Centre for Internet and Society

Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Impact report form

hasan — 2016-10-09T14:40:36Z

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year).

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog here.

This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Global metrics overview - all programs

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Global Metrics. We understand not all Global Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

Next to each required metric, list the outcome achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success.

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Overall

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	157	CIS-A2K has been able to increase participation of female editors across its Focus Language Areas.
2. # of new editors	799	Our WEP initiatives have helped in introducing and retaining editors across FLA (except for Odia).
3. # of individuals involved	1200	Public events and anniversary celebrations held in Odia and Kannada have helped Wikimedia projects in reaching the general public as these events have been widely covered by media.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	2823	Photo-walks, WEP activities and image re-licensing efforts have helped the A2K team in achieving this metric.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	18998	Thematic edit-a-thons anchored by A2K and Collaborative edit-a-thons that have been supported by A2K have been a big hit during the last grant period amongst Indic Wikimedians.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	109.64 MB

Kannada

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	23	As of now the Kannada community is relatively small, A2K would like to expand the user and editor base by taking Wikimedia activities to various parts of the state.
2. # of new editors	609	These numbers include new editors from WEP initiative and editathons conducted as part of 13 Kannada Wikipedia anniversary.
3. # of individuals involved	700	Public event organised during the 13th Kannada Wikipedia anniversary has boosted our reach.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	1290	Due to the Photo walk organised as part of the 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary celebrations.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	8132	Most of the articles created under WEP initiative are still under sandbox (as a quality enforcing measure), hence the number is low. The number also includes Wikisource folios.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	56.5 MB

Konkani

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	4	Activities in Konkani Wikipedia dipped after the project became live.
2. # of new editors	20	The new editors were introduced to Konkani Wikipedia with the help of Nirmala Institute of Education, Panjim an institutional partner of CIS-A2K.
3. # of individuals involved	50
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	34
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1546	Konkani Wikipedians took the project of creating one article per village in Goa quite enthusiatically.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	8.11 MB

Marathi

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	64	Events conducted at Pune University, Pune and IIT-Bombay involved existing Wikipedians.
2. # of new editors	59	Activities conducted at SWERI, Pandharpur, TISS, Mumbai and IIT-Mumbai have contributed to this.
3. # of individuals involved	150	Involvement of Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited opened up new readership to get involved in Marathi Wikimedia projects.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	27	A2K team could not organise a dedicated photo walk or invest in image re-licensing activity.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	331	Although the number of the articles is low, many new female editors were introduced and have taken up editing on Marathi Wikipedia.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	2.64 MB

Odia

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	21	Wiki Tungi activities are lead by active Wikimedians from the Odia community.
2. # of new editors	56	Nabakalebara edit-a-thon gained a lot of currency on the social media platforms which in turn resulted in new editors for Odia Wikimedia projects.
3. # of individuals involved	120	Three events with Puri WikiTungi (Puri Workshop, 15th Anniversary celebration, and Mission Odisha event), Wikipedia workshop in Utkal University.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	601	Nabakalebara edit-a-thon had an in-built component of adding images related to the Rathayatra.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1780	Only pages created in Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource are indicated and not article improved.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	9.56 MB

Telugu

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	30
2. # of new editors	45	Need to try getting more New users on to the board.
3. # of individuals involved	150
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	871
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1342	Includes folios digitized in Wikisource.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	7.23 MB

Train-a-Wikipedian

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	15	Editors who have participated in at least one training session.
2. # of new editors	10	Editors who got beginners' training (includes account creation and basic Wikipedia training such as Wikiformatting, components of Wikipedia, article structure).
3. # of individuals involved	30	#1+#2 and the people who were involved during training sessions.
4. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	5867
5. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	25.6 MB

Telling your program stories - all programs

Please tell the story of each of your programs included in your proposal. This is your chance to tell your story by using any additional metrics (beyond global metrics) that are relevant to your context, beyond the global metrics above. You should be reporting against the targets you set at the beginning of the year throughout the year. We have provided a template here below for you to report against your targets, but you are welcome to include this information in another way. Also, if you decided not to do a program that was included in your proposal or added a program not in the proposal, please explain this change. More resources for storytelling are at the end of this form. Here are some ways to tell your story.

We encourage you to share your successes and failures and what you are learning. Please also share why are these successes, failures, or learnings are important in your context. Reference learning patterns or other documentation.

Make clear connections between your offline activities and online results, as applicable. For example, explain how your education program activities is leading to quality content on Wikipedia.

We encourage you to tell your story in different ways by using videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g.), compelling quotes, and by linking directly to work you produce. You may highlight outcomes, learning, or metrics this way.

We encourage you to continue using dashboards, progress bars, and scorecards that you have used to illustrate your progress in the past, and to report consistently over time.

You are welcome to use the table below to report on any metrics or measures relevant to your program. These may or may not include the global metrics you put in the overview section above. You can also share your progress in another way if you do not find a table like this useful.

A2K key activities

During this grant period CIS-A2K has organized and supported a number of events in collaboration with Indic Wikimedia community members. Some of those are:

July 2015	August 2015	September 2015
Konkani Wikipedia goes live, (See more)	Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Annamacharya library Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore (See more)	Seminar on "Empowering Marathi Schools", Pune, Kannda Wikipedia meetup (See more)
October 2015	November 2015	December 2015
Konkani language book donation (See more)	4 Indic language communities IRC meeting, Community discussion for making Tulu Wikipedia live (See more)	Sau Dhuni Teen Project: December Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Initiative to bring 1000 books about the culture of Maharashtra on Marathi Wikipedia (See more)
January 2016	February 2016	March 2016
Konkani-language Edit-a-thon and English-Romi Konkani dictionary release, Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon (See more)	Digitisation sprint at Andhra Loyola College, Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary (See more)	(See more) National Wikipedia Education review program, Odia-language Women’s History Month edit-a-thons (See more)
April 2016	May 2016	June 2016
Odia Wikipedia's 14th anniversary (See more)	Mini TTT and MWT in Pune, Advanced training for Kannada-language Wikimedians (See more)	Train the Trainer 2016, MediaWiki Training (See more)

Capacity building

Train the Trainer

Train the Trainer (or TTT in short) is a residential program that attempts to groom leadership skills among the Indian Wikimedians. Participating Wikimedians interact with A2K staff members and community leaders towards designing, implementing and documenting activities such as outreach, GLAM projects, edit-a-thons, etc. Various topics such as grants' structure, funding opportunities both with A2K and WMF, effective reporting and documentation, use of Global and other metrics, etc., are also covered.

After the first 2 iterations in 2013 and 2015, the third iteration of the training program was conducted in June 2016.

Diversity

In this iteration—

Language: 16 Wikimedians from 10 different language communities participated as shown in the pie chart below.

Participants of TTT 2016, representing different language communities

Gender: This year we had 5 female participants (out of 15 participants). After the 2013 iteration we felt we should try to encourage more female Wikipedians to participate in TTT. However, this does not mean that we had any different eligibility criteria set for the female Wikipedians.

Participants division by gender

Representation of Indic Wikimedia communities: We had participants from all over India. Although TTT is a national-level event, we also had participants from outside of India (Nepal and Sri Lanka).

Lessons learnt

TTT 2016 participants

After the 2015 version we found that a few participants faced difficulties to understand and work on the pre-event presentations. This year (2016), we have given more detailed instructions and were in touch with the participants while they were doing pre-event works.
By dovetailing TTT and MWT, A2K team was able to bring Indic Wikimedians working for outreach and on technical front together. This helped the participants to create a wishlist regarding tools, gadgets, and other technical help required to conduct effective outreach activities.

Based on participants' feedback and suggestions plus our own observations, while keeping Wikimedia Foundation's guidelines in mind, we make necessary changes to our program structure. In this year's TTT we made a number of changes‖

We encouraged more eligible female editors to participate.
We found that the objective and aims of the event remained unclear to a few participants in the earlier iterations. This year we have given more attention to explain the program's objectives, aims and expectations.

Challenges

We expected that the participants would be in touch with us while planning, conducting, and making reports of an event. After 2015 TTT^[1] we found a few participants did not respond to our emails or messages.
While TTT 2016 participants have shown active interest during WCI-related edit-a-thon, the same level of interest was not seen during regular monthly meetups.
Despite having communicated to the TTT 2015 participants that a mini TTT should be organized in their communities, however this was not taken up actively.

Mediawiki Training

Participants of MWT 2016, during the workshop

MediaWiki Training (MWT) is an annual residential training workshop that intends to bridge the prevalent gap between outreach volunteers and MediaWiki volunteers and developers. MWT attempts to create and groom 'tech' leaders from the existing Indian language Wikipedians. It aims to facilitate discussions around nurturing leadership regarding technical issues such as filing bugs that hinder the growth of Indian language Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. At the same time, it encourages active contribution towards improving the existing MediaWiki software from the participants to understand importance of utilizing technology for outreach activities.

The first iteration of the event was held on 24-27 June 2015. 14 editors from 8 Indic communities participated in this workshop. Some of the topics taught during the workshop were: Bugs -presentation, demo & case study, Bots - Pywiki & AWB, MediaWiki tools, TranslateWiki, Quarry, WikiMetrics, APIs, User scripts.

The second iteration of the workshop was conducted on 17-19 June 2016 in Bangalore. MWT 2016 was planned to facilitate an idea-exchange platform between outreach volunteers and MWT participants. 11 editors from 6 Indic Wikimedia communities recieved training during this workshop. Some of the topics discussed during the program were Wikidata, usage of Wikimedia labs tools, templates and infobox creation, as well as AutoWikiBrowser (AWB).

Lessons learnt

Ensure better logistics co-ordination thus guaranteeing involved participation from the participants.
Priority topics must be given more time.

Challenges

Scheduling follow-up events such as mini version of MWT across Indic Wikimedia communities.
To identify female Wikimedians and encourage them to participate in MWT.

Train-a-Wikipedian

Train-a-Wikipedian session in Hyderabad on 15 May 2016

Train-a-Wikipedian (TAW) was started in December 2015 to identify enthusiastic Indic Wikipedians, to train and groom them to develop their editing skills. Inspired by the Adopt-a-User program of the English-language-Wikipedia, this initiative is working on encouraging new Wikimedians who nominate themselves to learn basic Wikimedia policies. Until 30 June 2016, more than 25 training sessions have been conducted.

The concept of Train-a-Wikipedian was appreciated by several Indic Wikimedians from different communities.
More than 25 Wikimedians signed up for this program.

Reflections

These are some of the reflections/feedback we received from Train-a-Wikipedian participants:

Username

	Community	Topics/Learnings	Feedback/Reflections
User:Nrgullapalli (Training page)	Telugu Wikipedia	Policy discussion such as civility, stub, How to search in a better way using operators etc on the web to get references Introduction to The Wikipedia Library / Resource exchange / CIS-A2K Resource exchange.	“ The training was helpful, I learned a couple of new tools. But I feel such trainings should be conducted on regular basis and follow-ups should be done. ”
User:Mouryan (Training page)	Bengali Wikipedia	Essentials of conducting local Wiki-event. Using special pages such as Special:UncategorizedPages,, Special:ShortPages etc., Google Books citation, Metrics.wikimedia.org	“ It was amazing and a quite enriching experience for me at a personal level sir. The things I learnt at Train-a-Wikipedian Hyderabad actually paid the results soon enough.and it enabled to successfully conduct my first offline Wikipedia Meetup in Kolkata just within one month's time. . . ”
User:Rajasekhar1961 (Training page)	Telugu Wikipedia	AdminTools such as MoreMenu, QuickWikiEditor, Citation making using Google Books citation tool, autofilling (from reftoolbar), DOI citation tool; Quick Page purging	“ I picked up some very useful skills & learnt good tools. But, I became a little inactive after that so could not utilize these learnings much. I hope to do so in future.

Lessons learnt

This initiative was inspired by English Wikipedia's program Adopt-a-user, however we found that we must make necessary changes to meet requirements of Indic Wikimedians.
Real-life training sessions left a deeper impact and motivated Wikimedians much more than online training modules.

Challenges

We failed to conduct sufficient number of offline training sessions.
Follow-ups have not been done for a couple of workshops, for example a TAW workshop was conducted in Hyderabad on 15 May and was well-received, but no follow-up TAW workshop has been conducted since then in the city.
From A2K's side sometimes there were delays in connecting and co-ordinating with the signed-up participants. On the other hand sometimes, we did not got responses from the participants when we contacted them.

Policies and guidelines on Indic Wikipedias

Indic Wikipedia policy handbook

CIS-A2K started working on a project to support and encourage Indic Wikipedians to create and/or localize policies in their native languages. A survey was conducted and a policy handbook was also created.

Lessons learnt

Efforts must be taken to initiate discussion regarding creation, localisation of policies in events organized by A2K

Challenges

Although a few policy-discussion meetups have been conducted (such as this one), we faced difficulties finding volunteer translators to translate the handbook into Indic languages.

Play media

Dr. Soubhagyavathi talks about Kannada Wikipedia

Kannada

Kannada Wikipedia Edit-a-thon partcipants at DSERT in January 2016

Kannada Wikipedia has reached the 20,000 article mark during this year. Kananda community members collaboratively designed the plan for the 13th Kannada Wikipedia anniversary. This activity brought together Wikimedians from different parts of Karnataka. By applying for a PEG Kannada Wikipedians have interacted with global Wikipedians and WMF staff. This event resulted in new editors and outreach activities in various parts of Karnataka. A2K has appointed a Program Associate as per its revised strategy A2K 2.0 for Kannada Wikimedia projects.

Institutional partnership

Two new partnerships have been initiated during this grant period–

The Department of State Educational Research and Training (DSERT), Government of Karnataka and
Alva's Education Foundation at Moodabidri.

While Alva's Education Foundation is going to be a partner in implementing Wikipedia Education Program. DSERT is an institution that trains school teachers all across Karnataka state. A2K will be training the trainers about using and editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in the context of their classroom. However, the 3 other institutional partnerships - Karnataka Janapada University, Manjusha Museum, Dharmasthala, and Tumkur University, Tumkur- that were anticipated during the writing of workplan, could not materialize. This was due to the delay in recruiting a Program Associate for the Kannada Wikimedia projects.

A2K has successfully continued its earlier partnerships and has benefited from their advice regarding our WEP activities and workplan.

Awareness and Outreach

Both the DSERT partnership and the 13th anniversary helped raise awareness around thematic article writing which encouraged Kannada Wikipedians to engage in projects. Various editing projects on literature, science, engineering subjects were taken up actively by the community members. Approximately 225 articles were created exclusively as part of 13th year anniversary celebrations.

Offline versions of Kannada Wikipedia (using kiwix) were distributed through flash drives like this during 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary

CIS-A2K also tried to engage in skill-building activities for the Kannada community members. As per the requests from volunteers, capacity building programs were arranged both in groups and in one-on-one settings to individual Wikimedians. Both TTT and MWT saw active participation from Kannada community. The results of these would be visible in the coming months.

In order to increase the offline readership of Kannada Wikipedia, offline versions of Kannada Wikipedia (using kiwix) were distributed through flash drives during 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary held at Mangalore. 50 such flash drives have been distributed so far to those in need.

Lessons learnt

Kannada was not properly represented in terms of blogs and media coverage and we have been working on addressing this issue.
A better communication method would be devised with inputs from the community members.

Gating factors

A2K has not been successful towards re-releasing of textbooks published by the Government of Karnataka under CC-by-SA licences.

An orientation for Kananda bloggers, some of who could be potential Wikimedians, has not taken place.
Some community members have repeatedly emphasized on having better communication, documentation of activities taken up by the Program Associate.

Odia

Active editors in Odia Wikipedia during the period July 2015 to Feb 2016

Through the community building activities such as the formation of Puri WikiTungi and revival of Bhubaneswar WikiTungi, active editors of the Odia Wikipedia movement reached 30 editors (as of 30 June 2016). Regular follow-up with Wikimedians on-Wiki and via different social media channels along with monthly meetups has helped in editor retention. This has further encouraged Odia Wikimedians to participate in both on-Wiki and off-Wiki activities.

CIS-A2K has supported the community to celebrate the 14th Anniversary of Odia Wikipedia, which facilitated 30 Wikimedians to meet and discuss the future activities for Odia Wikimedia projects.

Formation of Puri WikiTungi

Play media

Adyasha Sahu a Wikimedian from Puri community sharing her journey in the Wikimedia movement.

Puri WikiTungi is a city-based editing group formed by Wikimedians from Puri to spread awareness about Odia Wikimedia projects in and around the city. This group was formed after the first Wikipedia workshop in Puri. Around 30 individuals attended the workshop. 14 participants from this workshop have emerged as active editors on Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource. They are also involved in conducting offline meet-ups, seminar and workshops.

Bridging the Gender gap

Gender diversity in Odia Wikimedia community during 2014-16. For this statistics Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource have been considered.

CIS-A2K has engaged with seven new female Wikipedians and this has resulted in their active participation on Odia Wikimedia projects. One of the female Wikmedians, Chinmayee Mishra has independently conducted a Wikipedia orientation workshop. This workshop has boosted participation of female Wikipedians. Their efforts have been discussed through blog posts and other social media platforms.

Lessons learnt

Two organizations are unofficially supporting Odia Wikimedia community by providing meetup space and internet access for Bhubaneswar and Puri WikiTungis. A2K must make official agreements with these institutions.

Gating factors

Failed to build a partnership with any institution for running Education program for Odia Wikimedia projects. Awareness about the importance of WEPs is required for achieving this.

Telugu

A2K team has been successfully collaborating with Telugu Wikipedia community to improve content quality on Telugu Wikipedia and strengthen the community by increasing its reader and editor base. The team also shares ideas by providing and extending support such as involving community members in discussions with potential partners and designing programs based on their suggestions. Such collaboration has strengthened communities to conduct many Edit-a-thons which have resulted in a wide variety of quality articles. A2K intends to continue such collaborative activities resulting in improvements of stub and poorly translated articles.

Activities and Events

CIS-A2K team has been involved in conducting (holding or co-ordinating) several edit-a-thons in Telugu Wikimedia community, while a few were anchored in Telugu, others were multi-lingual. Many initiatives of the last grant period (i.e. July 2014 to June 2015) have been continued. A2K and the community have collaboratively organised an of sharing resources has resulted in which focused on improving Telugu movie articles. Community members have expanded stubs with information, references and photos. For the edit-a-thon A2K provided resources and references and the community members developed stub articles and created new articles.

Capacity building activities have also been carried out with Telugu Wikipedians. A copyrights session was conducted to improve Telugu Wikimedians' understanding on the subject and clear doubts for Wikisource contributors. Community members, Meena Gayathri and T.Sujatha, attending CIS A2K's Train-a-Wikipedian session have expressed that they gained invaluable knowledge and skills in content translation. The two later initiated a project to improve the quality of Google Translated articles. More than 30 such articles have been improved through it.

Similarly, the Quick introduction sessions held in Hyderabad community meet-ups by CIS A2K helped explain some online tools usage and enabled Wikipedians to contribute better for Wikimedia projects. One of the most active Wikipedians, Swaralasika, said that he was able to make better citations after the sessions which has helped him improve his editing.

Institutional Partnership

With the institutional partnerships established between CIS A2K and Annamayya library, Telugu Wikisource community members have uploaded some of the missing pages in on Telugu Wikisource. Due to the attempts of the community members towards proofreading these books can be downloaded now. The Andhra Loyola College partnership has also cultivated new editors and engage in WEP activities.

Outreach and Media

Increased media coverage has helped the cause of Telugu Wikimedia projects. Hard work of several Telugu Wikipedians (such as Pranayraj and Viswanadh) has been recognized and highlighted. Pranayraj points out that the media coverage helped him reach more people who want to contribute to Wikipedia.

Lessons learnt

A2K team has been working to make Telugu Wikipedia more visible in popular Telugu media, especially in printed media such as off-wiki and on-wiki events coverage in major local newspapers like Eenadu, Sakshi, Andhra Jyothi
WEP activities at partner institutions need to be synchronized with their academic schedule.

Gating factors

Technical support requests from the community were delayed on our end. To overcome this, we are trying to find interns to assign technical tasks requested from communities.

Konkani

Play media

Darshan Kandolkar talks about Konkani Wikipedia

Having gone live since July 2015 after nine years of incubation, Goan Konkani Wikipedia has developed and expanded with the help of CIS A2K to draw more contributors and resources into the project. CIS-A2K has attempted to develop Konkani Wikipedia in all the three scripts (Romi, Devanagari, Kannada). Institutions such as Thomas Stephen Konkani Kendra (TSKK) for Romi script, Goa Konkani Sahitya Academy for Devanagari script, Karnataka Konkani Sahitya Academy for Kannada script have agreed to donate content.

Department of Computer Science, Goa University, had organized an edit-a-thon to include the villages of Goa state on Konkani Wikipedia.

Due to the discontinuation of the Program Associate for Konkani, several of our programmatic activities have not been accomplished during this grant period.

Partnership

In the past year, CIS-A2K had the honour to collaborate with Mannd Sobhaann and World Konkani Centre, organizations working with Konkani language and culture, to bring in more resources into Konkani Wikipedia. These two organizations work for popularization and conservation of Konkani culture and language. Mannd Sobhaan has donated three Konkani books under CC-BY-SA license which has provided great sources for citation and references. On the other hand, these organizations have also agreed to hold GLAM activities, while A2K would digitize their archives of audio, video and text resources to further expand resources available for Konkani Wikimedia projects.

Activities and Events

A one-day edit-a-thon was organized at Krishnadas Shama Central Library, Goa in January 2016. Members of CIS-A2K participated in this event to help mentor the participants. The event created 100 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia in a single day.

Lessons learnt

Increase editor base by engaging academicians and bloggers.
Increase readership by introducing Konkani Wikipedia in primary and higher primary schools.

Gating factors

Activity in the end of 2015 was low in Konkani Wikipedia that no new articles were created in November and December.
Non-availability of a Program Associate

Marathi

Partnership

Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) has re-licensed 1000 books on the culture, history, and literature under CC-by-SA 4.0 license in October, 2015. In December 2015, a discussion was initiated by CIS A2K at The Energy Resources Institute (TERI) to plan digitization and uploading of the books for Marathi Wikisource.

Events and Outreach

A two-day workshop was organised by the CIS A2K Program Associate in August 2015 at Srimati Savitribai Phule Pune University. This workshop was an attempt to bridge the gender gap on Marathi Wikipedia. The "Sau Dhuni Teen" project focused on creating Wikipedia articles on notable women, themes and works related to gender studies. This event attracted new editors and introduced to them input methods for Marathi methods and basic guidelines of contributing to Wikipedia. The event also served as an important initiative to utilize Wikipedia in generating Indian language annotations on academic sources in Women's Studies and the Social Sciences.

In May, 2016, CIS A2K organized a two-day mini version of Train-the-trainer (TTT) and Mediawiki Training (MWT) for Marathi Wikimedians in Pune. Topics covered in the Mediawiki training include Wikidata, bug triage, Mediawiki extensions, etc., while the TTT session focused on advanced editing skills, outreach planning, and grants structure introduction.

Lessons learnt

A strategy is required to utilize books donated by Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) as references on Marathi Wikipedia.
Spreading Marathi Wikipedia-related activities to different parts of Maharashtra .

Gating factors

Some participants of workshops reflect that unavailability of sandboxes in Marathi Wikipedia was a concern for new editor as they were unsure if the article might be changed during the time they edit.

General Support and Service to the Movement

Play media

Odia Wikisourcer Pankajmala Sarangi shares her experience and future plans to grow the community. Video by Pankajmala Sarangi (original video) and Subhashish Panigrahi (post production), CC BY-SA 4.0. Pankajmala recorded the video herself covering a few specific topics sent over email.

Partnership Summary

Growing partnerships in WEPs: A2K team has successfully continued all the partnerships form the previous grant period and has also been able to bring new partners onboard thus adding value to the Wikimedia movement. A2K conducted a review program for its WEP partners in Bangalore during the last grant period. This review program allowed the WEP partners across 3 different states to meet and discuss the salient features of the WEP initiative being run at their institutions. This review program helped A2K team to understand institutional expectations and challenges. The review meeting also helped us to generate inter institutional collaboration and sync A2K schedule with academic calendar of these institutions.
Book/Resource donation and digitization: A2K team is immensely happy to have partnered with Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha which has donated 1000 books about the Maratha administration, culture, history and social life. Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited, Pune has offered us in-kind support by digitising all these books and making them available to be uploaded on Marathi Wikisource.
Our collaboration with Manasu Foundation, Bangalore has also allowed us to digitise content donated to A2K for free. Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada now hosts a Digital Resource Lab that provides nevessary infrastructure (Computers, Internet access and printing facility) for all the Telugu Wikimedians.
Centurion University, Bhubhaneswar has expressed in digitising Odia publications from the copyright lapse period. With this partnership A2K expects to add close to 50000 folios to Odia Wikisource.
Goa University partnership and Indian village articles: After a brief lull in the activities of Konkani Wikipedia activities have spiked up again mainly because of the encouragement offered by Goa University. Prof. Madhav Gadgil with support from Goa University has launched a project of using the Census of India data to create articles on Villages of India. This activity has been eagerly taken up by the Konkani community members.Encouraged by the level of enthusiasm shown by the Konkani community members Telugu, Marathi and Odia community members have also been engaged in creating articles on villages of India in their respective languages.
Partnership in image re-licensing: Alva's Education Foundation have donated more than 15000 images under CC-BY_SA license. These images depict the folk art forms, famous personalities, cultural practices, tribal costumes and other areas regarding the social and cultural life of Karnataka in particular and South India in general.
Decision of focusing on existing partnerships: Many institutions that were indicated under the category 'To be explored' for a partnership during this plan year have not been approached as A2K team worked towards consolidating its work with the existing institutions rather than crowding our resources. This decision was taken in accordance with the suggestion of community members and FDC suggestion.
Partnership re-assessment: A further re-assessment of Institutional partnerships based on the parameters of RoI, contribution to Global Metrics and community support will be undertaken during the grant period July 2016- June 2017. Thus providing the A2K team opportunity to consolidate its work further and adopting course corrections (such as working with a different Wikimedia project, changing target group, conducting intensive summer/winter camps and if necessary exiting the partnership).

Outreach Strategies Development

Online and offline media outreach strategies: Stories related to Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects used to get less attention in the regional language media in India. There has been a hike in news articles and columns related to Indic-language Wikimedia projects both in print and electronic media. One of the most important reasons behind this is the establishment and growing relations with journalists and news editors that are responsible for specific genre of news. Actively writing opinion pieces to newspaper editorials and making blog posts on popular online portals are another reason.
Laying out strategies for recruiting new contributors using social media: Learning from our past initiative experiences such as the movement where new contributors on social media helped Odia Wikisource go live^[2], CIS-A2K has been helping communities with online outreach strategies. Some of the lessons learned can be found in this learning pattern.

Other Communication and Contribution

Balance of Focus Language Area (FLA) and non-FLA language: As CIS-A2K has been working primarily in five focus languages (Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu, with Tulu and Santali as two additional languages), there has been more attention paid to the aforementioned seven languages and less on the remaining Indian languages. The same pattern also reflects in our media outreach. To balance this and to provide support in the larger Indic language community, CIS-A2K has made efforts in connecting non-FLA Wikimedians with global community leaders^[3] and writing about work accomplished in non-FLA communities.^[4]
Highlighting the' community-led projects and less-known languages: CIS-A2K has contributed and highlighting in promoting the projects that are primarily community-led^[5] that are not necessarily catalyzed by the CIS-A2K. Also, via public speaking and publications, CIS-A2K has attempted to promote indigenous and the less-known languages of India.^[6]

Challenges

Labor intensive WEP programs: WEP initiative at many of our institutions have proven to be labour intensive. A2K team has not been able to integrate its efforts with the community members. There has also been a perception that the participating Higher Education institutions are required to only provide infrastructure and carve time out of academic schedule. This leads to a situation where the A2K team is often forced to devote time and resources towards the evaluation of assignments.
Lack of institutional partnership in Odia community: Despite the A2K team's attempts to establish formal institutional partnership and further a WEP initiative in Odia language, we have not been successful. With the consent of the Odia community A2K team has approached Centurion University regarding setting up a Wikisource Learning Centre.

CIS-A2K request page

CIS-A2K has a request page intended for Wikimedian/s from India to place requests for support from CIS-A2K. Between 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2016, CIS-A2K has supported 21 such programs/initiatives. The communities supported by CIS-A2K include Odia, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali etc. Besides offering financial support to conduct events, CIS-A2K has also provided non-financial support such as SWAG material, and technical and documentaion support.

Some of the events/initiatives we have supported are

Odia Wikipedians conducting Nabakalebara edit-a-thon (July 2015), Odia Wikisource 1st anniversary celebration (October 2015), Wikipedia's 15th Birthday celebration (January 2016)
funding Bengali Wikipedia community to conduct a workshop (Wikiacademy) (August 2015), a meetup (October 2015), and an "in-depth Meet-up of Bengali Wikipedia editor community in Kolkata" (June 2016)
helping Malayalam Wikimedia community to organize a meet-up at Kozhikode, Kerala (July 2015), and Wikisangamotsavam 2015 (December)
support Telugu Wikipedians to conduct a photowalk and a joint Telugu-English Wikimedians’ meetup in Hyderabad (both in December)
supporting two-day workshop on Samskrit Wikisource - 2016

Lessons learnt

WMF grants opportunities should be discussed and promoted amongst Indic Wikimedia communities.
Wikimedia communities must be encouraged to optimize in-kind support such as event venue, internet connectivity.

Challenges

We have continuously informed communities that a request (specially if it is a large one) should come to us at least 3-4 weeks before the event date(s). However we have received requests at the last moment and hence faced difficulties (such as time-pressure) reviewing and process these requests in time.
We ask communities to submit expenditure details and narrative report of an event soon after its completion. However, we have faced difficulties collecting the said records in time.

Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)

Provide exchange rate used:

1 USD = 61.88 INR

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.

Revenue source	Currency	Anticipated	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Cumulative	Anticipated ($US)*	Cumulative ($US)*	Explanation of variances from plan
GSMA	INR	263,783.00	263,783.00	-	-	-	263,783.00	4262.73	4262.73
Wikimedia Foundation	INR	12,000,000.00	6,997,845.00	-	4,998,082.00	-	11,995,927.00	193,923.72	193,857.90
Kusuma Foundation	INR	15,000,000.00	7,500,000.00	-	7,500,000.00	-	15,000,000.00	242,404.65	242,404.65
MacArthar Foundation	INR	6,593,625.00	6,593,625.00	-	-	-	6,593,625.00	106,555.03	106,555.03
Cybersteward Project	INR	495,100.00	495,100.00	-	-	-	495,100.00	8,000.97	8,000.97
Big Data MF	INR	4,578,734.00	-	4,578,734.00	-	-	4,578,734.00	73,993.76	73,993.76
Privacy International	INR	3,883,300.63	-	405,388.00	3,477,912.63	-	3,883,300.63	62,755.34	62,755.34
IDRC	INR	6,751,260.57	-	-	6,751,260.57	-	6,751,260.57	109,102.47	109,102.47
The Mozilla Corporation	INR	662,173.00	-	-	-	662,173.00	662,173.00	10,700.92	10,700.92

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

Grants	Explanation
GSMA	This fund is allocated to CIS for GSMA project undertaken in collaboration with Privacy International. The research has sought to understand different legal and regulatory aspects of security and surveillance in India.
Wikimedia Foundation	Wikimedia Foundation has given this grant, as part of their APG, to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand Wikimedia’s Indic language free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia in Indic languages. In addition, the grant aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects and wider distribution of free knowledge within India.
Kusma Foundation Fund	Kusuma Foundation funds the core of CIS programmes.

Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)

Expense	Currency	Budgeted	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Cumulative	Budgeted ($US)*	Cumulative ($US)*	Percentage spent to date	Explanation of variances from plan
Staff Cost	INR	5,884,320.00	986,800.00	1,328,057.00	1,695,815.00	1,455,531.00	5,466,203.00	95,092.44	88,335.54	92.9	Slightly under spent
Staff Travel & Stay	INR	985,000.00	211,267.00	162,566.00	453,724.00	-	827,557.00	15,917.91	13,373.58	84.02	Due to inclusion of Program Associates presence staff travel has come down
Volunteer Support	INR	1,530,000.00	41,847.00	422,041.00	100,631.00	764,787.00	1,329,306.00	24,725.27	21,482.00	86.89	Increased activities with the intervention of Program Associates
Meetups	INR	895,000.00	84,285.00	4,679.00	151,904.00	114,825.00	355,693.00	14,463.48	5,748.11	39.74	A2K team has conducted Train-the-Trainer and Media Wiki Training during the last quarter of the grant period. These receipts will be updated in the final cumulative financial report
Digitization	INR	150,000.00	5,250.00	-	10,250.00	-	15,500.00	2,424.05	250.48	39.74	Purchase of scanners to assist communities towards digitisation has been done
Equipment	INR	80,000.00	-	170,000.00	362,430.00	122,660.00	655,090.00	1,292.82	10,586.46	819	Essential equipment such as laptops, video camera and hard disks purchased for newly hired Program Associates and A2K staff
Assistant/Intern	INR	110,000.00	20,000.00	30,000.00	110,000.00	-	160,000.00	1,777.63	2,585.65	145.45	Hiring of 3 Program Associates has resulted in over spending
Consumables (Printing, Statinery, Swag)	INR	460,000.00	-	-	-	-	0	7,433.74	0	0	A2K was unable to utilise these funds for publishing and distributing of Community Resources
Miscellaneous	INR	165,000.00	89,003.00	21,207.00	50,978.00	50,442.00	211,630.00	2,666.45	3,420.01	128	Unanticipated expenses regarding orientation of PA
Design/Documentation & Research	INR	50,000.00	-	20,950.00	-	16,508.00	37,458.00	808.02	605.33	75	Optimal spending
Program Advisor	INR	580,800.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	528,000.00	9,385.91	8,532.64	90.9	Optimal spending
TOTAL	INR	11,979,132.00	1,570,452.00	2,291,500.00	3,067,732.00	2,656,753.00	9,586,437.00	193,586.49	154,919.80	80	Final Financial report will have the cumulative details.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

Compliance

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

References

2016 TTT version was conducted between 15–17 June 2016, and in this impact report we are reporting only till 30 June 2016. Although we have seen positive impact after this year's TTT, we are not including these in this report.
Panigrahi, Subhashish. "More Than 40 Million People Await the Launch of Odia Wikisource". Wikimedia Blog (21 October 2014).
[ Roali], an IME for Assamese language that is quite popular in the Assamese speakers, came live after long time. CIS-A2K has worked closely with the developer of this IME, some of the Assamese Wikipedia community members and Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team in the entire process.
Broadening the scope of blogs CIS-A2K has contributed to the larger Indic communities has been a constant effort, though in a limited capacity. A few such blogs can be read here: 1, 2, and 3.
In this article, a community-led project for creating a script encoding converter for the Odia-language Wikimedia projects was highlighted. There were more publication in the Odia newspapers and the project was promoted on social media so that more people contribute using the Unicode standard. The latter will eventually help spread the language's reach on the Internet.
CIS-A2K and type designer Pooja Saxena submitted a paper and presented a paper titled "Bringing Ol Chiki to the digital world" at the Typoday 2016, an annual conference in India to bring type designers and script experts under one roof. The presentation is about CIS-A2K's work in bringing a freely-licensed typeface for the Ol Chiki script that is used to write Santali, an indigenous language spoken across several countries in South Asia.

Signature

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Lahariyaniyathi (talk) 17:01, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

Resources

Resources to plan for measurement

Global metrics are an important starting point for grantees when it comes to measuring programmatic impact (Learning Patterns and Tutorial) but don’t stop there.
Logic Models provide a framework for mapping your pathway to impact through the cause and effect chain from inputs to outputs to outcomes. Develop a logic model to map out your theory of change and determine the metrics and measures for your programs.
Importantly, both qualitative and quantitative measures are important so consider both as you determine measures for your evaluation and be sure to ask the right questions to be sure to capture your program stories.

Resources for storytelling

WMF storytelling series and toolkit (DRAFT)
Online workshop on Storytelling. By Frameworks institute
- The origin of storytelling
- Story frames, with a focus on news-worthiness.
Reading guide: Storytelling and Social change. By Working Narratives
- The uses of the story.
- Case studies.
Blog: 3 Tips on telling stories that move people to action. By Paul VanDeCarr (Working Narratives), on Philanthropy.com
Building bridges using narrative techniques. By Sparknow.net
- Differences between a report and a story
- Question guides and exercises.
Guide: Tools for Knowledge and Learning. By Overseas Development Institute (UK).
- Developing a strategy
- Collaboration mechanisms
- Knowledge sharing and learning
- Capturing and storing knowledge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/grants-apg-proposals-2014-2015-round2-the-centre-for-internet-and-society-impact-report-form

Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise: January iteration

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-15T17:47:50Z

The January iteration of the Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise took place online.

The Google-translated Telugu articles prioritization is an online exercise intended to prioritize and improve over 1,900 machine-translated articles on Telugu Wikipedia. This project began from 2009- 2011 when Google translation project took place on Telugu Wikipedia in several rounds. Jointly organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K, this exercise saw the participation of 1 female Wikipedian and 4 male Wikipedians.

12 machine translated articles were improved and 39 have been deleted due to their poor quality. In addition to this, 42 articles have been prioritised for further improvement. Says Telugu Wikipedian User:Meena gayathri.s, "people who wanted to improve Google-translated article waited [for a] long time to get a priority list of articles to be improved and in that aspect, this exercise is very useful."

Several such iterations are planned for the coming months. The meta page for the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/google-translated-telugu-articles-prioritisation-exercise-january-iteration

Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise: February iteration

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-18T05:02:13Z

The February iteration of the Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise took place online.

The Google-translated Telugu articles prioritization is an online exercise intended to prioritize and improve over 1,900 machine-translated articles on Telugu Wikipedia. This project was initiated in 2009 when Google translation project took place on Telugu Wikipedia in several rounds. Jointly organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K, this exercise saw the participation of 2 Wikipedians.

47 out of 116 articles have been prioritised for further improvement. Says Telugu Wikipedian User:Meena gayathri.s, "I improved Machine translated articles earlier and my major problem is whether my contribution is being channelled properly or not. I always used to think if we can have a list of articles that separates articles that needed to be improved from that of deleted; it will help a lot in this heavy task. This exercise is helping in the same aspect and that is why I'm contributing to this in every iteration."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/google-translated-telugu-articles-prioritisation-exercise-february-iteration

Google's Optical Character Recognition Software Now Works with All South Asian Languages

subha — 2015-09-26T14:31:15Z

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software by Google now works for more than 248 world languages, including all the major South Asian languages, and it's easy to use and works with over 90 percent accuracy for most languages.

This was published by Global Voices on August 29, 2015.

OCR software has been extremely beneficial for the study of language, helping to extract text from images of virtually any printed text—and sometimes even handwriting, which opens the door to old texts, manuscripts, and more.

Ketan Pratap at NDTV Gadgets writes:

Users can start using the OCR capabilities in Drive by uploading scanned document in PDF or image form after which they can right-click on the document in Drive to open with Google Docs. After choosing the option, a document with the original image alongside extracted text opens, which can be edited. Google notes that users will not be required to specify the language of the document as the OCR in Drive will automatically determine it. The OCR capability in Google Drive is also available in Drive for Android.

On Twitter, many users have welcomed and even celebrated this new feature from Google:

Optical Character Recognition #OCR in Google Drive recongnizes many indic languages including #Kannada give it a try http://t.co/99UkCJQ6gb

— Omshivaprakash (@omshivaprakash) August 28, 2015

@shylobisnett if you have access to a scanner, you can do OCR through google drive. works a bit faster.

— Whet Moser (@whet) August 27, 2015

Wow. Searching Google Drive for a keyword also returns results for images containing that keyword in the image. Didn't realise it did OCR.

— Mark Osborne (@mosborne01) August 25, 2015

Typically OCR software has difficulty reading the text on old documents or pages with blemishes and ink marks, spitting out gibberish instead of legible text.

Google's support page on this project shares additional details about character formatting, like its ability to preserve bold and italicized fonts in the output text:

When processing your document, we attempt to preserve basic text formatting such as bold and italic text, font size and type, and line breaks. However, detecting these elements is difficult and we may not always succeed. Other text formatting and structuring elements such as bulleted and numbered lists, tables, text columns, and footnotes or endnotes are likely to get lost.

For some of the languages, like Malayalam and Tamil, the OCR works with almost 100 percent accuracy, and includes support for formatting things like like auto-cropping, separating text by discarding images, and ignoring color backgrounds, explains Tamil user and Wikimedian Ravishankar Ayyakkannu on Facebook:

[…] Google Tamil OCR works with 100% accuracy ! Keep testing with various samples and comment here. Performance has been the same for many other Indic languages too. […] Auto crops, discards images and colored background. Recognizes different layouts. I could find only 1 mistake in whole page. Testing latest Vikatan – https://docs.google.com/…/1OXre4…/edit.. […]

(Bangla, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu-language users have commented in the same post with feedback after testing the updated OCR software. For a few scripts, like Gurmukhi (used to write Punjabi), it turns out that the output after OCR is quite poor, resulting largely in gibberish, when testing a screenshot image from Punjabi Wikipedia.)


Issues with Gurmukhi script after OCR using Google's OCR. Screenshot from Punjabi Wikipedia.

This is quite a large leap for the languages with lots of old texts that are not yet digitized. Old and valuable texts in many languages could now be digitized and shared over the internet using platforms like Wikisource and could be preserved and made available for sharing knowledge.

Google's OCR partly uses Tesseract—an OCR engine released as freeware. Developed as a community project between 1995 and 2006 (and later taken over by Google), Tesseract is considered to be one of the world's most accurate OCR engines and works for over 60 languages. The source code is now hosted at https://github.com/tesseract-ocr. Check this link for the OCR outputs in various South Asian scripts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/googles-optical-character-recognition-software-now-works-with-all-south-asian-languages

Google Gives Wikimedia Millions—Plus Machine Learning Tools

Admin — 2019-02-02T12:52:37Z

Google is pouring an additional $3.1 million into Wikipedia, bringing its total contribution to the free encyclopedia over the past decade to more than $7.5 million, the company announced at the World Economic Forum Tuesday.

The article was published by WIRED on January 22, 2019.

A little over a third of those funds will go toward sustaining current efforts at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, and the remaining $2 million will focus on long-term viability through the organization’s endowment.

Google will also begin allowing Wikipedia editors to use several of its machine learning tools for free, the tech giant said. What's more, Wikimedia and Google will soon broaden Project Tiger, a joint initiative they launched in 2017 to increase the number of Wikipedia articles written in underrepresented languages in India, and to include 10 new languages in a handful of countries and regions. It will now be called GLOW, Growing Local Language Content on Wikipedia.

It’s certainly positive that Google is investing more in Wikipedia, one of the most popular and generally trustworthy online resources in the world. But the decision isn’t altruistic: Supporting Wikipedia is also a shrewd business decision that will likely benefit Google for years to come. Like other tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, Google already uses Wikipedia content in a number of its own products. When you search Google for “Paris,” a “knowledge panel” of information about the city will appear, some of which is sourced from Wikipedia. The company also has used Wikipedia articles to train machine learning algorithms, as well as fight misinformation on YouTube.

Even efforts like GLOW—which will now expand to Indonesia, Mexico, and Nigeria, as well as the Middle East and North Africa—can help Google’s own bottom line. When the initiative first launched in India, Google provided Chromebooks and internet access to editors, while the Centre for Internet and Society and the Wikimedia India Chapter organized a three-month article writing competition that resulted in nearly 4,500 new Wikipedia articles in 12 different Indic languages. Smartphone penetration in India is only around 27 percent; as more people in the country start using Android smartphones and Google Search, those articles will make the tech giant’s products more useful. Wikipedia’s blog post announcing Google’s new investment makes this strategy fairly clear, noting that the company also provided Project Tiger with “insights into popular search topics on Google for which no or limited local language content exists on Wikipedia.”

Google is also providing Wikipedia free access to its Custom Search API and its Cloud Vision API, which will help the encyclopedia’s volunteer editors more easily cite the facts they use. Each time a Wikipedia editor adds a new piece of information to an article, they need to cite the source where they learned it. The Search API will allow them quickly look up sources on the web without having to leave Wikipedia, while the vision tool will let editors automatically digitize books so they can be used to support Wikipedia articles too. Earlier this month, Wikimedia also announced Google Translate was coming to Wikipedia, allowing editors to convert content into 15 additional languages, bringing the total available to 121.

These machine learning tools will absolutely make it easier for Wikipedia to reach people who speak languages currently underrepresented on the web. But the encyclopedia is also the reason many AI programs exist in the first place. For example, Google-owned Jigsaw has used Wikipedia, in part, to train its open source troll-fighting AI. The encyclopedia is also used by hundreds of other AI platforms, particularly because every Wikipedia article is under Creative Commons—meaning it can be reproduced for free without copyright restrictions. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa smart assistants use information from Wikipedia to answer questions, for instance. (Both companies also have donated to the Wikimedia Foundation as well.)

Google’s new investments in Wikipedia, specifically in GLOW, will address a genuine problem. The majority of Wikipedia’s tens of millions of articles are in English or European languages like French, German, and Russian. (There are also lots of articles in Swedish and two versions of Filipino, but most of these pages were created by a prolific bot). As the estimated half of Earth’s population that still lacks an internet connection comes online, it will be important that reliable information is available in the native languages people speak. That doesn’t mean, though, that in helping solve these issues companies like Google—or Facebook—don’t also have something to gain.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/wired-january-22-2019-google-wikipedia-machine-learning-glow-languages

GoI body National Mission for Manuscripts has digitised 3 million manuscripts

praskrishna — 2015-04-05T03:20:06Z

Twelve-year-old government body National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) has digitised over thirty lakh manuscripts and 185,88,390 pages in all as of 31 December 2014, Mahesh Sharma, Union Minister of State for Culture, Tourism & Civil Aviation said in the Rajya Sabha this week. He added that the National Archives of India (NAI) is set to digitise another 1,100,000 historic records. The government has spent over Rs 25 lakhs on digitisation as of January 2015 as compared to ~ Rs 36 lakhs in 2012-13.

The blog post by Sneha Johari was published by Medianama on March 13, 2015.

The NAI has digitised 41 non-priced NAI publications and 484 manuscripts which consist of 106,974 pages, 42 newspapers and printed books (10,346 pages) and 187,878 documents made of 613,413 pages of NAI’s oriental and public records collection.

Digital conservation over micro-film

Sharma said that the government is looking at strengthening the Public Records Act. He added that digitisation would be the preferred form of conservation since it had many advantages over micro-film processing and would provide better access to archives electronically which could be used by scholars, historians and academicians.

The NAI operates two schemes for funding the preservation of documentary heritage. These schemes include funding for preservation and conservation of rare books, old and rare documents, government libraries and museums among others.

The NMM is an organisation under GOI’s Ministry of Culture set up to create a national manuscript resource to enhance access, awareness and use for educational use. It offers courses, workshops and fellowships on Manuscriptology and Palaeography. Sharma said that the Ministry had some proposals to collaborate with foreign countries for digitisation of Indian documents but had not taken those up due to issues of national importance. Some of NMM’s challenges arise from the scale of manuscripts found in India (claimed at ~5 million), languages which cannot be read, in a poor and neglected condition and the lack of scholars who can study these manuscripts.

The NMM has 31 Manuscript Conservation Centres (MCCs) across the country under the NMM. The MCCs include organisations like Manuscript Library, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), Pune, Karnataka State Archives, Bangalore and INTACH Orissa Art Conservation Centre, Bhubaneswar.

The New Indian Express featured a report where Jayadhir Tirumalrao, Professor at the Centre for Dalit and Adivasi Studies and Translation, Hyderabad was among others who developed a script for the tribal language Gondi. The report claims that Gondi language was the only tribal language in India to have its own literature.

Previous digitisation initiatives:

In November 2014, around 55 books written by the Indian author and activist Niranjana in Kannada would be digitized and made available on Kannada Wikisource, allowing Kannada speakers to access these books easily.
In October 2014, the Ministry of Culture launched a national portal for museums. Collections in all museums under its control and those under the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) will be digitized and presented on this portal.

In July 2014, the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the Ministry of Science and Technology released the draft of Open Access Policy. The objective of this policy is to provide unrestricted access to research work funded by the departments. The draft states that since all funds disbursed by DBT and DST are public funds, it is important that the information and knowledge generated through the use of these funds are made publicly available as soon as possible.
In September 2013, Goa University entered into a 3 year MoU with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani Wikipedia.
In June 2013, Tata Communications Media Services planned to digitize documents of historical and cultural significance such as films and documentaries from the archives of Doordarshan and Films Division of India which go back to 1947 including speeches of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders.
In May 2013, Punjabi Sahitya Akademi Reference Lab scanned and saved around 1,000 manuscripts, stone-printed scripts, poetry books on computer hard discs, adding that the digitized editions will be available across the globe through the internet.

The Indian Government spent Rs 4.5 crores in 2010-11 for digitization and modernization of public libraries.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/medianama-march-13-2015-sneha-johari-goi-body-national-mission-for-manuscripts-has-digitised-3-million-manuscripts

Goa University to make available online Konkani Wikipedia, within 6 months

praskrishna — 2013-10-03T09:35:55Z

Thick heaps of the four volumes of Konkani language ‘vishwakosh’ or encyclopedia , till now available only in hard copy, will now attain a modern access.

This blog post was published by Jagran Josh on September 30, 2013. CIS signed an MoU with Goa University for digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons license.

The four volumes of encyclopaedia work, initially started by prominent Goan writer and academician late Manoharrai Sardessaiat of Goa University, will now be accessed in digitized format, alongside forming a base for a Konkani Wikipedia.

As mentioned by officials, the Konkani Wikipedia is to be ready to access within upcoming six months. With this, Goa University has turned out to be the first varsity in the nation to enter into a creative commons licence that will permit copyrighted produced data by an Indian university accessible to internet users and open to modification (wiki), making Goa University a victory of sorts of free information.

The university has signed a three-year MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge Programme. This centre represents Wikipedia in India, and now also the Konkani Wikipedia project.

After Google, Facebook and Yahoo, Wikipedia is the fourth most used asset on the internet which operates as an internet based encyclopaedia. Over Wikipedia, any of the users can upload new information and can also update or amend an existing topic. The Konkani Wikipedia is also planned to offer similar privileges to its users. GU's Konkani department and the centre will manage the development from the university campus.

"The Konkani vishwakosh covers all realms of knowledge like any other encyclopedia. The Konkani Wikipedia will act as a digitized repository of knowledge for future generations and Konkani speakers across the world. I look forward to the pleasure of going to the internet and clicking away to access a Konkani Wikipedia," GU vice-chancellor Satish Shetye said.

Shetye told, GU is delighted to relate with Wikipedia, which has become a global trend breaking the monopoly of publishers and transforming the way of sharing of knowledge into a democratic process.

GU registrar Vijayendra Kamat mentions, "At present, it takes time for a page with information in a regional language to download because they are usually found in the form of scanned pages, which are accessible as images and not text. The Konkani Wikipedia will make the text accessible as is the case of any English text on the internet”.

The Konkani vishwakosh, containing four large volumes of total of 3,632 pages, is a work of period of 14 years. It was edited by late Manoharrai Sardessai followed by the editor Tanaji Halarnkar. For the compilation process, GU Staff members, Ranjan Naik, Kalpana Naik, Kanchan Mordekar, Surekha Naik, Mukesh Thali and Shailendra Mehta contributed to it.

Konkani vishwakosh or encyclopedia covers, concisely presented world information with special weight given on information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography etc. The Wikipedia is offered in 20 Indian languages that includes Telugu, Assamese, Marathi, but not in language Konkani so far.

Interested Students, Professors or anyone else could contribute to this Konkani Encyclopaedia project by enrolling online at bit.ly/konkanivishwakosh, before 05 October 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/jagranjosh-september-30-2013-goa-university-to-make-available-online-konkani-wikipedia-within-6-months

Goa University students update ‘Goa’ Marathi articles on Wikipedia

Admin — 2019-02-22T02:27:14Z

Faculty and students of Goa University’s Marathi department have updated 164 Marathi articles on Wikipedia related to Goa recently.

The article was published in the Times of India on February 20, 2019.

They have also added information related to the state focused on freedom fighters, Marathi literature and cultural heritage, tourism, biodiversity and the environment.

The two-day effort was carried out under the supervision of Subodh Kulkarni from the Centre for Internet and Society, the Indian partner of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The history of Goan villages collected by students was uploaded on Wikipedia in Marathi Devanagari Unicode. They also participated in #1Lib1Ref campaign supported by Wikipedia Library and uploaded new articles and 25 photos.

Other than editing the 164 Marathi articles, the faculty and students also edited reference for articles on Wikipedia and contributed to important facts about Goa.

Kulkarni served as the resource person for the session, while director of digital learning and initiative at Goa University Prof Ramrao Wagh, head of department of Hindi Vrushali Mandrekar; librarian at GU library Gopakumar, head of department of Marathi Sunita Umraskar, and coordinator of the workshop Vinay Madgaonkar, oversaw the effort.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/times-of-india-february-20-2019-goa-university-students-update-goa-marathi-articles-on-wikipedia

Goa university re-releasing Konkani encyclopaedia on Sept 26

praskrishna — 2013-09-25T05:59:07Z

The Goa University in collaboration with Centre for Internet and Societie's Access to Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) is re-releasing its four volume 3632 page Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopaedia).

Click to read the original published in the Times of India on September 24, 2013.

This is being done under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0 to support the movement of open knowledge and open access, an official statement said.

The function will be held on September 26, at 10am in the conference hall of the administrative building of the Goa university.

The re-releasing of the Konkani Vishwakosh is an initiative by the Goa University to strengthen the Konkani community and language, the statement said adding that the information from the Vishwakosh will be used to write the articles on Konkani Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-september-24-2013-vijay-desouza-goa-university-re-releasing-konkani-encyclopaedia-on-september-26

Goa University Partners CIS India To Build Konkani Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2013-10-03T09:44:21Z

The Goa university has entered into a three year memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani Wikipedia, reports navhindtimes.

This blog post by Apurva Chaudhary was published by Medianama on September 30, 2013.

As part of this partnership, Goa University will be uploading the four volumes of Konkani encyclopedia and the Konkani wikipedia is expected to be available in six months. It appears that the partnership with CIS India includes processes such as scanning, digitization, and creating articles as per requirement of Wikipedia. CIS India has also called out for volunteers for a period of three months to help them digitizing the Konkani encyclopedia.

This is quite notable since most of the development in digitizing documents in Indian language did not include Konkani language, which is spoken in western coast of India. Besides, since the university will upload the Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia, it will allow users to search through texts. Most of the digitization projects just scan the books and upload the pages in image format, which makes it difficult to search or perform any kind of data related query.

Last year in May, Wikipedians were digitizing Indian language, out-of-copyright texts online, trying to address the comparative paucity of Indic language texts online. Wikisource is a repository of documents and archived material that serves as a reference source for Wikipedia, and a means of improving access to information sources. Of the 64 languages Wikisource is available in, 8 are Indian: Tamil (stats), Malayalam (stats),Telugu (stats), Kannada (stats), Sanskrit (stats), Marathi (stats), Bengali (stats) and Gujarati (stats). Note that most of these Indian language Wikipedia’s receive active contribution from CIS India under its CIS-A2K program.

Wikipedia had recorded 43.5 million pageviews in Indian language wikis, as of October 2011. In June 2013, the Hindi language Wikipedia had received monthly pageviews of 7.8 million, Tamil language Wikipedia had received 5.2 million pageviews, among others. So there’s clearly a demand to access information in local languages.

That said, while more languages are being added to the list, it should be seen that the articles in these languages do not contain just one or two sentences. According to an analysis by Shijualex.in, many articles posted under Indian language Wikipedia were under 2kb, indicating that it contained only couple of sentences.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/medianama-september-30-2013-apurva-chaudhary-goa-university-partners-cis-to-build-konkani-wikipedia

Goa University announces plan to upload Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2013-10-03T09:14:55Z

The Goa University, on Thursday, re-launched the four volumes of Konkani Vishwakosh (Konkani encyclopedia), and announced its ambitious plan to upload the same on Wikipedia – a free encyclopedia built collaboratively using Wiki software – so as to build the Konkani Wikipedia.

This article was published in Navhind Times on September 27, 2013. T.Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

The university has entered into a 3-year memorandum of understanding with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), for building up the Konkani Wikipedia.

Vice Chancellor of Goa University Dr Satish Shetye, speaking during the event held at the university said that Wikipedia is a global phenomenon and a platform to bring people together for making creative activities possible, which in fact, has challenged the monopoly of publishers and created a movement in order to put together knowledge, further making it accessible to public.

“This platform will bring together Konkani speaking people of the world, besides providing an opportunity to learn about digitisation, and write Konkani of global standard.”

Dr Shetye, who incidentally noticed large number of volumes of the Konkani encyclopedia stacked in the Goa University premises, decided to take them to maximum people through their re-launch and upload on the Wikipedia.

The work for the Konkani encyclopedia project was commissioned during the tenure of vice chancellor Prof B Sheik Ali, and was carried out by various people from Dr Manoharrai Sardesai to Dr Tanaji Halarnakar, with the aid of the Konkani department at the university.

The four volumes of the 3,632 page Konkani encyclopedia are being re-released under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0 to support the movement of open knowledge and open access. The programme director for the Access to Knowledge Programme of the Centre for Internet and Society, Vishnu Vardhan, speaking on the occasion said that the process of uploading the four volumes of Konkani encyclopedia on the Wikipedia would be complete in six months time, and includes processes like scanning, digitisation and creating articles as per the requirement of Wikipedia. He also stressed on the need to rewrite some of the articles in Konkani encyclopedia so as to contemporarise their contents.

Vardhan also informed that relevant training programme would be specially co-designed by the CIS as well as the university to put up the content on the Wikipedia.

Goa University is the first university in the country to re-license copyright of its content, and hence can be termed as the ‘Champion of open knowledge’, he observed. Registrar Prof V P Kamat and head of Konkani department Priyadarshini Tadkodkar were also present on the occasion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/navhindtimes-goa-news-september-27-2013-goa-university-announces-plan-to-upload-konkani-encyclopedia-on-wikipedia

Global Knowledge Can Only Save a Language: Pavanaja

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T04:09:40Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, a NGO funded by Wikimedia Foundation has started a mission for the revival of Wikipedia sites of Tulu and Konkani under its "Access to Knowledge" project. As a part of it the NGO had organised a demonstration on the use of wikipedia, here on Saturday.

A scanned version of the report of the workshop is reproduced below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/deccan-herald-april-6-2014-global-knowledge-can-only-save-a-language

GLAM in India: 10 tips for successful GLAM projects

subha — 2014-05-27T09:13:42Z

GLAM initiatives work as a gateway to unleash knowledge, decode archived documentation to build modern wonders and also educate people about their past cultural and scientific journey.

This was published in OpenGLAM on May 22, 2014.

In 2012, India celebrated its first GLAM project on Hindi Wikipedia at the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum, New Delhi. This museum houses a vast majority of Indian crafts - Pattachitra from Odisha, Bidri from Karnataka, colorful and intricate Banarasi sari from northern India and Saura art from indigenous tribes of Eastern India to name a few. It is also a workshop and home to many artisans and folk artists who live, paint, carve, sell, sing, perform and make a living being based in the museum as resident artisans.


A weaver weaving a shawl using handloom (Anil Bhardwaj / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

For this project, Wikimedia India and the India Program were roped in to plan, design and have the Wikimedia community train staffers on how to document Indian crafts, from royal lineage to folk. This resulted in the creation of many Indian craft-related articles in the Hindi Wikipedia and English Wikipedia as well as images on Wikimedia Commons.

Based upon my first hand experience of working closely with the staffers and the Wikimedia community during this project, I would like to share a few tips that might help you while planning and implementing a GLAM project:

1. Show what is it in for them

Large, public entities like museums, archives and libraries can be hesitant to open their doors for free public access. While discussing the potential of a GLAM project, it is wise to explain how the project will bring popularity, highlight the work that institutes are doing and will in turn benefit the government in preserving the state’s culture. Give examples of other such GLAM institutions which have gained public attention by adopting open strategies or by holding public events.

2. Show the institutions the big picture

Institutions often see their success in terms of number of visitors, number of media mentions or the number of sales (if they have some publications or a sales desk selling handicrafts or postcards for example). Tell them how an online presence could bring them local, national as well as international visitors, especially when they have an online presence in popular sites like Wikipedia or Wikitravel.

3. Push beyond your limits

Institutions operate in their own ways and often you might feel like you get stuck. Working with new staffers in a new institution is a big challenge and the pace of work cannot be smooth. What really matters is how much you impart your knowledge among the staffers and educate them about things that will be beneficial for the institution for continuing more GLAM projects in the future.

4. Track work-in-progress

It is always crucial to have smart trackers. These could be as simple as a spreadsheet (Excel, Google, …) or a wiki table for a team’s online tracking. You can of course always design your own. A database containing participant details with different colours for indicating progress in a project is a great way for assigning work, knowing strengths and learning about areas for improvement. Evaluating work internally by making use of smart charts and keeping deadlines is a must when there is a set of activities to be done.

5. Start with claps, swags in the middle, award at the end

Mobilizing volunteer contributors, especially government staffers, is always challenging. Outreach coordinators play a key role in keeping a group motivated enough to work collaboratively for a GLAM project. Participating staff members need to be given special attention during In real life meetups and gatherings, as well as specific guidance during training sessions. Fun games and activities that engage people help breaking communication barriers and build friendship. Swags also excite people to join. When a project starts rolling, keep different levels of excitement by giving different kinds of customized swags like caps, pens, stickers and buttons etc. Printed handouts that work like cheat-sheets are also useful. Creating levels to achieve and awarding the best achievers is another way of keeping people excited. Recognition drives!


Staff being trained by GLAM coordinators (Anil Bhardwaj / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

6. Bring media attention towards the middle of the project

When a significant amount of work is done, break it to the media. Regional and national media coverage and few blog posts covering a project gives a lot of visibility to the institution and the people involved. This is in fact the best way to get internal administration level support for implementing a project. Interview some of the achievers, put them up on the project page and blogs and show those posts to them. Many people love to see audio-visual and printed news, and showing the participants their video interviews and published blogs is another way of letting them know about their great contribution.

7. Fail fast, think long term

If a GLAM project does not result in substantial success or sustains for long, it is essential to realize the fact that it is not an easy task to make changes to the system that is set over centuries. It takes time to mobilize and be brave to admit the failure. But it is also never really a failure when there is plenty of learning which others could benefit from before starting similar projects. Starting a new GLAM project is always an investment for the future. Milestones and even scars caused during the course of mobilizing an institution to open up its treasures for the public count and they, over time become parameters others consider.

8. Exit with a few leaders and chuck out way forwards

While working with a group of people, seek out for people who could lead a group and do specific work. This will not just reduce your workload, but will help to have a more decentralized focused work.

9. Document the flow

It is really really essential to document the work in a human manner. If resources permit, bring a professional to take candid shots, shoot a few interviews and B-rolls. You can also be frugal or hire a professional from the open source community for free and do the same. Documentation of learning, challenges and tips for others are essential things that you, as a good samaritan-community member could bring other GLAMers.

10. Empathy is the key

Over and above, empathy is the only key while dealing with real people in a real space. Connect to every person in a group, put yourself in their shoes and try being one of them: nothing works better in implementing a huge project. Knowledge transfer is a subset of the process of building a cordial relationship. Not all GLAM institutions have a system in place to educate their staff about technical aspects of archiving or renovating or developing skill-sets in general. Your presence should leverage the learning and knowledge that you would acquire from multiple levels.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-glam-may-22-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-glam-in-india-10-tips-for-successful-glam-projects

GI-tagged products to get Wiki pages

praskrishna — 2016-01-27T16:33:47Z

Ever realised that the famous, red hot Naga Mirchi (a special variety of chilli from Nagaland) doesn’t have a Wikipedia page?

The article by S. Anandan was published in the Hindu on January 26, 2016.

And that Cannanore Home Furnishings — textile home furnishings from Kannur — is a brand with geographical indication (GI) registration? Wiki, which is an open and free repository of knowledge on the Internet, does not have pages, in English and other recognised Indian languages, on most GI-tagged Indian products.

The Centre for Internet and Society-Access to Knowledge — popular as CIS-A2K— which is a not-for-profit movement to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development, launched an India Edit-a-thon for seven days from January 25 to generate Wikimedia pages in English and Indian languages on Indian products recognised by the GI Registry of India.

“Kerala alone boasts 23 products, mostly agricultural, with the GI tag. But Malayalam Wiki doesn’t have information on all of them. Besides the Aranmula Kannadi, none of the other GI-tagged products from Kerala have Wiki pages in English. Nationally, there are about 213 GI-tagged products and we know nothing of most of them. There isn’t a single article on many of them even in English. It’s in this context that the Edit-a-thon becomes extremely relevant. It’s being held to celebrate the Republic Day,” says Wiki activist Manoj Karingamadathil.

13 pages already

The campaign, launched on Monday, has evoked enthusiastic response from Wiki activists who have begun to create pages on most of these products. At the time of going to press, 13 GI-tagged Kerala products have got Wiki pages and editors are at work to generate content for these products in English.

Apart from existing Wiki editors, freshers may also be part of the campaign. “All they have to do is to create a Wiki account before sending in researched content,” points out Mr. Manoj. The campaign will be on till January 31.

Seven-day India Edit-a-thon begins; Wiki activists begin creating pages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-hindu-s-anandan-january-26-2016-gi-tagged-products-to-get-wiki-pages

Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon

praskrishna — 2016-01-26T15:19:56Z

Between 25 January and 31 January 2016, CIS-A2K is organizing an edit-a-thon to celebrate India's republic day. The goal of this edit-a-thon is to create and improve Geographical Indications articles.

Expectations

We expect that if you participate in this edit-a-thon, you'll create or expand at least 3 articles. However you may work on as many as articles you want.

Rules

For an article to be considered as part of this Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon, it must adhere to the following rules

The new article must be created between 0:00 UTC on 25 January 2016 and 23:59 UTC on 31 January 2016.
Creation/Expansion rule: If you are creating a new article the new article must have a size of at least 3,500 bytes and a minimum length of roughly 300 words (the word count excludes templates, infoboxes, references, etc.), If you are expanding an existing article, you need to expand this article by at least 3000 bytes, (the word count excludes templates, infoboxes, references, etc.)
The articles should not copyvio content and should follow verifiability and other important policies of Wikipedia.
The articles should have decent references;
The article must not be purely machine translated.
There should not be any maintenance tags in the articles
The article must have a direct relation to Geographical Indications in India (see Proposed articles).

Participants

Please add your username below. If you can not find your community name, please add a section using level 3 header (eg. === Ukrainian Wikipedia ===). We also encourage you to start an event page on your Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/geographical-indications-in-india-edit-a-thon