Centre for Internet and Society

Odia Wikisource Turns 3

manasarao — 2017-10-23T05:40:20Z

Odia Wikisource, the Odia language version of Wikisource, an online digital library of free content textual sources run by the Wikimedia Foundation, celebrates three years of contributing to the free knowledge movement this October. Odia Wikisource is a sister project of Odia Wikipedia, the oldest Indian language Wikipedia. The Odia Wikimedia community, a group of active contributors to Odia Wikimedia projects in India, has been working towards digitizing rare books that are no longer under copyright as well as encouraging authors and publishers to free-license their work under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License 4.0. This license allows anyone free use of the work with due attribution. The books are usually digitized into Unicode text by scanning them using Optical Character Recognition technique. This ensures their easy accessibility on the Internet so that people may easily copy, share and use these works for citations and references. If the books are damaged to a degree that they cannot be scanned, volunteers take the painstaking effort to manually type out whole books and manuscripts.

Odia Wikisource contributors/ CCBYSA4.0 User:Psubhashish

The Odia Wikisource project was realized on 20 October, 2014 after a two-year incubation period. Says Pankajmala Sarangi, long time Odia Wikimedian active on Wikisource, "since [2014] more than 300 old and rare books have been digitised and made available online. Before that, searching [for] a book in Odia was not possible even if it existed in pdf or some other format. Now it has become easy and all the books available on Wikisouce are easily searchable." In addition to digitization, the Odia Wikimedia community members conduct regular quality checks of the content from time to time by ensuring proper licensing, attributions and other errors that may be avoided by thorough proof-reading. While these quality checks follow global guidelines that have been localised to help volunteers prevent vandalism of any form, it has not been without its challenges. Ms. Pankajmala explains that the lack of Odia text on operating systems is problematic for access and availability.

Despite the challenges, Odia Wikisource counts amongst its accomplishments the digitization of a twelve volume 14th century Odia classic as well as 16th century palm leaf manuscripts from the Dadhibaman Temple in Bargarh, Odisha. Taking the movement to classrooms, Odia Wikisource was introduced to students of the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences to pique the interest of young minds in the preservation of Odia language texts online. The many advantages of Odia Wikisource has also been illustrated to institutions with the Utkal University library encouraging the digitization of their rare books and manuscripts by Odia Wikimedians.

Sangram Keshari Senapati, another active Odia Wikimedian explains that Odia Wikisource is important for the preservation of those books which run a high risk of being lost in the coming years. He says, "our future generation must get a chance to read them." Adding to this, Ms. Pankajmala says, "Sky is the limit for Odia wikisource. We will try to digitise more books, most probably triple the number of existing books. We'll even try to reach more libraries and authors and get more books and further digitize them. The number of wikimedians may also flourish till that time."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikisource-turns-3

Marathi Wikipedia - Vishwakosh Workshop for Science writers in IUCAA, Pune

manasarao — 2017-12-20T02:42:39Z

A day-long workshop was organised for science writers at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-University_Centre_for_Astronomy_and_Astrophysics Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics], Pune on 7 October, 2017. Eminent astrophysicist-mathematician couple en:Jayant Narlikar|Jayant^[+] and en:Mangala Narlikar|Mangala Narlikar^[+] , and renowned ecologist en:Madhav Gadgil|Madhav Gadgil^[+] were among the dignitaries present at the event.

The workshop was planned in three sessions. Presentations and discussions were conducted in first session, while second session was focused on actual editing demonstrations on Wikipedia. In the same session the new websites based on different subjects developed by Marathi Vishwakosh were presented. The process of content contribution in text, images, audio and video forms was explained in this session. The third session was to explore networking with Dyanmandals formed by :en:Marathi Vishwakosh|Marathi Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal^[+] . Insisting the expertise of invited authors to contribute the articles in their own chosen fields in a well-structured format, this session will not only train the authors in content generation but also make them understand the expectations of laymen and common readers.

The mete page of the event is here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune

Guest Blog: Retd. Col. Ashwin Baindur on Strategy, Wikimedia Strategy Salon, Vijayawada

manasarao — 2017-10-24T11:52:49Z

User:AshLin aka Col Ashwin Baindur (retd) gave a Plenary Speech(in absentia) on Strategy at the Wikimedia Movement Strategy Salon, held in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh on 27 August 2017. It is reproduced here with permission:

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and my dear Wikimedia friends and colleagues,

I am deeply honoured to be asked to say the opening words for the Movement Strategy Salon being held today at Vijayawada. The problems of ill health prevent me from coming to be with you as I most dearly wish, but I do hope my few words and thoughts will make do instead. Let me introduce myself. I happen to be a retired army officer but I see myself as a citizen of the world, as a Wikipedian whose cherished dream is to make Jimmy Wales dream come true.

“Imagine a world where the sum of all knowledge is available to all mankind!”

The occasion for this conclave or salon is timely. The twenty first century paradigm of Open Culture, of sharing and collective intelligence are well established. Crowdsourcing, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and so many other important global resources are proof.

Education has received a huge fillip by the vastly increased amounts of data and knowledge on the Internet. Open sourcing has made its mark in the software side of the business world. Just as has open access publishing in Academia. Society as a whole has gained by all these manifestations of open culture.

And today, we are gathered here to begin thinking on the directions for the future of the Wikimedia movement in India.

What does this mean in our case? India is a country of many languages, dialects, people, communities, religions, tribes. Along with this are the collective efforts of 1.3 billion people to make a secular, democratic, economically strong nation. The ability to share learning, understanding, experiences are key to this process. And for this, collaboration is a vital necessity.

As of now the Wikimedia effort in India consists of a potpourri of projects, encyclopedia, quote, text repository and the use of Wikimedia Commons as a media repository. We have to grow this into a large, useful and versatile resource in each of our Indic languages.

The Wikimedians, a small band of volunteers to date, must take along the entire society of India so that we have betterment as a nation by first creating and using these resources. And today’s conclave with kindred souls from society, academia, industry.. is a beginning in this regard.

Now we are here to think what directions this Movement must take. I am envious that I can’t be part of this process with you. However, as a retired military person, let me say a few words on strategy and how it is decided.

All planning occurs at three levels. The most basic of activities to be done are referred to as tactics. Tactics are governed by operational planning which comprises of a worked out plan of how to achieve the overall plan or the goal.

The deciding of this overall plan or goal is referred to as strategy.

To be more specific..

“a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty..”

And when we do this for a long period of the future, it is more appropriately termed as ‘grand strategy".

For this we have to ponder - What is our aim? What are our strengths? What are our challenges? What are our opportunities? What are our resources and what are our constraints? What path should we take to achieve our aim?

These are to be reduced into a few directions which are broad based, actionable and full of potential. A good strategy must open huge opportunities, new fields, new possibilities.

The is not easy to do or quick to make. It will take more than one session, more than one day, week or even a month to get our strategy right.

Most important of all is that we learn to think in the new paradigm of sharing and open culture. We should leave behind the mindset of scarcity, possessiveness and personal benefit and embrace the values of the common good, creation of opportunities and innovation.

On our success in making a good strategy, depends the fate of millions of our children and youth who will either benefit from our decisions or lose opportunities if we are not wise and generous. We have to believe in the future. We have to want to make that future great for our nation.

I wish you the very best in this endeavour. I repeat, that I am envious that I can't be with you today. I pray that the things we decide from today onward in this process of grand strategy for the Wikimedia movement in the decades to come.

At the very end, I would like to thank the Wikimedia movement in India, CIS-India, the organisers of this salon and of course, my young friend Krishna Chaitanya Velaga for this opportunity.

Jai Hind!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guest-blog-retd-col-ashwin-baindur-on-strategy-wikimedia-strategy-salon-vijayawada

Marathi Wikipedia Workshop in Sangli, Maharashtra

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-08-16T08:40:58Z

A Marathi Wikipedia workshop was recently held in Sangli, Maharashtra

An introductory Marathi Wikipedia workshop was recently held at CSIBER Trust's V.P. Institute of Management Studies and Research, Sangli, Maharashtra. The workshop aimed to introduce Wikipedia and its sister projects to the participants.

In an effort to implement innovative projects for the students, in March 2017, the institution decided to integrate Wikimedia Projects and academic assignments for capacity building of students and faculty. The implementation started with the Wikipedia edit-a-thon on Environment Management at CSIBER Institute in Kolhapur on 30th March. The Institute in Sangli has also adopted the concept for this academic year. This workshop was organised for faculty and selected students who were taught basic editing skills on Wikipedia, searching for the concerned articles, categorisation and translation from other language wikis. Another focus of the workshop was to integrate academic assignments with Wikimedia projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-workshop-in-sangli-maharashtra

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asian Athletics Championships 2017 Edit-a-thon

Sailesh Patnaik & Jnanaranjan Sahu — 2017-08-01T05:23:47Z

Odia Wikipedians, in conjunction with Indian Athletics Federation and Sports and Youth Services collaborated to document the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships. Hundreds of photos were uploaded and new Wikipedia content added to inform the event’s fans.

The Asian Athletics Championships is an intra-continental sports event organized bi-annually since 1973. The 22nd championship was held in July at the Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar, India, where 655 athletes from 41 countries participated in 21 games. The Odia Wikipedia community worked with the event organizers in different ways, to document the event on Wikipedia, by holding edit-a-thons (editing workshops), to improve Wikipedia’s content about the championships and releasing official photos of the event under free Creative Commons licenses.

The original plan was for the Indian city of Ranchi, Jharkhand to host the 2017 athletics, but plans changed 90 days before the event when Bhubaneswar was selected as a venue instead. Preparing the Kalinga Stadium and getting ready for the championships in that short period was a challenge for the organizers. However, the state government of Odisha stepped in to assist, and as part of that freely shared the event website content under Creative Commons licenses.

The local Wikipedia community, along with the WikiTungi project in Bhubaneswar, were invited by R. Vineel Krishna, the State Department’s Director of Sports and Youth Services, to organize an edit-a-thon for the Championships. The scope was to improve Wikipedia’s content about the participating Asian athletes.

Before the event, existing Wikipedia articles provided little information on the biographies and accomplishments of some of the participating athletes. Odia Wikipedians collaborated with the Sports and Youth Services Department of Odisha to bridge the dearth of information.

Edit-a-thon participants gathered at the office of CSM Technologies, an event partner for the championships. Fifteen Wikimedians from Bhubaneswar and Puri WikiTungi, with some CSM staff members and new editors participated in the edit-a-thon.

Kalinga Stadium,, Bhubaneswar/ CC-BY-SA 4.0/ Sailesh Patnaik

The collection includes images of the athletes during their Heats, Semi Finals, Final, and Medal ceremonies of all four days. 127 images are used in 269 pages on Wikipedia in 27 languages, and many articles added their first image from this collection. WikiProject Women in Red used the images in many female athlete articles. The Odia Wikipedia community and the Centre for Internet and Society are also planning to work with the Wikipedia Asian Month competition to use these images to illustrate Wikipedia articles they work on, in their next edition. Victuallers, one of the volunteers of Women in Red project, identified athlete photos from the games website collection and used them to illustrate their articles. He has also created new articles of other participating female athletes.

Arpitha M. of India in action at the 400m hurdles event/ CC-BY-SA 4.0

The event started with a basic Wikipedia orientation session for new participants. There was no Wikipedia article for the championships in Odia language, so participants created it in addition to improving the English Wikipedia article. Along with that, 10 new articles were improved and created on both Odia and English Wikipedia. The 2017 Championships page on the English Wikipedia received over 100,000 views during the championships week.

“Wikipedia has been the one-stop source of knowledge for me,” says Alankar Devta, an edit-a-thon participant. “It has helped me learn a lot and prepare for competitions. This is the first time, I got a chance to take part in any Wikipedia edit-a-thon. Apart from that, the articles about the athletes taking part in this year’s Championships are of great help for the readers who may want to search for the athletes with expectations to find useful information about them.”

Wikimedia community members were offered passes to attend the opening ceremony and take photos. We spent four hours taking photos of the 41 participating teams, athletes and cultural events. All were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Nearly 19% of the photos taken at the opening ceremony are used on Wikipedia articles.

A major outcome of the edit-a-thon was releasing the content and images of the championship’s official website under a Creative Commons license. 286 images from the websites were added to Wikimedia Commons, of which 47.2% are used on Wikipedia in several languages.

“I have worked with the Women in Red project since it started,” says Victuallers. “Over the past two years, we have helped raise the percentage [of female biographies on the English Wikipedia] from 15.5 to 17%. One of the things that hold us back, though, is that women are less likely to have images available. It’s, therefore, amazing to find that a major athletic event has released hundreds of images with a CC BY-SA license. Participating athletes are all notable and women are fairly well represented. I have downloaded over 100 pictures and cropped group photos to create portraits. We’ve been tweeting the new articles and pictures on @WikiWomenInRed and trying to encourage all to “one up” the Odisha people. It’s a great success and we need more people to follow suit.”

With such collaborative spirit from the Government institutes, the Odia community is planning to get more content from Odisha under a free license. The community has also partnered with the Bhubaneswar Development Authority, to run a global edit-a-thon named Bhubaneswar Heritage Editathon, for documenting the culture and heritage monuments of the city.

A version of this blog post appears on the Wikimedia Blog, co-authored by Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/asian-athletics-championships-2017

Thematic Edit-a-thon at Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science, Satara

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-07-11T09:35:13Z

A Marathi Wikipedia edit-a-thon was held at Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science, Satara. The aim of the workshop was to edit and improve articles on Marathi Wikipedia under the theme "Environment and Local Biodiveristy". Participants were given an orientation on how to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science is housed under the Rayat Shikshan Sanstha, a century-old organization with the largest network of schools and colleges across Maharashtra. The management and local environmental group, Drongo, took the initiative to organize this thematic workshop in Satara, an area rich in terms of biodiversity in the Western Ghats. Noted ecologist and scientist Prof. Madhavrao Gadgil addressed the workshop as a resource person along with Prof. V.Y. Deshpande of the Institute. A total of 23 members from various like-minded organizations participated in the workshop.

Image by सुबोध कुलकर्णी/ CC-BY-SA 4.0

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/thematic-edit-a-thon-at-yashawantrao-chavan-institute-of-science-satara

Tallapaka Pada Sahityam is now on Wikisource

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-07-10T13:44:41Z

Tallapaka Pada Sahityam, a compilation of over fourteen thousand Telugu compositions is now available on Wikisource. Tallapaka Annamacharya was a 15th-century Hindu saint and composer who was renowned for singing in praise of Lord Venkateswara. The Tallapaka lineage began with him, giving rise to many bards in the Telugu language from the family. The Tallapaka Pada Sahityam is a compilation of three generations of Tallapaka poets: Tallapaka Annamacharya, Tallapaka Peda Tirumalacharya, and Tallapaka China Tirumalacharya. This compilation, published by Annamayya Library, Guntur has been uploaded by the library on Wikisource as part of their efforts to digitize the library archives. These lyrical works, dealing with a variety of themes, are of immense literary and cultural significance to Telugu speakers the world over.

Owing to the large size of the file donated by the library, the works need to be separated into 29 volumes. These separated files would be uploaded and indexed on Commons as well. A Unicode version of the work needs to be published and proofread in addition to their print version. Telugu Wikimedians are also exploring the possiblity of re-licensing recitations of the poems by literary connoisseurs. On 9 June, an orientation of these activities was conducted for long time Telugu Wikipedia, te:user:శ్రీరామమూర్తి, who has begun publishing Unicode text and proof-reading on Telugu Wikisource.

The link to the work is here:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Tallapaka_pada_sahityam.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/tallapaka-pada-sahityam-is-now-on-wikisource

Preliminary research result on Wikipedia gender gap in India

ting — 2017-05-23T11:09:23Z

Since June 2016, Ting-Yi Chang from the University of Toronto has worked with the CIS-A2K team to conduct action research on the Wikipedia gender gap in India. The research aims to improve the understanding of the gender gap (imbalance) issue in the Indian Wikipedia communities while examining local interventions.

This post is an extraction from the Wikipedia Gender Gap Bridging Toolkit - South Asia Edition which will be published on Wiki (Commons and meta) in late May 2017. The toolkit is a derivative of the gender gap research initiative.

Wikipedia has a wide gender gap in participation and content coverage. The editor survey in 2011 showed that among the active editors worldwide only 9% identified themselves as female. While research and initiatives have been proposed and conducted to “bridge the gender gap,” mass majority of these studies are done in the Western context (English/European language Wikipedias and communities). The movement dynamics and situation of other Wikipedian communities are not well explored or documented. Of the few studies that did focus on non-Western contexts, this action research is one of the few to look at the issue in India.

Due to the timeline of the research and the limitation of space in this post, we will only discuss the preliminary findings of the study, specifically for the following questions:

Q1: What are existing female Wikipedians’ (regardless of one’s activeness in editing) experience in the Wikimedian communities?

Q2: What are new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in gender gap bridging events) attitude and preference toward these gender gap bridging activities?

In Q1, we used open coding to find recurring themes in the qualitative data collected through 18 semi-structured interviews with 21 female Wikipedians, and label them to find certain patterns of answers. To answer question 2, discussion and infographics will be presented to summarize the 64 survey responses we have gathered.

Q1: What are existing female Wikipedians’ experience in the Wikimedian communities?

Western-based research and survey has shown that a plausible reason behind the gender gap on Wikipedia is the discriminatory and unwelcoming environment within the editor communities. Research was much needed to explore the reasons in the Indian context as we cannot simply apply the same results or rule out the possibility of the same situation. Among the 9 reasons that Sue Gardner, the former Executive Director of WMF, had pointed out in her 2011 blog post, we deem the “misogynist atmosphere” as the most problematic - it signals an unhealthy environment and structure for diversity and long term growth.

Thus, 18 private interviews were held to understand the positive and negative experience that existing female (Indian) Wikipedians have faced in the communities. In this question we are specifically looking at the interaction and interpersonal relationship between community members (editors), hence it does not include experiences like discouragement from speedy deletion or technical difficulty in editing.

In each of the two categories (positive and negative), we use three labels to cover the recurring themes mentioned. In “positive experience,” these are (a) emotional support and respect, (b) bonding and friendship, and (c) other support. In “negative experience,” the three labels are (a) neglected or belittled, (b) sexist comments, and (c) safety concern.

It is interesting to note that although in most (Western-based) research, the positive and negative experiences were in the online context, our interviewees (Indian female Wikipedians) had mostly pointed out experiences that were either offline or in non-specified context. Comments on the online interaction dynamics were fairly rare and neutral, while negative experiences mostly occurred in the offline settings.

This can indicate that the communities’ offline interaction dynamics leaves a much more significant impression (sadly, especially when it is negative) to female Wikipedians on their overall community experience. Additionally, it seems that compared to the Western/English context, Indian Wikipedian communities are more close-knit and active offline, that is, the editors are more likely to know each other personally. This dynamic is a great plus to create positive experience such as strong bonding and emotional support. However, it may also be more toxic when the experience is negative as compared to if the experience was online and anonymous. In other words, sexist comments, deliberate neglect, and safety concerns can have an aggravated effect when faced personally.

In numbers, more positive experiences were mentioned than negative ones when a neutral question was asked (such as “How do you think about the community?” / ”what is your experience in the editor community so far?”). Most negative experience were only revealed when a negative-oriented question was asked (such as “Have you had any negative or uncomfortable experience so far?”). This may be interpreted that the interviewees’ overall experiences are positive with only occasional negative encounters. However, this interpretation can still be biased if we consider the possibility that:

There is a lack of trust between the researcher and the interviewees (i.e. Interviewees may have the intention to provide a more pleasing/non-controversial answer), or
the selection of our interviewees was already biased since “existing” female Wikipedians can be those that have not experienced much negative experience (i.e. the female editors who were upset by more negative experiences and had already quit editing were not reachable when the interviews were conducted, or they might simply be uninterested in participating in the research).

Q2: What are new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in gender gap bridging events) attitude and preference toward these gender gap bridging activities?

As indicated in our last question, the offline interaction and activities seem to be very crucial in determining a female Wikipedian’s overall experience in the community. In other questions throughout the semi-structured interview, we had asked existing female Wikipedians - who had been active in gender gap bridging event conduct - to discuss what can make an event more welcoming to women. Below are some of the answers given:

A women-only event (although some also criticized that this approach often made the gender gap a “women-only” discussion)
Female tutor’s presence
Offline events where women can meet others face to face (although some had mention that they prefer to participate online - which makes them feel safer and more comfortable)
The chance for participants to socialize and make friends
Write about women-related topics (although some had argued that a gender gap bridging event should not promote the tokenizing logic that (only) women should (only) edit on women-related topics)

As you may notice, there are divergence of ideas regarding the points A, C, and E. In order to cross-check all these ideas, a survey of 11 scale-rating questions was developed to understand the new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in a gender gap bridging event) attitude and preferences. Three clusters of questions were formed - general experience, cross-checking questions, and attitude.

Below is an infographics on the 64 responses we had collected: (You may click on the image at the top of this page (under the blog title) to zoom in)

From the infographics above we can see that event participants’ overall experience are positive. However, it may still be far from perfect as there were 2 respondents who “fully disagreed” with the statement “I find the event environment safe, friendly, and welcoming.” There are still more than 40% of the respondents who thought editing is difficult (or somewhat difficult), which means improvement is needed in our event tutorship or a re-estimation participants’ skill levels is needed. Participants’ attitude towards the events was also mostly positive as indicated in the last two questions.

Cross-checking (A): Do women prefer a women-only event?

During the events, the presenters and resource persons usually encouraged male participation in the initiatives and stressed that the gender gap bridging efforts cannot be a further segregation between men and women editors. Hence, we do expect this to influence the answers given to the statement “I still prefer a women-only event.” Still, more than one-third of the participants indicated their preference in women-only events; we expect the actual rate to be even higher if the said factor was not present.

Cross-checking (B): Is the presence of female tutor(s) important? (Does a tutor’s gender matter?)

Question 5 and 6 show very interesting results. In the offline (in real life) event context, there seem to be more disagreement on the statement “I would prefer a woman to be my tutor.” These responses can be affected by the fact that majority of the tutors in Wikipedia events were still men, and if a participant had generally positive experience throughout the event, they might not be against the idea of having a male tutor again. Nonetheless, interestingly, the answer turned the other way around when the scenario changed to an “online” setting. More respondents then agreed that they would prefer a women as their tutor. This may be a sign that women are more alert and defensive when it comes to online interaction with people in the opposite sex.

Cross-checking (C) : Do women prefer offline (in-real-life) events over online ones?

Over 50% of the respondents chose “fully agree” to the statement while only 5 respondents chose either fully or partially disagree. We can conclude that women who had experience in an offline (in-real-life) event would still prefer the same setting in the future. However, of course, we cannot be sure how many women may have turned down this first event experience because it was offline. In other words, we do not know if the preference of women who had never attended any events. However, what we know is that mass majority of those who had one offline event experience would prefer the offline setting over an online participation.

Cross-checking (D): Does socializing matter to women?

Majority of the respondents fully agreed with the statement “I would like to socialize with and know more Wikipedians.” This is one of the very few questions where no one disagreed to. Although we cannot calculate the personal utility of socializing or conclude that socializing is “necessary” to make women feel more comfortable, we can assume that it will be a positive addition to the events if women can make new friends in the communities.

Cross-checking (E): Are women interested in women-related topics? Or would they have preferred to write about their expertise areas?

From the survey, we found that more women actually showed interest in writing on women-related topics than on their domain knowledge subjects. Over 80% of the respondents agreed that they were interested in writing more about women (and related topics) while slightly fewer women said the same about their expertise knowledge. Only 8 out of 64 respondents expressed a preference for writing on their domain knowledge topics over women-related topics. Hence, it seems that women-related topics are a good place to start (for one’s first Wikipedia event experience) as most women enjoyed it. One thing we are not able to estimate is how long can this interest be sustained.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/preliminary-research-result-on-wikipedia-gender-gap-in-india

Thematic Edit-a-thon at J.P.Naik Centre for Education & Development, Pune

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-06-07T08:59:43Z

A Marathi Wikipedia workshop was held at the J.P. Naik Centre for Education and Development in Pune recently.

A Marathi Wikipedia workshop was conducted in conjunction with VIgyan Ashram, a social work organization on 9 May, 2017. This was held at the J.P. Naik Centre for Education and Development. Vigyan Ashram conducts courses on Introduction to Basic Technology (IBT) or Multi Skill Foundation Course in various schools for integrating socially useful productive work with school curriculum. The goal of Wikipedia edit-a-thon was to attempt to integrate these objectives with Wikipedia Education Program and develop long term strategies. It also aims to build resources in the field of appropriate rural technologies on Marathi Wikipedia and equip its participants with the skills necessary to contribute to Wikipedia.

A total of 23 IBT coordinators from 18 schools(of 9 districts) participated in the workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/thematic-edit-a-thon-at-j-p-naik-centre-for-education-development-pune

Wiki Loves Mayabazaar

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-06-07T09:24:35Z

On the 60th anniversary of the movie Mayabazar, Telugu Wikimedians celebrated Wiki Loves Mayabazar, an event to commemorate the cult Telugu film Mayabazar. As part of the celebrations, an edit-a-thon of the same name was held at Ravindra Bharathi in Hyderabad. Interestingly, the Cultural Department of Telangana Government sponsored the entire event.

In the Telugu speaking regions, there is a well-known appreciation of the cinematic arts. Mayabazar, released in 1957 captured the imagination of fans like no other film had before. Telugu Wikipedians decided to pay tribute to the movie by improving articles and content related to it on Telugu Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

The edit-a-thon was held on 30 April, 2017 at the monthly Wikimitra Vedika meetup of Telugu Wikipedians. A screening of the film took place followed by discussions on references, citations, film studies and articles related to the film. From 1 May 2017, the edit-a-thon took place online.

There were 15 participants of which only one member was female. Telugu Wikipedian, Kasyap hoped for more participation as this "is an interesting event."

However, the event was made popular by the wide ranging media coverage in print and electronic media.

Media pieces on the event:

1. ‘మాయాబజార్‌’కు వినూత్న షష్టిపూర్తి

(Eenadu Newspaper; 1 May, 2017)

2.‘మాయాబజార్’కు 60 ఏళ్లు.. వినూత్న షష్టిపూర్తి వేడుకకు సిద్ధమవుతున్న వికీపీడియన్లు! (Ap7am.com; 1 May 2017)Wiki Loves Mayabazaar

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wiki-loves-mayabazaar

Marathi Wikipedia Symposium at Gokhale Institute Of Politics & Economics

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-06-07T08:45:18Z

A strategic symposium on Marathi Wikipedia and its sister projects was conducted on 29 April, 2017

The Marathi Wikipedia community held a symposium at the Gokhale Instititute of Politics and Economics on 29 April, 2017. This was an attempt to bring together various stakeholders for developing a strategic plan for Marathi language wiki projects such as Wikipedia, and especially Marathi Wikisource and Wiktionary. Over 70 persons were involved in the strategic planning efforts to take Wikisource and Wiktionary to existing Marathi Wikipedians and the general public at large. Eminent ecologist, Prof. Madhav Gadgil served as a resource persons for this event.

Gokhale Institute Of Politics & Economics and Rawat's Nature Academy took lead in organising this symposium. CIS-A2K facilitated the process. A total of 50 eminent personalities from various fields such as literature, linguistics, journalism, science forums, publishers, librarians, State Language & Culture Department honchos, active citizen forums working on different issues etc. took active part in the proceedings. They aim to act as anchors in future. According to the needs of Wikimedia projects, 12 Action Groups have been formed. Planning further sessions for May and June has begun over a common email thread.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/marathi-wikipedia-symposium-at-gokhale-institute-of-politics-economics

Continuing community engagement: Communities of interest and Quarrying

Manasa Rao — 2017-05-19T15:23:28Z

In telling the stories of Indian Wikipedians, we bring to you the story of Dr. Diptanshu Das, a doctor and avid Wikipedian, working with WikiProject Medicine who recently approached CIS-A2K with a technical request.

CIS-A2K has always believed in continuing our engagement with the communities and individuals we work with. This year in particular has been special to us thanks to our Train The Trainer alumni steadily achieving the goals they set out to achieve and continuing their Wiki journeys with more vigour. It is especially significant to us when our alumni come back to our resource and idea exchange platform to help develop their pet projects. For the first time, one such alumnus, Dr. Diptanshu Das, a doctor by profession and avid Wikipedian approached us in April 2017 with a request to our technical team. He wanted to know the number of articles that were tagged in both Category:WikiProject Pharmacology and Category:All WikiProject Medicine.

To provide some context, WikiProjects are generally article development projects undertaken by groups of editors on Wikipedia whose aim it is to achieve goals on specific topics and subjects on Wikipedia. For example, WikiProject Medicine manages and helps curate medical articles on Wikipedia. Similarly, WikiProject Pharmacology states that it "coordinates the development of Wikipedia articles and lists relating to the pharmacology and science of medications and other pharmacology-related topics." Working to define clearer guidelines for WikiProject Medicine of which he is a member, Dr. Das intended to find out how many articles were listed under WikiProject Pharmacology that were also tagged under WikiProject Medicine. As these two are closely related topics, the former being a sub-specialty of the latter, he felt it could cause an overlap which would mean that most of the sub-specialty articles would get lost in the "parent" category i.e. WikiProject Medicine.

CIS-A2K ran Dr. Das' request on Quarry, a public querying interface that lets one raise queries regarding databases in addition to managing them as an SQL(Structured Query Language) software would. Dr. Das had begun discussions with fellow Wikipedians to get their thoughts on the matter and wanted to provide data-specific points but was unable to gather consensus on developing a guideline. However, when CIS-A2K reported back to him, he realized that the overlap was not as significant as he had feared. WikiProject Medicine had 34,475 articles, WikiProject Pharmacology had 10,721 articles; only 2002 of these were tagged in both. Dr. Das, while relieved, believes that sub-specialty tagging would go a long way in helping improve articles such as those of WikiProject Pharmacology, many of which are still in Start and Stub classes.

"While collaborating on wiki is always good, it is important that an organization like CIS contributes its expertize," he says. CIS-A2K's presence as an idea exchange platform hopes to generate debate and discussions in addition to the physical resources and support we provide to communities. Dr. Das is also of the opinion that domain knowledge experts could make a real difference to Wikipedia by engaging with or creating WikiProjects that are specific to their interests and collaborate with other free knowledge champions around the world. CIS-A2K has attempted to encourage such communities of interest in the past so as to find an easier way to engage members of the general public and educational institutions as they are more likely to edit Wikipedia articles based on their personal hobbies and interests.

If you have requests for us please post them here or email Tito Dutta at tito@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/continuing-community-engagement-communities-of-interest-and-quarrying

Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Savitribai Phule Mahila Ekatma Samaj Mandal, Aurangabad

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-04-19T11:44:41Z

A Marathi Wikipedia edit-a-thon was conducted at Savitribai Phule Mahila Ekatma Samaj Mandal in Aurangabad

Savitribai Phule Mahila Ekatma Samaj Mandal, a social work organisation working with underprivileged sections of society in Aurangabad partnered with CIS-A2K to conduct a Marathi Wikipedia edit-a-thon on 13 April, 2017. The aim of the workshop was to introduce Wikipedia to the participants and enable them to contribute to Wiki projects. The theme of the edit-a-thon was to build resources on topics related to rural development and women's empowerment. The four hour edit-a-thon was attended by 30 participants who made a total of 300 edits. 15 new articles were created and 60 images were uploaded to Commons.

The link to the event page on meta can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-at-savitribai-phule-mahila-ekatma-samaj-mandal-aurangabad

Digitisation, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource Orientation Workshop at Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, Pune District

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-06-07T08:37:48Z

A digitization workshop was held at Vigyan Ashram, following the success of the introductory workshop in February.

On 5 February, an introductory Wikipedia orientation program was held in partnership with Vigyan Ashram, for 15 youths from Pabal and surrounding villages in Shirur, Maharashtra. Given the keen interest and enthusiasm of the participants, a follow up workshop was held on 3 April, 2017.

This workshop was attended by 30 participants who were trained on Wikimedia projects such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. They were given an orientation on digitization and OCR tools as well. The workshop aims to enable the training of resource persons who can go onto be employed at libraries and museums in order to help with their digitization efforts. The scanning of old encyclopedias in Marathi has also been proposed for the Wiktionary project.

Participants were taught how to upload books from the Internet Archive to Wikimedia Commons. Subsequently,there was also a demonstration of transferring books from Commons to Wikisource. There are two ways of doing this: the page by page OCR process or converting a complete book through OCR4Wikisource. As OCRS4Wikisource program runs only on Linux, limitation of machines at the event was a hurdle in providing all the participants a hands on experience. Therefore, the scanning activity could not be completed.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digitisation-wikimedia-commons-and-wikisource-orientation-workshop-at-vigyan-ashram-pabal-pune-district