Centre for Internet and Society

Wikipedia Orientation Programme for the Second Language Students of Christ University

praskrishna — 2013-11-14T05:16:07Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team will organize an Orientation Workshop entitled on Wikipedia for the undergraduate language students of the Christ University, Bangalore on November 16, 2013.

Trainers

T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet Society

Syed Muzammiluddin, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet Society

Dr Pavanaja,Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet Society

Interested Participants

The three days of the orientation programme will cover 1200 second language students of the Christ University, Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/wikipedia-orientation-programme-for-second-language-students

Wikipedia Orientation Program at Rotary Club of Salem

manasarao — 2017-12-11T15:52:12Z

CIS-A2K in conjunction with the Rotary Club of Salem, Tamil Nadu conducted a two-day Wikipedia orientation workshop for student members of the club.

Over the December 9- 10 weekend, CIS-A2K, in conjunction with the Rotary Club of Salem, Tamil Nadu conducted a two-day Wikipedia orientation workshop. This workshop focussed on teaching the basics of Wikipedia to all the student members of the club. The overwhelming participation of women volunteers was the highlight of the event. The workshop was organised by the Rotary Club while Salem Tamil Sangam also lent its support to the program. The President of the Rotary Club of Salem implored the students to contribute to the Tamil language by involving themselves more deeply with the Wikimedia projects.

With 13 female participants and 10 male participants, the participants were upbeat throughout both days. Veteran Tamil Wikipedian, Tamil Parithi acted as resource person along with CIS-A2K. Mr. Parithi explained the philosophy and history of the free knowledge movement which he felt was essential to the understanding of the wider Wikimedia movement. Usha Sanghamitra, a participant, reflects, "I previously thought some company was doing this but I am glad to note that it is people like you and me that are editing this information and creating such knowledge resources. I will surely take this up and continue to engage with Wikipedia."

A follow-up workshop is on the cards in December 2017.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikipedia-orientation-program-at-rotary-club-of-salem

Wikipedia Meet-up in TERI

praskrishna — 2011-09-22T12:21:53Z

The Wikipedia Bangalore meet-up is a monthly get-together of Wikipedians (contributors and users) to meet, discuss, share experiences, reach out and advocate for Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Danese Cooper, Chief Technical Officer, Wikimedia Foundation, Alolita Sharma, Engineering Programs Manager, Wikimedia Foundation, Erik Möller, Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation and Achal Prabhala, Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board Member attended the meeting. The Centre for Internet and Society made arrangements for this event.

The Indian wiki community is dedicated to mainly improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to the Republic of India and the history and culture of the Indian subcontinent.The efforts of Indian Wikipedians in English wikipedia is coordinated through Wikiproject India.

This meeting was held at The Energy & Resources Institute (TERI), near to Domlur Club in Bangalore on Saturday, 18 December 2010 and was attended by about 41 participants. There was good attendance from various professional fields – wildlife photographers, journalists, techies, students from Rajasthan (who were in Bangalore to attend FOSS.in) and many who were interested in Indic versions of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has 250 language versions. Their main data center is in Tampa (Florida). Most surfers from India would be hitting their caching servers in Amsterdam. The primary data however, will always reside in the United States of America as Wikipedia appreciates the freedom of speech provided by the US govt.

Wikimedia Foundation officials have met many important government departments in Delhi for promoting the Indic versions of Wiki. But the Government of India is not willing to open-source the fonts that are developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. There are 278 wikipedias including one wikipedia each for English and Simple English and there are more than 79,000 articles related to India on English Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation wants to promote Indic versions on mobile in a big way and is keen to work with Indian mobile handset makers to have the offline version of Wikipedia shipped with handsets. English has about 3.5 million articles. Indic has far lesser but can catch up with English provided people start contributing content. Indic editors can set up their own rules for content contribution and it need not be as tight as they have for English. Examples were cited from other countries. For example, Russia has been doing exceptionally well in adding Russian content and nobody in the world can beat the Germans for perfection. They pay a lot of attention to quality. Indians should also do so, it was felt.

Also see

The Wikipedia page
Mahesh's Blog Post

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-meet-up-bangalore

Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (Coverage in Prajavani)

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T11:04:24Z

Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave a presentation on Wikipedia with a special focus on students and women at Roshini Nilaya, Mangalore on February 26, 2014. An event report was published in Prajavani the following day.

Scanned version of the report published by Prajavani on February 27 is below. The event was organised by Roshini Nilaya and co-sponsored by CS-A2K.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-workshop-mangalore-coverage-prajavani-february-27-2014

Wikipedia Live Phone-in Programme on HMTV

praskrishna — 2013-06-18T05:54:01Z

Vishnu Vardhan took part in a one hour live phone-in programme on Wikipedia. This was telecasted in HMTV on June 1, 2013.

Dr. Rajasekar, Administrator on Telugu Wikipedia; Malladi Kameshwararao, Journalist and Telugu Wikipedian; Rahimanuddin Shaik, Telugu SIG, Wikimedia India Chapter; and T. Vishnu Vardhan Programme Director, CIS-A2K participated in a one-hour live phone-in programme on Telugu Wikipedia broadcast by HMTV (a Telugu News Channel) on June 1, 2013. This is probably for the first time a television news channel in India has done a live phone-in programme on Wikipedia. HMTV had also done a half-an-hour feature on Wikipedia which was broadcast on May 30 and May 31, 2013.

Videos

Part 1

Part 2

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-live-phone-in-programme

Wikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants

subha — 2013-07-17T06:33:20Z

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

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

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

1 http://bit.ly/11DMH5w

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

Wikipedia Indian Languages Workshop at IIT, Bombay

noopur — 2013-03-28T11:44:04Z

This is a brief report on the Wikipedia Indian languages workshop held on March 9, 2013 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in partnership with Vaani, the Hindi bloggers' club at IIT, Bombay.

Vaani is a group of students at the institute who maintain personal blogs in Hindi language. They upload stories, poems and other original material in Hindi and hold regular meetings as a part of Vaani. Their motive is to conserve and promote the love for native languages, especially that of Hindi.

The A2K team had proposed a meeting and workshop to Vaani students earlier in February but it was eventually scheduled in March. The date also coincided with Women's day celebrations which gave us an opportunity to discuss questions of gender, access, knowledge bias on Wikipedia and more. It was attended by 17 participants and was coordinated by Apoorv Maheshwari from Vaani.

The participant group was diverse – it consisted of doctoral students from humanities as well as sciences and a few graduate students from different departments. Before talking about how to contribute to Wikipedia, we had a round of introductions and questions from participants about what they wanted to know. Most of the participants had seen the 'edit' button and had clicked on it but were clueless beyond that. They also wanted to know about the style guide to writing articles on Wikipedia. After initial discussions and a few edits on English Wikipedia, we moved to exploring Indian language Wikipedias. Surprisingly, only a few of them knew that Wikipedia exists in Indian languages. This led to questions of font support, readership and contribution – who contributes to Indian Wikipedias, why one should contribute and more.

Unfortunately, since the institute's IP address has been reported and blocked for vandalism, we could not make user accounts on the spot. However, they tried their hand at editing to understand the process itself. Another challenge while doing workshops with Indian language Wikipedias is font support for individual computers that participants bring. Perhaps there is a need to carry support documentation and tools (keyboard layouts and free fonts). Towards the end, they expressed an interest in a longer Wikipedia program for all the bloggers on campus in different languages.

We thank the members of Vaani for their support and participation and hope to build and sustain this relationship further.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-workshop-at-iit-bombay

Wikipedia in UG Education program at Christ University

praskrishna — 2014-05-27T10:19:48Z

On May 15, 2014, Prajavani published an article about Wikipedia in UG Education program in Christ University.

Click to read the online version published by Prajavani here.

A scanned version of the article is given below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/prajavani-may-15-2014-wikipedia-ug-education-christ-university

Wikipedia in St. Xavier's College, Mapusa, Goa

nitika — 2013-07-26T11:33:29Z

A three hour Wikipedia workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet & Society, Delhi, in the morning of December 14, 2012 at St. Xavier's College in Mapusa, Goa. Over 30 participants attended the session.

The workshop started with a short introductory presentation followed by a learning session on how to edit the Wikipedia. Since there were lesser number of computers, participants were divided in groups of 2 or 3 at the maximum. Each group made at least 3 edits with the help of volunteers present in the room.

A follow up session will be organised in January or February of 2013 to organise an edit-a-thon for all the interested and enthusiastic participants.

A special thanks to everyone who helped organising this event, especially to Harriet Vidyasagar, Frederick, Debanjan - all from the Wikipedia family and Nitin Volvoikar, the Head of Journalism Department from St. Xavier's.


Above is a picture of the whole group of participants at the St.Xavier's College at Mapusa, Goa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-in-st-xaviers-college-goa

Wikipedia in Indian Languages on Mobile Phones

praskrishna — 2013-10-25T06:00:28Z

Wikipedia in India's regional languages and accessible over mobile phones is revolutionising the way Internet content is used in this multi-lingual country, say information technology (IT) experts.

This post by Megha Prakash was published in Sci Dev Net on October 15, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

"Developing Wikipedia and other content in regional languages is a way forward to bridge the knowledge gap," says T. Vishnu Vardhan, programme director of the Access to Knowledge project at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore.

In September, CIS signed an agreement with Goa University to train students and foster collaborative content development with Wikipedia libraries and archives in view. A similar agreement was signed in August with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, while a third is due to be signed this month with Christ University, Bangalore.

India's 28 states and seven union territories are organised on a linguistic basis and three of its vernaculars — Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi — rate among the world's ten most widely spoken languages, each with its own script.

With 70 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people and the market flooded with affordable feature phones, the majority of India's 1.2 billion people potentially have access to IT. Current usage, however, is limited to downloading entertainment content and to such applications as mobile banking.

Vardhan tells SciDev.Net that attention is now being paid to developing knowledge repositories in India's regional languages.

M. Sampath Kumar, who heads the Telugu department at the University of Madras in Chennai, says the Telugu Wikipedia is regularly used by students and researchers and is a resource for speakers of the language living abroad but eager to maintain community links.

Kumar tells SciDev.Net that literary content is popular and that there is a future for regional Wikipedia in educating the younger generation and serving as a free repository for traditional knowledge in the vernacular.

Subbiah Arunachalam, a Chennai-based IT consultant, says the effort will benefit non-English speaking rural youth at school and college levels and help bring them on par with their urban counterparts in terms of knowledge.

A programme funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and due to end in June 2014 covers the Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, Bengali and Konkani languages. A Hindi version already has 100,000 articles and recorded eight million views.

'Lilavati's Daughters', a book on Indian women scientists published by the Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences, is currently being translated into the regional languages with a view to engaging women content developers and editors.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/sci-dev-net-megha-prakash-wikipedia-in-indian-languages-on-mobile-phones

Wikipedia Hackathon at BITS Hyderabad

praskrishna — 2012-10-25T08:42:56Z

CIS - A2K team and BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad Campus are organizing a hackathon for their tech fest — ATMOS on October 26 - 27, 2012, from 6.00 p.m. on October 26 to 6.00 a.m. on October 27.

An all night hackathon to get started in contributing technically to the world’s largest source of free information – Wikipedia. The code that you write (and eventually deploy) will be viewed/used 7,938,026,125 times a month! Write user scripts that fix annoying little things with the way Wikipedia functions. Write bots to import (and accurately maintain) large amounts of information from various sources into Wikipedia. Write tools to make it easier to maintain Wikipedia’s standards and fight spam. Most of all join the awesome Open Source community and have fun!

Pre-requisites:

Preferable working knowledge of HTML/CSS/Javascript *or* python.

Laptops, which you will have to carry with you.

To register for the event, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-hackathon-bits-hyderabad

Wikipedia Gains Massive Traffic Thanks To Vernacular Languages

praskrishna — 2013-08-19T04:18:24Z

The blog post was published in Before It's News on August 1, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

Click to read the original published in Before It's News

Non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, the parent company of knowledge-based article collating platform Wikipedia seems to be receiving enhanced traction on the portal from India. The reason for this upswing in activity is apparently its decision to expand the scope of the portal via multiple Indian Languages, revealed a recent study by the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society (CIS).

A while back Wikipedia, sensing the need of non-English speaking /understanding audience had opened its doors for about 18 Indian Languages. The main attractions seemed to be articles penned down in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam & Kannada, which managed to attract a lot of writers who have come forth & added “thousands” of new articles in these & other native languages, all within a span of 8 months ranging from September 2012 to April 2013.

Interestingly, the study reveals that though a lot of pages did get created, many of these articles did not enjoy equally massive visitor count. However, when Wikipedia subsequently extended the support to Marathi & Bengali, the reader-count picked up. Started just a few months back, about 40,000 articles written in Marathi have been getting 30 Lakh visitors & these pages have collectively managed to add another 10 Lakh monthly visitors, while Bengali articles has been steadily getting about 14 Lakh Page Views per month.

Wikipedia seems to have undoubtedly fueled the consumption of online content. It has proven that people actually craved for knowledge in the native language, but didn’t have a proper platform. However, there were a few technological hurdles as well. Web Browsers, in their formative stages, simply didn’t have the capability of pulling, processing & displaying languages or alphabets other than English. Additionally, having been used to type in English-only keyboards, penning information-laden articles in native languages did have a long & steep learning curve.

Thankfully, such petty, but pestering issues seem to have been ironed out & creation, publication & consumption of content in local languages has evidently picked-up steam. Now the writers, who are fondly called ‘Wiki foot soldiers’ have been forwarding the crusade of offering free knowledge to anyone interested & numbers at both the end is growing healthily.

Judging by the appetite for online content in their local avatar, T Vishnu Vardhan, Program Director, Access to Knowledge Project, CIS has aptly summarized the current state of altered necessities. He says “In the last two years, the demand for knowledge in Indian languages has grown as we have moved to the motto of ‘roti, kapda and internet” What do you think?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/beforeitnews-august-1-2013-wikipedia-gains-massive-traffic-thanks-to-vernacular-languages

Wikipedia Editing as Assessment Tool in the Indian Higher Education Classroom

Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashwin Kumar A.P. and T. Vishnu Vardhan — 2014-01-30T10:06:40Z

Getting students to create and edit Wikipedia entries in English and Indian languages can be a comprehensive assessment tool at the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels. Both levels of higher education require the demonstration of the ability to present knowledge in encyclopaedic form, which can be done by a good review of relevant literature and the showcasing of key arguments in the field.

Using the Dublin competency level descriptors,[*] we can put down what sorts of higher education skills Wikipedia editing can help evaluate. The most commonly accepted descriptors internationally are:

Demonstration of Knowledge and understanding
Applying knowledge and understanding
Making judgements
Communication abilities
Learning skills relevant to higher education

Wikipedia allows for assessing the ‘depth’ of an article which is the measure of the quality of an entry. The depth is a function of several parameters like the number of edits an article has seen, the length of discussion in the talk pages, the number of footnotes, references, hyperlinks and editors active on that page. In addition to this, providing Wiki-interlinks to key concepts within an article and categorization of articles exposes the students to a "semantic web" of interconnections between various fields of knowledge. Although, it may not be a complete substitute for the more formal modes of assessment, it provides a more rounded form of evaluation for student assessment. The ‘depth’ indicator also shows the relative significance of an article for the larger community of users, thereby providing a better model for student assessment in the long run.

Bachelor's Level

By getting students to edit on Wikipedia at the Bachelor’s Level, you can test the following, and appropriate weightage can be given to each aspect of the work:

Comprehension of the theory, concepts and processes pertaining to a field or fields of learning
Demonstration of knowledge, supported by the use of advanced textbooks and other reading materials, of one or more specialised areas
Ability to apply this knowledge and comprehension in a manner that indicates a thorough and informed approach to the work, and have competences typically demonstrated through devising and sustaining arguments
Ability to gather and interpret relevant data to inform independent judgements which include reflection on relevant social, scientific or ethical issues
Ability to communicate information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist audiences [in the case of Wikipedia, the audience would usually be a non-specialist one]

Master's Level

By getting students to edit on Wikipedia at the Master’s Level, you can test the following, and appropriate weightage can be given to each aspect of the work:

Demonstration of knowledge and comprehension that is founded upon, extends and enhances that associated with the Bachelor’s level and is at the forefront of a field of learning
Critical awareness of current problems and new insights, new tools and new processes within their field of learning (ability to do a good literature review, which can be seen through the citations provided for a Wikipedia entry)
Ability to apply their knowledge, comprehension, and critical awareness in broader or multidisciplinary areas related to their fields of study
Ability to integrate knowledge and handle complexity, to formulate judgements with incomplete or limited information, with an awareness of the social and ethical responsibilities linked to the application of their knowledge and judgements
Ability to communicate their conclusions, and knowledge, rationale and processes underpinning these, to specialist and non-specialist audiences clearly and unambiguously
Ability to reflect on one’s own writing by engaging with feedback received from a collaborative network.
Ability to form peer knowledge networks through collaboration and interaction with other contributors

Risks and Mitigation

It is helpful to be aware of the typical risks a faculty may face in using Wikipedia entries as an assessment tool.

New article creation: Wikipedias, especially the English Wikipedia, are closely monitored by thousands of volunteers from across the world. Often, articles created by new users come under a lot of scrutiny. It is advisable to first encourage the students to edit and improve the existing articles before creating a new article all by themselves. Also taking the help of an experienced Wikipedian will go a long way in mentoring the students on the nuances of the Wikipedia platform and the volunteer community that strives in good faith to preserve the quality of entries.
Copyright violation: Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v (i.e., plagiarism) is a major challenge for the higher education sector across the world. Often the students find that copy-pasting the content from various sources is an easy way of doing an assignment. On Wikipedia, plagiarism is taken very seriously and a student editor can get banned from further contribution to Wikipedia, which may de-motivate the entire class. It’s useful for the faculty to give a detailed orientation on this aspect before encouraging the students to take up writing a Wikipedia entry as an assignment. There are numerous resources (text and videos) made available by Wikimedians across the world explaining the problem of plagiarism. These could be used by the faculty.
If you are encouraging students to write an entry in an Indian language Wikipedia, special attention and support needs to be planned to train the students in typing in that particular Indian language script. Wikipedias have a useful tool called Universal Language Selector (ULS) which makes it very easy for the student to start typing in any script using the transliteration method. There is increasing support for Indian language scripts, however. You could check whether your University computer lab has Unicode compliant computers/systems. This will help the students to work offline on their assignment, if required.
One of the biggest challenges for a teacher is to get the student to see the value of taking up a Wikipedia entry as an assignment. Some of the students may see this as an additional task or extra-curricular activity and may not put in a committed effort, which could affect the goals you have set for your course. Faculties are encouraged to find various means of integrating/dovetailing the Wikipedia assignment into the curriculum or course.
Faculty may also feel this as an additional burden on them, especially in terms of evaluation of the assignment. There are various tools available to measure most of the assessment parameters set out above, which will not take much time. It is in fact possible to save faculty time if the evaluation is planned meticulously.
A pragmatic challenge for the faculty would be to deal with a scenario where the entire class submits the assignments on Wikipedia on the last day. This will not only increase burden on the faculty but can also result in a lot of plagiarism. An effective way to address this challenge is to make the Wikipedia entry assignment part of a formative assessment, whereby the student develops the entry over a period of time (e.g. one month or during the course). There are various tools through which you can track the students’ contribution continuously and share feedback with them periodically.

[*].Available at http://www.tcd.ie/teaching-learning/academic-development/assets/pdf/dublin_descriptors.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-as-assessment-tool-in-indian-higher-education-classroom

Wikipedia Editathon on India Women's History at CBIT, Hyderabad

syed — 2014-04-07T01:32:57Z

“Wikipedia Editathon on India Women's History” and “Work-Life Balance: Women in Engineering” were organized parallelly at Chaitanya Bharati Institute of Technology (CBIT), Hyderabad on March 8, 2014. These events had a common session during the morning and a separate sessions in the afternoon.

The speakers for the morning session included Dr V Malakonda Reddy, Chairman,CBIT, Y Hemalatha, Chief Guest, CBIT staff Members V Hari Leela, Dr D Sandhya Sri and Dr B Chennakesava Reddy. Dr V Malakonda Reddy emphasised that the high position given to women is by no means a gift of the western society. He recalled the historic role played by women in India. Other speakers also stressed on importance of the day and the need for women as leaders and proactive members of the society.

During the morning session, Vishnu Vardhan, Director, Access to Knowledge, Centre for the Internet and Society, recalled that first computer programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace, which clearly necessitates a need for women to play an even more significant role in the Information technology era. He also spoke about the Ada Initiative (http://adainitiative.org/) which supports women in open technology and culture. He concluded by showing the English and Telugu project pages of the ediathons running concurrently and especially encouraged the girl students to participate in the editathon.

During the second session of the “Wikipedia Editathon on India Women's History”, Vishnu Vardhan explained the concept of “Wiki” and Wikipedia editing basics. On this occasion, a student volunteer Gayathri demonstrated the editing basics of Wikipedia on the stage.

She was later felicitated. All volunteers wore Wikipedia t-shirts which were provided prior to the event.

The practical session in the afternoon was handled by Syed Muzammiluddin, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, Centre for the Internet and Society. Later, in the evening there was a separate session with student volunteers. During the course of the session, the volunteers led by Ranjit and Ashraf showed CBIT Wiki (http://www.3mb.in/ES).They said that contributing to Wikipedia will definitely help them to build their college Wiki. It was pointed out that most of the CBIT students have registered on Wikipedia and many contributions are in the offing. The volunteers also informed that they have also signed up for Wikimedia India mailing list as they want to see more collaboration among the Wikimedia India community in future and be part of it. Prof Swamidas of the Information Technology Department supervised all the day long activities of the event.

Media Coverage

Andhra Prabha (March 8, 2014)
Andhra Bhoomi (March 8, 2014)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-editathon-on-india-women-history-at-cbit

Wikipedia edit-a-thons to add content on LGBTs

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T06:41:42Z

From Monday, Wikipedia will hold a series of “edit-a-thons” to encourage people to add content to the site about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

The article by Renuka Phadnis was published in the Hindu on July 7, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

It is inspired by “Wiki Loves Pride”, a global campaign to expand and improve LGBT-related content across Wikimedia projects. The campaign focuses on the June to October period, when LGBTs around the world celebrate their community.

An “edit-a-thon” is a workshop where people are trained in how to edit the Wikipedia and add content to it, usually focussing on a particular topic.

The aim is to make Wikipedia inclusive and reflect diversity by creating content on the LGBT discourse: history, culture, rights, equal opportunities and Article 377. The focus is also on generating content in regional Indian languages which do not have equivalents for terms such as “gay”, “lesbian” or “bisexual”. The website https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/ Events/Wiki_Loves _Pride_2014 has listed 11 languages.

The edit-a-thon will culminate in two offline events in Bangalore and Delhi on July 19, creating a forum for the community. While anyone can participate in the edit-a-thon, Vishnu, programme director for Access to Knowledge at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore, which works on improving Indian language Wikipedias and India-related content on Wikipedia, said, “We hope the [LGBT] community takes the lead.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-july-7-2014-renuka-phadnis-wikipedia-edit-a-thons-to-add-content-on-lgbts