Centre for Internet and Society

Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project

nitika — 2013-10-01T12:23:33Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the University of Goa invite you to a two-month project on digitization of Konkani Vishwakosh. Please send in your applications by October 5, 2013.

Click to download the event brochure here

Konkani Vishwakosh

Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume encyclopedia published by Goa University. It encompasses all the world information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography, etc.

Goa University has generously approved the re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-SA 3.0) to make it freely available to public and thus preserve Konkani language and culture in the digital era.

Digitization Project

Goa University in collaboration with the Centre for Internet & Society’s Access to Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) is digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh. This is a 2 month project where we will work with group of individuals who will help digitize the encyclopedia in a time bound manner.

We’re calling out for students, professors, faculty, professionals or anyone who is interested to preserve Konkani language and culture!

Help preserve Konkani language
Help preserve Konkani culture
Enroll in the program today and make a difference!

What will you gain out of it?

Learn typing skills: CIS-A2K will organize typing workshops for those who are not comfortable typing in Devanagari. This will be a two-day workshop organized in Panjim, Goa. Brilliant opportunity for you to learn a new skill!
Learn about Konkani Wikipedia: The program will also introduce you to Konkani Wikipedia, how does it work, who edits it, how can you edit etc.
Improve your writing, critical thinking, and research skills: Yes, there is so much that you can learn in our workshop. These skills will help you in personal and professional development.
Help preserve your language and culture: Out of 780 spoken Indian languages, 250 died out in last 50 years. Take the first step to save your language.
Go global: Showcase your work, Konkani language and culture on a global platform. That’s the power of digital era!
Earn while you learn: 30 final selected candidates will be remunerated for their work.

Deliverables

Selected 30 candidates will be assigned 100 pages each of Konkani Vishwakosh that needs to be digitized over a span of 2 months (Oct & Nov 2013). Typing 50 pages a month is surely a cakewalk!

Enroll Today!

Please fill the Application Form latest by October 5, 2013.

Contact Us

If you have any further questions please
Mail us at: nitika@cis-india.org
Twitter: @CISA2K
Visit us at: bitly.com/cis-a2k

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/konkani-vishwakosh-digitization-project

Konkani in Wikipedia Incubator — Taking it to the Next Level

nitika — 2013-01-25T07:34:34Z

An introductory session on Konkani in Wikipedia was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, Delhi in the Konkani Department at Goa University on December 12, 2012. About 30 participants took part in the event.

The Konkani staff and students were exhilarated to learn about Konkani in the Wikipedia incubation. They showed a keen interest to kick-start the project and get the translations done from all the following scripts: Devanagari, Roman, Kannada, Malayalam and Perso-Arabic for Konkani Wikipedia.

We are in touch with Ms. Madhavi Sardesai, Director of Konkani Department and are also examining the possibility of organising a follow up meeting sometime in January or February, 2013.

Frederick Noronha, one of the Wikimedia incubator members contributing to Konkani Wikipedia, has been helpful in introducing us with more Konkani writers and in organizing a common meeting sometime in early 2013 to take this project to the next level.

Also see:

Konkani in Wikipedia incubator (http://bit.ly/14bTwAi)
Some pages contributed already - much work needs to be done to improve quality (http://bit.ly/Tv5iUh)
List of tasks as viewed by volunteers (http://bit.ly/10Vxwus)
An example of a well-translated article, on the "Pinto's Revolt" by Isidore Dantas (http://bit.ly/XAmliz)


Above is a picture of the faculty and students at the inaugural talk in Goa University.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/konkani-in-wikipedia-incubator

Kolkata: Tasting the Sweetness of Wikipedia!

subha — 2012-12-04T07:19:54Z

Recently, Access to Knowledge team member Subhashish Panigrahi spent some time with wikipedians in Kolkata. Through this blog post he shares his experience and learning from the interaction. This post explores the journey of three wikipedians — Jayanta Nath, Deepon Saha and Ashwin.

Jayanta Nath and Deepon Saha — Lecture on Bangla Wikipedia

Jayanta is one of the active contributors in Bangla Wikipedia. He has supported community building for Bangla Wikipedia in India. Apart from contributing articles Jayanta supports many wikipedians for fixing technical issues on various language wikis. Deepon is another active wikipedian from Kolkata who contributes mostly to English Wikipedia besides contributing to WikiCommons and Bangla Wikipedia and taking active part in community building in Kolkata and other places. I met both Jayanta and Deepon recently in Kolkata and discussed about Bangla Wikipedia and the role of contributors from India.

Over the last few years Bangla Wikipedia has seen enough growth — growth in number of articles, growth in number of outreach, growth in number of contributors and lot more. However, there is something missing in this list, and that is the growth in number of Bangla editors from India. Sadly, though Bangla speaking people constitute a major part of the intellectual sphere. Bangla Wikipedia has not seen many new faces in the recent past from the Indian subcontinent. "English has become like a mother language of most Bengalis in Kolkata and Bengalis residing in other major cities", expresses Jayanta with grief. "Most of the Bengalis speak and are adhered to Bengali language but the use of language is limited only to speaking. And they no more use Bangla in writing. That is what makes it more difficult to tell them about Bangla Wikipedia", adds Deepon. Bangla Wikipedia in India is facing one more major challenge: media coverage. There is not much coverage about Bangla Wikipedia in Bangla media, especially print media. "I was interviewed by the Times of India, Hindu, Telegraph and few other English newspapers but, surprisingly there was not much coverage in Bangla media. There are almost 12 Bangla newspapers being published from Kolkata and in spite of our efforts the outcome is far below expectation", explains Jayanta. Jayanta feels there is much scope for community building for Bangla Wikipedia in rural West Bengal. Unlike urban Bengal, Bangla is the primary medium of both verbal and written communication.

Computer literacy might be a big hurdle when it comes to spreading words about editing Bangla Wikipedia. But it is difficult to predict about the status of government schools, computer and internet penetration before initiating outreach for rural places. Deepon also suggests about making a small survey in Bangla medium schools in Kolkata to understand the scope for any Bangla education program in those schools. We discussed about the internet penetration to measure and assess the state of Bangla on internet and its public usage. Out of the ten Bangla newspapers only two are available in unicode for their online edition. The state of unicode and online usage of Bangla in unicode is much better in Bangladesh which also explains that Bengalis in Bangladesh are using Bangla to a great extent including reading, writing and upon internet.

Typing is another challenge to be tackled. DTP operators, government offices where Bangla typing is used normally use a different typing scheme and non-unicode fonts (mostly old ISCII or ASCII fonts). "We could bring many Bangla enthusiasts to Bangla Wiki projects by simplifying the typing solution and making people aware about the available typing tools. Simple video tutorials and smaller help pages with easy-to-understand guidelines will be helpful and these should be linked from other pages so the new editors will find them and make use of them to learn editing", adds Deepon.

The Full Story Began with Loads of Curiosity and a Small [Edit] Button!

Deepon was searching for some information online while he discovered the available information on wikipedia is incorrect. He was searching for a help desk to ask to correct it. Suddenly he discovered the "Edit" button, when he clicked on it a new page opened up with a warning: "You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. Please log in or sign up to have your edits associated with a user name, among other benefits." He clicked, signed up and created a new account and corrected the mistake. That was the first time Deepon made his first edit on Wikipedia and never stopped after that.

Ashwin (User:AshLin): Passion to Contribute to Wikipedia still Flying like Butterflies

There was no book available in the early 80s when Ashwin wanted to know more about Indian butterflies. There was no article on Wikipedia about Indian butterflies and there were very less available resource on Indian butterflies. Ashwin along with Shyamal and other enthusiasts collaborated to start working on this project which brought many other contributors. The other project he was quite involved was about Indian snakes. One of his key motivations for contributing to Wikipedia was making the resource about Indian butterflies available for others.

	Ashwin is one of those active contributors from India who are active for the last few years for bringing more editors onboard to write on articles of Indian context, primarily on English Wikipedia. Out of his own passion Ashwin started contributing to several projects like WikiProject Lepidoptera which brought many wonderful articles on Wikipedia. Ashwin is greatly appreaciate for his participation in projects like WikiProject Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools, Collaborations of the month. Ashwin extended his help to the Pune community when he was in Pune from organizing outreach events to bringing editors onboard to take leadership for new projects. "There is a lot of scope for regional language wikipedians to learn from the English Wikipedia projects. Projects on English Wikipedia involves more people and the lessons would be helpful for other regional language wikipedians and English wikipedians in India are always interested to help", expresses Ashwin. Currently he is in a small wikibreak and will be back soon!

Ashwin is one of those active contributors from India who are active for the last few years for bringing more editors onboard to write on articles of Indian context, primarily on English Wikipedia. Out of his own passion Ashwin started contributing to several projects like WikiProject Lepidoptera which brought many wonderful articles on Wikipedia. Ashwin is greatly appreaciate for his participation in projects like WikiProject Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools, Collaborations of the month. Ashwin extended his help to the Pune community when he was in Pune from organizing outreach events to bringing editors onboard to take leadership for new projects. "There is a lot of scope for regional language wikipedians to learn from the English Wikipedia projects. Projects on English Wikipedia involves more people and the lessons would be helpful for other regional language wikipedians and English wikipedians in India are always interested to help", expresses Ashwin. Currently he is in a small wikibreak and will be back soon!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kolkata-tasting-the-sweetness-of-wikipedia

Kolkata Wiki Community Meetup

subha — 2013-10-30T10:51:57Z

Recently Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge Programme members T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi met wikipedians in Kolkata. The event was co-organized by the Access to Knowledge team from the Centre for Internet and Society and the Wikipedian community of Kolkata.

The Wikimedia community in the city of joy gathered near Salt lake during Recently Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge Programme team's visit. Four Wikipedians from Kolkata, Wikimedia Foundation's mobile Developer Yuvaraj Pandian and OPW intern Sucheta Ghoshal joined A2K's Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi for this meetup. Vishnu addressed the wikipedians and gave a brief introduction about the programme's objectives and plans. Bengali Wikipedians Jayanta Nath and Kalyan Sarkar shared the success stories and activities in Bengali Wikipedia community. They also discussed about the challenges Indian Bengali wikipedians are facing. Wikipedians discussed few of the technical aspects of Bengali Wikipedia over lunch. Vishnu and Subhashish discussed about the opportunities that could be explored to bring more good quality content relevant to West Bengal and Bengali language over lunch.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wiki-meet-up-kolkata

Knowledge Sharing through GLAM at Bangalore

praskrishna — 2013-02-18T05:37:46Z

A seminar for GLAM institutions (GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) will be held in Bangalore on February 25, 2013, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. The program is supported by Wikimedia, Creative Commons and the Centre for Internet & Society.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables users to share their knowledge and creativity through free legal tools. They develop, support, and steward legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Copyright laws were developed in a previous era where in protection was given to artists, authors, and other creators as a default. In this situation sharing requires a deliberate prior permission. In the internet era, so much of sharing of digital media is happening online, and these require tools that ensure prior permission, and control the level of use. The legal tools of Creative Commons enable controlled sharing.

Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable users to modify their copyright terms to best suit their needs.

What will users learn?

In this part of the seminar users will learn about:

Creative Commons as an organization
How the Creative Commons licenses work
How they relate to Open GLAM, and Wikimedia
What are the tools? How to choose them and use them
How can people selectively retain rights, while releasing some of it for free public use
Examples of how GLAM institutions are using CC
New business models and online communities
Other applications of CC

The speakers from Creative Commons have a long experience of discussing CC with GLAM institutions.

CC licensing also works for many other applications such as music, video, writing, and many other creative works. Open Education Resources, and Public Data are also some of the domains. The focus of the presentation will be on GLAM. However, people interested in other applications may also be able to take the opportunity to have discussions after the main presentation.

Who should attend the seminar?

The seminar would be of interests to:

Administrators of Public policy
Administrators of GLAM institutions
Art historians, Artists, Photographers, and Sculptors
Legal professionals
Bloggers, Authors, Editors, and Publishers.

Admission:

Admission is free to the public who register. Please bring a print copy of this registration page for admission.

Please visit the link to register: http://bit.ly/VZ8yIE

Location map of venue: http://goo.gl/maps/sYsxI

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/knowledge-sharing-through-glam

Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era: Coverage in Sakshi

praskrishna — 2014-07-04T11:31:57Z

Sakshi covered the Vijaywada event on June 25, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik gave their inputs.

Given below is a scanned version of the coverage published in the district edition:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/coverage-of-event-in-vijaywada-june-25-2014-sakshi

Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era: Coverage in Enadu

praskrishna — 2014-07-04T11:32:16Z

Eenadu covered the event on June 25, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik are quoted.

A scanned version of the event published in the district edition is below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/eenadu-june-25-2014-coverage-of-vijaywada-event

Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era

praskrishna — 2014-07-04T11:28:34Z

Andhra Loyola College and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team invite you to a two-day national workshop on knowledge and openness in the digital era.

Instructions for Participants

Each participant attending the Workshop 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 June 22, 2014. 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://sh.st/r9zc (click on this link).
Once registered the participants must enroll here http://bit.ly/U4Zxhp using an on-line registration form.
All the participants are expected to do take part in production sprints on Wikipedia. We will choose Telugu Language Wikipedia as a site to do some editing.

For this workshop each participant should come with three full-fledged articles (at least of 1200 words each) in Telugu. 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. Please check www.te.wikipedia.org to see if an article already exists on the topic that you are planning to write. You can even choose the expand the existing article on Telugu Wikipedia with your knowledge.

Suggested topics: a) Concepts/topics that you teach often; b) A famous theorist/thinker in your discipline; c) Any other notable topic that you feel should be in your language Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/knowledge-and-openness-in-digital-era

KIIT University to lead building free knowledge repository initiative

praskrishna — 2014-02-03T09:57:50Z

Centre for Internet and Society is a Bangalore based Non profit organization which works primarily in the broader domains ofinternet and policy research, accessibility, open knowledge and open education.

The blog post was published by India Education Diary.com on January 20, 2014.

Its Access To Knowledge program is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and works in fostering the volunteer Wikimedia community that contributes in enhancing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Its primary mandate is upbringing Wikipedia editors by outreach, creating primary resources for sources of reference in multiple ways that lead to enrich Wikipedia.

From a technical institution, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology has grown to a multidisciplinary world class University. KIIT University is a world class university spread over 25 sq. km. of land accommodating 20 sprawling wi-fi campuses with 10 million sq.ft. built up area. The university has 25 constituent schools offering more than 100 programmes. Being accredited by NAAC of UGC and NBA of AICTE, KIIT has 20,000 students pursuing under graduate and post graduate studies in the fields of Engineering, Computer Application, Management, Rural Management, Law, Biotechnology, MBBS, M.D., BDS, Nursing, Fashion Technology, Cinema & Media Studies and Languages. KIIT stands out as one of the finest universities in India declared under section 3 of the UGC Act of 1956. KIIT educational conglomerate is unique in offering a wide spectrum of academic programmes from kindergarten to postgraduate level, earning it a place in the Limca Book of Records.

Wikipedia has a critical stand in academia when it comes to peer academic research. But on the other side students ofter access and use Wikipedia for their assignment work despite of the non acceptance of Wikipedia content by the teacher community. The primary reason of Wikipedia's factual errors in many Indic related articles being Wikipedia's low contribution from the global south needs more contribution. Academicians and subject experts who are in charge of building the infrastructure of providing free knowledge to everyone often were stuck because of this setback.

This led to an conjugation of subject experts and Wikimedia contributor communities to set up a system called Wikipedia Education Program (WEP) where editing, correcting and enhancing Wikipedia articles become part of the curriculum.

To begin with the students in different schools at KIIT University the local Wikipedia community with the support from CIS-A2K is going to conduct classroom Wikipedia workshops to pilot Wikipedia contribution. KIIT University would be one of world's few universities to pilot student Wikipedia contribution as part oftheir curricula in any regional language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-education-diary-january-20-2014-kiit-university-to-lead-building-free-knowledge-repository-initiative

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop, Mysore — Coverage in Prajavani

praskrishna — 2013-03-25T08:49:20Z

A Kannada Wikipedia workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society in Mysore on March 24, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event. Prajavani has published a report of the event on March 25, 2013.


Prajavani published a report of the Kannada Wikipedia workshop held at Mysore on March 25, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-report-in-prajavani

Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujire, Karnataka

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:12:41Z

A Kannada Wikipedia workshop is being planned to be organised in Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujire on the 13th August 2015. This is going to be part of the several outreach programmes in the institution.

Topics to be discussed:

What, Why & How of Wikipedia
Basics of Wikipedia markup
Kannada Wikipedia
Editing Kannada Wikipedia
What can be added to Kannada Wikipedia and how to add articles

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-at-shree-dharmasthala-manjunatheshwara-sdm-college-ujire-karnataka

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at SDM

praskrishna — 2013-09-12T06:16:36Z

The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, SDM College, Ujire is holding a wiki workshop on September 15, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja from CIS-A2K team is participating in this workshop.

The workshop is being held to teach post-graduate students studying Journalism and Mass Communication on contributing and editing Wikipedia. The students will be particularly trained to edit Kannada Wikipedia.

More about SDM College, Ujire here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/kannada-wiki-workshop-sdm

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Vijaya Karnataka)

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T07:22:57Z

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted a workshop in Hasan on June 4, 2013. Vijaya Karnataka published a report of the workshop on June 5, 2013.


Above is a report of the workshop in Vijaya Karnataka. The workshop was conducted by Dr. U.B.Pavanja on June 4, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/vijaya-karnataka-june-5-2013-report-of-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-in-hasan

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Samyukta Karnataka)

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T07:16:11Z

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted a workshop in Hasan on June 4, 2013. Samyukta Karnataka published a report of the workshop on June 5, 2013.


Above is the report in Kannada of the workshop conducted in Hasan on June 4, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/samyukta-karnataka-june-5-2013-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-coverage

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Prajavani)

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T07:05:25Z

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted a workshop in Hasan on June 4, 2013. Prajavani carried a report on June 5, 2013.


A Kannada Wikipedia workshop was conducted in Hasan by Dr. U.B. Pavanaja on June 4, 2013. Above is the report published by Prajavani in Kannada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/prajavani-june-5-2013-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-coverage

Centre for Internet and Society

Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project

Konkani Vishwakosh

Digitization Project

What will you gain out of it?

Deliverables

Enroll Today!

Contact Us

Konkani in Wikipedia Incubator — Taking it to the Next Level

Kolkata: Tasting the Sweetness of Wikipedia!

Jayanta Nath and Deepon Saha — Lecture on Bangla Wikipedia

The Full Story Began with Loads of Curiosity and a Small [Edit] Button!

Ashwin (User:AshLin): Passion to Contribute to Wikipedia still Flying like Butterflies

Kolkata Wiki Community Meetup

Knowledge Sharing through GLAM at Bangalore

Sponsors

What is GLAM and what does it have to do with Wikimedia and Creative Commons?

Why contribute?

How to contribute?

How does it help the GLAM institution?

Creative Commons

What will users learn?

Who should attend the seminar?

Admission:

Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era: Coverage in Sakshi

Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era: Coverage in Enadu

Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era

Instructions for Participants

KIIT University to lead building free knowledge repository initiative

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop, Mysore — Coverage in Prajavani

Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujire, Karnataka

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at SDM

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Vijaya Karnataka)

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Samyukta Karnataka)

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Prajavani)