Centre for Internet and Society

Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses

Pavan Santhosh S. & Subhashish Panigrahi — 2016-09-20T12:43:29Z

This campaign was started on June 19 and copyright migration process is complete for 17 books so far. Once the copyright migration is over the books—ranging from historical figures and popular personalities to regional history—are going to be digitised on Wikisource.

List of books and their authors

Author: Gadam Gopala Swamy
Book: Paschima Godavari Jillalo Mahatmuni Sancharam, a historical account on Gandhi's travels and the way he spread his ideology in and around this area.
Significance: This can be used in improving articles related to the history of villages of the West Godavari district. Swamy is going to publish his magnum opus on the national movement in West Godavari along with another biographical work about the notable people of the district.

"I dedicate these works to all the people of the West Godavari district. All my efforts will be useful even if one person [from West Godavari] reads these works, learns what their ancestors lived for and died for [in the national independence movement] and tries to be responsibly contribute to the society. I find this could only be possible through placing it in digital platform like Wikisource."
- Dr. Gadam Gopala Swamy, historian, former professor

Author: Kanuri Badarinadh (Historian, Novelist and Journalist)
Books: Biographies, short biographies like Tanuku Talukulu, Yarra Narayana Swamy Jeevitha Charitra, Local Histories like Panara Vishayamu, Maa doothikapuramu, collection of articles on historical, cultural, social and art like Kasyapa Vyasalu, Antharvani, Badareenadheeyam, Lochoopu, Annavi anukonnavi, Vyasa Badarikam, historical fiction like Kavi garu, Koutilyuni Nireekshanam.
Priority: These Books can be used as resources to create articles about notable personalities of West Godavari district, several important persons and events in Andhra pradesh politics and history. Can improve articles related to West Godavari district, especially about the history sections in the village articles.

“I don't want these works to be in bookshelf and get wasted by termites. My wish as an author and researcher is to make these works available to future historians who can make use of it, so that our people get to know the local history”
- Kanuri Badarinadh, historian, novelist and journalist. Badarinadh has donated some of his books.

Author: Katta Srinivasa Rao, historian, Wikipedian and poet
Book: Ganapeswaralayam, a historical account of temples of historical importance that were built in Kusumanchi of Khammam district in Telangana. These temples flourished under the Kakatiya dynasty’s reign.
Priority: Katta Sriniavasa Rao is one of the first line Telangana historians who are working to rebuild Telangana’s History. This work is result of his research. It contains valuable content about Ganapeswara Temple and gives a glimpse of the sculpture, history and society under Kakatiya dynasty in Khammam.

Author: Vemuri Venkateswara Rao
Book: Ramanujan Nundi atu itu, a book about mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his works in mathematics
Priority: Like many other Indian languages, Telugu also has a lower number of books related to science and mathematics especially in the contemporary context. This book is about Ramanujan Numbers, formulas and a few more works. It also has description about contemporary mathematics built upon Ramanujan's work. This can be used to improve mathematics related articles in Telugu Wikipedia.

Author: Yasaswi Sateesh Kumar
Books: Okkamata, contains brief poetic pen portraits that explains about contemporary Telugu poets, Tellakagitam is anthology of Telugu poet Yasaswi’s poetry.
Priority: Photos of many contemporary Telugu poets and brief descriptions about them are now under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. These can be used in Wikipedia articles about notable poets.

Author: Emma Rauschenbusch Clough
Translator: Vivina Murthy
Book: Cheppulu Kuduthu Kuduthu is a translation of Emma Rauschenbusch Clough’s English book “While sewing sandals”. The English book was released in 1899 and is in Public Domain. The Telugu book was translated by Vivina Murthy and was published in 2007 by Manasu Foundation. As the translator had rights on his translated work, he released it under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license to make it freely available to all on our request.
Priority: Historical record especially about Christianity in coastal Andhra Pradesh, dalits in 19th century.

Author: Gurajada Apparao
Book: Gurujadalu is a compilation of all the works Gurajada Apparao -- he is considered as one of the greatest literary figures of modern Telugu literature. The book was edited and published by the efforts of Manasu Foundation and its associates. Apparao’s works are under Public Domain already as per the Indian Copyright Law,. But the critical introduction and some of the translations included in the book were copyrighted by Manasu foundation which they released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. This move will help digitize them on Wikisource and make them freely available to Telugu people.
Priority: Even Though some of the works of Apparao got digitized on Wikisource, this can showcase his complete literary journey with bringing a vast set of reading for the Telugu readers.

All of these books were released or agreed to be released under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license in June and July 2016. Some of these books were digitized on Wikisource, and the proofreading is going on currently. Some of the the remaining books being scanned and some are uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. The ones that have been uploaded on Commons are being indexed and digitized on Wikisource.

The news about all of these license migrated books was shared with the [Telugu Wikimedia] community, and also personally with some of the community members like Rajasekhar, Sri Ramamurthy, Gullapalli Nageswara Rao, Bhaskara Naidu, and a few others who supported in various stages of digitization like indexing, proofreading, etc.

"I wish this contribution will go forward in the same way and help making Telugu Wikisource number one in entire Indic Wikisources. I will support this work wherever you need and please ask my help whenever necessary. Definitely we can collaborate."
- User:Rajasekhar1961, Telugu Wikimedian

The list of the books can also be located on the Telugu Wikisource.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/campaign-for-relicensing-copyrighted-books-under-creative-commons-licenses

Data Xgen launches paid Hindi email service

praskrishna — 2016-08-30T02:35:03Z

Jaipur based Enterprise email provider Data Xgen Technologies has launched a paid email service in Hindi Devnagari script. This is especially for .bharat domain names, but can also be used for other domains. As of now, the company offers email packages starting at Rs 99, Rs 499, Rs 999 and Rs 1,499, which look like monthly plans.

The blog post by Sneha Johari was published in Medianama on August 29, 2016.

Ajay Data, the company’s founder and CEO told MediaNama that it plans to launch an app for sending free email in Indic language, starting with Hindi. Data said that he was hopeful about Hindi email adoption given the vast majority of the population in India was rural and did not understand English. “People get left out of communication streams because they do not understand English. But they can still get onto the internet and communicate with all of us. Mobile companies are also selling phones in Indian languages, marketing as Hindi phones.. And this is the right time (for Indic email) since the segment is being created,” he added.

Earlier this month, the Indian government told email service providers to provide users with addresses in Indian languages, starting with Hindi. It also wanted ‘sufficient local language content and tools to access it’ in order to increase internet penetration and push higher rural adoption. This was needed because English speakers and readers in the country were low (10.35%), according to Rajiv Bansal, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT.

Wikipedia Indic efforts

About 3 weeks ago, Wikipedia launched in Tulu, the 23rd Indian language Wiki. In September 2013, the Goa University had entered into a 3 year MoU with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani Wikipedia, which was launched 6 months later. In August 2014, former Bihar CM Nitish Kumar launched the ‘Bihar on Wikipedia’ campaign inviting people of the state to write about their villages, towns, culture, history, development over the years, etc. Note that in 2012, Wikipedia editors were digitizing Indian language, out-of-copyright texts online, trying to address the comparative paucity of Indic language texts online.

As of June 2016, Wikipedia had 16 million page views per month on the Hindi wiki, with overall 106,844 articles. This is not a significant increase. According to this August 2011 report, there were 0.1 million Hindi articles on the platform, and 9 million overall views.

Indian mobile handsets need to support Hindi: BIS

In June, the Bureau of Indian Standards reportedly said that mobile handsets in India would need to support typing in Hindi and English, and reading in all 22 official Indian languages. We’d pointed out at the time that this was essential for growth of access to the internet for handsets in order to access content in users’ local languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/data-xgen-launches-paid-hindi-email-service

Focus on India—WikiConference produces new apps; state government adopts free licenses

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T03:15:22Z

WikiConference India and its productive hackathon

The second WikiConference India, held August 5–7 in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, drew hundreds of new and experienced members from 20 language communities of various Wikimedia projects from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. This event was more thematic than the first WikiConference India (held in 2011), with numerous presentations, panel discussions and workshops on the gender gap, Wikipedia in education, Mediawiki, and state of the movement in India. The event was organized by the Community of Wikimedians in India, supported by Wikimedia India and the Centre for Internet and Society, and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. The newly formed user group Punjabi Wikimedians hosted the event. WikiConference India's main goal was to build community and increase participation among Wikimedians in India. Interest in the event was strong: 452 Wikimedians from more than six countries applied for ~100 scholarships. Wikipedia's well known gender gap was evident: only 55 scholarship applicants were women, but a strong focus on diversity resulted in ~25% of scholarship recipients going to women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. In all, about 250 people attended the conference. Several Foundation staff spoke at the event, including executive director Katherine Maher, Asaf Bartov, and Tighe Flanagan.

A highlight of the conference was the hackathon track, which spanned all three days of the conference. It proved highly productive, yielding seven apps that are expected to help Wikimedians in a variety of ways. I spoke with Santosh Shingare (Cherishsantosh), the Bangalore-based Wikimedian who organized the hackathon. Santosh had previously served as an organizer of the 2011 WikiConference, and has run hackathons annually since then. Santosh's primary motivation for holding such events is learning; he spoke of limited opportunities to learn about new areas of technology beyond his core skills in WebRTC and Android. He enjoys collaborating with other Wikimedians and sharing technical skills. This event was his first with an international draw, and he looks forward to opportunities to collaborate beyond India's borders in the future.

As Santosh outlined in a message to the Wikimania email list, the hackathon's 35 participants made substantial progress with the following projects:

WikiSpeak with native language (web and Android): Speaking the text of Wikipedia articles
Edit Tamil Wiktionary (Android)
Audio file upload to Wikidata (Android): Assists users in uploading small files that demonstrate the pronunciation of lexical items
A layer that shows local Wikipedia articles on a Google Map
Optical character recognition for Hindi and Malayalam
Communication platform [WebRTC] (Web Application): Santosh wrote this app himself; hackathon participants used it to communicate
Notifications: browser notifications for Wikipedia functions such as recent changes

Santosh highlights that the projects grew out of advance communication. To identify problems and generate ideas, the hackathon organizing team posted a survey ahead of the event. Requests from various language communities, including Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, and Malayalam, drove several of the projects. The software is all freely licensed, and there are no plans to generate revenue.

Santosh is not a prolific Wikipedia writer or editor, but rather sees value in his ability to communicate among Wikimedians who seek features from various language communities, including his native Marathi and other Indic languages in which he has varying degrees of fluency.

He plans to update the Wikimedia community shortly with further details on each of the seven projects. He is already planning the next of India's annual hackathons. Hackathon organizers worldwide might be interested in learning more about Indian Wikimedians' efforts, and Wikimedians around the world can expect to benefit from their projects.

The conference generated a number of media reports. P

Indian state of Tamil Nadu adopts Creative Commons license

The state of Tamil Nadu on the subcontinent

Last week brought a rare piece of good news in the world's uncertain progress towards the widespread free licensing of information on the Internet. Ravidreams announced on the Wikimedia India mailing list that the government of one of India's largest and most populous states—Tamil Nadu—has issued an instruction to Tamil University and "all other government departments and institutions to release all their publications, archives and collections under Creative Commons by Share-Alike license".

The move comes one year after the collaboration between the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community and the Tamil Virtual Academy, an independent institution set up by the state government in 2001 to provide online resources for Tamil-language communities around the world. TVA and the Tamil-language Wikimedia community collaborated to persuade the government to make the order. Wikimedia India (one of three Creative Commons affiliates in the country) served as an institutional partner, signing the initial agreement on behalf of the Indian Wikimedia community, and funding a Wikimedian in Residence at TVA.

Ravi, who also serves on the TVA committee for outreach, told the Signpost that the TVA is very keen to share its collection of encyclopedic resources with Tamil Wikimedia projects. The community contributed strategic knowledge of free-content licensing, providing precedents for free content release by other governments in India and other countries, and helped in the drafting of the actual order. "But it takes a lot of time, effort, high-profile connections to change how government institutions work", he said.

An example of the distinctive Tamil script

“

Almost 99% of the time it's about the right officer/minister who cares for our mission being in charge of the right department at the right time. It's very hard to bring change through a bottom-up approach. These precedents help when someone at the top gets interested in changing things. So, any community that expects to influence public policy should be prepared to do a lot of groundwork.

”

Tamil-language Wikipedian Thamizhpparithi Maari serves as Assistant Director, TVA and state coordinator of its computing outreach unit, which the government is funding to encourage students in the state to use open-source media and software; this program includes the development of mobile apps and the running of contests to enhance students' computing skills. He described to the Signpost the elaborate process of finally gaining legal and administrative approval for the CC-by-SA release order. Thamizhpparithi has already started a process of digitising books from the universities to share with the Tamil wiki community, involving between 400,000 and 500,000 pages in some 200 books, using Google optical character recognition (OCR).

"This is just the beginning; we expect millions of pages to be uploaded to Tamil Wikisource", Ravi said. Most of the content that will become available for uploading is in Tamil, although some will be in English and other Indian languages; this will present significant opportunities for the Tamil Wikimedia community.

A rare Tamil-language book in an archival exhibition

There are about 70 million native speakers of Tamil, and another eight million second-language speakers. It is an official language in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka (with which the state shares a maritime border), and Singapore, and is also used in Malaysia and the African island of Mauritius. The language, written in a distinctive curvilinear script, has a rich literature of poetry reaching back thousands of years, and of novels over the past few centuries; this is attested by a related category on the English Wikipedia that is already of impressive size.

The Open Policy Network, a project of Creative Commons, published an overview of the value of this kind of work in 2014; the Network advocates for governments around the world to adopt free content licenses. T

In brief

Mobile app provides offline access to 8,000 medical articles in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, and Spanish: The apps, which supplement a popular English language app, were announced by the WikiProject Med Foundation and Wikimedia Switzerland. More language editions are planned.
Wikimedia Foundation appoints five volunteers to its Board Governance Committee: Newly appointed trustee Nataliia Tymkiv announced the selection of the advisory group. Board governance issues have been the subject of much discussion since the tumultuous events at the WMF over the last year. The four members of the BGC are Tymkiv (chair), Kelly Battles, Christophe Henner, and Dariusz Jemielniak.
WikiConference North America will take place October 7–10, 2016 in San Diego. Scholarship applications are open until August 23; conference submissions until August 31.
WikiConvention Francophone will take place in Paris August 19–21.
New help page takes aim at common newbie obstacle: Many articles carry banners, to flag problems with the articles. New contributors often lack an understanding of how to go about removing the banners, if they address the underlying issues. In recent months, Fuhghettaboutit created a help page to explain the process, and advocated for linking to the page from the templates. The help page now gets several thousand views per day, suggesting that it is filling a significant gap.
Machine-assisted translation of Wikipedia articles, which has increased with the introduction of the Wikimedia Foundation's Content Translation Tool (covered by the Signpost in a June 2015 op-ed, in June 2016, and in various other pieces), has sparked a controversy in recent weeks. See here: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT.
Wikidata RfC on defining data quality underway: Alessandro Piscopo, a guest of Wikimedia Germany, asserts that: "to achieve high quality, it is important to define first what data quality is on this knowledge base." Join the discussion: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Data quality framework for Wikidata. P

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-signpost-august-18-2016-pete-forsyth-and-tony-focus-on-india

Tools orientation session for Telugu Wikimedians of Hyderabad

Pavan Santhosh S. — 2016-08-17T14:35:54Z

A tools orientation session is being organised on July 10 at Hyderabad during the regular monthly meetup. Telugu Wikimedians who would be interested to learn about advanced editing tools like citation templates and Twinkle are welcome to join.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/tools-orientation-session-for-telugu-wikimedians-of-hyderabad

Training-the-trainer programme and Mediawiki training at Pune

garule — 2016-08-18T11:14:57Z

A two-day long train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training programme was organised during May 28-29 in Pune to better capacity of Wikimedians both technically, and outreach and community building.

The participants were trained about planning, organising and reporting for outreach programmes, public speaking, advanced editing skills and and the Wikimedia grants structure. Similarly for the Mediawiki training, the major topics covered in the Mediawiki training sessions were Six Wikimedians; bug triage, bots, Mediawiki extensions and scripts, and Wikidata. The sessions were discussed and planned in the Marathi Wikipedia Village Pump in advance. Rahmanuddin Shaik and I facilitated the individual sessions. Thanks to Sanket Oswal, Treasurer, Wikimedia India who shared about the chapter’s ongoing activities, especially the Wiki Loves Earth project. The community members from Nashik shared about their plans for a meetup in the city of Nashik in June.

Santoshi Tiwari, a Wikimedian from the city of Nashik who was attending a programme like this for the first time feels that there is need for more such programmes more often in multiple cities as there are already 16 Wikimedians from her city who are eager to learn more advanced editing skills. “I learnt about many interesting aspects of the Wikimedia world, like the Wikipedia Adventure game, Wikidata and Wikipedia policies and guidelines

. Until this time, I was contributing to Wikipedia on my own but I started contributing to Wikidata after this event. Now I am enjoying playing the Wikipedia Adventure. I also got the opportunity to meet many Wikimedians in person” shares Santoshi. She explains, “this was good as an introductory event but I would like to participate in sessions that are more detail-oriented. Also, having edit-a-thons during such events will be very useful. With a total of about 19-20 people participating in total, 7 female participants is still a good starting point to have a balanced community. However there should be plans for accommodating more people in the upcoming events”.

Going forward, there are plans to have at least one session in four month in cities where there are higher number of Marathi Wikimedians.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/training-the-trainer-programme-and-mediawiki-training-at-pune

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: Gender Gap in Indian Language Wikipedias – Projects, Outreach and Outcome

pavanaja — 2016-08-17T02:43:54Z

India is not much different from the global statistics when it comes to gender gap issues in Wikipedia. Indian language Wikipedias are known to have similar ratio of male to female editors.

The submission was included as part of a panel related to the gender gap at the WikiConference India 2016.

Many activities are being made to bridge the gender gap in Indian language Wikipedias. These are aimed both at improving the ratio of female to male editors and increasing women related content in Indian language Wikipedias. Some of the notable projects are Art+ Feminism editathon, Lilavati’s daughters editathon, International Women’s day or month editathon, editathon to add articles about woman writers of coastal Karnataka. Sizeable number of students who are part of the Wikipedia in Education Program which are being run at many educational institutes of India are female. Some of these students continue editing and contribute to Wikipedia. Some female students worked as interns and have contributed by improving the quality of articles written by their peers. Outreach is one of the regular activities of taking Wikipedia to people. Outcome of the projects and the data on retention of the participants of outreach activities as regular contributing Wikipedians, survival of the newly created editors for short and long periods are documented and will be presented at the conference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-gender-gap-in-indian-language-wikipedias-2013-projects-outreach-and-outcome

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: We, Men, Women: Collective Learning in Bridging Indic Wikipedia Gender Gaps

Elisachang — 2016-08-17T02:37:01Z

There is no denying that non-English Wikipedias are disproportionally underrepresented in scholarly focus despite the significant role of an open knowledge society can play in smaller linguistic groups – local collaboration and communication, knowledge dissemination, as well as preservation of local language resources.

A presentation was made at the WikiIndia Conference 2016.

Likewise, for the issue of the Wikipedia gender gap, missing the discourse and context of the Indian language Wikipedias’ gender imbalance will be a great loss considering the potential it possesses in gender empowerment and the recognition of female’s accomplishment in the local communities.

In this action research, we approach the issue with localized lens to investigate the gender gaps in five Indian language Wikipedias (Kannada, Konkani, Telugu, Odia, and Marathi) and to recode female participants' experiences in editing, negotiating, and communicating. However, this is not an ordinary gender gap bridging plan, we are not only promoting the idea of female-inclusive open knowledge society, but also actively searching for effective incentives, tangible outcomes, and sustainable strategies to cope with the challenges in respective contexts. Most importantly, we hope to create an example for the establishment of “community feedback loops” for reflective learning. Combining practical approach with theories in Feminism and Social Network, we ask.

How do female and women’s organizations perceive Wikipedia and its use on knowledge production?
How do we incentivize females and various female organization and make them feel empowered through online contribution?
What type(s) of network are ideal for female newcomers? How can we improve cross-community/gender communication?
How can we build a more welcoming platform for collaboration?

Indian language Wikipedias may be small, but they are in the phase of much flexibility and opportunities to shape and reshape the cultures and dynamics. Through the cyclical process of an action reaction, narrowing gender gaps in our local Wikipedias is no longer discrete events of individual efforts – but a collective action, a mutual learning, as what Wikipedias were built for.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-we-men-women-collective-learning-in-bridging-indic-wikipedia-gender-gaps

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: How to better tell your Wikimedia Community Story using Media as a Tool

subha — 2016-08-17T02:24:19Z

The Wikimedia community has constantly struggled to a) reach out to masses and tell them about their contribution, and motivate people to contribute to the Wikimedia projects. Media plays a very important role in spreading the word about Wikimedia projects and the contributor community, and at times, encouraging the audience to contribute.

A presentation was made at the WikiConference India 2016. This was one of the submissions which was accepted.

This has not been a very successful trend in the movement so far that a large number of people have engaged on Wikimedia projects because of a media shoutout. But there is no doubt about media being a great tool to engage with a large number of people. Apart from the mainstream media, social media has also been a gamechanger in mobilizing masses. The audience in both these kinds of media demand a certain kind of content and storytelling. And it is not easy to create relevant content for an audience that is hungry for new stories. Also, dealing with mainstream media has a lot to do with interpersonal skills.

This workshop would cover a few best practices from lessons learned from several media-related exercises in the recent years. Some of these exercises come with success and some with failures with some specific learning. And these important takeaways will hopefully lead a path in creating some kind open education resources (OER) for the Wikimedia community. However, none of the methodologies that are going to be discussed here are going to be ready solutions to change the awareness about the Wikimedia movement overnight. But these will certainly help the participants map their own community stories. The interactive workshop will help the participants to make some roadmap for a regular and sustained engagement on media.

Those who are keen on learning about using different media tools and take their Wikimedia stories to a wider world should consider participating this. It would be beneficial if they come prepared with a list of challenges that they are facing in media outreach.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-how-to-better-tell-your-wikimedia-community-story-using-media-as-a-tool

Wikipedia WikiMeetup at Bangalore

praskrishna — 2016-08-12T13:31:04Z

Bangalore based Wikipedians will gather for a meeting at the Centre for Internet and Society on Sunday, August 14, 2016 at 3.00 p.m.

Anyone interested in Wikipedia (user, contributor or curious about it). Wikipedians from any part of India or the world and anyone who is interested in Wikipedia! Meetup is open to members of all Wikimedia projects and Wikipedians from all languages. All are welcome, and we are especially interested in seeing newcomers to join the experienced Wikipedians/Wikimedians.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/wikipedia-wikimeetup-at-bangalore

South Asia's Largest Wikimedia Conference Kicks Off in India

subha — 2016-08-08T01:39:25Z

Wiki Conference India 2016, the largest gathering of the contributors of Wikipedia (the multilingual online encyclopaedia) and its sister projects called Wikimedia projects, begins August 5 in Landran, in the Indian state of Punjab.

The blog post was published by Global Voices on August 5, 2016.

The conference returns five years after its first iteration in 2011. This year's event is focused on bringing the contributor communities of South Asian and English-language Wikimedia projects from the Indian subcontinent under one roof.

A few hundred participants including 100 scholarship holders from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka will meet at the Chandigarh Group of College campus, where the conference is being held. Organizers have planned a series of presentations, talks and workshops—related to major topics like gender bias in Wikipedia, technology, global reach, education, volunteer leadership building and engagement and program design—to occupy participants for all three days.

For the separate technical sessions, a pre-event needs assessment survey was conducted widely to collect input about the technical challenges that volunteer contributors are facing. A hackathon is in the works to address some of the major technical challenges of different language communities.

The Wikimedia community in South Asia as a whole and the Wikipedia community, both of which rely on volunteers, are creating a massive repository of freely licensed content in the Indian languages on the Internet. Currently Wikipedia itself is available in about 293 languages. Other Wikimedia projects—Wikisource, a free library; Wiktionary, a multilingual online dictionary; and Wikimedia Commons, the world's largest media repository housing hundreds and thousands of images, audio, video and other media files—will add a few hundred more projects to this list.

Some of the noted guests who are addressing the gathering include Wikimedia Foundation's board member Nataliia Tymkiv, the organization's newly promoted Executive Director Katherine Maher, Punjabi-language poet Surjit Patar, and Internet freedom advocate and Centre for Internet and Society's Executive Director Sunil Abraham.

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon has been running for about a month prior to the conference in 12 Indian language Wikipedias and one European language Wikipedia (Ukrainian Wikipedia). The main languages in this edit-a-thon are Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. The focus of this sprint is to expand the content reach of Wikipedia on Punjab, Punjabi people, and their language and culture as a symbolic gesture to show gratitude to Punjab where the event is happening. Articles about Punjab or Punjab people in other local languages will help many local readers of Wikipedia learn about Punjab in their own language. So far, more than 1,900 article have been created by about 100 Wikipedians. The edit-a-thon will be also running during the conference so that the participants can also contribute to this activity.

Konkani language is the official language of the Indian state of Goa and is spoken along the western coast of India. In an interview, The Discoverer, an active contributor to the Konkani-language Wikipedia, explained how Wikipedia can unite native speakers who speak different variations of the same language and write in different scripts:

For Konkani Wikipedia to succeed, it is not just a ‘good idea’ for Konkani speakers writing in various scripts to work together on one Wikipedia, but it’s also a necessity and a challenge at the same time. It’s a necessity, because as things stand, no one script has a strong enough community to run a Wikipedia by themselves. It’s a challenge because not everyone can read every script, and it’s important for all the users of a Wikipedia to be able to understand all the content on that site.

The full interview is here.

A team of dedicated organizers who are primarily volunteers and represent several Wikimedia communities from India and three Wikimedia-affiliates—Wikimedia India, Punjabi Wikimedians and Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge program—are working together to make this event a success.

More details about the event could be found in the event page, and on Facebook and Twitter.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/global-voices-august-5-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-south-asia-largest-wikimedia-conference-kicks-off-in-india

Community digest: Konkani language speakers are separated by scripts but unite by Wikipedia; news in brief

subha — 2016-08-07T03:11:06Z

Konkani-language Wikipedians on what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers who speak in different variations of the same language and write in different scripts.

This was published on Wikimedia Blog on August 4, 2016

I reached out to a few Goan Konkani Wikipedians to learn about their experience with the project, especially after it went live in 2015. In the interview they share what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers that are currently dispersed in many states, speak in different variations of the same language, and write in different scripts.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Hi The Discoverer [a long time contributor to Wikipedia who is actively contributing to the Goan Konkani Wikipedia], you have been actively contributing to the Goan Konkani Wikipedia since 2006 even before it went live in 2014. What potential do you see in the Goan Konkani Wikipedia bringing Konkani speakers from the states of Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala?
User:The Discoverer (TD): Even though my first contributions were in 2006, I have been moderately active on Wikipedia all these years.

I do agree with you that Konkani Wikipedia has the potential to bind people across borders. As you have rightly pointed out, Konkani is remarkable in that, for the small geographical area where it is a native language, it has developed a large number of dialects, in addition to being used in multiple scripts. Unfortunately, in the offline world, we see that there are disagreements over certain Konkani scripts being favored or not favored in terms of official recognition. Konkani Wikipedia can not only be a platform in bringing together Konkani speakers from many regions but can also be the unifying factor among the Konkani people.

SP: How do think Wikipedia could be a good platform to help unifying the Konkani people?
TD: For Konkani Wikipedia to succeed, it is not just a ‘good idea’ for Konkani speakers writing in various scripts to work together on one Wikipedia, but it’s also a necessity and a challenge at the same time. It’s a necessity, because as things stand, no one script has a strong enough community to run a Wikipedia by themselves. It’s a challenge because not everyone can read every script, and it’s important for all the users of a Wikipedia to be able to understand all the content on that site.

SP: Very rightly spotted. And how do you think the Wikipedia community and the CIS-A2K program should work together to tackle this challenge?
TD: We need an automatic script converter (see the script converter resource page for Konkani on Meta and task on Phabricator) that could make the lives of the editors easier. Most people cannot read more than two scripts. Most users are currently depending on an external site for transliteration when the user cannot read the script used in a Wikipedia article. That’s painful and a user might also would not know about a third party converter. An automatic script converter on Wikipedia would enable people to read any page in the script of their choice in a single click. This is where CIS-A2K can really help Konkani Wikipedia, by helping to implement the script converter. In addition to the script converter, CIS-A2K could also study various multi-script Wikipedias in existence and prepare a list of such features that are used in these Wikipedias to deal with multiple scripts, so that Indian multi-script Wikipedias can consider implementing such a feature as well.

Konkani Wikipedia is facing another challenge right now in growing the community as there are only handful of active editors. And we need contributors from varied walks of life to add more diversity to the community. The boost that was needed initially to make Konkani Wikipedia live—thanks to institutions like Goa University (GU) and Nirmala Institute of Education (NIE) and CIS-A2K for bringing in many student-editors—needs more intensity now. Students from GU and NIE were mainly from the Konkani language and teaching disciplines. If you consider other larger Wikipedias, like the English Wikipedia, they owe their success to editing by people from a diverse backgrounds, and also to the fact that the people are comfortable with the basics of markup and coding and were able to build templates, etc. Today, there is almost no one who is working on templates and other similar technical stuff for Konkani Wikipedia. Here too, CIS-A2K can help by reaching out to Konkani speakers with a background in computing—for instance, students of Bachelor of Computer Application (BCA), Master in Computer Application, Computer Science and engineering. This will help build a community that is technically adept at creating templates and dealing with more advanced types of content for the Wikipedia.

The Konkani Wikipedia can also take advantage of software extensions like VisualEditor and Flow that the knowledge of markup and other technicalities that the user needs to have, so that users who are uncomfortable with editing markup can focus on just adding content with a much more simple and user-friendly interface.

In these ways, participation of people from different regional and vocational backgrounds can form a vibrant editing community leading to the growth of the Konkani Wikipedia.

In brief

WikiConference India 2016 to be held at Chandigarh during August 5–7: The second WikiConference India (WCI) will be held on August 5-7 in Chandigarh, India. After the first WCI in 2011, this will be the largest gathering of the Wikimedians from the Indian subcontinent. A team of volunteers representing several Wikimedia communities across the country and three Wikimedia affiliates—Wikimedia India, Punjabi Wikimedians and Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program—are working together to make this event a success. Over 100 scholarships have been offered to noteworthy contributors from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Various talks, meetups and workshops are planned for the three-day event, and a needs assessment survey has been put in place for ensuring any hackathon needs are addressed.
Punjab edit-a-thon: A month-long edit-a-thon has been running in 12 Indic language Wikipedias and one European language Wikipedia (the Ukrainian) to enrich the content related to Punjab, the Punjabi people, and their language and culture. So far, more than 1000 articles have been created by about 100 Wikipedians. As we have already surpassed the dream target of 1000 articles, we are planning to extend the edit-a-thon through WikiConference India so many can participate during the event.
Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses: A campaign has been started to relicense Telugu-language books of several noted authors from “all rights reserved” to a Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) license. This campaign was started on June 19 and copyright migration process is complete for 17 books so far. Once the copyright migration is over the books—ranging from historical figures and popular personalities to regional history—are going to be digitized on Wikisource. “I don’t want these works to be in bookshelf and get wasted by termites. My wish as an author and researcher is to make these works available to future historians who can make use of it, so that our people get to know the local history” shares Kanuri Badarinadh, a historian, novelist and journalist who has donated some of his books.
Train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training program for capacity building of community leaders from Indian subcontinent: After two iterations of the Train the Trainer in 2013 and 2015, CIS-A2K organized the third program during June 15-17 at Bengaluru. The Mediawiki training was designed to help groom technical leadership skills of the technical contributors of the communities. A total of 45 participants, that were selected by a collaborative consultation with the community, took part in these events. The trainers for both the events consisted of subject experts from the Wikimedia community, the free knowledge movement, the free and open source software community and CIS-A2K program staff. A series of small Mediawiki trainings will follow soon that will be led by the trained participants.
Indian women in Science edit-a-thon: Organized by IndiaBioscience, a not-for-profit working for research and advocacy on the life sciences in India, this edit-a-thon began with an introduction to the series of Wikipedia edit-a-thons that have been running to expand Wikipedia’s reach on Indian women with contribution to Science. There was a Q&A session Professor Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan followed by introduction to Wikipedia editing, its policies and guidelines, and brief on copyright, and Creative Commons licensing. 11 new articles were created and 11 existing articles were expanded in English, Hindi and Odia-language Wikipedias.
Indigenous South-Asian language gets a new open Unicode font: A new font for the Ol chiki script (used to write the Santali language) along with input tools are getting ready to be released soon. Santali is spoken by over 6 million people in South Asia over Bangladesh and Nepal and six states in India. This project, supported by the Centre for Internet of India, will help native language speakers type in Unicode across platforms, and also using Universal Language System in all Wikimedia projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-digest-konkani-language-speakers-are-separated-by-scripts-but-unite-by-wikipedia-news-in-brief

WikiConference India 2016

praskrishna — 2016-08-07T01:35:50Z

WikiConference India 2016 is an event to provide a common platform for all Wikimedians in India to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other information. The Conference is open for participation of Wikimedians from all nations, and will be taking place on the 5th, 6th, and 7th of August 2016 at Chandigarh.

The Conference has a very distinct Indian flavor and deals primarily with issues relating to India on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The main objective is to reduce the gap between different communities and get help from other community members on technical issues and other things like best practices in decision making and how we resolve the disputes in the community.

Guests

Katherine Maher, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Nataliia Tymkiv, Board Member, Wikimedia Foundation
Asaf Bartov, Senior Program Officer, Emerging Wikimedia Communities, Wikimedia Foundation
Runa Bhattacharjee, Manager, Language Engineering Team (International), Wikimedia Foundation
Dr. Surjit Patar, Punjabi poet and writer
Tighe Flanagan, Senior Manager, Wikipedia Education Program, Wikimedia Foundation
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society
Yohann Varun Thomas, President, Wikimedia India
María Kreuz, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Social Media Campaign

Facebook event page - https://www.facebook.com/events/146258892472025/ (More suited for conference participants only)
Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/WikiConferenceIndia2016
Facebook group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikiConferenceIndia2016/
Official Twitter Handler - https://twitter.com/WikiConIndia
IRC Channel - #wikiconferenceindia

More Info, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/wikiconference-india-2016

The largest Wikipedia gathering in South Asia kicks off

subha — 2016-08-06T17:11:39Z

Wikimedia Conference 2016Wiki Conference India 2016 (WCI), the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia, will be held during August 5-7 this year in Chandigarh, India.

This was published Opensource.com on August 5, 2016

The first iteration of this event was five years ago in 2011. The event is focused around South Asian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. Hundreds of participants, including over 100 scholarship holders from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, will participate in this three-day event. A team of volunteers representing several Wikimedia communities across the country and three Wikimedia affiliates—Wikimedia India, Punjabi Wikimedians and Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge program—are working together to make this event a success.

Several Wikimedia project and program-related talks, meetups and thematic workshops, focused on technology, program design, volunteer leadership building and engagement, gender gap in Wikipedia, global reach, and education, will keep the participants occupied. There will be separate technical tracks, which were chosen from the results of a pre-event needs assessment survey to ensure that community needs are met. Prior to the conference, a month-long edit-a-thon has been running in twelve South Asian language Wikipedias, and one European language Wikipedia (Ukrainian Wikipedia). The focus of this sprint was to expand the content reach of Wikipedia on Punjab, Punjabi people, and their language and culture as the event is happening in Punjab. So far, more than 1900 articles have been created by about 150 Wikipedians, and the edit-a-thon will be also running during the conference to keep the option of creating more articles open to the participants. Some of the guests includes Wikimedia Foundation's board member Nataliia Tymkiv, the organization's newly promoted executive director Catherine Maher, Punjabi-language poet Surjit Patar and Internet freedom advocate and Centre for Internet and Society's Executive Director Sunil Abraham.

As compared to the last WikiConference India, this conference has more thematic focus, especially on challenges like the gender bias on Wikipedia, and emerging projects like the Wikipedia Education Program. There are as many as six presentations related to gender gap, and six more related to education program.

There has been constant engagement on both on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #WCI2016. Some of the most-used basic phrases in the Punjabi language have been recorded and shared to the participants from outside the region to communicate with the locals.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-august-5-2016-largest-wikipedia-gathering-in-south-asia-kicks-off

WikiConference India 2016 Starts Friday in Chandigarh

praskrishna — 2016-08-05T01:48:32Z

India, a key growth area for Wikipedia, is gearing up for a national conference "for Wikimedians in India to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other information".

First published by Indo Asian News Service was mirrored on NDTV website on August 4, 2016. Sunil Abraham will be participating.

While the conference is open to "Wikipedians" from across the globe, organisers announced here that it would have a "very distinct Indian flavour and will deal primarily with issues relating to India on Wikipedia and its sister projects".

Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is the world's sixth-most popular website in terms of overall visitor traffic. Its worldwide monthly readership totals almost 500 million.

Since 2011, the Wikipedia has been working to expand its growth in India, and it held its first Indian conference in Mumbai in November that year, which was attended by 700 persons and addressed by website founder Jimmy Wales.

This year, the meet takes place from August 5-8 in Chandigarh, the city and a Union territory of a million population that serves as the capital of the states of Punjab and Haryana.

"The main objective is to reduce the gap between different communities and get help from other community members on technical issues and other things like best practices in decision making and how we resolve the disputes in the community," the organisers said.

Those attending including Wikimedia Foundation executive director Katherine Maher, board member Nataliia Tymkiv, senior programme officer for emerging Wikimedia communities Asaf Bartov, language engineering team international manager Runa Bhattacharjee, Punjabi poet Dr Surjit Patar, and Wikipedia education programme senior manager Tighe Flanagan.

From India, participants will include The Centre for Internet and Society executive director Sunil Abraham, and Wikimedia India president Yohann Varun Thomas.

This event includes "hackathons" and "edit-a-thons" - collective workings towards improving the content available online. It will also see sessions on the Wikimedia movement in India, examples of its use in education, innovative tech solutions from India, content translation, a "gentle introduction" to Wikidata, gender gaps, and case studies from various Indian languages.

Participants are coming from the Wikipedias in languages including Punjabi, Kannada, Odia, Tamil, English, Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Sindhi, Hindi and Chinese.

Because of its widespread popularity - and contrary to fears that a website "anyone" can edit will not have quality - the Wikipedia notches often among the highest results when information is searched for on the world wide web.

It is a project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of "openly editable content". As the site explains: "The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning quick) and encyclopedia."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/indo-asian-news-service-ndtv-august-4-2016-wiki-conference-india-2016-starts-friday-in-chandigarh

Architectures of Knowledge

praskrishna — 2016-07-30T14:44:01Z

Rohini Lakshane was a speaker at a workshop organized by Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities at Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.

Rohini briefly spoke about WikiSource, and content donation in Indian languages done by some libraries and non-profits as a result of the efforts of the CIS-A2K team. See the event schedule here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/architectures-of-knowledge