Centre for Internet and Society

Discussion on Creation of Social Media Guidelines & Strategy for Telugu Wikimedia

manasarao — 2017-10-24T14:42:24Z

Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online.

An online discussion of guidelines and policies for the various Telugu Wikimedia social media handles was conducted. User:Pavan santhosh.s suggested a set of strategies and guidelines that can be taken into consideration for an official Social Media Policy of Telugu Wikimedia Projects. These suggestions included defining objectives, guidelines (with do's and don'ts) and strategies for the Social Media Policy. User:Ravichandra supported the idea and suggested another objective(showcasing best quality works of Wikipedia). User:Viswanadh added some strategies (such as writing a series of posts about technical aspects that help Wikipedians). User:Pranayraj1985 suggested some don'ts in handling Wikipedia pages as well as handles while User:Rajasekhar1961 expanded the strategy to other sister projects(Telugu Wikisource and Wiktionary). Finally, User:Chaduvari suggested not to name any page as official to avoid possible conflicts. User:Swaralasika announced consensus and User:Pavan santhosh.s created a page based on the discussion in order for the community to reflect.

User:Pranayraj1985 said, "there are pages & groups for Telugu Wikipedia in Facebook for years. We are using them as major social media promotion channels. I(Pranay) am publishing content related to Telugu Wikipedia in those channels. Some of the community members also been admins of page and group. But once or twice, in Facebook page and group, unrelated posts were published and I informed this to Wikimedians active on Facebook and removed those posts. I am glad that this discussion happened and community came up with guidelines and strategy now. This is very much needed.

The guideline page can be found here.

Although the event was successful in creating guidelines, none of the input included women's voices as there were no female participants. Here's hoping there is a diversity of voices in future discussions.

With input from Pavan Santhosh S., Telugu Community Advocate, CIS-A2K.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/discussion-on-creation-of-social-media-guidelines-strategy-for-telugu-wikimedia

Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Solapur University

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-10-24T14:09:24Z

15 September

A Marathi Wikipedia Workshop was held at the Department of Mass Communications at Solapur University. The workshop aimed to introduce Wikimedia and its sister projects to the students. The workshop comprised 25 participants with 10 female attendees.

Sharing their thoughts after the event, the participants were enthuse. Says Priyanka Lagshetti, "I never imagined that I can contribute to Wikipedia. I worked on various media related articles." Another participant, Ambadas Bhasake added, "This workshop showed us a innovative way to use internet productively and constructively"

While 19 new editors joined Wikipedia, participants worked on 60 articles and made around 90 edits. 15 images were added to Commons and into articles.

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-workshop-at-solapur-university

Orientation Program at Kannada University, Hampi

Gopalakrishna A. — 2017-10-24T13:01:25Z

A Kannada Wikipedia Orientation Program was conducted at Kannada University Hampi on 31 August and 1 September 2017.

A Kannada Wikipedia orientation program was conducted at the Kannada University in Hampi recently wherein the participants where introduced to the various Wikimedia projects in Kannada. The participants were doctoral research students of the Dravida Samskruti Adhyayana Kendra of which 5 were male and 1 female.

Working on Wiktionary, the students added 3300 words to their sandboxes, which will be moved to the main space on Wiktionary.

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/orientation-program-at-kannada-university-hampi

Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Aurangabad

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-10-24T13:18:41Z

A Marathi Wikipedia Workshop was recently held at the MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication on 11 August 2017.

A Marathi Wikipedia workshop was recently conducted at the MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication at Aurangabad. The workshop aimed to introduced Marathi Wikipedia to the students of the college and equip them with the process of editing the same. The workshop was attended by 10 female participants and 15 male participants.

"It was happiest moment for me, when I created new article on Pashmi, [a] species of dog. I added [an] image also." says Shivani Joshi a participant at the workshop. While 21 new editors were introduced to Wikipedia, 60 articles were improved and 15 images added. Another participant, Randhir Patil who added content on water-related articles says, "This content can be used as training material by field workers.

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-workshop-at-mgm-trusts-college-of-journalism-and-mass-communication-aurangabad

Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal, Satara

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-10-24T11:52:24Z

A Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was conducted at the Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal in Satara on 4 August 2017. The organisation, working on issues of women's rights, gender, justice and violence against women, was given an introduction to editing on Wikipedia. Voluntary organisation Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal is eager to implement innovative projects for the students and field activists. It has decided to integrate Wikimedia Projects and training modules for capacity building of students and movement volunteers. To get the overall introduction of Wikimedia Projects and basic skills, this workshop was organised for faculty and selected students. The edit-a-thon was attended by 10 female and 5 male participants.

Sana Patel, a participant emphasises, "I realised the need to contribute gender related content. It is very important to write about women's issues and laws'. The edit-a-thon resulted in 13 new editors discovering Wikipedia for the first time. 20 articles were improved and five images were uploaded. A follow-up workshop on building content on women-related issues has been planned with the Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal as well as other like-minded organisations in Satara. Onkar Tapase, a participant opines, "as a journalist, I see a great potential to contribute"

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-at-dalit-mahila-vikas-mandal-satara

Wikimedia Workshop at Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College, Satara

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-10-24T11:52:19Z

A Wikimedia Workshop was on 4 August 2017 at the Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College in Satara to introduce the Wikipedia and its sister projects to the students.

A Wikimedia Workshop was conducted at the the Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College in Satara. The workshop provided an introduction to students on the various Wikimedia projects. The workshop also aimed to equip them with Wikipedia editing skills. However, owing to time constraints the editing component has been postponed.

The workshop saw at an attendance of 30 participants, with 20 women participants. The Principal of the institution, Ms. Sunita Pawar said, "Wikipedia is good platform for students to do online assignments. We are eager to integrate it in academics." A discussion on integrating academic assignments with Wikimedia Projects was conducted to develop the basic theme and concepts.

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-workshop-at-ismailsaheb-mulla-law-college-satara

Odia Wikisource Turns 3

manasarao — 2017-10-23T05:40:20Z

Odia Wikisource, the Odia language version of Wikisource, an online digital library of free content textual sources run by the Wikimedia Foundation, celebrates three years of contributing to the free knowledge movement this October. Odia Wikisource is a sister project of Odia Wikipedia, the oldest Indian language Wikipedia. The Odia Wikimedia community, a group of active contributors to Odia Wikimedia projects in India, has been working towards digitizing rare books that are no longer under copyright as well as encouraging authors and publishers to free-license their work under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License 4.0. This license allows anyone free use of the work with due attribution. The books are usually digitized into Unicode text by scanning them using Optical Character Recognition technique. This ensures their easy accessibility on the Internet so that people may easily copy, share and use these works for citations and references. If the books are damaged to a degree that they cannot be scanned, volunteers take the painstaking effort to manually type out whole books and manuscripts.

Odia Wikisource contributors/ CCBYSA4.0 User:Psubhashish

The Odia Wikisource project was realized on 20 October, 2014 after a two-year incubation period. Says Pankajmala Sarangi, long time Odia Wikimedian active on Wikisource, "since [2014] more than 300 old and rare books have been digitised and made available online. Before that, searching [for] a book in Odia was not possible even if it existed in pdf or some other format. Now it has become easy and all the books available on Wikisouce are easily searchable." In addition to digitization, the Odia Wikimedia community members conduct regular quality checks of the content from time to time by ensuring proper licensing, attributions and other errors that may be avoided by thorough proof-reading. While these quality checks follow global guidelines that have been localised to help volunteers prevent vandalism of any form, it has not been without its challenges. Ms. Pankajmala explains that the lack of Odia text on operating systems is problematic for access and availability.

Despite the challenges, Odia Wikisource counts amongst its accomplishments the digitization of a twelve volume 14th century Odia classic as well as 16th century palm leaf manuscripts from the Dadhibaman Temple in Bargarh, Odisha. Taking the movement to classrooms, Odia Wikisource was introduced to students of the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences to pique the interest of young minds in the preservation of Odia language texts online. The many advantages of Odia Wikisource has also been illustrated to institutions with the Utkal University library encouraging the digitization of their rare books and manuscripts by Odia Wikimedians.

Sangram Keshari Senapati, another active Odia Wikimedian explains that Odia Wikisource is important for the preservation of those books which run a high risk of being lost in the coming years. He says, "our future generation must get a chance to read them." Adding to this, Ms. Pankajmala says, "Sky is the limit for Odia wikisource. We will try to digitise more books, most probably triple the number of existing books. We'll even try to reach more libraries and authors and get more books and further digitize them. The number of wikimedians may also flourish till that time."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikisource-turns-3

Online bid for Science in Marathi

Admin — 2017-10-18T13:32:23Z

Pune scientists hold a workshop with Marathi Vishwakosh to thrash out how to provide more vocabulary for scientific discourse in the language, to cater to a vast majority that is not comfortable looking up info in English.

The article by Aparajita Vidyarthi was published in Pune Mirror on October 18, 2017.

City scientists have teamed up with the makers of the Marathi Vishwakosh and other organisations to promote the usage of the Marathi language for scientific discourse. Most of the scientific material available on the internet is in English. Thus, readers who wish to read this material in Marathi have fewer options. A workshop for the scientific scholars and authors was organised last week to urge them to write in Marathi. It was a joint effort by the Marathi Vishwakosh, Rawat’s Nature Academy, Centre for Internet Society and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA).

Mahtigar, the system operator of the Marathi Wikipedia, shared, “The number of scientists and scholars writing in Marathi has increased manifold, but there is still a long way to go as the number of Marathi readers are also increasing by the day. Also, I feel that even though the internet is a ready search tool, information is not that easy to avail of for the simple reason that it is not available in a layman’s language. For instance, if a person from the rural areas wishes to read and get information about the crops or agriculture, not much information is available in the language of his preference.”

He continued, “I still feel that initially, a bit of leniency to use technical words in English while writing scientific articles in Marathi should be given, since it will be easier to understand the material. Eventually, we can move on to using the technical Marathi words in articles.” It is being expected that by 2021, the number of Marathi readers of scientific journals will see a prominent incline. According to the KPMG and Google report, 80 per cent people in India will be using Indian languages to get information off the internet. Also, by 2021, around five crore of the Marathi population would prefer to operate the internet in Marathi only. Thus, efforts should be made to provide the material in the language.

Subodh Kulkarni, Marathi advocate from the Centre for Internet and Society, told Mirror,“The field of science is continuously expanding and evolving; the language has to do the same to stay on a par with it. Thus, continuous efforts have to be made to keep updating the dictionary and thesaurus of local languages. Supporting this cause, prominent scientist Jayant Narlikar among others has agreed to put his book on astrophysics on Wiki Source without copyrights. The book has been written in Marathi.” It has often been debated that usage of the internet is more in urban areas compared to villages. Surprisingly, on the contrary, the rural areas use the internet for 530 minutes per week, whereas city dwellers use only around 487 minutes per week.

Underscoring the immediate need for scientific content in Marathi, Pradip Rawat, director of Rawat’s Nature Academy, stressed, “Out of 12 crore Marathi speakers, only around 50,000 know English. What about the rest? Scant information is available for Marathi readers. Even though the fisherman and labourers have access to the internet via the smartphone, they can’t really decipher the information owing to the language barrier. The Marathi encyclopedia will now be linked to the Marathi Wikipedia, so that more and more information is available for the people. I think it is a watershed moment. During the workshop, we also discussed about a comparative chart of where the other Indian languages stand. We have to strengthen Marathi on the internet. This way we will be able to approach the commonest person of the country.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/pune-mirror-october-18-2017-aparajita-vidyarthi-online-bid-for-science-in-marathi

Marathi Wikipedia - Vishwakosh Workshop for Science writers in IUCAA, Pune

manasarao — 2017-12-20T02:42:39Z

A day-long workshop was organised for science writers at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-University_Centre_for_Astronomy_and_Astrophysics Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics], Pune on 7 October, 2017. Eminent astrophysicist-mathematician couple en:Jayant Narlikar|Jayant^[+] and en:Mangala Narlikar|Mangala Narlikar^[+] , and renowned ecologist en:Madhav Gadgil|Madhav Gadgil^[+] were among the dignitaries present at the event.

The workshop was planned in three sessions. Presentations and discussions were conducted in first session, while second session was focused on actual editing demonstrations on Wikipedia. In the same session the new websites based on different subjects developed by Marathi Vishwakosh were presented. The process of content contribution in text, images, audio and video forms was explained in this session. The third session was to explore networking with Dyanmandals formed by :en:Marathi Vishwakosh|Marathi Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal^[+] . Insisting the expertise of invited authors to contribute the articles in their own chosen fields in a well-structured format, this session will not only train the authors in content generation but also make them understand the expectations of laymen and common readers.

The mete page of the event is here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune

Guest Blog: Retd. Col. Ashwin Baindur on Strategy, Wikimedia Strategy Salon, Vijayawada

manasarao — 2017-10-24T11:52:49Z

User:AshLin aka Col Ashwin Baindur (retd) gave a Plenary Speech(in absentia) on Strategy at the Wikimedia Movement Strategy Salon, held in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh on 27 August 2017. It is reproduced here with permission:

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and my dear Wikimedia friends and colleagues,

I am deeply honoured to be asked to say the opening words for the Movement Strategy Salon being held today at Vijayawada. The problems of ill health prevent me from coming to be with you as I most dearly wish, but I do hope my few words and thoughts will make do instead. Let me introduce myself. I happen to be a retired army officer but I see myself as a citizen of the world, as a Wikipedian whose cherished dream is to make Jimmy Wales dream come true.

“Imagine a world where the sum of all knowledge is available to all mankind!”

The occasion for this conclave or salon is timely. The twenty first century paradigm of Open Culture, of sharing and collective intelligence are well established. Crowdsourcing, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and so many other important global resources are proof.

Education has received a huge fillip by the vastly increased amounts of data and knowledge on the Internet. Open sourcing has made its mark in the software side of the business world. Just as has open access publishing in Academia. Society as a whole has gained by all these manifestations of open culture.

And today, we are gathered here to begin thinking on the directions for the future of the Wikimedia movement in India.

What does this mean in our case? India is a country of many languages, dialects, people, communities, religions, tribes. Along with this are the collective efforts of 1.3 billion people to make a secular, democratic, economically strong nation. The ability to share learning, understanding, experiences are key to this process. And for this, collaboration is a vital necessity.

As of now the Wikimedia effort in India consists of a potpourri of projects, encyclopedia, quote, text repository and the use of Wikimedia Commons as a media repository. We have to grow this into a large, useful and versatile resource in each of our Indic languages.

The Wikimedians, a small band of volunteers to date, must take along the entire society of India so that we have betterment as a nation by first creating and using these resources. And today’s conclave with kindred souls from society, academia, industry.. is a beginning in this regard.

Now we are here to think what directions this Movement must take. I am envious that I can’t be part of this process with you. However, as a retired military person, let me say a few words on strategy and how it is decided.

All planning occurs at three levels. The most basic of activities to be done are referred to as tactics. Tactics are governed by operational planning which comprises of a worked out plan of how to achieve the overall plan or the goal.

The deciding of this overall plan or goal is referred to as strategy.

To be more specific..

“a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty..”

And when we do this for a long period of the future, it is more appropriately termed as ‘grand strategy".

For this we have to ponder - What is our aim? What are our strengths? What are our challenges? What are our opportunities? What are our resources and what are our constraints? What path should we take to achieve our aim?

These are to be reduced into a few directions which are broad based, actionable and full of potential. A good strategy must open huge opportunities, new fields, new possibilities.

The is not easy to do or quick to make. It will take more than one session, more than one day, week or even a month to get our strategy right.

Most important of all is that we learn to think in the new paradigm of sharing and open culture. We should leave behind the mindset of scarcity, possessiveness and personal benefit and embrace the values of the common good, creation of opportunities and innovation.

On our success in making a good strategy, depends the fate of millions of our children and youth who will either benefit from our decisions or lose opportunities if we are not wise and generous. We have to believe in the future. We have to want to make that future great for our nation.

I wish you the very best in this endeavour. I repeat, that I am envious that I can't be with you today. I pray that the things we decide from today onward in this process of grand strategy for the Wikimedia movement in the decades to come.

At the very end, I would like to thank the Wikimedia movement in India, CIS-India, the organisers of this salon and of course, my young friend Krishna Chaitanya Velaga for this opportunity.

Jai Hind!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guest-blog-retd-col-ashwin-baindur-on-strategy-wikimedia-strategy-salon-vijayawada

Wikipedia Workshop on Template Creation and Modification Conducted in Bengaluru

tito — 2017-08-10T06:48:26Z

A Wikipedia workshop on template creation, modification was conducted in Bengaluru on 30 July 2017. Here is a report.

A Wikipedia workshop on template creation, modification was conducted in Bengaluru on 30 July 2017. 9 Wikipedians, mostly associated with Karavali Wikimedians and Kannada Wikimedia projects attended the workshop. A template is a Wikipedia page created to be included in other pages. Templates usually contain repetitive material that might need to show up on any number of articles or pages. They are commonly used for boilerplate messages, standard warnings or notices, infoboxes, navigational boxes and similar purposes.¹ The workshop was requested by Kannada Wikimedians.

The workshop started with explaining template and its importance. This was followed by discussing structure of a template, and creation of a simple template with a couple of variables. This activity continued for sometime, and designing a template with CSS markup was shown. Following this different types of templates such as infobox, navbox, sidebar, informational templates such as Hatnote were shown and discussed. On Wikipedia there is a Special page with a list of wanted templates. The participants studied the page and started making a list of templates they should create or improve. It was found that a good number of templates on Kannada Wikipedia don't have proper documentation in native languages. The participants came to a conclusion that attempts should be made to properly localize the template. During the workshop the participants spent sometime to translate and localize some template documentations.

The workshop was a preliminary one in nature and should be followed up by an advanced workshop.

Image credit

File:Kannada wiki workshop on Template 02.jpg by User:Gopala Krishna A from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

Footnotes

Help:Template on English Wikipedia, accessed 10 August 2017
Special:WantedTemplates on a Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikipedia-workshop-on-template-creation-and-modification-conducted-in-bengaluru

CIS-A2K Co-Facilitates Punjabi Wikimedians Wikimedia Strategy Meeting

tito — 2017-08-01T08:02:14Z

On 15 July 2017, Punjabi Wikimedia User Group, conducted Punjabi Wikimedia Strategy Meeting at Patiala. CIS-A2K members Tanveer Hasan and Tito Dutta attended the event as co-facilitator and resource person. The event was followed by a meeting on the next day when active Punjabi Wikimedians and CIS-A2K representatives discussed different plans and strategies for the Punjabi Wikimedian projects in the coming months. Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is conducting, encouraging to conduct and supporting Strategy Meetings in different countries of the world. Wikimedia Foundation relates

these meetings to strategy for the Wikimedia movement, strategy for entities such as the Wikimedia Foundation and Chapters, and roadmaps for individual Projects (e.g., Wikidata or Wiktionary or Wiki Loves Monuments). In India, several communities have conducted or have shown interest to conduct Wikimedia Strategy Meetings. Punjabi Wikimedians, a WMF recognized user group, conducted their Strategy Meeting at Punjabi University, Patiala on 15 July 2017. Punjabi Wikimedians Satdeep Gill and Stalinjeet were the primary hosts. Around 16 people from different domains of knowledge, including active Punjabi Wikimedians participated in the meeting. Punjabi Wikimedians invited CIS members Tanveer Hasan and Tito Dutta to co-facilitate the event. CIS-A2K helped Punjabi Wikimedians to plan the meeting structure and anchor the discussion.

On 16 July, a meeting between Punjabi Wikimedians and CIS-A2K was conducted. The aim of the meeting was to plan Punjabi Wikimedians' events and activities for the next one year. 8 active Punjabi Wikimedians and Tanveer Hasan and Tito Dutta, from CIS-A2K participated in this meeting. A good number of important topics were discussed during the meeting such as―

Should Punjabi Wikimedians register themselves as an organization and what are advantages and disadvantages of registering as an organization,
How can CIS help Punjabi Wikimedians as Fiscal Sponsor to route grants from the Wikimedia Foundation,
Wikidata Workshop (North India)― how can Punjabi Wikimedians contribute to and be part of it.
Regional Train-the-Trainer and MediaWiki Training for Punjabi Wikimedians.
Wikisource digitization

CIS-A2K provided suggestions and inputs on these topics. CIS-A2K thanks Punjabi Wikimedians for hosting the meetings.

Image credit

File:Punjabi Wikimedians Strategy Salon - 15 July 2017 01.jpg by Satdeep Gill from Wikimedia Commons, image licensed under theCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/cis-a2k-co-facilitates-punjabi-wikimedians-wikimedia-strategy-meeting

Marathi Wikipedia Workshop in Sangli, Maharashtra

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-08-16T08:40:58Z

A Marathi Wikipedia workshop was recently held in Sangli, Maharashtra

An introductory Marathi Wikipedia workshop was recently held at CSIBER Trust's V.P. Institute of Management Studies and Research, Sangli, Maharashtra. The workshop aimed to introduce Wikipedia and its sister projects to the participants.

In an effort to implement innovative projects for the students, in March 2017, the institution decided to integrate Wikimedia Projects and academic assignments for capacity building of students and faculty. The implementation started with the Wikipedia edit-a-thon on Environment Management at CSIBER Institute in Kolhapur on 30th March. The Institute in Sangli has also adopted the concept for this academic year. This workshop was organised for faculty and selected students who were taught basic editing skills on Wikipedia, searching for the concerned articles, categorisation and translation from other language wikis. Another focus of the workshop was to integrate academic assignments with Wikimedia projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-workshop-in-sangli-maharashtra

Telugu Wikisource Workshop

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-08-16T08:40:55Z

Recently, a Telugu Wikisource Workshop was conducted in Hyderabad between 22- 23 July, 2017

An introductory Wikisource workshop was recently held for Telugu Wikipedians in Hyderabad. This event was held in conjunction with the NTR Trust, an organisation working towards socio-economic change in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Wikisource aims to build a library of source texts as well as translations. The workshop held between 22- 23 July was conducted for both existing Wikimedians and those new to the movement. Prior to the workshop, Telugu Wikipedians were consulted and were asked to take part in the event and provide their support. The participants were taught the basics of Wikisource and encouraged to contribute to it. They were given a tutorial on the entire process from uploading the book to completing it as an eBook. They were taught important aspects such as copyright, Creative Commons licenses as this would help them select books to upload on Wikisource.

Says participant Sri Ramamurthy "I am contributing to Telugu Wikisource for a long time, regularly. I could learn how to do some important aspects of Telugu Wikisource like indexing a book and techniques like OCR in this event. This turned out to be a very useful event. As resource persons are from Telugu language and sessions were in Telugu, I could easily and quickly grasp things."

Ten index pages were created during the event and 193 pages were uploaded onto Telugu Wikisource after the event. The event had only two female participants and eight male participants. CIS-A2K hopes to make more of a concerted effort to bridge this gap in participation between males and females.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikisource-workshop

How It Came To Be: Wiki Loves Uniformed Services

Guest blogger: Krishna Chaitanya Velaga — 2017-07-10T04:14:58Z

I'm User: Krishna Chaitanya Velaga from English Wikipedia; fortunately and unfortunately my user name and my real name share the same text. I have been contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects since December 2014. I work primarily on Indian military history related topics and articles. Initially, I was focused on creating articles rather than assessing them. My wiki journey can be best described in two parts, before and after Train The Trainer 2017.

The latter part of 2016 proved to be a critical period of my Wiki journey. I was credited with my first good article, first featured A-class article and list, first featured list and, several Did You Know credits on English Wikipedia. Later on, I was awarded the “Military history newcomer of the year” for 2016. I was the first Indian to receive the award. Additionally, I was selected to be the “Featured Wikimedian of Month for January 2017” by Wikimedia India.

As of January 2017, I have been contributing for nearly two years, and as far as I have observed the military history topic area of India is one of the most neglected areas. With two well known military historians from India, Srikar Kashyap Pulipaka (User:StrikeEagle) and Colonel Ashwin Baindur [retd.] (User: AshLin) on a semi Wiki break, I was left to be the only regular contributor. In an attempt to encourage more Wikipedians to work on this area, Indian military history work group emerged as an initiative by the Military history project. The work group closing in on a year since its inception, has more than twenty-five members at present. As the founder of the group, I aspire to incubate the group into an independent task force under Military history project. One of the major problems I faced while working on the military history articles was regarding images. Though the images were accepted on Commons, they were rejected at advanced levels of assessment i.e. A-class review, FAC, FLC etc. One of the primary reasons for the problem is the unclear copyright statement presented on the official websites of the armed forces and various uniformed services. I had been thinking for a long while to resolve this issue and TTT provided me with the path to finds a solution for this. Train the Trainer (TTT) is one of the best initiatives by Centre of Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge. It is a three-day residential program to enhance the trainer in experienced and well established Wikipedians through the length and breadth of India. Prior to TTT 2017, I have only been involved in online activities of Wikipedia, predominantly contributing to Indian military history topics. I hardly knew about the offline community of Wikipedia i.e. the grant structure of Wikimedia Foundation, conduction of edit-a-thons, meet-ups, program affiliates etc. Not only this, but also the Wikipedian contacts I had were very sparse. Though I was selected to attend TTT 2016, I could not attend to academic constraints. During TTT, I had rich exposure to the wider Indian Wikimedia community and that of Indic language projects. TTT also cleared many of the misconceptions I had of Wikimedia, some them include the use of Harvard referencing style, importance of offline events, etc.

Owing to the experience I decided to act on the problem. There is a heavy need of images related to the uniformed services. So I discussed my idea with Ravi Shankar Ayyakannu (User:Ravidreams), coordinator of Wiki Loves Food and Manager for Strategic Partnerships in Asia under Global Reach Team. Initially, I thought of naming it Wiki Loves Armed Forces, Wiki Loves Security Services etc. But with an intention to widen the scope, it was named as Wiki Loves Uniformed services. Once finalized, I started creating necessary pages and templates on Commons. Simultaneously, I worked on forming the core team of coordinators and judges. I chose Suyash Dwivedi (User:Suyash.dwivedi) and Mourya Biswas (User:Mouryan) to be the Coordinator and Assistant Coordinator respectively, with myself as the Lead Coordinator. The jury included Col. Ashwin Baindur [retd.], Diego Delso (User:Poco a poco), Col. Ravi Shankar Vasireddy [retd.] (Off-community) and Sirkar Kashyap Pulipaka. After having done these tasks, I moved on to file a detailed rapid grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation. The grants team was very responsive and the grant was approved in a week. This initiative gained good global support including the foundation’s staff, who were happy to see a new Wiki Loves initiative budding. However, till now there aren't as many images as expected. To increase awareness about the program we’ve decided to implement a new strategy of conducting photo walks with government permission. Apart from that we’re also in contact with the Indian Navy to donate their images to the contest. The deadline may extend for about a month or so depending upon the stats. Personally, I see great potential for this project, but the problem is one of Wikipedians' response. I hope this initiative will be a great success and will be taken up by fellow Wikimedians from others countries. I conclude by thanking CIS-A2K for conducting innovative workshops and Wikimedia India for their support to the project since its inception. I also thank each and every unacknowledged finger behind this great initiative.

Krishna Chaitanya Velaga

Lead Coordinator

Wiki Loves Uniformed services (India) 2017

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/how-it-came-to-be-wiki-loves-uniformed-services