Centre for Internet and Society

Converting from nonUnicode (Nudi, Baraha, ...) font encoding to Unicode Kannada

pavanaja — 2016-10-23T15:36:25Z

People have been using computers for typing and printing Kannada text for more than 25 years. Most of the usage of Kannada on computers was limited to the DTP arena.

People made use of packages like PageMaker (Version 6.5 or 7) to type and compose pages. Even now, many people still use these packages for Kannada DTP work. The text entered into these packages is stored as font glyph codes rather than character encodings. Non-Unicode truetype fonts like Nudi, Baraha, ShreeLipi, Akruti, etc, are some of the most popular fonts being used.

The system does not understand these characters as Kannada characters. Any text based operations like search, replace, sorting, spell-check, text-to-speech, etc, are not possible with this kind of text. Employing Unicode for all digitisation works of Kannada text solves this problem. Usage of Unicode for Kannada has become prominent only recently. All websites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Wikisource, etc, want the text only in Unicode. There is still a large amount of text entered and stored with old non-Unicode font based encodings. These are mostly present in the form of PageMaker files. This blog post explains the process of converting the text present in PageMaker into Kannada Unicode text.

The Kannada and Culture Department of the Government of Karnataka have released Unicode complaint open-type fonts and Unicode based software for Kannada under GPL. These are available for free download on their website (http://kannadasiri.co.in/index/software). Download and
install “Ascii to Unicode Kannada Converter” from this page. This software works only in Windows. Now you are ready to convert the text from PageMaker file into Unicode.

Open the PageMaker file. Select the Text tool depicted by a big “T” shaped icon. Click anywhere in the text area. Select the entire text (Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C). Now open Notepad and paste this text into that (press Ctrl-V). The text will appear gibberish in Notepad. Don’t worry about it. Save the file as plain text file (.TXT file). Remember where you have saved the file.

Now run the “Kannada ASCII Unicode Converter” software. In the first textbox enter the name of the ASCII file to be converted (the file you just saved from Notepad). In the bottom textbox enter a filename for the Unicode text file that will be created by the software. Select the default “GOK (Kuvempu Nudi Baraha)”, or other encoding as the case may be, as the encoding from which the text has to be converted. Click on the button written “ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿ”. It will show the progress of conversion.

Once the conversion is complete, it will display an appropriate message to indicate completion of the conversion. If you open the text file created by the software, it will have the text converted into Unicode. This text can be used in Wikisource, Wikipedia, etc.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/converting-from-non-unicode-nudi-baraha-font-encoding-to-unicode-kannada

Continuing community engagement: Communities of interest and Quarrying

Manasa Rao — 2017-05-19T15:23:28Z

In telling the stories of Indian Wikipedians, we bring to you the story of Dr. Diptanshu Das, a doctor and avid Wikipedian, working with WikiProject Medicine who recently approached CIS-A2K with a technical request.

CIS-A2K has always believed in continuing our engagement with the communities and individuals we work with. This year in particular has been special to us thanks to our Train The Trainer alumni steadily achieving the goals they set out to achieve and continuing their Wiki journeys with more vigour. It is especially significant to us when our alumni come back to our resource and idea exchange platform to help develop their pet projects. For the first time, one such alumnus, Dr. Diptanshu Das, a doctor by profession and avid Wikipedian approached us in April 2017 with a request to our technical team. He wanted to know the number of articles that were tagged in both Category:WikiProject Pharmacology and Category:All WikiProject Medicine.

To provide some context, WikiProjects are generally article development projects undertaken by groups of editors on Wikipedia whose aim it is to achieve goals on specific topics and subjects on Wikipedia. For example, WikiProject Medicine manages and helps curate medical articles on Wikipedia. Similarly, WikiProject Pharmacology states that it "coordinates the development of Wikipedia articles and lists relating to the pharmacology and science of medications and other pharmacology-related topics." Working to define clearer guidelines for WikiProject Medicine of which he is a member, Dr. Das intended to find out how many articles were listed under WikiProject Pharmacology that were also tagged under WikiProject Medicine. As these two are closely related topics, the former being a sub-specialty of the latter, he felt it could cause an overlap which would mean that most of the sub-specialty articles would get lost in the "parent" category i.e. WikiProject Medicine.

CIS-A2K ran Dr. Das' request on Quarry, a public querying interface that lets one raise queries regarding databases in addition to managing them as an SQL(Structured Query Language) software would. Dr. Das had begun discussions with fellow Wikipedians to get their thoughts on the matter and wanted to provide data-specific points but was unable to gather consensus on developing a guideline. However, when CIS-A2K reported back to him, he realized that the overlap was not as significant as he had feared. WikiProject Medicine had 34,475 articles, WikiProject Pharmacology had 10,721 articles; only 2002 of these were tagged in both. Dr. Das, while relieved, believes that sub-specialty tagging would go a long way in helping improve articles such as those of WikiProject Pharmacology, many of which are still in Start and Stub classes.

"While collaborating on wiki is always good, it is important that an organization like CIS contributes its expertize," he says. CIS-A2K's presence as an idea exchange platform hopes to generate debate and discussions in addition to the physical resources and support we provide to communities. Dr. Das is also of the opinion that domain knowledge experts could make a real difference to Wikipedia by engaging with or creating WikiProjects that are specific to their interests and collaborate with other free knowledge champions around the world. CIS-A2K has attempted to encourage such communities of interest in the past so as to find an easier way to engage members of the general public and educational institutions as they are more likely to edit Wikipedia articles based on their personal hobbies and interests.

If you have requests for us please post them here or email Tito Dutta at tito@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/continuing-community-engagement-communities-of-interest-and-quarrying

Community Toolkit for Greater Diversity

Admin — 2018-10-30T02:08:31Z

P.P. Sneha participated in a 3 day programme organized by Wikipedia community in Mandrem, Goa from October 5 - 7, 2018. The event was a peer training programmeto strengthen the work in the direction of building greater diversity and inclusion in the Wikimedia community.

Click to see the agenda of the event

More info of the programme can be accessed here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/community-toolkit-for-greater-diversity

Community Prioritisation of Content Donation: Kannada Wikisource

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:42:09Z

CIS-A2K has initiated a community consultation in order to prioritise and streamline the work on Wikisource projects across FLA. Due to the commitment of volunteers from the respective FLA and the institutional partnerships that A2K has developed we have been able to bring a large corpus of content under free licence into our Wikisource projects. CIS-A2K promotes both content donation and content acquisition strategies in order to bring in free licence content.

The re-releasing of the content under CC-BY-SA is a difficult task no doubt, but the even more difficult task is to get the donated content digitised and made available on Wikisource. As this activity involves three intermediary steps of scanning the original document, uploading the same on commons.wikimedia.org and finally recreate the same page on Wikisource by typing.

It is common knowledge that Indian Language Wikimedia communities consist of very few volunteers and in many communities it is Wikipedia that is the chief attraction for volunteers. This compounds the problem towards work that has to be done on Wikisource. To overcome this problem CIS-A2K has initiated a community consultation and prioritisation effort. CIS-A2K consults community in form of posts on Village pump, mailing lists and other channels of communication and update them about the overall content donated towards Wikisource projects and requests for suggestions and feedback as to the plan to digitse and bringing the content on Wikisource.

For the month of November, 2015 CIS-A2K discussed the plan with the Kannada community Wikimedians and proposed a plan of aggregating all the content that has been donated towards Kannada Wikisource and copyright lapse content that has been identified by Wikimedians. A2K team is currently utilising its institutional partnership with Christ University in digitising the content of Sri. Niranjana a prominent Kannada author that was donated by Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana. As a result of this collaboration with the community A2K team shall be posting a comprehensive list of the content donated to Kannada Wikisource along with copyright lapse books that are available digitally on Digital Library of India and Osmania University Digital Library and other such platforms.

This consultation process with the Kannada Wikimedia community also seeded an idea of creating a 'Book Bank' for Kannada Wikimedians. The objective of the book bank is to provide authentic references, citation material and other primary sources of information for content generation. As a first step towards building of the proposed book bank, we have purchased encyclopaedic material on Stone Inscriptions found in Karnataka, Women writers of Karnataka, Literary history of Karnataka and Kannada Dictionaries. The material acquired under 'Book Bank' will serve as resources for community and will be provided to the community members upon request for the same.

Following lists provide information about the current status of projects undertaken on Kannada Wikipedia:

Projects which are active on Wikisource:

Vimochane - 50 pages to be typed out of 355
Abhaya - 63 to be typed of 326 pages
Doorada Nakshatra - 23 typed out of 175
Rangammana Vathara - 23 to be typed of 209 pages
Ekangini - 41 typed of 228 pages
Kalyanaswami - 100 typed of 251

These books are scanned and uploaded on Kannada Wikisource

Books to be uploaded on Wikisource:

Chirasmarane
Mrutyunjaya
Deekshe
Navodaya
Palike banda panchamruta
Swami Aparampara

Books available to be scanned:

Banashankari
Nandagokula

CIS-A2K has visited the following libraries in order to optimise the efforts put into Kannada Wikisource:

1) Central Library, Cubbon Park, Bangalore

2) Kannada Shaitya Parishat, Chamarajpet, Bangalore

3) B.M. Shri Pratishtana Library, Bangalore

4) Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs, Basavanagudi, Bangalore

The visits have resulted in identifying many books that were hitherto unavailable with A2K team. We are in process of getting these books and digitise them so that they can be uploaded on Kannada Wiisource. A2K team is hopeful that the increased levels of activity and consultation held with the community will help the overall progress of Kannada Wikisource project.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-prioritisation-content-donation-kannada-wikisource

Community led Konkani Wikipedia Outreach

nitika — 2014-06-10T08:44:22Z

Goa University students organised the first ever community led Konkani Wikipedia outreach on May 14, 2014. Fifteen first year M.A. students from Konkani Department participated in the six hour long workshop.

The primary focus of this workshop was to educate the MA first year students about contributing to Konkani Wikipedia which is currently in incubation.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) took this up as an assignment to build capacity of interested community members to conduct effective outreach sessions in Konkani. By way of supporting and mentoring such workshops CIS wants to make sure that we do not reach a situation where Konkani Wikipedia community is entirely dependent on CIS-A2K for its growth. The community should be able to sustain even if CIS-A2K pulls out of its Konkani work.

The workshop was organised by, User: Darshan kandolkar , User: Konknni mogi 24, User: Supriya kankumbikar and User: John Noronha. The presenters were trained, mentored and supported by CIS-A2K to organise this workshop. This included:

Helping the trainers get physical space to organise this workshop at Goa Central State Library.

Training the presenters on how to best organise the workshop and divide it into different sections such as a) Introduction to Wikipedia b) Introduction to Basic Editing c) Hands on workshop on basic editing d) Advance Editing e) Hands on workshop on advance editing

Providing all the training documents such as presentation and presenters note.

Providing registration and feedback forms.

Helping in getting the IP released from '7 accounts creation per IP rule'.

Helping the trainers to design customised energisers, Wikipedia quiz and Wikipedia games to keep the participant's enthusiasm high.


Above: Participants take part in Wiki editing at the workshop.

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

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

subha — 2016-08-07T03:11:06Z

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

This was published on Wikimedia Blog on August 4, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In brief

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

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

Community Digest—Estonians working on a new feedback system for Wikipedia articles

subha — 2016-02-27T06:30:41Z

Community digest is a weekly publication on Wikimedia Blog. This week, I have authored a section on the Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary that is being celebrated today. It includes a small section from a longer interview with Kannada Wikipedian Vasanth S.N. The two blogs on creating Odia-language character encoding converters I had written before in the Huffington Post and the DNA are also featured in the digest.

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog here.

Sites that rely on the cooperation of people need to be able to easily exchange information. When there are some problems with an article, you could always add some templates to specific places or point to them on talk page—but that can sometimes be painful and time consuming.

The problem can grow even greater when articles are written inside a Wikipedia Education Program. You may need to follow up with hundreds of students and provide them feedback so that they can easily understand what should they fix. This can be a rather tricky job when dealing with people who have never before written to Wikipedia.

For example, in Estonia we have a course called “Estonian Composition and Conversation” in the University of Tartu, where there are on average more than 200 students per year writing articles on Wikipedia. We are keenly interested in providing good quality feedback, but with that number of students and with the use of the usual wikisystem, that is hard to achieve.

So we needed a solution.

When using the usual method (the talk page), you need to point out where are all of the mistakes located and then express your concerns about them. With a lot of comments, that does get rather messy and it’s hard to understand where are those comments directed to; it’s not an ideal medium for feedback in massive scale and not that useful for neither the students nor the person giving feedback. So the goal was simple: to ease the process of giving feedback to students who write wikiarticles as their coursework.

What we did was to create a system called WikiComment.

What does it do? Well, at first it allows to add comments to exact letters/sentences/paragraphs to speed up the commenting process and make it easier to locate the issues. In addition to adding comments, it also provides various highlighting options and a possibility to strike through text. Secondly, it allows for better monitoring of the articles of interest. That means the wikiComment user has information about which pages have been modified and he or she can easily check if the changes have solved the marked questions.

We hope that this will make it easier to focus on text and to the quality of writing.

Obviously WikiComment could be used outside the education initiative and in many other ways as well, but that is just how it all started. For example we’ll soon add support for sites like Meta-Wiki, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wikinews, and Wikiquote, among others. Having a discussion about some details in grant request or talking about local tourist sites may have just become easier. But to really optimize the system and to make it as good as possible we’ll need your feedback, so please go on and test that site—if you have any suggestions, just let us know.

Ivo Kruusamägi, Estonian Wikipedian

In brief

Kannada Wikipedia anniversary: The Kannada Wikipedia is all set to celebrate its 13th anniversary. The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on 12 June 2003 with a message “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia in Kannada). However, it took over a year—on July 12, 2004 the first article about a city Shimoga was created. Over the last decade Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for the Kannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name—there were about 700,000 pageviews in December 2015. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (February) being the highest and 22 (May) the lowest and 80 being the count in last December. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. Since its inception, the project has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles.

The biggest hurdle, as explained by Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig, has been cleaning up the articles created by paid translations of Google when Kannada Wikipedia along with many other Indian language Wikipedias were used as testing grounds for improving Google Translate, a multilingual machine translation tool. Vasanth S.N., a Kannada Wikipedian who has cleaned up over 60 such articles prefers to use an existing good quality encyclopedia like the 16 volume Kannada Vishwakosha, published by Mysore University and relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the university, as a resource to create and improve articles. To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians are gathering at Saint Aloysius College Mangalore, Karnataka this 14th. The larger community, including long time Wikipedians and new members like the students faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs, will gather and participate in a day-long edit-a-thon and chalk out plans for the future.

Innovation and revolution in the Odia language: Wikimedian Subhashish Panigrahi has written two pieces recently. In dnaindia.com, he described a Unicode converter that in revolutionizing Internet access in the Odia language; in the Huffington Post, he wrote about why contributing and adding to Wikipedias in Indian language is so important.

Coming together across the divide: Saanjh (ਸਾਂਝ سانجھ), a Punjabi word which means collaboration, was an online edit-a-thon between the Gurmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia and Shahmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia in January 2016. The plan came together after two editors, one from each side, met at Wikimania 2015. Organized by the Punjabi Wikimedians User Group, 23 editors participated; you can read more about their story on Meta.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate, Wikimedia Foundation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-community-digest-estonians-working-on-new-feedback-system-for-wikipedia-articles

Community celebrates birthday of Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wiktionary

subha — 2016-07-09T03:25:02Z

This June, Odia Wikipedia turned 14 and Odia Wiktionary turned 11. Odia Wikimedia community member Chinmayee Mishra, CIS-A2K Programme Associate Sailesh Patnaik and I co-authored this blog in the Wikimedia Blog. The blog chronicles several major activities of the community and features quotes from many old and new community members.

This was published on Wikimedia Blog on June 23, 2016.

With the Odia Wikipedia and its sister projects, a handful of dedicated volunteer editors are taking the Odia language to the world outside. The editor community that has recently celebrated Odia Wikipedia’s 14th anniversary in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India is collectively growing two more projects; Odia Wikisource, an online library that already has over 300 volumes of text, and Odia Wiktionary, an online dictionary that has over 100,000 entries. With these live projects and more projects in the pipeline, this community is bringing a digital revolution in Odia by sharing valuable content online and creating many language tools inside and outside the Wikimedia projects.

The Odia Wikipedia community had gathered in the city for a two-day long event to celebrate the anniversary. These two days were spent in intensive capacity building activities as the community is quite dispersed in many places in Odisha and outside, and are all volunteers. Odia Wikipedia, the flagship project was started as one of the first four Indian language Wikipedias along with Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedia in 2002, a year after the English Wikipedia was made live. The project was quite dormant for more than nine years and got revived by a group of editors in Bangalore during 2011. Then the project became much of a household name when more Odia speakers living in Odisha and outside joined contributed in writing and editing articles of several different subject areas. Odia Wikipedia is part of the 292 language Wikipedia family and a larger global family of hundreds of other free knowledge projects that are collectively known as Wikimedia projects. “Odia Wikipedia is officially available online at https://or.wikipedia.org and is free for anyone to create articles on notable topics, and edit and enhance those articles”, says Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the administrators of the project. Aliva Sahoo, one of the active editors, shares, “being a student of Odia-language I was seeking information on musical instruments and could not find much. So I started translating from English and now it is one of the longest articles on Odia Wikipedia.” As part of the WikipediansSpeak project, we have tried to capture the voice of the community of Aliva and a few other contributors.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): How did the two-day long capacity building activity go? What was the outcome of the different sessions?
Jnanaranjan Sahu: This event was useful in bringing most of the active contributors under one roof as we are working online. This event helped us learn from each other and impart knowledge so that everyone can go back and use them.

SP: What are the problems you faced before coming to this event and how these sessions are going to help you in future?
Abha Pradhan: I was not sure of the copyright part while uploading images on Wikimedia Commons. A lot many pictures got deleted because of my own ignorance. Similarly, I got to learn a lot about linking multiple language entries using Wikidata. These two are my biggest lessons of all that I learned from the sessions taken by other experienced Wikipedians.

SP: What did you learn from these sessions?
Rajalaxmi Mishra: I got to learn about basics of Wikipedia editing, rules and guidelines, several technical aspects like using templates, uploading and adding images to articles and dealing with copyright issues on Wikipedia.

Subas Chandra Rout, one of the long time active Wikimedians has been the single most contributor to grow the medical science-related articles on Odia Wikipedia. Subas is the only Wikimedian who has translated all the medical science-related article from Wikimedia Medical Project run by the Wiki Project Med.

“We have several subject areas covered on Odia Wikipedia – from the elaborate rituals of Jagannatha temple to medical science. Interestingly, almost all the articles on medical science are written by a retired assistant professor Dr. Subas Chandra Rout and needless to say those articles are of really high quality”, explains Pritiranjan Tripathy, an editor who is based in the Indian city of Kolkata.

It was like a “Catch me if you can” challenge when I started to translate medical topics into the Odia language as part of Wiki Project Med on March 5, 2015 with my first article on African trypanosomiasis. There were more than 150 articles in the project. Gradually the number of topics in the project increased and so did my translated article on Odia Wikipedia. After completion of the 345th article (Marfan syndrome, on May 6, 2016), I looked at the Wikipedia project dashboard, and I saw that I was the only person to complete all the articles in the project among all the world’s contributors.

“The next big goal is to enhance the quality of the existing articles by adding more images, references from external sources and expanding small articles by adding more information”, said long-time contributor Shitikantha Dash. Shitikantha, who is also an administrator of Odia Wiktionary, says, “it is important that more people contribute to the Odia Wiktionary so that words of all times and all genres, especially the technical and loan words make their way to this free multilingual dictionary. A 10 day-long campaign is going to be organised to celebrate the 11th anniversary of Odia Wiktionary so that every Wikipedia editor adds at least one word. And we are also using these words to create a spell check that will be freely available for anyone to use”.

The contributor community that is collaboratively building these projects has been also creating many tools and technical resources like editor manuals. The script encoding converters that the community has built is helping a lot of online users to be able to share their writings on blogs and social media. “Before the onset of these converters, a vast majority of the people working in press and media were stuck with outdated encoding systems like Shreelipi and Akruti. Mrutyunjaya Kar, a long time contributor and administrator of two projects; Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource explains, “Odia Wikipedia is available at https://or.wikipedia.org and we encourage more people to join us in this movement.”

“This is a way to bring digital freedom for everyone and share the world’s knowledge in our own language.”

Chinmayee Mishra, Odia Wikimedian
Subhashish Panigrahi, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Sailesh Patnaik, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Associate, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-july-7-2016-community-celebrates-birthday-of-odia-wikipedia-and-odia-wiktionary

Community Capacity Building Workshop at KIIT University

praskrishna — 2014-04-08T05:22:17Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team is organizing a workshop for community capacity building at KIIT University on March 30, 2014.

Experienced Wikimedians and Subhashish Panigrahi from CIS-A2K mentored the community about community building strategies and outreach. They had a discussion about the further steps with students (graduating batch) of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal who took part in the Odia Wikipedia Education program. Finally there was a discussion on CIS-A2K's Odia language work plan for Wikipedia and WikiSource.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/community-capacity-building-workshop-at-kiit

Commemorating Ulo Senthamizh Kodai (1945 - 2024): A Luminary of Tamil Open Knowledge Movement

pavan — 2024-02-08T14:59:50Z

பயன்தூக்கார் செய்த உதவி நயன்தூக்கின் நன்மை கடலின் பெரிது. (௱௩ - 103) திருவள்ளுவர் (Payandhookkaar Seydha Udhavi Nayandhookkin Nanmai Katalin Peridhu (Transliteration). The contribution made without weighing the return, When weighed, outweighs the sea. - Thiruvalluvar

With deep sorrow, we announce the passing of Ulo Senthamizh Kodai (December 22, 1945 – February 1, 2024), a distinguished technologist, author, academician, and prolific contributor to the Tamil Wikipedia community.[1] Born on December 22, 1945, in the village of Puducherrypalli in Thiruvallur district, Tamil Nadu, India, He devoted his life to engineering, science, and promoting scientific knowledge in Tamil.

Ulo Senthamizh Kodai earned his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Guindy Engineering College and a Master's degree from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore. His illustrious 33-year career at the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board included earning a Ph.D. He authored the acclaimed book "Makkal Ariviyal Ilakkiyam: Nokkum Pokkum" and received the Tamil Nadu Government's award for best book in engineering and technology in 2007.

Passionate about Tamil Nadu's science and technology history, Ulo Senthamizh Kodai contributed extensively to scientific vocabulary in Tamil. He served on the editorial board of the Bharathidasan University Journal of Science and Technology and significantly contributed to the Tamil Virtual Academy's glossary of technical terms.

In addition to academia, He was a luminary in the Tamil Wikipedia community, starting his contributions in 2014. He created over 2000 articles and had an edit count of 28513 in Tamil Wikipedia, focusing mainly on scientific articles. He was actively involved until his final days, participating in discussions and editing articles until January 29, 2024.

Ulo Senthamizh Kodai leaves behind a legacy continued by his son Vanchi. His impact on Tamil science and the Wikipedia community is immeasurable, with notable contributions to projects like the 100 WikiDays and the Tamil Teachers' Articles Cleanup Drive.

Members of the Tamil Wikipedia community mourn his passing. Fellow Wikipedian Mahalingam noted, "The passing of Ulo Senthamizh Kodai is a great loss to us all." Former colleague Jambulingam remembered his dedication and encouragement, while longtime contributor K. Murthy recalled Ulo Senthamizh Kodai's resilience despite physical challenges.

Ulo Senthamizh Kodai's contributions were recognized with accolades, including featuring on the main page of Tamil Wikipedia in 2016 and various barnstars and medals from fellow Wikipedians.

As we bid farewell to Ulo Senthamizh Kodai, we remember him not only for his significant contributions to Tamil science and Wikipedia but also for his unwavering dedication to knowledge, education, and the Tamil language. His passing leaves a void in the community, and he will be dearly missed.

We are planning to host a condolence meeting online and we will soon provide information about that. We encourage people to share their memories/experiences of their association with Ulo Senthamizh Kodai on this thread.

Tamil Wikimedians & CIS-A2K.

[1] Biographical Article about Ulo Senthamizh Kodai in Tamil Wikipedia

[2] Userpage of Ulo Senthamizh Kodai in Tamil Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/commemorating-ulo-senthamizh-kodai-1945-2024-a-luminary-of-tamil-open-knowledge-movement

Commemorating Chandan Chiring (1990-2024)

Nayan Jyoti Nath and Ajay Das — 2024-05-07T23:51:28Z

"ৱিকিপ্ৰকল্পসমূহৰ সম্পাদনাৰ দুৱাৰ সকলোৰে বাবে মুকলি। ই কোনো নিৰ্দিষ্ট সংখ্যাত্মক লক্ষ্য আগত ৰাখি কৰা কাম নহয়। ই এক নিৰৱচ্ছিন্ন প্ৰক্ৰিয়া। বৰ্তমান সময়ত অসমীয়া ৱিকিপিডিয়াত লিখিবলগীয়া বিষয় আছে অগণন, ৱিকিউৎসত সন্নিৱিষ্ট কৰিবলগীয়া গ্ৰন্থও আছে অগণন। সেইদৰে ৱিকিউদ্ধৃতিত সন্নিৱিষ্ট কৰিবলগীয়া লেখাৰ সংখ্যাও গণিব নোৱাৰা। ৱিকিউদ্ধৃতিয়ে পূৰ্ণাংগ ৰূপ পোৱাৰ পিছত এতিয়া আমি অন্যান্য ৱিকিপ্ৰকল্প যেনে ৱিকিঅভিধান, ৱিকিগ্ৰন্থ, ৱিকিসংবাদ আদিলৈয়ো মন মেলিব পাৰোঁ। কিন্তু ইয়াৰ বাবে আমাক লাগিব আমাৰ মাতৃভাষাটোৰ প্ৰতি আন্তৰিক দায়িত্ববোধ, এক শক্তিশালী কৰ্মদল আৰু সাংগঠনিক কাৰ্যকৰিতা। ইয়াৰ লগতে আমি এই কথাত গুৰুত্ব দিব লাগিব যে খৰধৰকৈ অপৈণত বহু কাম কৰাতকৈ নিয়মিতভাৱে উন্নত মানৰ কাম কৰি কিদৰে অসমীয়া ৱিকিপ্ৰকল্পসমূহৰ গুণগত মান বজাই ৰাখিব পৰা যায়।"
- চন্দন চিৰিং ফুকন

(Editing WikiProjects is open to everyone, without specific numerical goals in mind, as it's a continuous process. Currently, there are countless articles awaiting creation on the Assamese Wikipedia, numerous books to be added to Wikisource, and an endless amount of content for Wikiquotes. Once the Wikiquotes project gains its complete form, we can shift attention to other projects like Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. However, achieving this requires a genuine sense of responsibility toward one's mother tongue, a robust workforce, and effective organization. Moreover, maintaining the quality of Assamese wiki projects necessitates consistent, high-quality contributions, rather than rushing to produce a large quantity of immature work.
Chandan Chiring Phukan)

With a heavy heart, I am deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of Chandan Chiring Phukan at 11:30 pm on Saturday, April 27th. Chandan Chiring was born on November 14, 1990, in Titabor, Jorhat district of Assam. He completed his primary and higher secondary education in Titabor and obtained Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Commerce from B Barooah College and KC Das Commerce College, Guwahati. After completing his education, he started his career in a private institution and moved on to work as a District Account Manager in the ASSAM STATE RURAL LIVELIHOOD MISSION (ASRLM) department of the Government of Assam owing to his talent. He began his career as a government employee in Barpeta district of Assam and was transferred to Majuli in July 2023 after two years. Chandan entered the world of literature at an early age and published his poems in several Assamese children's magazines ever since he was in school. Chandan always carried the ocean of Assamese art and culture in his heart. He was also interested in Indigenous food cultures, especially South Asian cuisine. He had a special place in his heart for Indian as well as Greek mythology and the Harry Potter films. He cherished an interest in gardening and photography. Despite his busy schedule, he enjoyed reading books and spending time on wikis.

After the transfer, he was affected with chronic dysentery, which gradually developed multiple internal infections, and experienced decreased immunity. He was under treatment for three months and was unable to walk. He slowly recovered and took care of his body at home for a few days. One day after Bahag Bihu, he started having fever and his health deteriorated, leading to his passing on April 27th.

Feeling that Chandan had recovered from his illness, he became more aware of his tastes. He dreamt of publishing a book of children's poems and fairy tales from around the world, but this dream didn’t become reality.

Chandan Da's passing hits close to home for me, as he was not just a fellow Wikimedian but a dear friend within my small circle of trusted individuals, a circle I hold tightly due to my introverted nature. Despite never meeting him in person, Chandan Da became a guiding light in my Wikimedia journey. His commitment to quality over quantity was evident in the 583 pages he created in Assamese Wikipedia despite the challenges of limited typing tools and keyboards around 2012, when he joined. His dedication extended to editing, with a remarkable 12,893 edits on Assamese Wikipedia, 1090 on Assamese Wikisource, and 1289 on Assamese Wikiquote, where he also served as an administrator. Chandan Da's contributions weren't confined to his native language; he uploaded 632 images and documents to Commons and participated in numerous Wiki workshops and conferences, including the Wiki Tea table meet at Assam College of Engineering on October 25, 2014, the Assamese Wikimedians' Conference and Workshop at Pragjyotish College on January 2, 2022, and a significant Train the Trainer (TTT) event in Kerala from September 28 to October 1, 2023. His total global edits amounted to an impressive 19,520. His impact reverberates through the Wikimedia community, inspiring newcomers and veterans alike.

Chandan Da's message for the community was published in the Assamese wikipatrika in September 2012, November 2015, May 2016, and May 2023 editions. He actively participated in publishing the wikipatrika regularly, starting from its first issue in September 2012. For his tireless efforts, he received many barnstars and accolades, totalling 34 barnstars, including The Original Barnstar, The Tireless Contributor Barnstar, Asian Month 2023 Barnstar, and The Teamwork Barnstar. He possessed great leadership qualities, always pushing others to contribute and do something for their mother tongue. He single-handedly contributed to getting a domain for Assamese Wikiquote and tirelessly contributed while encouraging others to do the same. Despite being hospitalized for around three months and facing difficulties in speaking and seeing clearly, he participated in the feminism and folklore campaign, creating 47 articles and becoming the fourth highest contributor from Assamese.

Although advised to rest after gaining strength, he fell ill again, but even on his deathbed, he was organizing an edit-a-thon on Assamese Wikiquote from April 22nd to April 28th. Unfortunately, he passed away on April 27th at 11:30 pm. We shared almost everything, discussing vast topics from films to mythology, personal matters to serious issues, and from food to travel. All of these conversations will be missed dearly. Since joining the service, I hardly had time to contribute to Wiki, but he always insisted that I contribute in any form. His encouragement and inspiration were the driving forces behind my recent activity on Wiki. He also consistently reminded me to attend the monthly Wiki meet, which I shamefully avoided many times due to my nature. His impact on the Assamese Wiki community cannot be forgotten. His loss is deeply felt not only by the Assamese wiki community but by the entire Indic wiki community. Today, the entire Assamese wiki family mourns his loss as Asomi Aai lost one of her dearest sons. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, "The only way to deal with death is to transform everything that precedes it into art." Chandan Da's contributions to Wiki, his poems, his dreams—all are art that will eternally remain in our hearts. May his departed soul find peace.

This article was written by Nayan Jyoti Nath, an Assamese Wikimedian. Ajay Das is the co-author.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/commemorating-chandan-chiring

Classical Odia Language in the Digital Age

subha — 2014-07-28T07:41:51Z

The essay was published in the June edition of Odisha Review, a magazine published by Government of Odisha's Department of Information and Public Relations.

Click to read the original article published in Odisha Review here.

Odisha’s documentation and archival history dates back to the pre-Kalinga civilization that existed more than 5,000 years back in which today’s Odisha was a major part of it. It, later was more vibrant when Kalinga kingdom and was widespread from Ganga to Godavari, geographically consisting of modern day Odisha entirely and partly Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chattishgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana and part of Tamilnadu and Kerala. The epigraphs of cave painting in Gudahandi and stone inscriptions of Hatigumpha in Udayagiri complex are a few examples of the early documentations that the ancestral Kalingan tribes had made. Furthermore, the early Buddhist poets of Kalinga (popularly known as 64 Sidhapada) wrote “ doha ” (spiritual verses) in Pali language. Pali is the language of all of the Buddhist literature and predecessor of modern Odia, Maithili, Bangla and Assamese language and has deep impact on many other Indic languages. Odia has travelled through a long journey of “Tambapata ” (bronze plate inscription), “Talapatra” (palm leaf manuscripts), printed books since early 18th century and e-books in the modern days. Years of history that have perished during invasions by foreign invaders could have told more about this civilization. Modern Odisha state, so far has been able to uphold the pride of having the largest number of palm leaf manuscripts (over 20,000 manuscripts) in the world. Odia printing and publication industry is spread across all the 30 administrative districts of Odisha and other Indian cities like Kolkata and New Delhi and to some extent in some parts of Surat. A few million books would have been printed starting from the first book “New Testament ” that got printed in 1809.[1]

In this chronology there comes the new age reading tools “e-books” or electronic books less formally initiated in the eighties by students of Regional Engineering College, Rourkela (Now National Institute of Rourkela) and now crossed a decade.[2]

Odia got classical status on 20 February this year after 5 other Indian languages on the basis of its literary heritage of over three millennia. Interestingly, it is older than most of the most spoken languages in the world. Like many other mighty civilizations, traders of this region conquered places and took their language and culture to their occupied colonies. Early traders of Kalingan Sadhabas were trading silk and spices with South Asian countries. With them travelled Kalinga’s language and culture. When all of the other language’s have been able to have a strong presence on the Internet, online content available in Odia is way limited compared to even other Indic languages. It has been almost a decade since Odia support is available in most computers across operating systems. But, the digital desktop publishing (DTP) published resources are still not available in a searchable manner – not on internet or in a computer locally. Currently, the Odia publication industry uses proprietary standard fonts for Odia typing. Akruti, LEAP office, Shreelipi are name to few. All of these were the only means for printing books using desktop publishing at one point of time. But, these encoding systems are out-of-date. The major drawback of these fonts is, they have regular Latin characters replaced by Odia characters. If a document is typed using one such fonts is sent to someone it is difficult to even read or reuse if the person in the receiving end does not have the exact font used for typing. As already mentioned the fonts are commercial and proprietary and it is mandatory to buy them to use. In reality most of the users do not buy and use pirated versions of the software for work.

The printed documents typed in one standard is not compatible with the other one. To avoid this problems, an advanced universal standard called “Unicode” was released in early 2000. Unicode has both Odia and Latin characters in a font that allows both the scripts to be displayed correctly at the same time. It is universally compatible and all the operating systems have Unicode fonts installed in the computers. This takes the pain of installing multiple fonts to access any typed text. Searching any text typed in Unicode is as simple as googling something in English. Moreover, documents typed using one Unicode font could be read using another Unicode font. Unfortunately, none of the Odia newspapers have their publications in Unicode at this moment.

This, practically does not allow any reader to search, access, reuse and quote any content. Same is the case for all other published resources like books and magazines. More than 80 per cent of the published content are not even released online and also not archived.

Many publishers, intimidated of online content plagiarism have been protecting their publications. Unfortunately, copyright laws in India are not stringently practiced unlike the west. This has given rise to a parallel piracy market for the movies and music over the years. Interestingly, books are not of that much demand as music and movies are. As a result of the lingua-cultural shift to English from native languages regional language publications are not widely sold in the post-colonial Indian book market as compared to the English publications. The case of the use of Odia language as a language of governance is still not put in place. Odia is still to be used as a medium for official communication in all of the government offices. English medium educational Boards have been domineering over the Odisha state Board. Despite of these challenges, number of Odia dailies is slowly growing. There are around 100 newspapers published daily from various regions of Odisha. It is essential to note that news archives, unlike literary writings have much of any kind of high commercial value. So is in the case of scholarly and research publications. If all of these publications could be made available online in digital form that will take Odia literature to the global audience. This triggers the need of A) making sure the forthcoming publications are not just typed in Unicode but made available online, B) digitization of published books and making them available free on internet.

It is essential to take measures to ascertain the forthcoming publications use Unicode standard and digitizing published matter and publishing them online. Online content could be made available in Unicode and has trillion times reach than printed matter. As a vast number of the users use Microsoft’s Windows XP they could either upgrade their operating system or move to completely free and open source and Linux based operating systems like Ubuntu. At this moment, Odia has far less content on internet.

Odia Wikipedia tops the list of Odia Unicode content websites and is the largest Odia online encyclopaedia with over 8,000 articles. Available for free on or.wikipedia.org, Odia Wikipedia is a community project where any user could create, edit and modify content. The articles being encyclopaedic and referenced from other reliable sources has some level of authenticity. As this is a small project and is developing it needs more voluntary contribution to grow to a larger project that could serve the purpose of an Open Educational Resources (OER) for students. There are a handful of web and news portals maintained by individuals and organizations that have Odia content in Unicode. The other upcoming project is Odia Wikisource which is an online library. Odia books that are useful for the Odia speaking community like classical literature, religious scriptures, dictionaries and lexicons, journals and research papers and manuscripts could go online on this platform. The most important thing about these two projects is that they both have only volunteers as contributors and anyone and everyone could contribute. Any individual or organization who is interested could add a lot of value to Odia language by contributing the process of digitizing content and making them available for free. These projects, additionally are released under Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses that allows free reuse, modification and commercial reproduction of content. Many valuable books could also be part of Odia Wikisource.

Srujanika, a Bhubaneswar based organization in collaboration with National Institute of Technology, Rourkela and Pragati Utkal Sangh, Rourkela has scanned over 760 Odia books. Out of these, over 200 books are hosted in a non-profit project “Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB)” and hosted at: oaob.nitrkl.ac.in. Organizations like Manik-Smrutinyas and Institute of Odia Studies and Research have re-licensed books of noted author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty and Dr. Debi Prasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty respectively to Creative Commons licenses for free, commercial distribution. Majority of the resourceful magazines like The Utkal Prasanga could be also made available in Unicode standard by changing its copyright terms to Creative Commons licenses. Larger debates are also needed to convince authors and knowledge and information producing organizations/departments like universities and government’s departments (e.g.Information and Public Relations, Department of Mass Education and Department of Statistics.) to migrate from proprietary copyright restrictions to reusable licenses like Creative Commons licenses. This will not only will help for more public-private collaboration and knowledge production but also taking language resources to masses which is discontinued because of lack of updated technological advancement like use of Unicode font and digitizing valuable content. Government portals need Odia localization in Unicode standard so public get access to information in Odia language and this could make e-governance much more easier. Government notifications that often are released publicly are found to be released in image formats. Many such public and private information could just be released in plain text that will increase the searchability, accessibility and reusability million times.

Footnotes:

[1].Pattnaik, Pushpashree. Presentation on digitization of Odia books in Utkal University (21 February 2014).

[2].Mohanty, Jagadish, eSabada. eOdissa.com (2009 - 2010).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odisha-review-june-2014-classical-odia-language-in-digital-age

Citizen Media Summit 2015

praskrishna — 2015-02-08T14:57:29Z

The Citizen Media Summit 2015 was held in Cebu City, Philippines on January 24 and 25, 2015. Subhashish Panigrahi was a speaker at the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/citizen-media-summit-2015

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia

nitika — 2013-12-31T11:48:02Z

The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K team) is pleased to share with you the key accomplishments about the work it accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013 in this report. In accordance with the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge Program’s (CIS-A2K) Konkani Work Plan 2013-14 the program has invested time and effort to build Konkani Wikimedia community and projects.

Highlights

Increased editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia

CIS-A2K has been organising different programs and workshops. The idea is to bring in as many volunteers as possible who can contribute to Konkani Wikipedia for years to come. We have organised these outreach sessions mainly in Devanagari, Romi and Kannada scripts. As a result of these programs we have been able to significantly increase no. of editors, consistently have minimum of 5-6 active editors per month and build a community of volunteers. You can also view level of editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia for the past few months in the chart below:


Above: Edits Per Month on Konkani Wikipedia (Mar-13 to Dec-13) (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Increased number of articles on Konkani Wikipedia

Total number of articles increased from 150 in Sep 2013 to 315 in Nov 2013. The number of articles have doubled over a period of 3 months. We should keep in mind that out of those who edited in Devanagari; 95% of them were completely new to the input method and had to spend considerable time learning and practicing it.


Above: No. of articles on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Translated Media Wiki messages

CIS-A2K organised translation sprint to help translate Media Wiki interface messages. We achieved translating 79% of these messages in Konkani Devanagari while all 100% messages have already been translated in Romi script

Re-release of Konkani Vishwaksh under Creative Commons License

Upon CIS-A2K‘s explicit request, Goa University has approved the re-release of Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-SA 3.0) to make it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done. This is a huge step to help preserve Konkani language and culture in the digital era. Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume hard copy encyclopedia (3632 pages) published by Goa University; a work that took over 14 years to develop. It encompasses the world’s information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography etc. To know more about click here and here

Initiated & Completed 30% of Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project

Goa University in collaboration with the CIS-A2K is digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh. 37 participants are enrolled in this project who are working to digitize the encyclopedia in a time bound manner. All 3632 pages of Konkani Vishwakosh will be digitized. The program started on 19th October and in just about 2 months 30% of the encyclopedia had already been digitized. You can monitor the progress of this project on Wikisource. Here are the links for Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3 and Volume 4. Please note that some of the participants firstly digitize the encylopedia either in their Sandbox or offline and then move it to Wikisource. To know more about the project click here.

Signed an MoU with Goa University

Goa University entered into a three year MoU with CIS for building Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this partnership, Goa University and CIS-A2K will work together to help build Konkani Wikipedia and community.

White paper by a Linguist

Fr. Pratap Naik, S.J. B.Sc., B.Ed. M.A. (Linguistics), M.Phil. (Linguistics), Ph.D. (Linguistics) has written a white paper discussing issues faced by Konkani language and his views on how it should be dealt on Wikimedia projects. We'll soon upload the white paper on Wikimedia Commons and make the link available.

14 Outreach session, over 450 participants, in 3 months

CIS-A2K organised about 14 outreach sessions and reached out to over 450 people to create awareness about Konkani Wikipedia and the community between Sep-Dec 2013. Details of these sessions can be found here.

Got consensus from field experts

Over the past few months CIS-A2K has spoken with Konkani Wikipedians (such as Frederick Noronha, Deepak D'Souza, Seby Fernandes) Konkani linguists (such as Fr. Pratap), professors from Konkani Department at Goa University (Dr. Madhavi Sardesai and Dr. Priyadarshini Tadkodkar), cultural experts (such as Prof. Alito Siqueira and Harriet Vidyasagar) and other experts to propose a solution for Konkani Wikipedia that faces a problem of usage of multiple scripts. To a great extent we have got consensus from different field experts that we should strive to create separate Wikis for each script, at least those which prove to be active.

Wikipedians Speak

One of the ongoing projects of CIS-A2K is 'Wikipedians Speak' which are small videos of Wikipedians that captures their expereinces, learnings and challenges. As a part of this project CIS-A2K published several videos of Konkani Wikipedians.

Link to the post published on Wikipedia

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

CIS-A2K, KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences sign MoUs

subha — 2014-02-03T06:24:18Z

KIIT University, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoUs) for furthering Odia Wikipedia.

Dr.Achyuta Samanta, Founder-Chairman of KIIT and KISS inaugurated both the collaborations formally. Dr. Sasmitarani Samanta, Registrar, KIIT and Surjya Kanta Mohanty, Chief Operating Officer, KISS signed the MoUs of KIIT and KISS respectively whereas T. Vishnuvardhan, Programme Director, CIS-A2K was there to sign in both the MoUs on behalf of CIS along with Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, CIS-A2K. Odia Wikipedians Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, Shitikantha Dash, Jnanaranjan Sahu and Sailesh Patnaik, senior faculty and management members; Prof. Parthosen Gupta, Professor-KIIT School of Management, Sucheta Priyabadini, Joint Registrar, KIIT Santosh K. Pani, Dean-KIIT School of Electrical Engineering and other staff members from KISS were there for this event.

The event was held on January 11, 2014 from 10.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/cis-a2k-kiit-university-kaling-institute-of-social-sciences-mou