Centre for Internet and Society

Access to Knowledge Bulletin — August 2014

praskrishna — 2014-10-04T15:51:15Z

The Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) newsletter for the month of August 2014:

India Access to Knowledge/Newsletter/August 2014 - Meta

Andhra Loyola College and the Centre for Internet & Society sign MoU for Better Net Access

Andhra Loyola College (ALC) and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to steward the growth of Telugu Wikipedia and to make available free knowledge in Telugu to all Telugus across the globe.
Highlights

Ten theosophical books authored by Rev. Fr. P. Jojaiah, SJ released under free license (CC-BY-SA-4.0)
For the first time an educational institution in the state of Andhra Pradesh is signing an MoU with CIS-A2K to work collaboratively to qualitatively improve Telugu Wikipedia.
ALC faculty and students to create free e-content in Telugu on Telugu Wikipedia.
Digital content from the fields of Botany, Physics, Chemistry, Telugu, Statistics, Ethics and Religion, Music and Dance to be produced on Telugu Wikipedia.

Blog Entries

We are Wikipedia (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Global Voices Online, June 18, 2014)
OpenGLAM at Wikimania 2014 (by Subhashish Panigrahi, OpenGlam, August 27, 2014)

News and Media Coverage

CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Now, Christ students will contribute to Wikipedia (by H.M.Shruthi, Deccan Herald, August 5, 2014).
CIS-A2K Signs MoU with Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada (Eenadu, August 15, 2014).
ALC signs MoU for better net access (The Hindu, August 15, 2014).

Wikimedia Foundation has funded A2K to anchor the growth of Wikimedia movement in India. The A2K team consists of six members, four based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Subhashish Panigrahi and Rahmanuddin Shaikh. One team member Nitika Tandon has left from the organisation -- We wish Nitika all the best for her career. We also have one Advisor Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana working with us. Archives of our newsletters can be accessed here. Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programs, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications here.

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
CIS group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cis.india
Visit us at: https://cis-india.org

Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

Retrieved from "http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=India_Access_to_Knowledge/Newsletter/August_2014&oldid=9929126"

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-bulletin-august-2014

Access to Knowledge Bulletin — August 2013

praskrishna — 2013-10-04T10:49:51Z

The Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) newsletter for the month of August 2013:

Updates from Konkani Wikipedia

The CIS-A2K programme organised a four-day workshop in collaboration with the Goa University for students of M.A. (Konkani) at the Central State Library, Konkani Department, University of Goa from August 21 to 24, 2013. Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi conducted this workshop. The event saw 38 students creating 43 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia, which is incubation. The main objective is to bring this seven-year-old project out of incubation into a live Wikipedia project. Event reports, blog entries, videos, guest column and media coverage arising from the workshop can be accessed by clicking on the links below:

Event Reports

Konkani Wikipedia — Climbing up the Indian Language Ladder? (by Subhashish Panigrahi, August 31, 2013):
Konkani Wikipedia Advances in 4 Days — From 90 Articles to 130 Articles! (by Nitika Tandon, August 31, 2013):

Guest Columns

Konkani Wikipedia climbing up the Indian language ladder (by Subhashish Panigrahi, DNA, September 6, 2013).
Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Startup Goa Blog, September 9, 2013).

Media Coverage

Wikipedia writes a new script (by Joyce Dias, August 24, 2013, The Goan). CIS-A2K workshop held in Goa is mentioned extensively. Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi are quoted.
Konkani Wikipedia makes headway (by Diana Fernandes, OHeraldO, August 24, 2013). Nitika Tandon is quoted.
Konkani Wikipedians Speak (Goan Voice Daily Newsletter, September 4, 2013). Konkani Wikipedia workshop organized in Goa from August 21 to 24, 2013 is mentioned in this newsletter.

Blog Entries

Voices from Goa: Frania Pereira tells Why She Writes Articles on Konkani Wikipedia (by Subhashish Panigrahi, August 27, 2013).
Voices from Goa: Wikipedia Editor Rusita Paryekar (by Subhashish Panigrahi, August 27, 2013)

Other Wikipedia Updates

Event Reports

A Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Krishnarajapet (by Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, August 14, 2013). The workshop was co-organized by the CIS-A2K team along with Kannada Sahitya Parishat of KR Pet.
Wikimania 2013: Wikipedians represent Indian Languages in Hong Kong (by Subhashish Panigrahi, August 19, 2013). The event was organised by Wikimedia Foundation. Subhashish participated in the event.
An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at Sambalpur (by Gorvachove Pothal, August 27, 2013). This workshop was held at Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology, Burla, Sambalpur on July 26 and 27, 2013. Odia Wikipedian Gorvachove Pothal organized this workshop with financial support from the CIS-A2K programme.

Events Co-organised

Digitization of Books for Indic Language WikiSource (co-organised by Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K, CIS, Bangalore, August 18, 2013).
A Workshop on Editing Wikipedia in Mumbai (organised by the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education and CIS-A2K, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, August 24, 2013). The workshop was aimed at assisting students to take part in the Indian Languages Mela at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (September 20-21, 2013) which is hosting a competition for best Indian language entries on Wikipedia.

Event Organised

Mobile Training Workshop @ CIS (CIS, Bangalore, August 29, 2013). Rachita and Keerthana Chandrashekar gave a talk on mobile campaigns.
Wikipedia Training in Telugu for Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad (Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad, September 5-6, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan taught a module on "Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era".

Events Participated

Wikimania 2013: The International Wikimedia Conference (organised by Wikimedia Foundation, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, August 7 – 11, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.
Wikimedia Asia Meeting (organised by Wikimedia community, Hong Kong, August 10, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the meeting. Unedited transcript of the entire conversation is posted online.
వికీపీడియా:సమావేశం/హైదరాబాద్/ఆగష్టు (Hyderabad, August 25, 2013). T.Vishnu Vardhan participated in the meeting through Skype.

Media Coverage

Wikipedia Gains Massive Traffic Thanks To Vernacular Languages (Before It’s News, August 1, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.
Wikipedia boom in Marathi, Malayalam and other desi languages (by Sandhya Soman, The Times of India, August 1, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.
Wikipedia boom in vernacular languages (by Divya Saboo, DNA, August 1, 2013). The Centre for Internet and Society is mentioned.
Stress on posting articles on Kannada Wikipedia (by R. Krishna Kumar, Hindu, August 2, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja is quoted.
India’s Indigenous Languages Drive Wikipedia’s Growth (by Mahesh Sharma, TechCrunch, August 6, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.
Krishnarajapet Wikipedia Workshop Coverage (Prajavani, August 12, 2013).
Krishnarajapet Wikipedia Workshop Coverage (Vijaya Vani, August 12, 2013).
Krishnarajapet Wikipedia Workshop Coverage (Suvarna Times of Karnataka, August 12, 2013).

Other guest columns:

ଅବସର ପରର ଦ୍ବିତୀୟ ଜୀବନ, ଅବସର ପରେ ସକ୍ରିୟ ଭାବେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଲେଖାଲେଖି ଜାରୀ ରଖିଥିବା ଜଣେ ଡାକ୍ତରଙ୍କ ସ‌ହ ଭାବାଲୋଚନା (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Odiapua, September 10, 2013).

Ongoing / Upcoming Events

Digital Resources in Telugu: A Workshop for Research Scholars (co-organised by the Department of Cultural Studies, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and CIS-A2K, September 13, 2013).
Train the Trainer — Four-day long Residential Training Workshop in Bangalore (organised by CIS-A2K, Bangalore, October 1 – 5, 2013). The programme will be held in the first week of October.

Wikimedia Foundation has funded A2K to anchor the growth of Wikimedia movement in India. The A2K team consists of three members based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja and Subhashish Panigrahi and one member Nitika Tandon in Delhi.

Archives of our newsletters can be accessed here (http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters). Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programs, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications at http://bit.ly/TOcXId.

About CIS

Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
CIS group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cis.india
Visit us at: https://cis-india.org

Support Us
Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org.

To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-bulletin-august-2013

Access to Knowledge Bulletin — April 2013

praskrishna — 2013-05-29T10:57:49Z

In the third issue of our newsletter for 2013, we are pleased to bring you updates from the Indic Wikipedia Visualisation project, reports of events organised in Kolkata, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar.

Wikimedia Foundation, beginning from September 1, 2012, awarded the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. Consequently, Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program became the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of CIS. In the third issue of our newsletter for 2013, we are pleased to bring you updates from the Indic Wikipedia Visualisation project, reports of events organised in Goa, and press coverage of the Kannada Wikipedia Workshop held in Mysore.

The A2K team consists of three members based in Delhi: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi and one member Dr. U.B. Pavanaja who is working from Bangalore office. Noopur Raval, Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge) has resigned. April 24, 2013 was her last working day. Archives of our newsletters are here.

Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programs, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications at http://bit.ly/TOcXId.

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages.

Guest Blog

Indian WikiWomen celebrate Women’s History Month (by Netha Hussain, April 29, 2013).

Event Organised

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (April 29, 2013, Govinda Pai Research Centre, MGM College Udupi). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the workshop and gave a talk on Kannada Wikipedia.

Events Co-organised

The following events were organised in the month of March but reports were written during the month of April. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi held meetings with wikipedians:

Kolkata Wiki Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Kolkata Wiki Community, March 14, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia - Cuttack Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Cuttack, March 16, 2013).
Odia Wikipedia – Bhubaneswar Community Meetup (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Bhubaneswar, March 17, 2013).

The following event was organised in the month of April. We will be publishing the report soon:

Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013 (organised by Telugu Wikipedia Community and CIS, Hyderabad, April 9 – 11, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan was one of the trainers at the Wikipedia Academy at Centre for Good Governance on April 9, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan spoke about the Access to Knowledge work in one of the sessions of Wikimedia Meeting with Media Heads on April 10, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk on A2K’s plans for the growth of Telegu Wikipedia in 2013-14 at the Telegu Wikipedia general meeting on April 11, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan also gave a talk about Access to Knowledge in the digital era at the Wiki Chaitanya Vedika on April 11, 2013.

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. The policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos, etc. We have conducted policy research for the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc.

CIS is accredited as an observer at WIPO. CIS staff participates in the Standing Committee for Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) meetings regularly held in Geneva, and participate in the discussions and comments on them from a public interest perspective. Our Policy Director, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

Request for Collaboration
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-bulletin-april-2013

Access to Knowledge — September 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T06:18:01Z

This is the first newsletter from the Access to Knowledge team of CIS in Delhi. The issue introduces you to the CIS Access to Knowledge program, the team members in Delhi and reports from Workshops conducted by the Wikipedia community.

Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation has awarded CIS a two-year grant of upto INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India:

Access to Knowledge Programme

The Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program has become the Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of CIS.

CIS Office in Delhi

The A2K team consists of four members: Nitika Tandon, Shiju Alex, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval.

Statistical Report

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report (January – June 2012) (by Shiju Alex). The data for this report and analysis are based on the statistical data published at http://stats.wikimedia.org.

Wikipedia Workshops

Note: Although most of these workshops were conducted prior to the grant period, the reports for all of these were written during September, hence we are featuring these:

The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 30, 2012).
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012).
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (Tumkur, Karnataka, September 15, 2012).
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (by Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012). There was coverage in the Hindu on September 28, 2012.

Blog Entry

Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telugu Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, September 29, 2012).

About CIS

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-september-2012-bulletin

વિકિપીડિયા ગુજરાતી માં પણ છે

praskrishna — 2012-12-07T10:36:20Z

We've recently been featured in the Gujarati magazine on technology: Cybersafar. The below article was written by Harsh Kothari.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/article-in-cybersafar

Aaron Swartz: The First Martyr of the Free Information Movement

lawrence — 2013-01-24T12:26:02Z

Well known American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist died on January 11, 2013. Lawrence Liang from the Alternative Law Forum discusses with Newsclick the tragic loss. The interview was conducted by Prabir Purkayastha.

This interview was originally published by NewsClick on January 19, 2013.

Discussing on the immediate background in which this tragic event happened, Lawrence says that all of us are collectively mourning the death of an extremely talented individual. He adds that Aaron was facing a very difficult trial ahead. A couple of years ago he had plugged his computer on to the MIT network and had downloaded approximately four million articles from JSTOR (primary database for social science and other science journals) and he had intended to make freely available. This act of his in many ways marks Aaaron's short life but one which is marked by a certain commitment and activism around the idea of free knowledge.

Lawrence further says that his anger at databases like JSTOR was the fact that they were charging extraordinary amounts of money to provide access (which meant that they were not available to most people in the world) without paying any royalty to the authors contributing to the article or to the people who do the peer review of the articles. Here is a scenario which is rent control of the worst kind essentially of knowledge which is completely privatised and enclosed (public knowledge which is enclosed in this particular way).

Most researchers and academics who work and contribute towards making of journals do not get compensated for it but are paid for by public money because they happen to be employed by universities or research centres. And then all this material goes behind pay walls. And that is the context in which we need to understand Aaron's life. Click below to watch the full interview:

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/aaron-swartz-the-first-martyr-of-free-information-movement

Aaron Swartz Memorial Hacknight

praskrishna — 2013-01-17T05:18:22Z

On Saturday, January 19, 2013, HasGeek and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are organizing a hacknight to understand Aaron’s work and contribute to his projects. The event starts from 2.00 p.m. onwards and ends at 8.00 a.m., the next day morning.

Among the hackers present will be some of Aaron's collaborators, such as Anand Chitipothu and A S L Devi.The Aaron Swartz memorial hacknight is a free event. You do not have to be a hacker to contribute and do not have to be present for the entire night. Join us even if just to show solidarity or inspire others on what they can do. HasGeek encourages participants to bring their own energy drinks and snacks for the evening so that there is enough to go around.

To register, visit: http://hacknight.in/hasgeek/aaronsw-memorial. Once your registration is approved, you can add or join a project to work on during the hacknight.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was a hacktivist. He helped create RSS 1.0; contributed to Creative Commons; was an early builder of Reddit, where he's often acknowledged as a co-founder; created the web.py framework; and more recently, became a data liberator, first with PACER, the US public case law archive, and then with scholarly articles from JSTOR, both of which got him into trouble with the law. Aaron's Demand Progress project helped stop SOPA and PIPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act in the US, both of which threatened to have far reaching unintended consequences.

Aaron Swartz took his life on Jan 11, 2013. However, his work on making the world a better place should not die with him. On Saturday, January 19, HasGeek and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are organizing a hacknight to understand Aaron’s work and contribute to his projects. Among the hackers present will be some of Aaron's collaborators, such as Anand Chitipothu and A S L Devi, who can help you get started.

About HasGeek

HasGeek creates discussion spaces around emerging technologies to foster the growth of communities. Since 2010, HasGeek has organized a number of conferences, hacknights and geekups around open source, web design and development, big data, cloud computing and mobile opportunities. The HasGeek Job Board connects thousands of individuals every month with jobs around upcoming technologies. HasGeek also builds tools to assist communities with organizing events and meetups. For more information, write to info@hasgeek.com

About CIS

CIS is a research and advocacy organization based in Bangalore. Founded in 2008, the Centre critically engages with issues concerning internet governance, freedom of speech, public accountability and digital pluralism. Through multidisciplinary research, intervention, and collaboration, CIS seeks to explore, understand, and affect the shape and form of the internet, and its relationship with the political, cultural, and social milieu of our times.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/aaron-swartz-memorial-hacknight

A Workshop on Editing Wikipedia in Mumbai

praskrishna — 2013-08-23T16:00:46Z

The Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS-A2K) is holding a workshop on Wikipedia editing at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai on August 24, 10.00 a.m. to 4.30 p.m.

The morning session will be having a discussion and demonstration on Wikipedia (10.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.), which will be followed by a practical session (2.00 p.m. to 4.30 p.m.).

As part of the run-up to the Indian Languages Mela (planned for September 20-21, 2013), CILHE will conduct a workshop for those who would like create new articles in any Indian Language Wikipedia. The workshop is organized in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) and the Wikipedia Hyderabad community. The objective of the workshop is to train students to edit Wikipedia. Participants are encouraged to work with Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu or any other language of their choice. Although the workshop is mainly intended for potential competitors for the Mela awards for Best New Article in an Indian Language Wikipedia, anyone interested in Wikipedia is welcome.

As you may know, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, and is the 5th most-visited website in the world! It's completely free to use and re-use, it has no advertising, and is available in more than 286 different languages - including 20+ Indian languages. Wikipedia articles are written by ordinary people who volunteer to share their knowledge with the world.

The CILHE is committed to producing material in Indian languages for higher education, and is partnering Wikipedia in drawing new editors to the Indian language Wikipedias so that they become an important knowledge resource.

What students gain from Wikipedia editing:

It improves writing skills. Wikipedia provides students a platform to hone their writing skills. Writing on Wikipedia enhances critical thinking and the ability to see all sides of a story. Students will find this incredibility useful in both their personal and professional lives while evaluating the pros and cons of different situations, projects, assignments etc. Wikipedia editing also strengthens research skills. A Wikipedia editor has to provide credible references by looking up books, journals and online materials. Writing on Wikipedia is good practice for those who will also work on a thesis or a research project.

Your articles will be read by thousands of people across the globe. If you edit a Wikipedia article, it is there *forever* and the audience can be any number from the 500 million who read Wikipedia every month!

It'll boost your chances in admissions or scholarships or placements.

It teaches students how to collaborate! Editing Wikipedia is magical. You add some content and someone from some other part of the class or school or town or country or somewhere else in the world adds a little bit more and makes the contribution that much better. Wikipedia helps one learn how to work productively with other people, even those you don’t know and may never actually meet.

The workshop will cover the following:

What exactly is Wikipedia and how does it work?
Who edits Wikipedia?
How do I edit Wikipedia?
What can I edit?
How can I input text in Indian languages?
How do I insert images?
How do I find and add references?
Do’s and Don’ts

Participants are required to register at least by August 23, 2013. Send your names to Ritesh Khunyakari riteshpk@gmail.com.

Important Instructions

Each student attending the Wikipedia Training programme should register themselves on Wikipedia. Please note that once you register on a Wikipedia project, you can use that 'Username' (i.e. same log-in details) across all Wikipedias and Wikimedia platforms. This should be done by August 23, 2013. Please note that you will not be able to register more than 5 Usernames from a single IP address within 24 hours (a security feature of Wikipedia). This tutorial will help you with Registration on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial/Registration
Once registered the students must furnish their details on the google doc. I have already entered my data just as sample. Please circulate this link to all the students at the earliest. This should be done by August 24, 2013 before the commencement of the Workshop https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AshSF7ZKRBR5dFBfM2lTaExINTZodVZ4ejd3VURzMEE&usp=sharing
All the students are expected to do editing on Wikipedia. We will choose Telugu Wikipedia (www.te.wikipedia) as a site to do some editing. Please be assured that we will also show how to use English and other language Wikipedias. For this workshop each student should come up with one article at least in an Indian language. This should be typed and be available in a soft copy form and could be carried in a thumb drive or any other storage media which should be easily accessible to them during the training programme.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/workshop-on-editing-wikipedia-in-mumbai

A Wikipedia Workshop at SRM University, Chennai

noopur — 2012-12-27T05:57:34Z

The Centre for Internet & Society, Delhi in association with Metawings Institute organized a one-day workshop on contributing to Wikipedia at SRM University on December 17, 2012. About 40 students from different engineering colleges in Chennai participated in the workshop. Metawings coordinated for the logistics and for spreading the word among the students.

The three-hour workshop was mostly interactive. Since most students had a fair idea of what Wikipedia is and who writes articles on Wikipedia, they had many queries on who the 'editors' were, who selects them, how one can become an editor, how to determine reliability and authenticity of Wikipedia articles and so on. This was a pattern that I observed in many workshops that we conduct where people who have a level of ease and familiarity with using Wikipedia to get information, have often wondered if the information they are using is reliable or not. This also gives us a chance to explain how their contributions can make the encyclopedia more inclusive, informative and reliable.

One student was called upon to create a user account and instead of answering his query on patrolling edits, I encouraged him to vandalize a popular article just to see how quickly it is reverted and the correct version is restored. Some students were also interested in knowing about Indian language Wikipedias. So, I invited a student to create his account in Tamil Wikipedia and create his user page subsequently.

After the workshop the students wanted to stay in touch and receive more information on Wikipedia projects they could contribute to and filled up contact forms.

Special thanks to Metawings for helping us out with the logistics and to the student coordinators at SRM University for their cooperation!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-workshop-at-srm-chennai

A Wikipedia Workshop at NMAIT

subha — 2013-01-04T16:30:28Z

The Centre for Internet & Society, Delhi collaborated with Metawings Institute to spread the words about Wikipedia for Indian languages. A one-day workshop was organized to educated the students on contributing to Wikipedia on December 21, 2012. About 170 engineering students took part in this event.

The workshop began with interaction with the students about their understanding. I asked few questions like what is Wikipedia, who edits articles on Wikipedia, is it paid or free, did they ever try to edit Wikipedia, etc. I took them through a presentation to explain basics of Wikipedia, five pillars, notability and copyright issues related to vandalism. One of the students were called to create his user account. Students were showed the simpler sign up process. To explain how articles are edited we introduced errors in the article on Bengaluru and made it the capital of India for few minutes! Students were explained how Wikipedia editors correct mistakes like these in real time and correct facts are published in Wikipedia. A majority of the students asked about the authenticity of articles which is open to anyone. So I got a chance to refresh the page and show how the error introduced was reverted within a few minutes.


Above is a picture of the participants from the Wikipedia Workshop at Karkala

The session went on with such interaction and students were explained more about the importance of citing references to add credibility to the facts they can add on Wikipedia articles.

We also had Dr. Ashok Kumar, prof, Computer science department, a wikipedian and columnist for Kannada newspaper Udaya Vani. Dr. Kumar introduced Kannada Wikipedia to the students. At the end of the session I had a discussion with him about organizing more workshops for Kannada Wikipedia and supporting participant students. Special thanks to Metawings for finding the venue and supporting for the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-workshop-at-nmait

A Wikipedia Presentation at BITS, Goa

Radhakrishna Arvapally — 2015-03-09T01:21:43Z

Quark is one of India's largest science, technology and management festivals, held every February at BITS Pilani - K.K. Birla Goa Campus. This year in 2015, the event was held from February 6 to 8, 2015. This blog post captures the key moments. About 12 delegates attended the event.

How it Started?

For celebrating this annual event, "Quark 2015", BITS Pilani invited speakers from all over India. Many parallel tracks happen during this event. I got an Invite to speak about Wikimedia projects.The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) supported my event participation.

Dr. Sunil Kumar, a BITS physics professor who could not join the presentation due to conflicting meetings met me in the morning that day. He was curious to understand how Wikimedia projects work, how people collaborate to write the same article, how the conflicting views gets resolved among editors and how one can trust the content. He was excited to know the mechanics behind. We discussed about organizing a quiz for their students. He responded very positive and said that he will discuss this internally and get back to me later.

CIS team also helped me to establish contact with Luis Gomes, a local Konkani Wikipedian. We met at the event and shared our thoughts. It was a good learning for me to understand how Konkani Wikipedia is progressing.

I gave my speech in the afternoon. The participants showed great enthusiasm to learn about Wikipedia projects. The session was very interactive. The participants tried answering open ended questions like — As on today, what are the possible ways to preserve unique knowledge and skill? The participants also asked questions on the source of knowledge contribution to Wikipedia and how it survives?

My presentation showcased how anyone could contribute to Wikipedia and also explore greater possibilities of exploring existing frame work with examples like QRpedia, WikiWand, and many more.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/a-wikipedia-presentation-at-goa

A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi

Yuvraj Pandian — 2012-12-04T07:31:21Z

Wikipedian Yuvaraj Pandian visited the CIS office in Delhi and helped the Access to Knowledge team conduct a super-ad-hoc mini-hackathon with two other volunteers, Sheel from Delhi and Harsh from Ahmedabad. The aim was to get them a kickstart in developing userscripts/gadgets, and get them to a point where the prior existing documentation makes sense to them.

The ad-hoc plan had three parts:

The execution environment (Concept of userscripts vs gadgets, ResourceLoader)
The API concepts (Special:ApiSandbox, concept of 'actions' in the API)
Accessing the API from JS (mediawiki.api module, concept of AJAX)

Here is the account of what they did, written by Yuvi:

"We covered all parts of them slowly, with both Harsh and Sheel working at things until they fully understood what they were doing and why whatever they were doing was working.

I introduced them to the environment first by having them execute code in Chrome's JS Console, and then in their own common.js. Once they understood the context in which the code was getting executed, the 'ResourceLoader default modules'[1]documentation started making sense to them, and they could pick up other modules from there.

We then explored the API via the API Sandbox[2], which is a relatively new (and not very well known) way of letting people play around with the API. It is a massive improvement over the older, non-interactive docs[3], and both Harsh and Sheel were very excited about being able to discover all the things they could do with the API. A fair amount of time was spent messing around with it on different wikipedias (en, hi and gu) and reading bits of the API Documentation[4] to understand the concepts behind the actions - and for filling in the gaps.

Finally we had them use the API from a userscript to make calls. I went through the entire process line by line, explaining how AJAX works and how asynchronous programming works. We traced the flow of code together to understand how the seamingly nonlinear asynchronous programming model works. Then we dug into a bit of how to use the mw.loader module to make dependencies work, and why the same code that was working in the chrome js console was not working in their common.js.

It ended with them trying to port HotCat to their native language wikipedias. Harsh started to explore more about getting started with MediaWiki dev itself (rather than just gadgets), but the clone took a looooong time and we had run out of time by then. I directed him to a WMF tech open chat happening today, and hopefully that could help!

[1].https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Default_modules
[2].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox
[3].https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
[4].https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/mini-hackathon-delhi

A Wikipedia Editing Workshop in Goa

praskrishna — 2013-03-05T09:10:24Z

On the occasion of International Women's Day, the Access to Knowledge team from the Centre for Internet & Society is organizing a wikipedia editing workshop on March 8, 2013 at Nirmala Institute of Education, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., followed by an offline and online editathon.

The online editathon is a month-long affair, which will be held every weekend starting with the weekend after March 8. The goal of the month-long event is to encourage more women to contribute to Wikipedia and increase representation of articles related to women in Wikipedia.

The event aims at creating new articles, expanding the existing stubs and translating English articles to various Indian languages. Members are requested to start edithons in regional language Wikipedias.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-editing-workshop-in-goa

A Wiki Workshop at Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology, Ghaziabad

subha — 2013-01-22T03:09:25Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team organized a Wikipedia workshop at Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology (RKGIT), Ghaziabad in collaboration with Metawings on January 17, 2013. Subhashish Panigrahi summarizes the happenings from the one-day workshop in this blog post.

As part of the soft skill development training program, RKGIT, an engineering college is working on a series of activities to empower the students with practical approach and competence for their professional life. We were invited to conduct a workshop for the students of mechanical engineering and help them understand the real reasons for contributions to Wikipedia as a volunteer.

Some of the focus areas we set for the workshop were:

Number of students not to exceed 60 to make sure that we get enough time and space to interact actively and pay individual attention.

Number of coordinators to support with logistics to conduct the workshop smoothly.
Active participation of teachers.
Arrangement of internet labs with multiple IP addresses for smooth user account creation.

Around 65 mechanical engineering students from second and third year participated in this workshop. We began the workshop with an interactive discussion about their practical relation with Wikipedia as students and the usability and difficulties that they face. I presented about some important facts about Wikipedia and voluntary contribution in different ways. During and after the presentation students asked a lot of questions about the notability and authenticity of articles, collaboration vs. fights among editors, references and its significance, etc.

There was a short break to make way for students to settle in the internet lab for a hands on training session. We faced problems with the LAN and 3G network for mobile broadband which made this session longer than expected. There were problems for creating accounts because of the Internet explorer and X based systems and the students couldn't create their user accounts. So, we had to manage with them contributing anonymously from IP addresses. Despite these unexpected technical problems all of them edited various articles. Some of them tried to vandalize and observe the quick reversal of the vandals.

Subhashish presenting about Wikipedia to the participants

I had a discussion with the director about conducting more such workshops, especially technical workshops where students can code and contribute to MediaWiki.

Quick links:

Presentation used for this workshop: www.slideshare.net/psubhashish/you-can-also-wikipedia
English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org (Click here to create an account on Wikipedia)

Presentation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/wikipedia-workshop-at-rkgit-ghaziabad

A Telugu Wiki Meetup @ CIS, Bangalore

SJ Veera — 2013-08-19T06:53:18Z

On June 2, 2013, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) hosted a Telugu wiki meetup in its Bangalore office. Updates from the meetup is shared in this blog post.

Access the Telugu wikipedia page about the event here

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the Telegu Wiki Mahotsavam held in Hyderabad earlier this year (in April 2013) due to personal and professional constraints even though Arjuna Rao called me twice and requested me to attend it. However, when he called again recently about a planned meetup in Bangalore, I willingly took up the initiative.

I used the "Category: Wikipedians in Bangalore" and communicated with all the Telugu users. I met T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet and Society and personally and took his views. Myself and Arjuna took the initial steps to organize this meeting. Arjuna managed to invite Dr. T. Ramakrishna and Gudipati Narayana for this meetup. He also managed to announce about this event in the press.

We finally met at CIS and had a two-hour session:

The Programme

Welcome note by Sasi
Mutual introductions
An introduction was given to Telugu Wiki projects with practical examples. (Using, searching, editing, interaction and getting help)
Guests’ doubts were clarified by the Telugu Wikipedians Ravichandra, Arjuna and Sasi
Dr. Ramakrishna suggested that parallel to the Telugu Wikipedia development, Telugu should be encouraged to be used in administration. This should start with interactions with the officials and the organizations working towards it
Gudipati Narayana conveyed his view that Telugu Wikipedia can be used to increase the standards in Telugu teaching
Both the guests promised that they will do their bit in organizing the Wikipedia awareness events in the organizations know to them

A group photo of Telegu Wikipedians from the meetup held at CIS, Bangalore is seen below

It is decided that a Telugu Wiki Meet-Up will be held on second Saturday of every month in Bangalore for Telugu Wikipedians.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/telugu-wiki-meet-up-at-cis-june-2-2013