Centre for Internet and Society

Post More Articles on Kannada Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:38:06Z

The article was published in Indian Express, Mangaluru edition on December 12, 2015. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted. A scanned version of the article is given below.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/post-more-articles-on-kannada-wikipedia

English and Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Hyderabad

Pavan Santosh — 2015-12-31T07:49:19Z

After a long time, a collaborative Telugu and English Wikipedia edit-a-thon is being organised in Hyderabad on December 20.

This Sunday, the Telugu and English language Wikipedia editors are organising a unique edit-a-thon at Golden Threshold, Abids. The event is aimed at translating many English Wikipedia articles related to Telugu language and culture to Telugu and vice versa. Theatre scholar and Telugu Wikimedian Pranay Raj Vangari and English Wikimedian Srikar Kasyap are organising this event with support from Centre for Internet and Society. Telugu speakers who contribute to English Wikipedia are going to contribute to Telugu Wikipedia. “The event is scheduled at 10 am and over a dozen articles are planned to be created during the sprint”, explains Vangari. Kashyap adds saying, “the Wikimedians are also planning to share best practices of the two communities which will benefit everyone”. The event is open to all and newbies will be oriented with the basics of Wikipedia editing and enriching the knowledge pool in Telugu and other languages on the Internet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/english-and-telugu-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-hyderabad

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

pavanaja — 2016-01-12T11:22:25Z

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

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

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

Sau Dhuni Teen Project: December Edit-a-thon

garule — 2015-12-08T10:30:09Z

As part of the "Sau Dhuni Teen Project" a multilingual Wikipedia Wikipedia edit-a-thon was organised at the Women's Studies Centre, University of Pune.

Concept note:
The digital domain is becoming increasingly significant as a knowledge repository today. Especially relevant in this context is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which contains information on almost every topic under the sun and is used extensively by researchers. The fact that information from the Wikipedia is even used as a starting point of academic writing necessitates thinking about how this information is organized, or in other words, how we conceptualize Wikipedia as a knowledge resource. In the multilingual Indian context, generation of content in the Indian languages is a logical next step. It is with the intention of strengthening this knowledge network in the social sciences, that Women's Studies Centre, Pune University conducts content generation workshops with university researchers. The broad mandate of the digital resource generation workshop is to introduce university students to tools of collaborative knowledge production on the internet and methods for generating new online content in Indian languages under Sau Dhuni Teen Project. Also introductory session on Wiktionary.

Project aim:

Facilitate researchers to think critically about concepts and their associations
Involve researchers as active editors on the Indian language Wikipedias
Utilize Wikipedia as a platform to generate Indian language annotations of academic texts in Women's Studies and the Social Sciences

The organisers are also planning to engage the students in annotating one key women's studies text each through follow-up workshops and credit them as contributors to the "Annotated Bibliography project"

Project outcome:

9 female participants joined for this edit-a-thon and edited various articles on Marathi Wikipedia. The Marathi Wikimedia community being quite particular about the citations from Marathi-language source was somehow challenging as the participants struggled at times to find much information about many things notable. A simple step by step tutorial was created, printed and shared among the participants. Some of the participants showed interest in participating in the Train-a-Wikipedian programme that CIS-A2K is planning. Sheena D'Lima engaged with the participants by sharing her learning from Manual of Style for writing Wikipedia article.

More information about the event on Meta.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/sau-dhuni-teen-project-december-edit-a-thon

TTT 2015

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:36:25Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) conducted a four day training workshop for Wikimedians all over India in order to facilitate conducting and organising outreach activities for promotion of Wikimedia activities within Indian language communities. Wikimedians from 21 language communities had participated in this training workshop including Wikipedians working for Nepali and Maithili Wikipedia.

CIS-A2K was successful in providing an idea exchange platform during the TTT workshop. Wikipedians from all over India got a chance to discuss their respective Wikimedia projects and identify best practices that could be customised for their own Wikimedia projects.

CIS-A2K conducted TTT 2015 with a clear objecive of training Indian Wikimedians in conducting effective outreach activites, As a reflective exercise on the efficacy of our TTT camp held in Bangalore during February, 2015 we are now conducting follow-up with the participants and I have contacted three Wikipedians (for the month of November 2015) and following are the updates:

Sailesh Patnaik (Odia Wikimedian):

Activities till now:

Attended Google I/O Bhubaneswar to deliver a talk about Wikipedia movement.
Has organized a workshop at KIST Bhubaneswar with 50+ participants.
Was invited by GDG Bhubaneswar group to deliver a talk about Wikipedia project during Google Dev Fest.
Presented a seminar at CET Bhubaneswar after the invitation from the organizing committee of the Perception (The Annual tech fest of CET , Bhubaneswar).

Upcoming Activities

Planning to organize a Wiki Takes Bhubaneswar photowalk and am also planning a GLAM project with a Cooperative society powered by Central Government and spread Open Source movement in Odisha.

V.T. Narayanan and Sayant Mahato (Samskritam Wikipedians):

Activities till now:

In May 2015, Samskrita Bharati organized a camp in Kalladka.
In July 2015 : Rashtriya Sanskrit Samsthan, Sringeri (Now Sringa Giri) organized a symposium for their staff and students.
In August 2015, Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidya Peeta, Tirupathi organized introductory classes on Wikipedia. Sayant Mahato attended the programme and expained in detail about Sanskrit Wikipedia.
Later in August 2015, at Aksharam, Bangalore, Samskrita Bharati conducted a " Medha Shibiram" exclusively oriented to youngsters and students who are based outside India like in USA. The Shibiram was well received both by the students and their parents. The participants were very interested to know about Sanskrit Wikipedia.
Samskrita Bharati is engaged in the work of editing the existing articles in Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ttt-2015

Touch Point Report: Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University and St. Aloysius College, Managalore

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:37:14Z

CIS-A2K conducts Wikipedia in Education programme at St. Aloysius colege, Mangalore. This partnership is unique as it provides to us a pool of editors for three Wikimedia projects, i.e: Kannada, Tulu and Konkani.

Touch point Report:

St. Aloysius

With editors from St. Aloysius college taking lead in organising 13^th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia anniversary, Kannada Wikipedia is growing in Mangalore and can be expected to produce content and engagement regularly similar to Bangalore and Mysore volunteers.

Activites

Translation of system messages for Tulu Wikipedia
Creating Tulu WP tutorial videos
Guiding St Aloysius College Student interns
Planning of 13^th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia anniversary

Reporting on the learning: PEG application created after extensive discussion with the student volunteers and Mr. Vishwanth Badikana who is primary coordinator of the event.

New developments: A possible partnership with Karnataka Tulu Academy is being explored, this could lead to content donation.

Failures: Non-availabilty of scanners hampered our chances of securing some important primary resources that would have been useful for content generation.

Primary Contact: Mr. Vishwanath Badikana,

Christ University

Introduction: A2K team is implementing its largest Wikipedia in Education programme at Christ University. This programme has been under operation since 2013 and has seen multiple revisions regarding: faculty engagement, evaluation process, student contributions and A2K team's responsibilties.

Activites: Edit-a-thon on Wikivoyage organised at Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University, Bangalore

Reporting on the learning: 1) As the edit-a-thon was happening on English Wikivoyage and A2K team had not intimated about the event to the larger community, there were instances of accounts being blocked and ip address being blocked as well.

A2K conducted Wikivoyage edit-a-thon and was surprised to see that many tourist places in India do not find mention on this Wikimedia project.

New developments: Interest shown by the faculty of Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University to host the student assignments on Wikimedia projects.

Failures: A2K was unable to help students to upload images onto commons.wikimedia.org during the session. A follow up session is being planned.

Primary Contact: Ms. Mugdha Kulkarni, mugdha.shailendra@christuniversity.in

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/department-of-tourism-studies-christ-university-st-aloysius-college

Analysis of Institutional Partnerships: University of Mysore and Guru G Learning Labs

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:39:15Z

University of Mysore considered to be one of the most prestigious institutions in the country has been famous for its innovative pedagogic techniques and opening up for students various avenues of knowledge acquisition.

The Kannada Encyclopedia project that was taken up by the Kuvempu Kannada Adhyana Samsthe, (KIKS), Manasagangothri, Mysore was one of its kind during its inception. It is safe to say that though Kannda has seen many other projects and attempts towards compiling encyclopedias, to this day the Vishwakoshas produced by University of Mysore are among the top picks regarding quality of the content, scope of the information and its reach with the general public. Many other encyclopedia projects such as “Bala Vignana Kosha” compiled by Shivaram Karanth, “Jnana Gangothri” by Niranjana, the “Kananda Sahitya Vishwakosha” from the Kannada University, Hampi have provided encyclopedic content to the Kannada readers.

The idea of the University of Mysore complied Vishwakoshas was simple. It seeked to provide basic and elemenatry information about key topics all around the universe (physical, spiritual, material, cultural, social, behavioural, political and many other domains of knowledge) to the general public. The intention was to make information accessible and easily understandable. It was not expected to educate or assist people in gaining profieciency regarding a certain topic but was expected to provide salient features, brief history and concise introduction.

Rationale for Institutional partnership:

The compilation of topics that were to be part of the Vishwakosha was done alphabetically and till date 13 Vishwakoshas have been produced along with one Kannada Vishaya Vishwakosha which exclusively deals with matters pertaining to Kannada land, language, literature, politics, culture, entertainment and other aspects of Kannada life. The Vishwakosha project was a method to democratise the process of production of knowledge. People from all walks of life were invited to contribute to the Vishwakosha along with the academicians and researchers. The submissions were then scrutinised by the review committee and was edited, information added as per the requirements. As this was not a text only Vishwakosha many attempts were made to source images as well. These were not used as ornamental or page filling purpose but was also informative in its own way with adequate meta data.

These encyclopedias have been extremely popular with the Kannada audience both for the content and for its competitive pricing. Prasaranga, the publication division of University of Mysore had also offered an discount for people who would purchase the entire set of Vishwakoshas at a special rate. The Vishwakosha project faced many problems and the last volume of the Vishwakosha was released in the year , while the first volume was released in . University of Mysore has also digitised the Vishwakoshas and made it avaialable for general public on a CD.

Plan of Action:

Access to Knowledge team sought to bring these treasure troves of Knowledge onto the digital platform and update the information available on these Vishwakoshas. It was a shot in the arm for the activities being conducted by CIS-A2K when University of Mysore agreed to re-release all of its encyclopedias under free licence for the benefit of larger Kannada community. University of Mysore also agreed to handover soft copies of the few encyclopedias (that were already digitised) to create and redirect content towards Kannada Wikipedia.

A2K team has conducted three skill building and Wikipedia orientation workshops with the students of University of Mysore in order to kick start the content generation activities. These workshops were received very positively by the students. However due to lack of an active community and serious infrastructural issues the students could not continue with the activities that had been planned. Due to the inactivity of these new volunteers we have witnessed a decrease in the activity of content generation effort as aimed earlier.

CIS-A2K facilitated extracting the legacy text from the soft-copies, converting them to Unicode, distributing the files among volunteers and Christ University interns and uploading them to Kannada Wikisource. These articles will serve as primary material for new content generation on Kannada Wikipedia. CIS-A2K celeberated Open Knowledge Day in collaboration with University of Mysore.

The non availability of infrastructual requirement, administrative difficulties such as scheduling of academic calendar offered the A2K team many invaluable lessons towards fostering an institutional partnership. A2K team adopted corrective measures and has been using the encyclopedias donated by University of Mysore as a primary reference for the subsequent edit-a-thons. A2K has also created a project page on Meta to attract Kannada Wikimedians towards content generation.

Outcome and Output:

A2K team utilised its institutional partnership with Christ University in the initial stages and digitised volumes of Kannada Encyclopedias. These were used both as references for the edit-a-thons conducted by CIS-A2K and as a primary reference material that was curated into an independent article on Kannada Wikipedia. Many Kannada Wikimedians have joined hands with A2K in acheiving this. This is an on-going activity.

Plans for Future:

As University of Mysore has rich archival collection particulalry in Indian Languages, A2K team intends to talk to individual departments to bring this content to Open Knowledge repositiries.

A2K team would like to involve various Departments to dedicate some staff on an hourly basis towards speedy completion of the project.

The existing MoU is understood as a one time activity of content donation (print and e copy of Vishwakosha) where as A2K would like to continue this activity as a long term engagement that will facilitate in building research skills and writing skills.

A2K team intends to request to University of Mysore should select/suggest some student volunteers for the digitisation project. With the inclusion of Kannada PA A2K team would collaborate with key Departments at the University of Mysore to conduct digitisation and translation sprints that will be facilitated by and other Wikimedians.

A2K team would like to collate all the new articles created with the help of the content donated by University of Mysore and circulate it as a newsletter on a monthly basis and sent to the Kannada community and University of Mysore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/analysis-of-institutional-partnerships-university-of-mysore-and-guru-g-learning-lab

Community Prioritisation of Content Donation: Kannada Wikisource

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:42:09Z

CIS-A2K has initiated a community consultation in order to prioritise and streamline the work on Wikisource projects across FLA. Due to the commitment of volunteers from the respective FLA and the institutional partnerships that A2K has developed we have been able to bring a large corpus of content under free licence into our Wikisource projects. CIS-A2K promotes both content donation and content acquisition strategies in order to bring in free licence content.

The re-releasing of the content under CC-BY-SA is a difficult task no doubt, but the even more difficult task is to get the donated content digitised and made available on Wikisource. As this activity involves three intermediary steps of scanning the original document, uploading the same on commons.wikimedia.org and finally recreate the same page on Wikisource by typing.

It is common knowledge that Indian Language Wikimedia communities consist of very few volunteers and in many communities it is Wikipedia that is the chief attraction for volunteers. This compounds the problem towards work that has to be done on Wikisource. To overcome this problem CIS-A2K has initiated a community consultation and prioritisation effort. CIS-A2K consults community in form of posts on Village pump, mailing lists and other channels of communication and update them about the overall content donated towards Wikisource projects and requests for suggestions and feedback as to the plan to digitse and bringing the content on Wikisource.

For the month of November, 2015 CIS-A2K discussed the plan with the Kannada community Wikimedians and proposed a plan of aggregating all the content that has been donated towards Kannada Wikisource and copyright lapse content that has been identified by Wikimedians. A2K team is currently utilising its institutional partnership with Christ University in digitising the content of Sri. Niranjana a prominent Kannada author that was donated by Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana. As a result of this collaboration with the community A2K team shall be posting a comprehensive list of the content donated to Kannada Wikisource along with copyright lapse books that are available digitally on Digital Library of India and Osmania University Digital Library and other such platforms.

This consultation process with the Kannada Wikimedia community also seeded an idea of creating a 'Book Bank' for Kannada Wikimedians. The objective of the book bank is to provide authentic references, citation material and other primary sources of information for content generation. As a first step towards building of the proposed book bank, we have purchased encyclopaedic material on Stone Inscriptions found in Karnataka, Women writers of Karnataka, Literary history of Karnataka and Kannada Dictionaries. The material acquired under 'Book Bank' will serve as resources for community and will be provided to the community members upon request for the same.

Following lists provide information about the current status of projects undertaken on Kannada Wikipedia:

Projects which are active on Wikisource:

Vimochane - 50 pages to be typed out of 355
Abhaya - 63 to be typed of 326 pages
Doorada Nakshatra - 23 typed out of 175
Rangammana Vathara - 23 to be typed of 209 pages
Ekangini - 41 typed of 228 pages
Kalyanaswami - 100 typed of 251

These books are scanned and uploaded on Kannada Wikisource

Books to be uploaded on Wikisource:

Chirasmarane
Mrutyunjaya
Deekshe
Navodaya
Palike banda panchamruta
Swami Aparampara

Books available to be scanned:

Banashankari
Nandagokula

CIS-A2K has visited the following libraries in order to optimise the efforts put into Kannada Wikisource:

1) Central Library, Cubbon Park, Bangalore

2) Kannada Shaitya Parishat, Chamarajpet, Bangalore

3) B.M. Shri Pratishtana Library, Bangalore

4) Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs, Basavanagudi, Bangalore

The visits have resulted in identifying many books that were hitherto unavailable with A2K team. We are in process of getting these books and digitise them so that they can be uploaded on Kannada Wiisource. A2K team is hopeful that the increased levels of activity and consultation held with the community will help the overall progress of Kannada Wikisource project.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-prioritisation-content-donation-kannada-wikisource

Works of Odisha litterateur JP Das to be available online free

praskrishna — 2016-01-03T10:51:10Z

The works of bureaucrat-turned-writer from Odisha, Jagannath Prasad Das, can be accessed free online after the digitisation process is complete.

The article was published in Odisha Sun Times on December 5, 2015.

Saraswati Samman and Sahitya Academy award winner, prominent writer, former IAS officer and cultural historian, popularly known as JP Das, has recently re-licensed 30 of his notable works under a free license called CC-by-SA 4.0. This opens up a whole new window to his books being accessible to readers for free online.

Recently, the scanning of the original books was made by the Bhubaneswar based non-profit and science education research organisation Srujanika which will now be made available after converting them into text form.

Not just Dr Das, many other notable individuals like Padma Shree Debi Prasanna Pattanayak, Manoj Panda, Dr Subrat Prusty, Bharat Majhi and organisations like Aama Odisha, Manik Biswanath Smrutinyasa that have come forward in the past to make their books available online using Odia Wikisource as a platform. Aama Odisha’s founder Soumya Ranjan Patnaik in a public gathering last year had permitted for relicensing and digitizing 19 volumes of Odia books published by Aama Odisha.

“I made a rather late and hesitant entry into the internet and digital world, but it has since become an integral part of my life. My introduction to digital books was through Srujanika’s digitised version of Purnachandra Odia Bhashakosha – all of 95,00 pages in seven volumes — which was impossible to handle on the writing table. That made me think how wonderful it would be to have all Odia books available on the internet that could be easily accessible to every interested reader,” says Das.

“As a beginning, I decided to put my own writings on the internet. Many of our young Odia writers are quite active on the social media. I hope they will take the initiative to get more and more Odia books available on the internet with the help of Odia Wikisource,” he adds.

Notably, Odia Wikisource is a sister project of the Odia Wikipedia and is available at or.wikisource.org on the internet. As a free online Odia-language library, it houses over 119 books already and all of the books are either under public domain or under the above mentioned creative commons share-alike license which gives the freedom of accessing the works for free, reuse them and even correct if any mistakes found, of course following the guidelines made by the Wikisource community. Currently, about 10 Wikisourcers are actively contributing to digitise books of various genres ranging from science to fiction to even the Odia classics.

With more authors generously opening up their work online, it feels like they are worried of the books becoming obsolete from the new generation leaving them with no way to learn about their own language and literature. Regional languages like Odia are facing the struggle to selling more books with the growing trend of English-centric education and rat race for jobs. In such a tough situation, more popular Odia literary content is certainly going to give a boost to readership and will take the language to more people, he expressed.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/odisha-sun-times-december-5-2015-works-of-odisha-litterateur-jp-das-to-be-available-online-free

30 Books of Odia Author and Historian Jagannath Prasad Das to Come Online on Odia Wikisource

subha — 2016-01-03T11:19:12Z

The article was published in Discover Bhubaneswar, a web portal on Odisha on December 4, 2015.

Odia author and cultural historian Jagannath Prasad Das has recently permitted to re-license under a free license Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0 for 30 volumes of his notable works. The author, popularly known as “J P” or “JP Das” has been honored with Saraswati Samman and Sahitya Academy award for his significant contribution in fiction, historical research of Odisha’s cultural heritage in his books Puri Paintings, Chitra-Pothi and Palm-leaf Miniatures apart from his Odia books “Prathama Purusa” and “Bhabanatha O Anyamane”.

“As a beginning I decided to put my own writings on the internet. Many of our young Odia writers are are quite active on the social media. I hope they will take the initiative to get more and more Odia books available on the internet with the help of Odia Wikisource”, he adds.

This contribution opens up a whole new window to his books being accessible to readers for free online. Recently the scanning of the original books were made by the Bhubaneswar based non-profit and science education research organization Srujanika which will now be made available after converting them into text form.

Apart from Dr Das, many other notable individuals like Padma shree Debi Prasanna Pattanayak, Dr Subrat Prusty, Manoj Panda, Bharat Majhi and organisations like Aama Odisha, Manik Biswanath Smrutinyasa have taken the noble step of sharing their works online with free licenses using Odia Wikisource as a platform.

Odia Wikisource, a sister project of the Odia Wikipedia, is available online at or.wikisource.org. There are over 238 books already and all of the books are either under Public Domain or under the above mentioned Creative Commons Share-Alike license which gives the freedom of accessing the works for free, reuse them and even correct if any mistakes found, of course following the guidelines made by the Wikisource community. Currently about 10 Wikisourcers are actively contributing to digitize books of various genre, ranging from science to fiction to even the Odia classics.

With more authors generously opening up their work online, it feels like they are worried of the books becoming obsolete from the new generation leaving them with no way to learn about their own language and literature. Regional languages like Odia are facing the struggle to selling more books with the growing trend of English-centric education and rat race for jobs. In such a tough situation more popular Odia literary content is certainly going to give a boost to readership and will take the language to more people.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/discover-bhubaneswar-30-books-of-odia-author-and-historian-jagannath-prasad-das-to-come-online-on-odia-wikisource

Guru-G Learning Labs and CIS A2K Institutional Partnership

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:52:06Z

Incorporated in 2013, Guru-G is the world’s first gamified platform for teaching and teacher training.

Guru-G converts existing textbooks and teacher resources into adaptive teaching packs (or guided lesson plans), which provide in-class guidance to teachers on different ways in which they can teach a topic. The guidance adapts to the teacher’s past behavior, student moods & the practices that have resulted in best learning outcomes for their students. These packs save preparation time & effort for a teacher before class plus make teaching fun and interesting during and after class. Teachers can also track their progress and train at their own pace if interested.

Rationale for Institutional partnership:
A2K aimed at developing additional resources that would supplement the learning curve of students at High school and undergraduate levels. The partnership also aimed to build digital research skills into the students so as to equip them for the new modes of knowledge aggregators.

Both Guru-G labs and CIS work at the intersection of technology, education and social empowerment, it was planned that due to the mutual interests, the partnership will be able to identify a large group of Wikipedia users in Kannada and it was hoped that of these new generation readers some of the students would be trained as Wikipedians. Contribution towards Wikisource was also discussed in the MoU.

Plan of Action:
Due to the internal team movement and shortage of manpower from at CIS, we were unable to work closely with the Guru-G Lab. However, we have recently restarted our conversations with them.

Plans for Future:
As Guru-G Learning Labs provide platforms to collaboratively discuss ideas, A2K team, would like to use this partnership in designing our training activities.

Nature of collboaration and rolling out of resources for better implementation of Wikipedia in Education programme run by CIS-A2K. CIS-A2K will work with educational institutions, developmental organisations and teachers who have already been identified by Guru-G labs and provide to them resources such as Offline Wikipedia.

Training programmes may be designed and customised for Wikipedia in Education programme run by CIS-A2K across different colleges. Creating platforms and activities for A2K's community capacity building activities such as TTT and MWTTT.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guru-g-learning-labs-and-cis-a2k-institutional-partnership

Open access in the Marathi language expands by a thousand books

Subhashish Panigrahi and Abhinav Garule — 2016-01-03T11:26:49Z

As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.

This was published in Wikimedia Blog on December 3, 2015.

As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.^[1]

MGS is a non-profit organization working for the preservation of Maharashtra’s linguistic and cultural heritage. It was founded in Pune, India in 1894. Being an important archive for the preservation of many hundreds of years old manuscripts and historical artifacts from the Peshwa era, the institution is open to public for study and research.

During the four-day anniversary celebration, the Centre for Internet Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K)—an organization that supports the Wikimedia movement in India—opened a Wikipedia stall there where Marathi Wikimedians were present. Around 600 people visited the stall and learned about the news of MGS’s book donation.

Many active and new Marathi Wikimedians were present at the exhibition stall along with Abhinav Garule from the CIS-A2K program to share the incredible work Marathi Wikipedia and Wikimedia community at large are doing. Autographs of eighteen notable writers who received awards from Sanstha for different genres of writings were collected for uploading to the Wikipedia pages about them. While meeting the authors, Wikimedians also approached them to relicense some of their works under Creative Commons licenses so that they could be digitized on Wikisource and/or enrich Wikipedia—and some of the authors expressed a good deal of interest in opening up their books for Wikisource.

Some of the major books donated are Peshwa Rojnishi (diary of Peshwa), Benjamin Franklin Charitra (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin), Kekavali, S M Paranjape Charitra (autobiography), Letters Exchanged between the Sanstha and the British Government, Shinde Gharanyacha Padmamay Itihas (manuscript), and Marathwadyatil Arvachin Marathi Vangmay (modern Marathi literature from Marathwada, a region in Maharashtra) are some of the popular books read by Marathi speakers that are going to be part of the books donated by the organization.

We reached out to Avinash Chaphekar, the joint secretary of the organization, to know more about the state of book publication and readership.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Could you share your ideas of opening these invaluable books for Wikisource? How they are going to be useful for the online readers to learn about the Peshwas?

Avinash Chaphekar (AC): These books are of historical importance and contain information that needs to reach more people; they cover topics that are rarely covered well anywhere else. Right after India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommended the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, as it contains a lot of messages for a common person, a lady walked up to and asked if she could read it in Marathi. Be it such autobiographies or a poetry book like “Kekavali”, such books that were published by the MGS should not be kept closed—many readers are searching for them. We donated 800 of these old books to the Marathi Wikisource because we don’t have large presence in the media or the Internet, so how would any reader who does not know us buy a book? If these books are available online, they can at least find and read them.

SP: Where do you think there is gap between publishers and readers today? Many Marathi books get published every year and if you search on the Internet, which many people today do, you would hardly find much.

AC: Online readership is increasing every day, but when you look at Marathi readers, the majority of them are still buying books. During the exhibitions here (even this year!), there is always quite a rush to buy books. Only the youth and tech-savvy people read online. But most people we meet say that they feel more comfortable holding and reading physical books. Moreover, there is no concrete research validating that most of the youngsters here are accessing information only online. I still feel reading books in a conventional way by holding books in your hands will continue to exist as there is some kind of satisfaction that lies in it.

SP: Did you know that we are going to get these books retyped, meaning that readers will not just be able to read them in their smartphones or computers but they could use the text for republishing the same books in the future? How do you think such a model will be useful for publishers?

AC: At the MGS, we don’t have funds to republish these books, and publishers are not ready to do it no matter how historically valuable the books are—even an incredibly valuable reference book called Marathi Grantha Nirmiti Watchal (the history of creation of Marathi books in Marathi), authored by SG Tulpule and published by us in 1973. This book has detailed information about Marathi publications, even those that existed before printing technology existed. As many such books are not being reprinted, we cannot leave the remaining few copies to perish. Let them go online and reach millions of people.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-december-3-open-access-in-marathi-language-expands-by-thousand-books

Odia Wikimedia community meetup at Cuttack

Sailesh Patnaik — 2015-12-29T12:07:56Z

Odia Wikimedians are planning to gather in Cuttack and discuss about future project ideas for the community.

Agenda:

Discussion about existing projects and planning for future
Implementing the community's plans
Responsibilities of CIS-A2K's new program Associate Sailesh Patnaik
Restarting monthly meetup plans in Cuttack and Bhubaneswar

शंभर वर्षांपूर्वीच्या पुस्तकांचे होणार डिजिटायझेशन

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T07:47:20Z

Lokmat (newspaper) covered Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha's Project news.

Read the original article in Lokmat here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/93690292d930-93593094d93793e90292a94293094d93594091a94d92f93e-92a94193894d92491593e90291a947-93994b92393e930-92193f91c93f91f93e92f91d947936928

Open Source India 2015

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T07:46:46Z

The twelfth Open Source India event organized by EFY Group was held at NIMHANS Convention Centre in Bangalore on November 19 and 20, 2015. Subhashish Panigrahi attended the event for the first day.

Open Source India (OSI) is the premierconference in Asia targeted at nurturing and promoting the Open Source ecosystem in the subcontinent. Started as LinuxAsia in 2004, OSI has been at the helm of bringing together the Open Source industry and the community in the last 11 years. The 12th edition of OSI this year aimed to take this event a notch higher by focusing on the Open Source ecosystem in Asia, and more specifically, in India.

For more information see the brochure of the event. Schedule of the event on Day 1 here and Schedule of the event on Day 2 here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/open-source-india-2015