Centre for Internet and Society

Expanding the World of Telugu Wikipedia – CIS-A2K and ALC join hands

T Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik — 2014-09-30T05:11:29Z

Students and faculty of Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada aim to enhance Telugu Wikipedia through increased contributions to Wikipedia and make it available under free license.

The Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in its quest to catalyze the growth of open knowledge movement in Indic languages recently added another feather to its cap by signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Andhra Loyola College (ALC) in Vijayawada on August 14, 2014 to work collaboratively to improve Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu Wikisource. College Principal Fr. G.A.P. Kishore, Vice-Principals Fr. P. Anil Kumar and Fr. Rex Angelo, correspondent Fr. Raju signed the agreement with CIS-A2K programme director T. Vishnu Vardhan.

The MoU signed with ALC is for a period of five years and encompasses four activities: Open knowledge creation in Telugu across various disciplines on Telugu Wikipedia: ALC faculty and students will be trained by CIS-A2K staff and interested Telugu Wikimedians to understand the principles that govern Wikipedia in order to generate quality entries. Faculty from Botany, Physics, Statistics, Ethics, Religion, Telugu Literature, and Music will work with CIS-A2K. Each of the faculty in the coming months will come up with a plan to generate open knowledge in Telugu in their respective disciplines. Content donation and digitization on Telugu Wikisource: ALC through its networks will help CIS-A2K to bring Telugu content under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. The Telugu department of the college expressed keen interest to work with CIS-A2K in digitizing historical Telugu content and to make it available on Telugu Wikisource. Various competitions will be planned in the future. Creating a free software environment at Andhra Loyola College: 400 machines within various labs on the campus will be converted into FOSS systems with free and open source software including support for Telugu and other Indic languages. It should be noted that all the existing computers of ALC are run on proprietary software. As a pilot initiative CIS-A2K has already converted 30 systems in a lab and named it as Loyola FOSS Lab. CIS-A2K to revise the FIT (Fundamentals in Information Technology): A mandatory course for all undergraduate students which will introduce students to FOSS, Openness and Wikipedia. This is an outcome of the FOSS orientation done by T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahimanuddin Shaik during the two workshops that were held at ALC.

CIS-A2K will put every effort to involve Telugu Wikimedians and FOSS community in taking this collaboration with ALC forward. CIS-A2K will also create a project page on Telugu Wikipedia to actively document and publicly share the detailed plans and progress. More updates will also be shared on this website.


Above: Representatives from ALC and CIS-A2K seen during the signing ceremony.

The signing of the MoU was done at a public event in the presence of students, faculty and management of ALC and various representatives from media. The media covered this event enthusiastically. The Hindu coverage can be found here and Eenadu article coverage is here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/expanding-the-world-of-telugu-wikipedia-cis-and-alc-join-hands

NIE Steps in to Grow Konkani Wikipedia

vishnu — 2014-10-10T11:26:26Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) signed a memorandum of agreement (MoU) with Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa to enhance digital literacy in Konkani in the education sector across Goa.

The Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of CIS, in its sustained efforts to enhance the content and reach of Kokani Wikepedia (which is in incubation), has signed an MoU for a period of five years with Nirmala Insitute of Education (NIE), a Secondary Teacher Education College established in 1963 by the Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in response to the then urgent need for trained teachers in post liberation Goa. The key objectives of this partnership are: a) to design, develop and execute a certificate course titled "Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia", which is aimed at middle and high school teacher-trainees and teachers; and b) to introduce Wikimedia projects into the pedagogic curriculum of NIE.

Both CIS and NIE share a mutual interest in conserving, developing and disseminating knowledge free of cost in Konkani, which incidentally is Goa’s official language. Konkani as a language faces several challenges — it has no official script. The population who speak it are dispersed across the world and have little motivation to further the cause of Konkani, and there are few educational venues that offer a formal course to study Konkani or offer Konkani based curriculum. NIE Principal Dr. Denzil Martins welcomed this MoU and said that "it will guide our teacher-trainees to upload relevant information in Konkani that can be freely accessed by the local population" and "provide the volunteer-trainees with skills that they will be able to use to contribute and enhance the free knowledge in Konkani". The MoU was signed by Dr. Denzil Martins from NIE and T. Vishnu Vardhan (Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, CIS) in the presence of staff and students of NIE and volunteers Harriet Vidyasagar and Gayathri Rao Konkar. Dr. Rita Paes, ex-Principal of NIE who worked to forge this MoU sent her best wishes.

CIS-A2K since 2013, has worked to develop partnerships with key educational institutions to promote and grow Konkani Wikipedia. It has previously worked with NIE to design and implement a program to enroll 100 B.Ed. students to increase the amount of information available in Goan villages and towns on Konkani Wikipedia. A2K has also been instrumental in convincing Goa University to re-release Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopedia) under CC-BY-SA 3.0 , making it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done.

The course ‘Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia’ will enable the teacher participant to have a) a comprehensive understanding of changes due to digital technology to the knowledge domain; b) an introduction to various openness movements that inform the discourse on Open Educational Resources; c) exposure and training to participate on open knowledge platforms like Wikipedia; and d) practical examples and best practices of using Wikipedia and sister projects within the classroom context. The parties will also co-design and jointly implement programmes to introduce Wikipedia in the NIE curriculum. The curriculum for this workshop is positioned within the context of indian languages (particularly Konkani) and school education to ensure that any learning is practical and can be applied within the teachers immediate pedagogic environment. Speaking about the relevance of this course Gayathri and Harriet (who have been associated with NIE as volunteers) mentioned that "the Goa government has handed out tablets to all school going children in Goa. In order to use them effectively in the classroom will require teachers to rethink their role and teaching methodologies and this course is an important step towards that". Agreeing with this Denzil Martins feels that this course "will provide the teacher-trainees with ideas and inputs for using Wikipedia in creative ways in the classroom".

This partnership could bring huge momentum and scale for the growth of Konkani as participants who graduate from this course will as teachers act as anchors and mentors to teach and assign Wikipedia editing assignments in their respective schools and classrooms.

As Gayathri feels "such courses once fine tuned should be made available to teachers from all over the country and should be part of the package for introducing the digital technology in the school system. Today it ends with setting up computer labls in schools or distribution of hardware to students - they may have a 'computer teacher' but the class and subject teachers never become part of these new initiatives. Only when this happens can we move away from 'teaching computers' to using computers as tools to learn and teach, which is the primary objective of digital technology in schools".

CIS will develop this open course and welcomes anyone to partner in this effort, which will be made available for anyone to use it within their context. The efforts to build free and open knowledge platforms like Konkani Wikipedia will continue and partnerships like NIE will play a crucial role in building a robust knowledge society in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/nie-steps-in-to-grow-konkani-wikipedia

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

Will domain dot भारत spur the growth of Indian languages on the internet?

praskrishna — 2014-09-08T05:50:11Z

Modi's effort to promote the use of Hindi and e-governance has given hope to those who want to see more vernacular content online, but many challenges have to be overcome.

Rohan Venkataramakrishnan's blog post was published in Scroll.in on August 29, 2014. Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

For most of its short history, the internet has been the English speaker’s playground. Though English is the world’s third-most spoken language (after Mandarin and Spanish), it is by far the most commonly used language on the internet. If you wanted to make sense of most of what’s on the World Wide Web, you had to be able to read and write English.

This is slowly changing. The launch of Devanagari script web addresses on Sunday, allowing people to use .भारत domain names, was another step in the slow effort to bring about a multilingual Web. Already, Indian languages like Hindi – one of the most commonly-spoken languages on Earth – lag far behind. The move gels well with the new government’s effort to promote the use of Hindi, and its push to increase digital services available to all citizens. The next few years could well see a spurt in vernacular content online.

But first many challenges have to be overcome. “At present, not a single Indian language figures in the top 10 languages prevalent on the Internet, though Chinese, Arabic and Russian feature in the list,” said a McKinsey report on the internet's impact on India. “The next wave of internet adoption in India will be dominated by local language speakers, which underscores the need for much more content and applications to be offered in local languages.”

Vernacular internet
Early studies of the internet attempted to quantify how much of the web was in English. A 1997 estimate put the number at 80% of all websites, while the Online Computer Library’s study in 2003 concluded that 72% of all online content was in English. Today that number is much lower.

W3Techs, which conducts surveys of the internet, now estimates that about 55% of content on the Internet is in English, followed by German, Russian and Japanese. Indian languages don’t crack the top 35.

The analysis is by its nature imprecise. The internet is vast and mostly uncharted. Estimates suggest search engines have indexed only 40% of Web content, leaving much off the mainstream radar. Measuring language becomes even harder because, in the early years, when fonts were harder to render, most non-English content on the internet was spelt out in Roman letters.

Indian Wiki
The rise of multilingual scripts has changed that, and made it easier to evaluate the diversity of the internet. Yet even the best approach relies more on sampling than measurement. There is one section of the Web, however, that does allow for comparisons of absolute numbers.

Relative to other tongues, Indian language-articles still comprise a minuscule portion of Wikipedia. English, Spanish and French are perhaps expected, but even languages like Vietnamese have nearly 10 times the number of pages that Hindi does. Waray-Waray, the fifth-most commonly spoken language in the Philippines, appears to be an outlier because of an automated translation method that creates pages in that language.

Hindi content has been growing on the internet encyclopedia, from no pages in 2003 to more than one lakh in 2011, but it still falls far behind the languages that are spoken as commonly as it, like Spanish and Arabic, let alone those with much smaller reach. Of course in many countries English is not spoken at all, so Internet users need web pages in their own language. In India, because of the language-class association, the majority of Internet users are at least conversant in English.

Obstacle Course
The impediments to further growth are all too apparent. For one, internet infrastructure still leaves much to be desired. Though India has the third-largest internet user-base in the world, only 10% of the country is actually online. Even by 2015, when internet access is expected to reach 28% of the population, the equivalent rural figure is likely to be just 9%, according to estimates.

“A lot of the core infrastructure that is necessary for language computing is missing,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet & Society. “There’s no mandate by the government that these languages must be supported, no comprehensive dictionaries, no thesauri, no machine translation capabilities, no optical character recognition capabilities. Because our market is so insignificant for proprietary software makers, they haven’t done enough to develop these. Meanwhile, the free software community is too small and mostly English-speaking.”

The government has launched some initiatives in this regard, like a National Translation Mission aimed at machine translating text from English into Indic languages, as well as banks of fonts that are free to use. But Abraham said that while the government is clear this should be a priority area, it underestimates the scale of the problem.

“We need large scale investment by the government into each language,” he said. “We’re looking at maybe even Rs 100 crore per language, to bring each of our traditional languages into the internet age.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/scroll-in-rohan-venkataramakrishnan-will-domain-dot-bharat-spur-the-growth-of-Indian-languages-on-the-internet

OpenGLAM at Wikimania 2014

subha — 2014-10-06T05:09:19Z

GLAM activities in the last two months have been quite happening!

Subhashish Panigrahi's blog post was published on OpenGLAM website on August 27, 2014.

After Open Knowledge Festival in Berlin, OpenGLAM members and other GLAM contributors met again during Wikimania London, the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement focused on what people are making with wikis and open content. There were GLAM talks, workshops, discussions and brown bag talks: in this blog I’ll go into some of the highlights, but you can find an overview of all GLAM & Free culture submissions here.

Best practices for the evaluation of GLAM-Wiki cooperation

A GLAM-Wiki evaluation workshop was organized by Beat Estermann, Maarten Brinkerink and Wikimedia Foundation’s Program Evaluation specialist Jaime Anstee to assess the impact of the past GLAM projects and to create a road map by placing evaluation parameters in place for institutional collaboration. From the GLAM wiki residency project at Wikimedia UK, Jonathan Cardy presented the evaluation process needed in place for Wikipedia-in-Residence programs. Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE)’s Lilli Iliev shared information about the evaluation practices WMDE has put in place in order to implement small to large scale GLAM projects in Germany. While working with various cultural institutions in Germany, they focused on qualitative aspects of the content acquired, on goal oriented programs like “GLAM on Tour”, and on mass outreach by popular media and post campaign impact measuring. Four groups were then formed to work on particular GLAM projects, how they plan to evaluate tangible output and measure return on investments.

Have you heard?

In the scope of the Wikipedia Voice Intro Project that he founded, Andy Marbett (http://pigsonthewing.org.uk) spoke about the beauty of having recordings of notable people where they not just pronounce their names in their native languages, but introduce themselves with their dates and places of birth. With BBC’s collaboration, this project has grew to an avenue on Wikipedia to enrich biography-articles. This is indeed a project that has run absolutely in zero cost and aims at making Wikimedians meet their stars and document their voices for ever on the Internet. The full video of the talk is available below.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-glam-august-27-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-open-glam-at-wikimania-2014

We are Wikipedia

subha — 2014-09-06T03:19:29Z

Wikimedia Deutchland has included a paragraph about WeAreWikipedia on their blog.

@WeAreWikipedia auf Global Voices

Subhashish Panigrahi hat einen Beitrag über das Twitter-Projekt „We Are Wikipedia“ auf der Bloggerplattform GlobalVoices veröffentlicht. Subhashish erklärt unter anderem wo die Idee für das Projekt herkommt und greift einiger der unterschiedlichste Beiträge auf, die über den Twitter-Account in den letzten Wochen liefen. Inzwischen gibt es auch schon eine deutschsprachige Version des Beitrags

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

Digital Publishing Meeting

praskrishna — 2014-09-09T08:25:32Z

As an initiative towards building a community, a meeting on digital publishing was conducted by C-DAC GIST Pune on August 22, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja attended the meeting.

See the Facebook page of the event here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/c-dac-august-22-2014-digital-publishing-meeting

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages

praskrishna — 2014-08-22T00:51:52Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) in partnership with the School of Cultural Texts and Records, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai is organizing a two-day workshop for students at Jadavpur University on August 25 and 26, 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/developing-digital-open-knowledge-resources-in-indian-languages

ALC signs MoU for better net access

praskrishna — 2014-08-20T06:50:48Z

Andhra Loyola College (ALC) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society – Access to Knowledge (CSI-A2K) here on Thursday.

The MoU will enable faculty and students to have more access on internet world, said the ALC management.

Read the original article published in the Hindu on August 15, 2014.

Institute principal Fr. G.A.P. Kishore, vice-principals Fr. P. Anil Kumar and Fr. Rex Angelo, correspondent Fr. Raju and CSI-A2K programme director T. Vishnu Vardhan signed the papers. Faculty of various departments participated in the programme. Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Kishore said for the first time in AP, ALC has made the MoU with CSI-A2K to work collaboratively to improve Telugu Wikipedia. Very soon the digital content in botany, physics, Telugu, chemistry, ethics, religion, music and other subjects of the institution would be produced in Telugu Wikipedia, said the principal.

“A ten-member core committee has been constituted to train the faculty in each department in the college on A2K, who will teach the students. CSI will train the trainers and upload the material from time to time,” said Mr. Rex Angelo. Mr. Vishnu Vardhan said that CSI is promoting institutional partnerships across the country to promote regional languages. The society has plans to team up with more colleges in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and take up more outreach programmes in the next few days.

“Wikipedia has access to over 287 languages and 3.5 crore essays in the world. It is very unfortunate, that it has very few items in Indian languages,” said the programme director.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-august-15-2014-alc-signs-mou-for-better-net-access

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

rahim — 2015-01-20T18:47:13Z

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

This is a big leap for the college in opening up itself to the internet world. The college is planning to train its faculty and students to create free econtent in Telugu. These resources will in turn be dedicated to the society.

The signing of the MoU took place in the college premises on August 14, 2014 at 2.00 p.m.

Ten theosophical books authored by Rev. Fr. P. Jojaiah, SJ was released under free license (CC-BY-SA-4.0) on the same stage.

The event was organized by ALC and CIS.

CIS-A2K has been closely working with ALC. They have organised 4 workshops for students and faculty. CIS-A2K also helped in QR coding of the institute.

Now, this MoU would further enable CISA2K and ALC to collaboratively work on creating free and open knowledge in Telugu across various disciplines on Telugu Wikipedia. This collaboration is set to benefit millions of Telugus to freely access knowledge in Telugu on the internet.

Media Coverage

ALC signs MoU for better net access (The Hindu, August 15, 2014)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/alc-cis-sign-mou-better-net-access

CIS-A2K Signs MoU with Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada: Coverage in Eenadu

praskrishna — 2014-09-09T09:22:23Z

This article was published in Enadu on August 15, 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/cis-mou-with-alc-coverage-in-eenadu

Now, Christ students will contribute to Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-08-06T05:33:41Z

The department of languages at Christ University has set a precedent by including contribution to Wikipedia as a part of the undergraduate course work.

The article by H.M.Shruthi was published in the Deccan Herald on August 5, 2014.

Introduced last year on a pilot basis, the programme is all set to get a new outlook this year.

As a part of the initiative, students are required to submit an article to Wikipedia in an Indian language (the second language subject chosen). The languages offered are Kannada, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit and Tamil.

Earlier, much to the chagrin of lecturers, students were most often found rehashing material online for their assignments. On the contrary, the students will now be contributors for online content. But this is just one of the outcomes. Through this, the department has not only set out to enrich the regional language resources online, but has also turned students into knowledge producers.

Speaking about the initiative, Kannada Department HoD, Y S Shivaprasad, finds that students have become passionate about digital resources. “There are at least 500 students. In the first two years of the undergraduate degree, students study second language. Even if 10 per cent of them take it forward later, we can enrich our online Kannada resources.”

Since it was the first time last year, the faculty made a list of topics for inclusion in Kannada Wiki. “We were able to bring out 25 good quality articles. Interestingly, this turned out to benefit rural students, as they took a lot of interest in it,” Shivaprasad said, adding that RBI, Yakshagana, poet Raghavanka and Kuppalli were some of the topics covered.

Redesign this year
As per the redesigned format this time, in their first semester, students will digitise one page of an existing piece of literature in the Indian language concerned. This has been included to help them gain typing skills, apart from strengthening vocabulary.

In the second semester, students will be digitising four or five pages of literature. In the III semester, they will have to write one assignment in the second language of their choice and the fourth semester will be dedicated to an article (in Indian language) on the theme of their choice from any core subject.

T Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at Centre for Internet and Society (the university is implementing the programme in coordination with this organisation), sees this as an initiative for production of knowledge in Indian languages. “From the past several years, there have been talks about how there is no production of knowledge in Kannada (or other regional languages). This is a step towards it.”

“Adding fun to the otherwise hectic course work, the Wiki assignments helped us acquire editing skills and strengthen vocabulary in Kannada,” said Tejas N K, a final year science student at Christ University.

Having found his love for it, he has decided to contribute articles even in his final year, though it is not part of his course work this time. “It presents a challenge of learning something new and thinking creatively. More over, it is satisfying to know that the information we compile is of use for people seeking online resources in regional language.”

Transformation
Sharing similar enthusiasm is Komal K J, a final year BCom student, who hopes to contribute articles even after completing her degree. She sees a significant transformation: “Earlier, we were collecting information from Wikipedia. Now, we are contributing for it,” the student said.

She has submitted an article to Sanskrit Wikipedia. From formatting the article to inserting images and learning to attribute sources to the information uploaded on Wiki, she takes pride in the responsibility. “It is open for people across the globe to read. Hence, it is a huge responsibility. We have to make sure the information is authentic.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/deccan-herald-shruthi-august-5-2014-now-christ-students-will-contribute-to-wikipedia

Kannada Wikipedia Presentation for Kannada Science Writers

praskrishna — 2014-08-06T10:15:09Z

The following is the media coverage for the Kannada Wikipedia presentation at the Central University at Gulbarga on July 30,2014, in Gulbarga edition of Prajavani Kannada daily, dated July 31.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/kannada-wikipedia-presentation-prajavani-coverage

Access to Knowledge Bulletin — July 2014

praskrishna — 2014-10-04T14:46:22Z

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

University of Mysore Re-releases Kannada Vishwakosha (Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons Free License

The University of Mysore and the Centre for Internet and Society co-organized the Open Knowledge Day in Mysore on July 15, 2014. On this occasion Mysore University released six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under the Creative Commons (CC) license. Kannada Vishwakosha brought out by the University of Mysore can easily be termed as the best encyclopaedia in Kannada. It has been modelled after the famous Britannica encyclopaedia. Mysore University Vishwakosha has 14 volumes having a total of 13802 pages. The very first volume was brought out in the year 1969 and the final volume was released in 2004. Many famous Kannada authors, scientists, academicians and stalwarts from other fields have worked on creating this encyclopaedia.

Leading English and Kannada dailies like Andolana Kannada, City Today, Deccan Herald, Hosa Diganta, Kannada Jana Mana, Kannada Prabha, Rajya Dharma, Samyukta Karnataka, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Udayavani, Vijaya Karnataka, and Vijaya Vani published about this. Scanned versions of the published articles can be downloaded here.

Announcement

Our grant application to the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) of the Wikimedia Foundation was approved by its board which met in Frankfurt from May 21 to 24, 2014. CIS had requested a grant of Rs. 18,406,454 and were awarded Rs. 12,000,000 for the next one year.

Articles / Blog Entries

Aircel & Wikimedia Foundation announce Wikipedia Zero (by Dr. U.B.Pavanaja, Prajavani, July 3, 2014). As per this, users of Aircel need not pay for data for accessing Wikipedia.
ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଅକ୍ଷରସଜ୍ଜା (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Samaja, July 4, 2014).
State of Odia Language in Computing and Future Steps (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Sovereign for national Level Seminar on "Computer Application and Odia Language", July 7, 2014).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ବିକାଶର ରାସ୍ତା (by Subhashish Panigrahi, The Sambad, July 23, 2014).
Wiki Loves Pride 2014 and Adding Diversity to Wikipedia (by Dorothy Howard, Wikimedia Blog, July 25, 2014).
Doctors and Translators Are Working Together to Bridge Wikipedia's Medical Language Gap (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Global Voices, July 27, 2014). This was re-published on the Wikimedia Blog, July 30, 2014.
Classical Odia Language in the Digital Age (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Odisha Review, posted on July 28, 2014). The essay was published in the magazine’s June edition.

Event Organized

Open Knowledge Day (co-organized by Mysore University and CIS-A2K, Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies, University of Mysore, July 15, 2014). The event coincided with the Open Knowledge Festival in Berlin from July 15 to 17. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the event.
Wikipedia orientation for Christ University UG students, Bangalore

Participation in Events

National Level Seminar on Computer Application and Odia Language (organized by Institute of Odia Studies and Research, July 6, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi was a panelist.
Open Knowledge Festival 2014 (organized by Google, Omidyar, et.al., Berlin, July 15 – 17, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi represented India as the India Ambassador of OpenGLAM local and made a presentation.
# NAMA: The Future of Indic Languages (organized by Medianama, The Oberoi Hotel, Bangalore, July 24, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.
Kannada Wikipedia Presentation for Kannada Science Writers (organized by Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath at PDA College of Engineering, Gulbarga, July 29, 2014). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave the presentation and demo. Thirty-two participants attended the workshop.
Kannada Wikipedia Presentation for Students and Research Scholars (organized by Central University of Karnataka, Gulbarga, July 30, 2014). Dr. U. B. Pavanaja gave the presentation and demo. 37 participants attended the presentation.
Talk about Kannada Wikipedia (organized by District Kannada Sahithya Parishath, S.M. Pandit Auditorium, Gulbarga, July 30, 2014). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a talk as inaugurator of the first session of the Jilla Sahithya Sammelana (district literary festival). About 600 people attended this talk.

News and Media Coverage

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

Wikipedia edit-a-thons to add content on LGBTs (by Renuka Phadnis, The Hindu, July 7, 2014).
Font problem hits Odia (by Bibhuti Barik, The Telegraph, July 7, 2014).
Four volumes of Kannada Encyclopaedia digitised (by R. Krishna Kumar, The Hindu, July 12, 2014).
‘ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ’ಕ್ಕೆ ಇನ್ನು ಲೈಸೆನ್ಸ್ ಹಂಗಿಲ್ಲ (Prajavani, July 14, 2014).
Soon, all 14 volumes of Kannada encyclopaedia to be online (by R. Krishna Kumar, The Hindu, July 15, 2014).
ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ (Kannada Prabha, July 15, 2014).
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶದ ಆರು ಸಂಪುಟ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾಗೆ (Udayavani, July 15, 2014).
ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾದಲ್ಲಿ kannada ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ : ಈಗ ಆನ್ ಲೈನ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ 6 ಸಂಪುಟಗಳು ಮುಕ್ತ…ಮುಕ್ತ……(Just Kannada, July 15, 2014).
Six Kannada encyclopaedias released (Webindia 123, July 15, 2014).
150 Rare Books Get New Lease of Life Online, Courtesy Students (by Anila Backer, New Indian Express, July 15, 2014).
Open Access: Students help revive and digitize rare books for Malayalam Wiki Library (Spicy IP, July 15, 2014).
'Trolled' from US Congress, Wikipedia bans edits (by Narayan Lakshman, The Hindu, July 25, 2014).
Telugu Wikipedia struggles to stay afloat (by Renuka Phadnis, The Hindu, July 27, 2014).
The joys of being a Wikipedian (by Svetlana Lasrado, New Indian Express, July 29, 2014).
Kannada Wikipedia Presentation (Vijayavani, July 30, 2014).
Kannada Wikipedia Presentation for Kannada Science Writers (Prajavani, July 31, 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 is based in Delhi. 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.

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Kannada Wikipedia Presentation

praskrishna — 2014-08-06T09:57:48Z

The following is a scanned copy of the media coverage for the Kannada Wikipedia presentation at the Kannada Science Writers workshop at Gulbarga on July 29,2014, in Gulbarga edition of Vijayavani Kannada daily, dated July 30.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/kannada-wikipedia-presentation-vijayavani-coverage