಯರೆಂದರೆ ಸಂತ ಅಲೋಷಿಯಸ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಬಿ.ಸಿ.ಎ ವಿಭಾಗದ ಮುಖ್ಯಸ್ಥರಾದ ಡಾ| ರವೀಂದ್ರಸ್ವಾಮಿ ಅವರು, ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಭಾಗದ ಮುಖ್ಯಸ್ಥರಾದ ಡಾ| ಸರಸ್ವತಿ ಅವರು ಮತ್ತು ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥಾಪಕರಾದ ಡಾ| ಯು.ಬಿ.ಪವನಜ ಮತ್ತು ಹದಿಮೂರನೆಯ ವರ್ಷಾಚರಣೆಯ ಸಂಚಾಲಕರಾದ ಡಾ| ವಿಶ್ವನಾಥ ಬದಿಕಾನ ಅವರು.

ಶ್ರೀ ವಿಶ್ವನಾಥ ಬದಿಕಾನ ಅವರ ಸ್ವಾಗತ ಮತ್ತು ಪ್ರಾಸ್ತಾವಿಕ ನಂತರ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ಉದ್ಘಾಟನೆಯಾಗಿದ್ದು ನಾಡೋಜ ಕೆ.ಪಿ.ರಾವ್ ಅವರಿಂದ. ನಂತರ ಕೆ.ಪಿ.ರಾವ್ ಅವರಿಗೆ ಸನ್ಮಾನ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ. ಸನ್ಮಾನ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ನಂತರ ಮಾತನಾಡಿದ ರೆವರೆಂಡ್ ಫಾದರ್ ಡಿಸಿಲ್ವ ಅವರು ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಇತಿಹಾಸದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ಕನ್ನಡ ಸಾಹಿತ್ಯಕ್ಕೆ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಕೊಡುಗೆಗಳ ನಡೆ, ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕಾಗಿ ನಡೆಯುತ್ತಿರುವ ಕೆಲಸಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮತ್ತು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆಯೂ ತಮ್ಮ ಮೆಚ್ಚುಗೆಯ ನುಡಿಗಳನ್ನು ವ್ಯಕ್ತಪಡಿಸಿದರು.

ನಂತರ ಕೆ.ಪಿ.ರಾವ್ ಅವರು ಎರಡು ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಉತ್ತರ ಹುಡುಕುವಂತಹ ಹಾದಿಯಲ್ಲಿನ ಶುಭನುಡಿಗಳು ನೆರೆದವರ ಗಮನ ಸೆಳೆಯುವಂತಿದ್ದವು.

ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಏಕೆ ಬೇಕು ? ಅನ್ನುವ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗೆ ಮೂರು ಉತ್ತರ ಹುಡುಕುವ ಹಾದಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸಾಗಿದ ಅವರ ಅಭಿಪ್ರಾಯದಲ್ಲಿ ೧.ಕನ್ನಡ ಲಿಪಿ ಮಾತ್ರ ಬಲ್ಲವರಿಗೆ ಜಗದ ಜ್ಞಾನ ತಿಳಿಸಿಕೊಡಬಲ್ಲ ಸುಲಭದ ಮಾಧ್ಯಮ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ೨. ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ಮಾತ್ರ ಸಂಬಂಧಿಸಿದ ವಿಷಯಗಳು ,ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿ,ಭಾಷಾ ಸೊಗಡು ಬೇರೆ ಭಾಷೆಯ ವಿಕಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಅಷ್ಟು ಸಮಂಜಸವಾಗಿ/ಪೂರ್ಣವಾಗಿ ಮೂಡಿಬರಲು ಸಾಧ್ಯವಿಲ್ಲ.

೩. ಯಾರಿಗಾದರೂ ಗೌರವ ಕೊಡಲು ಬಳಸಬಹುದಾದ ರು,ರಿಗೆ(ರಾಯರು,ರಾಯರಿಗೆ) ಯಂತಹ ಭಾಷಾ ವೈಶಿಷ್ಟ್ಯವನ್ನು ಹೊಂದಿದ ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ತನ್ನದೇ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯವಿರಬೇಕಾದ ಅಗತ್ಯವಿದೆ.

ಮುಂದುವರಿಸಿದ ಅವರು ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ಭಾಷಾಂತರದ ಬದಲು ರೂಪಾಂತರ ಮಾಡುವ ಅಗತ್ಯದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಪ್ರಸ್ತಾಪಿಸಿದರು.ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಮೂಲಕವಾದರು ಕನ್ನಡ ಪದಬಳಕೆಯಲ್ಲೊಂದು ಸಮಾನತೆ ಬರಲೆಂಬ ಆಶಯವನ್ನೂ ವ್ಯಕ್ತಪಡಿಸಿದರು.

ನಂತರ ಮಾತನಾಡಿದ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಅತಿಥಿಗಳಾದ ವಸಂತಕುಮಾರ್ ಪೆರ್ಲ ಅವರು ಶಿಲಾಲೇಖ--> ತಾಮ್ರ ಪಟ-->ತಾಳೆಗರಿ-->ಪುಸ್ತಕದ ರೂಪದಲ್ಲಿದ್ದ ಸಾಹಿತ್ಯ ಈಗ Digitial ಅವತರಣಿಕೆಯಾಗಿ ಬೆಳೆದು ಬಂದ ಪರಿಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು. ಕರಾವಳಿಯಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಹವ್ಯಕ, ಬ್ಯಾರಿ,ತುಳು,ಕೊಂಕಣಿ, ಮಲೆಯಾಳಂ,ಮರಾಠ,ಕರಾಡ, ಬೆಸ್ತರ ಹಲವು ಉಪಭಾಷೆಗಳ ರೂಪದಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಭಾಷಾ ಸೊಗಡನ್ನು, ನಮ್ಮ ರೀತಿ ರಿವಾಜುಗಳನ್ನು ದಾಖಲಿಸಿಡುವ,ವಿಕಿ ಮೂಲಕ ಸಂರಕ್ಷಿಸುವ ಅಗತ್ಯದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು.

ನಂತರದ ಶುಭನುಡಿಗಳು ಪಿಲಿಕುಳದ ಶಿವರಾಮಕಾರಂತ ನಿಸರ್ಗಧಾಮದ ಕಾರ್ಯನಿರ್ವಹಣಾಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳಾದ S.Aಪ್ರಭಾಕರ ಶರ್ಮ ಅವರಿಂದ. ತದನಂತರ ಡಾ| ಯು.ಬಿ ಪವನಜ ತಮ್ಮ ತೈವಾನ್ ಪ್ರವಾಸದ ಸಂದರ್ಭದಲ್ಲಿ ಪೂರ್ಣ ಚೈನೀಸಿನ windows ನೋಡಿ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲೂ ಈ ರೀತಿ ಮಾಡಬಾರದೇಕೆ ಎಂದು ಆಲೋಚಿಸಿದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದ್ದರು. ೧೯೫೨ರಲ್ಲಿ ೧೬೦೨ರಷ್ಟಿದ್ದ ಭಾಷೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಈಗ ಉಳಿದಿರುವುದು ೭೦೫ ಮಾತ್ರ ! ಭಾಷೆಗಳ ಪರಿಸ್ಥಿತಿ ಇಷ್ಟು ಚಿಂತಾಜನಕವಾಗಿರೋ ಸಂದರ್ಭದಲ್ಲಿ "ಮಾಹಿತಿಯ ಆಗರ" ಎಂಬಂತಾಗಿರೋ ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ವಿಕಿ ಏಕೆ ಮತ್ತು ಹೇಗೆ ನೆರವಾಗಬಹುದು,ಅದರ ಸದ್ಯದ ಸ್ಥಿತಿಗತಿಗಳೇನು ಎಂಬುದರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು.

ವಿಕಿಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ:

ಜನವರಿ ೧೫ ರಂದು ಶುರುವಾದ ವಿಕಿ ಈಗ ೩೦೦ ಭಾಷೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಲಭ್ಯವಿದೆ. ೨೦೦೩ ಜೂನ್ ಮೂರರಂದು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಯ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭ. ಇಲ್ಲಿಯವರೆಗೆ ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು, ಮೈಸೂರು, ಮಂಗಳೂರು, ಸಾಗರದಲ್ಲಿ ಆದ ಸಂಪಾದನೋತ್ಸವಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ರಚನೆಯಾದ ಪುಟಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ಜನರ ಭಾಗವಹಿಸುವಿಕೆಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು. ಮಾತನಾಡುವವರ ಲೆಕ್ಕದಲ್ಲಿ ೩೫ ನೇ ಸ್ಥಾನದಲ್ಲಿರೋ ಕನ್ನಡದ ವಿಕಿಗೆ ಪ್ರತೀ ಘಂಟೆಗೆ ೮೯೨ ಭೇಟಿಗಳು ಸಿಗುತ್ತಿವೆ. ೧೫ ವರ್ಷಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ವಿಕಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸೃಷ್ಠಿಯಾಗಿರೋ ಲೇಖನಗಳ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆ ೫೦ ಲಕ್ಷ ದಾಟಿದ್ದರೆ ೧೩ ವರ್ಷದ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿ ಲೇಖನಗಳ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆ ೧೯,೬೦೦. ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಭಾಷೆಗಳ ಪಟ್ಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ೧೦೭ನೇ ಸ್ಥಾನದಲ್ಲಿರೋ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿ ಭಾರತೀಯ ಭಾಷೆಗಳ ಪಟ್ಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಹತ್ತನೇ ಸ್ಥಾನದಲ್ಲಿದೆ ಎಂಬ ವಿಕಿಯ ಬಗೆಗಿನ ಅಂಕಿಅಂಶಗಳು ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದಲ್ಲಿ ನೆರೆದವರಿಗೆ ತಿಳಿಯಲ್ಪಟ್ಟವು. ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮಕ್ಕೆ ನೆರೆದಿದ್ದವರಿಗೆಲ್ಲಾ ಧನ್ಯವಾದಗಳನ್ನು ಸಮರ್ಪಿಸಿದ್ದು ಡಾ| ಸರಸ್ವತಿ ಅವರು.

೧೧:೪೦ ಕ್ಕೆ ಪ್ರಾತ್ಯಕ್ಷಿಕೆಗಳ ಎರಡನೇ session ಆರಂಭವಾಯಿತು. ಇದರಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಲೇಖನಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ಅದರ ಸಂಪಾದನೆಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ಖಾತೆ ತೆರೆಯುವುದೇ ಮೊದಲಾದ ಮಾಹಿತಿಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ಯೋಜನೆಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಪವನಜ ಅವರು ನೆರೆದವರಿಗೆ ಪ್ರಾತ್ಯಕ್ಷಿಕೆಯನ್ನು ನೀಡಿದರು

೧೨:೪೦ ಕ್ಕೆ Creative common, license ಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಸಂಪಾದಕರಲ್ಲೊಬ್ಬರಾದ ರೆಹಮಾನುದ್ದೀನ್ ಶೇಖ್ ಅವರಿಂದ ಪ್ರಾತ್ಯಕ್ಷಿಕೆ ಇತ್ತು.
ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟಿವ್ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್ ನ Attribution, no derivative, non commercia, sharealike ಎಂಬ ಅಂಶಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದ ರೆಹಮಾನುದ್ದೀನ್ ಅವರು ೬ ತರದ ಲೈಸನ್ಸುಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು. ಅವುಗಳೆಂದರೆ
೧) cc by A --> attribute
2) cc by S --> share alike
3)cc by ND --> no derivative
4)cc by NC --> non commercial
5)non commerical, share alike(CC by SA)
6)non commercial, no derivative
ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಫೋಟೊಗಳನ್ನು ಬಳಸಬೇಕಾದರೆ ಉಪಯೋಗಿಸಬೇಕಾದ creativecommonsತಾಣದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದ ಅವರು ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಕ್ಕೆ ಯಾವ ತರಹದ ಫೋಟೋಗಳನ್ನು ಬಳಸಬಹುದು, ಯಾವುದನ್ನು ಬಳಸಬಾರದು ಎಂಬ ನಿಯಮಗಳನ್ನು ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು. ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿರೋ ಫೋಟೋಗಳನ್ನು ಬಳಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವಾಗ ಫೋಟೋ ಬಳಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬಹುದು, ಆದರೆ ವಿಕಿಯಿಂದ ತೆಗೆದುಕೊಂಡದ್ದು, ಇಂಥವರ ಫೋಟೋ ಎಂದು ಹೇಳಬೇಕು ಎಂಬುದೇ ಮೊದಲಾದ ಲೈಸನ್ಸ್ ಗೆ ಸಂಬಂಧಪಟ್ಟ ನಿಯಮಗಳನ್ನು ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು.

ಬೆಳಗಿನ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ಕೊನೆಯ ಅಂಕದಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಸಕ್ರಿಯವಾಗಿ ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಂಡಿರುವ ರಾಧಾತನಯ, ವಸಂತಕುಮಾರ್,ಬಿ.ಎಸ್.ಚಂದ್ರಶೇಖರ್, ಓಂ ಶಿವಪ್ರಕಾಶ್,ಹರೀಶ್ , ತೇಜಸ್ ಮುಂತಾದ ಸಂಪಾದಕರಿಗೆ ಧನ್ಯವಾದಗಳನ್ನು ಸಲ್ಲಿಸಲಾಯಿತು. ಹೊರ ಊರಿನಿಂದ ಬಂದ ಸಂಪಾದಕರಾದ ಅನಂತ್ ಸುಬ್ರಾಯ್ ,ಚಿರಾಗ್ ಸಾರ್ಥಿ ಮತ್ತಿತರರಿಗೆ ಪ್ರೇಮಿಗಳ ದಿನದ ಸಂಕೇತವಾದ ಗುಲಾಬಿಯನ್ನಿತ್ತು ಅಭಿನಂದಿಸಲಾಯಿತು :-)
ನಂತರದ ಭಾಗ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯನ್ನರ ನುಡಿಗಳು. ಇದರ ಅಂಗವಾಗಿ ಕೆಳಕಂಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯನ್ನರು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದ ಬಗೆಗಿನ ತಮ್ಮ ಅಭಿಪ್ರಾಯಗಳನ್ನು ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು
೧)ಕ್ರೈಸ್ಟ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಯೋಜನೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಂಡಿರುವ ಡಾ| ಶಿವಪ್ರಸಾದ್
೨)ಮೈಸೂರು ವಿಶ್ವವಿದ್ಯಾಲಯದ, ಮೈಸೂರು ಸಂಪಾದನೋತ್ಸವದ ಸಂಚಾಲಕರಾಗಿದ್ದ ಡಾ| ಸೌಭಾಗ್ಯವತಿ
೩)ಸಾಗರದ ಸಂಜಯ ಗಾಂಧಿ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ, ಸಾಗರ ಸಂಪಾದನೋತ್ಸವದ ಸಂಚಾಲಕರಾಗಿದ್ದ ವಿದ್ಯಾಧರ ಚಿಪ್ಳಿ
೪)ಸಂತ ಆಗ್ನೆಸ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಉಪನ್ಯಾಸಕರಾದ ಶ್ರೀಮತಿ ಕವಿತಾ
೫)ಭಾರತೀಯ ಗೋತಳಿಗಳ ವಿಕಿ ಯೋಜನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ, ಸಾಗರ ಸಂಪಾದನೋತ್ಸವದ ಸಹಸಂಚಾಲಕರಾಗಿದ್ದ ವಿಕಾಸ್ ಹೆಗಡೆ
೬)ಕ್ರೈಸ್ಟ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿನಿ ತ್ರಿವೇಣಿ
೭)ಸಂತ ಅಲೋಷಿಯಸ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿನಿ ಮಮತಾ ಅವರು
೮)ಸಂತ ಆಗ್ನೆಸ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿನಿ ಧನಲಕ್ಷ್ಮಿ
೯)ಉಜಿರಿಯ SDM ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿಗಳಾದ ಆಂಜನೇಯ ಮತ್ತು ಮಂಜುನಾಥ
೧೦)ಮಂಗಳೂರಿನ ರಾಮಕೃಷ್ಣ ಪಿ.ಯು ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಉಪನ್ಯಾಸಕ ನಟೇಶ್ ಆಳ್ವ
೧೧)ಮುಕ್ತ ತಂತ್ರಾಶಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ತಮ್ಮನ್ನು ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಂಡಿರುವ, it for change,openstreetmap NGO ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಂಡಿರುವ ಶ್ರೀ ಯೋಗೀಶ್
೧೨)openstreetmapನಲ್ಲಿ ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಂಡಿರುವ ಶ್ರೀವಿದ್ಯಾ ಅವರು
೧೩)ಕೊನೆಯದಾಗಿ ನನಗೂ ಒಂದಿಷ್ಟು ಮಾತನಾಡೋ ಅವಕಾಶ !

ಮಧ್ಯಾಹ್ನ ಭೋಜನಾನಂತರ ಸಂತ ಅಲೋಶಿಯಸ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಐಟಿ ಲ್ಯಾಬಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಸಂಪಾದನೋತ್ಸವ ನಡೆಯಬೇಕಿತ್ತು. ಆದರೆ ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲ ಸಂಪರ್ಕ ವ್ಯತ್ಯಯದ ಕಾರಣದಿಂದ ಅದರ ಬದಲಿ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ಸಭಾಂಗಣಕ್ಕೆ ಸ್ಥಳಾಂತರಗೊಂಡಿತು. ರೆಹಮಾನುದ್ದೀನ್ ಅವರಿಂದ ಉತ್ತಮ ವಿಕಿ ಲೇಖನ ಹೇಗಿರಬೇಕು, ಇರುವ ಲೇಖನವನ್ನು ಬಾಹ್ಯ ಕೊಂಡಿ, info document ,ಚಿತ್ರಗಳನ್ನು ಹಾಕುವ ಮೂಲಕ ಹೇಗೆ ಉತ್ತಮಪಡಿಸುವುದು ಎಂಬ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಪ್ರಾತ್ಯಕ್ಷಿಕೆ ನಡೆಯಿತು. ನೆರೆದಿದ್ದ ಕಾಲೇಜು ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿಗಳಿಗೆ ಪಿಲಿಕುಳದಲ್ಲಿ ತೆಗೆದಿದ್ದ ಚಿತ್ರಗಳನ್ನು ಪಿಲಿಕುಳ ಎಂಬ ವರ್ಗಕ್ಕೆ ಸೇರಿಸಿ ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಹೇಗೆ ತಯಾರಿಸಬಹುದು ಎಂಬುದರ ಬಗ್ಗೆಯೂ ವೇದಿಕೆಯಲ್ಲೇ ತಿಳಿಸಲಾಯಿತು. ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾಲ್ಗೊಂಡವರಿಗೆಲ್ಲಾ ಭಾಗವಹಿಸುವಿಕೆಯ ಪ್ರಮಾಣಪತ್ರ , ಕಾಲೇಜುಗಳಿಗೆ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದ ಪೆನ್ ಡ್ರೈವ್ ನೀಡಲಾಯಿತು. ಸಂಜೆ ನಾಲ್ಕರ ಸುಮಾರಿಗೆ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ಮುಗಿಸಿ ಹೊರಬಂದರೂ ಇನ್ನೂ ಆ ವೇದಿಕೆಯ ನೆನಪು ಮನದಲ್ಲಿ ಸುಳಿಯುತ್ತಲೇ ಇದೆ. ನೂರಕ್ಕೂ ಹೆಚ್ಚಿನ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ನೆರೆದಿದ್ದ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯನ್ನರ ನುಡಿಗಳು ಕಿವಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಅನುರಣಿಸುತ್ತಲೇ ಇದೆ.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/caaccdcb0cb6cbec82ca4cb5ca8

Why aren’t Indians using Wikipedia to hold the government to account?

praskrishna — 2016-02-14T11:07:49Z

Despite its popularity, the site's benefits are going unutilised.

Madhav Gadgil's post was published by Scroll.in on February 6, 2016. CIS work was quoted.

Thanks to modern science and technology, the treasury of human material as well as intellectual and cultural wealth is overflowing. Enormous quantities of information are exchanged today at lightning speed, and incredible numbers of people separated by great distances are in constant touch with one another. Two contrasts characterise this world: on the one hand, disparities are growing in material wealth, and on the other, there is growing equality in access to informational and cultural resources.

The inequities in material wealth has accelerated the rate of degradation of the natural world, but at the same time progressive laws flowing from equality in intellectual wealth are helping people combat the degradation. This is one reason why, as much as ever, a well-informed citizenry is the lifeblood of social progress. Ensuring that citizens have ready access to reliable information is the prime responsibility of all of us, including obviously of our governments.

Wayward rulers

Regrettably, the government machinery is failing to discharge its responsibility.

Consider, for instance, Maharashtra’s irrigation scam, in which thousands of crores were siphoned off or wasted on dud irrigation projects. The statistics provided at various times by the state’s agriculture and irrigation departments are inconsistent. It is probable that none of them reflect the ground reality. Most rivers in Maharashtra are polluted well beyond legally permissible levels, yet the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board hardly acknowledges this sorry state of affairs. Such pollution often results in mass deaths of fish, but neither the fisheries department nor the Pollution Control Board maintains reliable records.

Or consider these two examples. After the people of Kerala succeeded in moving the government machinery, a committee of the legislature reported that 90% of the stone crushers in the state were operating without permission from local panchayats or without registering with district collectors. Another time, when the Central government-appointed Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel revealed similar irregularities with solid evidence, the Centre first suppressed its report and then, pushed by a Delhi High Court order, made only an English version available. To top it all, the Maharashtra government uploaded on its website a Marathi summary full of distortions.

Clearly then, with the government machinery failing, people must work on their own to bring to light the true state of affairs. Fortunately, our media provides a good deal of reliable information on issues of public interest. For instance, it was newspaper reports that forced the Goa Forest Department to accept the presence of tigers in the state. It is again the media that often records large-scale fish deaths in our rivers.

Such information gets recorded on social media too, but this remains scattered, barring systematic efforts like as the one launched by the Hyderabad-based “Save Our Urban Lakes” coalition. Besides, much of the material on social media like Facebook is often self-centred and prejudiced, making it difficult to ascertain the veracity. On the other hand, newspapers and TV channels are continually exposed to sceptical public scrutiny, ensuring that, by and large, they deliver reliable information.

On balance then, people at large can wean genuine, reliable information only by carefully collating it from newspapers and TV channels, official documents and scientific studies and systematically organising it through some responsible social media.

Starting a discussion

Wikipedia is just such a reliable social medium. It is an entirely voluntary, cooperative, web-based enterprise aimed at freely and readily delivering all the knowledge in the world to all the citizens of the world in their own languages. The platform started off in 2000 with a call to experts to contribute articles on the pattern of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but without any remuneration. When experts showed little interested, Wikipedia was thrown open to citizens in 2001, converting it into an anyone-can-edit enterprise. After all, experts too acquire much of their knowledge reading what others have written.

Wikipedia operates on the understanding that laypeople may make mistakes, but these can be eliminated by ensuring open scrutiny and giving full scope for additions, deletions and corrections. That this system has resulted in material of a quality on a par with expert-written encyclopaedias has been established by studies by respected scientific journals. Moreover, not being constrained by the page limits of a printed encyclopaedia, it has generated greater amount of material with a broader scope.

All this has been achieved due to the dedication of 50,000-odd voluntary editors improving existing and writing new articles. This community of editors follow a set of conventions arrived at over the years through consensus. It has been decided that Wikipedia will not include material based on original observations, but instead verifiable information compiled from published studies or reports. Wikipedia believes in a “neutral point of view” presenting the different perspectives, provided these are supported by good evidence. Besides reliability, Wikipedia articles aim for speed (Wiki means quick). For instance, the article on the December 2004 tsunami was composed in two days through contributions of some 1,000 editors largely relying on newspaper and TV reports.

Every Wikipedia article is accompanied by a “discussion” page, on which a variety of issues can be explored without the strict constraints of neutrality and verifiability. This is in addition to the “discussion” page accompanying the “User” page that automatically gets assigned to anyone who registers on the website as a user. On all these debating platforms the site imposes only one major discipline – that they will not be used for self-promotion or abusing others.

Because of these noteworthy conventions, the information on Wikipedia has acquired a special significance. For instance, in Europe and the United States, it has served to subject the performance of political leaders to careful scrutiny. Biographical articles on leaders often include documentation of the promises made before election and the extent to which these were fulfilled. In the past, whenever agents of these leaders tried to delete unfavourable content, they were caught out quickly because Wikipedia preserves all versions of any article, including a record of the IP address of the computer employed to make changes.

The grassroots

Since Wikipedia is unconstrained by governmental control and cannot be subjected to commercial pressures because of its donation-based ad-free model, it is an outstanding medium to document what is happening on the ground. This information can be accumulated through incremental, asynchronous micro-contributions. In India, it presents an excellent instrument for common citizens to document their experiences and issues of concern on the English and the 21 Indian language editions.

The articles could deal with specific geographical localities such as cities (e.g. Pune), wards in a city (e.g. Kothrud in Pune), villages (e.g. Warkhand in Pedne taluka of Goa), talukas (e.g. Dodoamarg in Maharashtra), districts (e.g. Kolhapur or North Goa), rivers (e.g. Panchaganga, Mula-Mutha, Zuari). All we need is some official information source to initiate such articles. The 2011 Census of India is one such excellent database. Every census locality in this database is assigned a unique Census Location Code.

To explain with an example: each of the many villages named Loni, Wadgaon or Mendha in Maharashtra has a different Census Location Code. Similarly, there is a district and a city in Madhya Pradesh as also a town and a taluka in Karnataka, all sharing the name Sagar. Again, these are assigned four different Census Location Codes. This facility permits us to refer unambiguously to any geographical locality at various spatial scales such as district, taluka or city or village. In addition, on their Wikipedia entries, one could readily add the latitude, longitude and altitude off Google Earth.

As it happens, there exists a code – developed by Prashant Pawar – to automatically generate base articles on census localities. Three such Marathi articles, on villages Haladi (Karavir), Rukadi (Hatkangale) and Parite in the Panchaganga basin of Kolhapur district, have been uploaded on the Marathi Wikipedia.

No less than 40,000 such articles were automatically uploaded on the English Wikipedia around 2003-’04 and were then quickly developed further by other interested citizens. However, that was not the norm. While Bollywood celebrates Wikipedia with Shah Rukh Khan singing Mere bareme Wikipediape padh lo, Indians participate little in editing or creating new Wikipedia articles. For instance, an article on the Pune Bus Rapid Transit System on the English Wikipedia is merely based on an official pamphlet. It ignores the vigorous discussion on the subject, including the many news reports in the past several years. The discussion page accompanying the article is almost blank. Surely, the more aware citizens of Pune could put the powerful medium to good use to provide a more detailed and balanced account of their city’s Rapid Transit System.

Bonding across languages

We could, of course, follow the American pattern of automatically generating articles on all Indian localities covered in the 2011 Census. But Wikipedia is not just an encyclopaedia – it is a community, and in the absence of awareness about the enterprise, this approach might not be fruitful. The communal effort was visible when the residents of Haladi in Maharashtra initiated a base article on their locality.

Besides creating base articles, interested citizens can upload photographs, audio and video clips on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license, permitting anybody to freely use or modify the material after giving due credit to the original creator. Aside from this, citizens can also augment information on issues of their concern through Right to Information queries or enquiries from forums like zilla parishads, municipalities, state legislatures or the Parliament. The Centre for Internet and Society has developed excellent resource material to support citizens taking up Wikipedia-related activities. A group of volunteers led by Subodh Kulkarni is also promoting this participation, as is Goa University.

Much could be accomplished if Indians become active participants on Wikipedia. People could use their articles and their discussion pages to draw the attention of journalists or scholars to their concerns. For instance, people in the command area of a dam could call attention to the fact that no canals have been constructed to bring water to them. A journalist could then investigate the issue and develop a news story, which in turn could provide a verifiable reference for a Wikipedia article. Such interaction could constitute an effective and transparent social audit. One can visualise an array of topics for a social audit, ranging from the status of wage payments in rural employment guarantee works, pending forest rights claims, encroachment of real estate on river beds, privatisation of public beaches, and availability of public toilets for women.

The newly emerging facility of Wikidata can strengthen this social audit. Wikidata permits integration of data not only from English but from multiple languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Kannada. For instance, sacred groves – forest fragments that are communally protected – constitute a traditional conservation practice not only in India, but also in Bhutan, Myanmar and even Nigeria. This tradition is still relevant – indeed, new sacred groves have recently been constituted in villages granted Community Forest Rights such as Pachgaon in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra.

Using Wikidata and keywords such as Devari (Marathi), Devpan (Konkani), Nagarbana or Devarakadu (Kannada), Sarpakavu (Malayalam), Oran (Hindi), one can quickly compile quantitative information on this practice, helping bring together people from across the country. Similarly, using keywords in different languages for a phenomenon such as mass fish mortalities, one may compile systematic information on this phenomenon that Pollution Control Boards deliberately ignore.

Of course, the objective of the Wikipedia enterprise is to compile objective, verifiable information from a neutral point of view and the Wikipedia community will not be involved in any activism. Nevertheless, such an exercise of putting together information could serve a useful function of organising a social audit. This could help, say, scattered members of fishing communities that are adversely affected by pollution-related fish mortalities to organise themselves.

Democratic approach

This is a golden age for those fascinated by knowledge. And Wikipedia is a triumphant manifestation of the age, a progressive enterprise of good-faith collaboration with the noble objective of making all knowledge available to people all over the world. The English Wikipedia has taken giant strides towards such a goal. The key to this success of science has been the rejection of all authority other than empirical facts and logical inferences, and its aim is to engage all those interested in knowledge regardless of their social, economic or educational background. It is this democratic approach that has facilitated the rapid accumulation of knowledge. Yet there are continual attempts by so-called experts to monopolise knowledge.

It is the duty of true lovers of knowledge to resist such attempts. Knowledge has a vast canvas. Our environment, our social settings are legitimate subject matters of knowledge and every citizen can be involved in nurturing it. Wikipedia is an important step in the direction of bringing on board all citizens in the pursuit of knowledge. The ability of the Wikidata facility to bring together knowledge scattered in multiple Indian languages is one manifestation of this progressive development. All of us Indians should join hands in developing a reliable understanding of the nature around us and of our society, polity and economy. This enterprise of taking Wikipedia to the grassroots would be a worthy contribution to the cause of nation building.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/scroll.in-february-6-2016-madhav-gadgil-why-arent-indians-using-wikipedia-to-hold-the-government-to-account

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

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-02-12T11:29:10Z

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

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

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

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

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

This little innovation is bringing a revolution in the Odia language

subha — 2016-02-27T07:33:06Z

Depicting human language within computing environments has always been a challenge: a given language's script and alphabet needs to be mapped to a coding system that a computer can process digitally. This is done by way of an encoding system that basically maps each character to a unique numeric code.

The article was published by DNA on February 3, 2016.

This was a standard approach for dealing with languages in the computing context. However, over time, many such encoding systems mushroomed. In 2012, Odisha-based non-profit Srujanika, with help from colleagues, created two text encoding converters that could convert two different legacy non-Unicode based script encoding systems to the universally accepted Unicode. I personally tested and found a lot of typos. It seemed to me that one would take more time to convert and proofread than just typing the text.

Unicode is a computing industry standard that provides a unique number for every character of the alphabet irrespective of the platform, program or script. Before the onset of Unicode there existed several other standards—such as American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII)—that defined the manner in which letters of a particular language were depicted on a computer. The text encoding converters generally are used to convert them from one encoding systems to another.

However, as proprietary and legacy encoding systems were so popular among the desktop publishing (DTP) operators, most Indian language media houses remained tied to their existing encoding systems even after Unicode was introduced. This led to editors, journalists, writers and many native language users having to reliable and intuitive way to input in their own language. For example, Unicode Odia resulted in a huge gap of Odia-language content online with users that depended on earlier, disjointed standards.

The converters I explained before could solve this problem partially as they could convert only two encoding systems with about 80% linguistic accuracy. While seeking help to enhance and scale up these existing converters, three Wikimedian-developers came forward to work on the available converters and create more foolproof ones. We worked together for hours spanning over a few months to make the converters better. When I asked my writer and journalist friends to test it, the result literally thrilled me as they all had started writing in Odia on Facebook the very next day.

More blogs started coming in Odia and more social media interaction in Odia. Interestingly, popular newspaper Sarbasadharana.com and an online portal Odisha.com used it. Many even started contributing to blogs and online portals. It became much easier for Wikimedians to use existing resources from portals, newspapers and magazines to enrich Wikipedia. Some of the available soft copies of public domain books acquired and books that were relicensed to CC licenses could easily be used on Wikisource.

Though it is difficult to measure the exact percentage of growth for online Odia-language content on the Internet, a significant change is seen today as compared to the state of the Odia language on the internet six months ago. Almost all the federal entities that were stuck with two non-Unicode encoding systems finally moved to Unicode, with official portal odia.odisha.gov.in including adoption of Unicode in their core policy. As a gesture of support to the development, the federal department has included Odia Wikipedia on the top of their resources page.

Recently, Jnanaranjan Sahu, one of core contributors to the project combined all the converters into a standalone on-wiki converter that is available both on Wikipedia and Wikisource. Many of the larger Odia language community have contributed in finding errors which were fixed. Jyanaranjan has made available a free online responsive converter that not just works from a computer but also seamlessly work from any smartphone. The converter has indeed helped to widely use Odia on the Internet. The bigger dream of an Odia version of Google is closer to becoming real.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dna-february-3-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-little-innovation-is-bringing-revolution-in-odia-language