Centre for Internet and Society

Ten Telugu Books Re-released Under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License

rahim — 2014-07-08T05:29:39Z

For the first time in the history of Indian books, 10 Telugu books by a single author were released under Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA 3.0) on June 22, 2014 at 10 a.m. at Golden Threshold, Abids, Hyderabad.

The event was organised by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team.

CIS-A2K has collaborated with Telugu Wikipedians in convincing Indu Gnaana Vedika to re-release 10 of their books under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license which is compatible with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Unlike the predominant digitization efforts (which only makes scanned images available), these books will be uploaded on Telugu Wikisource (www .te .wikisource .org) and converted into Unicode (searchable) text. This will ensure that these books are freely read, both online and offline in various formats like PDF, epub, mobi, text, etc. This is a major milestone initiative by CIS-A2K to make the sum of all knowledge in Telugu freely available to all Telugus over the internet and is part of its Telugu language area plan.

Telugu Wikipedia has been in existence for 10 years and has 57000 articles on various topics. Telugu Wikisource is one of the sister projects of Wikipedia which has more than 9600 pages and 100 books, it is the largest online Unicode book library available today at the service of Telugu people.

The Programme

The event started with invocation by Indu Gnaana Vedika followed by introduction of Chief Guest and Guest of Honour.

The patron of Indu Gnaana Vedika, Sri Sri Sri Prabodhananda Yogeeswarulu presided over as the chief guest and N Rahamthulla, long time wikipedian and Special collector, Srisailam project, Kurnool was the guest of honour.

Addressing the gathering, Prabodhananda emphasised on the importance of availability of knowledge in ones own mother language, and also why knowledge should not be confined to books alone, but should be brought onto various platforms, internet being one among them. This would not only ensure wider reach for the books, but also enable the language to survive in the fast changing era.

Then, a video interview of guest of honour, Rahamthulla was played, where he spoke about creation of new technical jargon in ones own mother language and how Telugu was being used as administrative language in his office among his subordinates.

Rahamthulla also spoke on the practices he brought into in his own office to adopt mother language at work and gave out suggestions that would effectively help all in adoption of mother language at work places with Telugu as an example.

This was followed by Veeven’s talk on “End-User’s perspective of free licenses”, where he spoke about importance of open content, free software and free licenses.

Then, program director of CIS-A2K, T. Vishnu Vardhan spoke about the importance of creative commons licenses in the context of Indian languages in Internet. In his speech, Vishnu informed that there is enormous literature and content available in Indian languages which is unusable because of ignorance of licenses. He listed out guidelines that would help writers to have their work reach millions through releasing it under a free license.

Then, in a formal manner, the copyright holder of the books signed on the documents, specifying that the books are released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. In the tea break that followed, participants enquired experts on free licenses.


Above: Prabodhananda handing over the signed agreement to Vishnu Vardhan (by Rahmanuddin Shaik, CC-BY-SA 3.0 License)

A Wikisource demonstration by Rahmanuddin Shaik was shown followed by Q & A session.

Then there was a panel discussion on “CC licenses” which saw participation from one each of a free license expert, writer and end user. This brought in awareness and more deeper thought into bringing in more literature in Telugu into CC licenses.

An outcome of the event was:

N Rahamthulla promised to re-release his books under CC license.
Mandali Buddhaprasad, Deputy Speaker, Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly, gave permission to release 4 of his books under CC license.
Several other writers have come forward to re-release their books under free licenses.

Given below is the certificate signed by Sri Sri Sri Acharya Yogeeshwarulu giving permission to publish his works under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License:

For additional details of the event, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/ten-telugu-books-re-released-under-cc-by-sa-license

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

Telugu Wikipedians create Articles on Punjab in Telugu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2016-08-12T14:02:20Z

Telugu Wikipedians created articles on Punjab in a national level contest. Telugu Wikipedians received a trophy during the closing ceremony of Wiki conference India at Chandigarh.

Telugu Wikipedians created more than 450 articles about Punjab in Telugu Wiki and shared their experiences with English and Malayalam Wikpedians. Along with Pranay Raj, Pavan santhosh worked in co-ordination and Viswanadh in organizing support for this edit-a-thon. Venkata Ramana, Meena Gayathri, Ravi Chandra, Pavan Santhosh, Murali Mohan, Sujatha, Sultan Khadar, Viswanadh, Bhaskara Naidu, Manikantha, Rahmanuddin, Rajasekhar and few others participated in this edit-a-thon and created Punjab related articles such as Punjab cuisine, Punjabi language, history of Sikhism, Punjabi way of dressing, Punjabi dialects and many such aspects. Telugu Wikipedians also made a presentation on the various developments in Telugu Wikipedia.

Media Coverage

Telugu regional press covered the Punjab edit-a-thon and about the Telugu Wikipedia winning the trophy. The Centre for Internet and Society provided support by releasing an open press note that could be edited by the Wikipedia community in Village pump for press relations.

Coverage in Sakshi

Coverage in Eenadu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/telugu-wikipedia-articles-on-punjab-media-coverage

Telugu Wikipedia Winter Camp at Andhra Loyola College

rahim — 2015-02-26T02:27:05Z

Students of physics, statistics and Telugu departments of Andhra Loyola College spent 5 days of their Christmas vacation of 2014 to edit and enrich Telugu Wikipedia and Wikisource. They worked on their respective subject areas and came up with more than 100 new articles on Telugu Wikipedia and about 300 pages of Veeresalingam's works were typed on Telugu Wikisource.

CIS-A2K has signed an MoU with Andhra Loyola College to make available free knowledge in Telugu to all Telugus across the globe. In this approoach, a two month camp was organised in the college campus. In continuation to the two month camp, 5 days of students' Christmas vacation were marked as Wiki Winter Camp at Andhra Loyola College. 5 students from each of Physics, Statistics and Telugu showed interest to attend the camp. By the time, camp began, there were not 15 but 41 students from various disciplines who attended the camp.


Students and faculty who attended the camp. Source :Wikimedia Commons

For physics and statistics-department students, first day of the wiki winter camp involved students exploring English and Telugu Wikipedias, glancing through various reference websites such as JSTOR, IEEE Explorer, Google scholar, and their own textbooks in Telugu medium. New entrants created their user accounts on Telugu Wikipedia. Students got an essence of how an article on Wikipedia should look like, what should be there and what not. Few students came up with their own ray diagrams for physics (optics - mirrors) articles, uploaded them to Wkimedia Commons and then put them up in their articles. For some of the students, it was the first time they were typing in Telugu, and they felt very curious and excited. The rest of the three days students added about 103 articles on Telugu Wikipedia on physics, and a 10 articles on statistics. By the end of 5 days camp, faculty and co-ordinator for physics, Dr. Sahaya Bhaskaran expressed happiness at his students' work, he affirmed that one can learn his respective subject only if he understands it in his native language, and if he could reproduce that in his native language, he would remember for long.

For Telugu students the five-day camp was fun typing in works of Kandukuri Veeresaingam. First day, students who were new entrants learnt to type in Telugu, and were introduced to the Wikisource platform. In all, they typed about 300 pages of a compilation of Veeresalingam's works. Sri Kola Sekhar, faculty of Telugu a ALC and co-ordinator for Telugu wiki winter camp said he was confident of making students type entire Veeresalingam works in a year's time.

At the end of the 5 day camp, students were given a review of their work, and students felicitated with certificates.

Convener for the camp, Dr. B. Sivakumari, who is also a Wikipedia co-ordinator for Botany, expressed her gratitude to CIS-A2K team for organising the program.

This event has also contributed in achieving the 60,000+ article count landmark at Telugu Wikipedia and 10,000+ pages landmark at Telugu Wikisource.


Media coverage in Eenadu daily

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/telugu-wikipedia-winter-camp-at-andhra-loyola-college

Telugu Wikipedia struggles to stay afloat

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T07:46:10Z

For a language that is spoken by 10 crore people, content is sparse.

The article by Renuka Phadnis was published in the Hindu on July 28, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

Sujatha, a Chennai-based homemaker, has set for herself the task of updating the Telugu Wikipedia with details of all the districts in Andhra Pradesh.

“I asked others but no one joined me in adding ‘edits’. They said they were too busy,” she says.

For a language that is spoken by 10 crore people, including a tech-savvy population, content in the 11-year-old Telugu Wikipedia is sparse and growing slowly with 20,000 articles added in the last one decade.

T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge Programme of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), said Telugu Wikipedia was lagging behind its other Indian-language counterparts despite there being no other content repository in Telugu.

The reason is not lack of writers in the language. There are 1,000 to 2,000 active Telugu bloggers writing on topics ranging from poetry to politics. In fact, the Telugu Wikipedia was started by such bloggers.

But they are reluctant to contribute to the Telugu Wikipedia and prefer blogging because they can see their names after adding the content. Rahimanuddin Shaik, Programme Officer and system operator for Telugu Wikipedia at CIS, said, “You could call it the ‘identity crisis’ of Telugu Wikipedia writers.”

In 2006-07, an attempt was made to induce content in the Telugu Wikipedia by injecting 30,000 ‘articles’ by a bot, a Python-based script. They were one-liners about villages in Andhra Pradesh, introduced with the expectation that people would add more content. That effort did trigger 5,000 articles.

Later, in 2013, the Telugu Wikipedia became more collaborative and Hyderabad University associated itself with it by hosting Telugu Wikipedia events on its Golden Threshold campus.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-july-27-2014-renuka-phadnis-telugu-wikipedia-struggles-to-stay-afloat

Telugu Wikipedia stall at Vijayawada Book Festival

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-15T16:23:32Z

The Telugu Wikipedia community put up a stall at the Vijayawada Book Festival in January, in order to increase reach of the regional language encyclopaedia.

Last in a series of book stalls set up across the Telugu-speaking region, the Telugu community set up shop at the 27th Vijayawada Book Festival from 3 to 11 January 2017 at the PWD Grounds. The community had previously set up similar book stalls in Rajahmundry and Hyderabad. Considered one of the largest book festivals in India with deep-rooted cultural significance in the Telugu literary circles, the Telugu community aims to increase the reach and visibility of Telugu Wikipedia through the setting up of this stall.

The book festival, open for the public from 11 am to 11 pm, was inaugurated by Kendra Sahitya Akademi winner Rachapalem Chandrasekhar Reddy, with a collection of 235 stalls to browse from. The festival was organised in partnership with the Andhra Pradesh Department of Language and Culture and NTR Trust. The stall was set up by Telugu Wikipedia community members with support from CIS-A2K and NTR Trust.

More than 150 individuals were engaged through this event. Interested members of public would receive follow-up through "Know-How" videos of Telugu Wikipedia. This provides basic information regarding editing and contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects. They would also receive invitations to offline events taking place in Vijayawada in the future.

Telugu Wikipedia editor User:Pranayraj1985 said of his experience in talking to the public about Telugu Wikipedia, "I learnt a lot about what people know about Wikipedia and what they didn't know. In general, many of the visitors exclaim when they [come to] know, there is Wikipedia in Telugu language. But, in contrast, here in Vijayawada, we could at least find handful of people who knew there is something called Telugu Wikipedia.

The link to the events page on meta can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikipedia-stall-at-vijayawada-book-festival

Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Rajahmundry Book Fair

manasa@cis-india.org — 2017-02-06T12:48:36Z

Telugu Wikipedia community put up a stall at the three day Rajahmundry Book Fair from 20 - 23 November 2016.

The initiative was supported by The Centre for Internet and Society and NTR Trust. The stall was run by long time community advocates and editors of Telugu Wikipedia. The volunteers distributed pamphlets and explained to the visitors the basics of editing Wikipedia. They distributed a survey to understand current topics of interest in order to update the Telugu wiki pages. Some visitors utilized the expertise of the volunteers and set up Wikipedia accounts at the stalls.

The book fair in the river side city didn’t see many takers this time round considering the move to demonetise was announced the previous week. The organizers had not made alternative payment arrangements at such short notice. Volunteer Pranay Raj said, “although there were uncontrollable factors at play, the city has great potential and Telugu Wikipedia plans to expand its editor base in the city through institutional partnerships from schools and colleges.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikipedia-stall-at-rajahmundry-book-fair-1

Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Hyderabad Book Fair

manasa@cis-india.org — 2017-02-06T12:48:09Z

Telugu Wikipedia community put up a stall at the Hyderabad Book Fair in December welcoming members of the public to join as editors on the regional encyclopaedia.

The Telugu Wikipedia community put up a stall at the 30th edition of the Hyderabad Book Fair from 15th to 26th December, 2016 at the NTR Stadium. Supported by The Centre for Internet and Society, the volunteers were long time Telugu Wikipedia community members. They helped visitors set up Wikipedia accounts and become editors on the free access encyclopedia. They also spoke to the visitors and explained how Wikipedia works and the collaborative efforts undertaken by various language communities in maintaining the regional language wiki pages. Additionally, a survey was conducted to find out what topics of interest are currently trending among the public. The Telugu Wikipedia community aims to take this feedback into consideration in order to update the topics they frequently edit.

Some visitors seemed interested in attending upcoming Wikipedia events and workshops. The organisers welcomed interested members of the public to attend the Hyderabad Wikipedia Monthly meetup on 22nd January, 2017.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikipedia-stall-at-hyderabad-book-fair

Telugu Wikipedia Education Program at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada

Pavan Santosh — 2016-01-13T07:51:13Z

In collaboration with Andhra Loyola College (ALC), Vijayawada, Access to Knowledge programme (CIS-A2K) of the Centre for Internet and Society is opening up a Wikipedia Digital Centre in the college so that students and local Wikimedians could grow Wikipedia and other Wikimedia content in Telugu and other Indian languages. To begin with this, a two-day long Wikipedia Education Program is also being initiated which will continue to grow further by expanding local content on Wikipedia.

As part of this two-day programme 40 undergraduate students (10 each from Botany, Statistics, Physics and Telugu) will be taking part and will be creating articles in their respective subjects in four languages; Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil.

On the 13th a Wikipedia Digital Centre will be opened at ALC. G Umamaheswara Rao of Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies (CALTS) lab, University of Hyderabad will be joining as the chief guest. This lab will have 10 computers and will be jointly managed by the CIS and ALC where the student-Wikipedians and the local Wikimedia community could conduct regular Wikipedia outreach programmes. Joining in this event are principal of the institution Fr. Kishore, Professsor Sivakumari from Department of Botany, Professor Sahayabaskaran, Department of Physics, and Professor Kola Sekhar, Department of Telugu. On behalf of CIS-A2K, Rahmanuddin Shaik and Pavan Santosh will be participating and facilitating the Wikipedia Education Program and the inauguration of the lab.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/telugu-wikipedia-education-program-at-andhra-loyola-college-vijayawada

Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Annamacharya library to preserve rare Telugu literature text

rahim — 2016-06-18T18:12:24Z

Telugu Wikipedia Community and the Centre for Internet & Society are conducting the Annamaya Library edit-a-thon on August 6, 2015 at Andhra Loyola College, Vijaywada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/rare-telugu-religious-and-historical-work-preserved-at-annamacharya-library-to-come-on-wikisource

Telugu Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at ALC

praskrishna — 2016-06-18T18:11:50Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team conducted an edit-a-thon at Andhra Loyola College on August 6, 2015. Eenadu published a report.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/telugu-wiki-edit-a-thon-at-alc

Telugu Wikipedia Day 2015: Eenadu Coverage

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:33:51Z

Telugu Wikipedians conducted history photowalk in Dr. YSR state archaeological museum to celebrate Telugu Wikipedia Day 2015 on December 13, 2015. Pavan Santosh supported the community as a representative from CIS-A2K

Below is the media coverage of the event published by leading newspaper Eenadu (Hyderabad edition) on December 13, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/telugu-wikipedia-day-2015-eenadu-coverage

Telugu Wikipedia Day 2015, Photo Walk

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:27:08Z

On December 13, 2015, Telugu Wikipedians conducted a historical photowalk in Dr.YSR state archeological museum to celebrate Telugu Wikipedia Day 2015. Pavan Santhosh attended the event as a CIS-A2K representative and facilitated media coverage for the programme.

One of the popular telugu news channel TV9 covered the event and telecasted the same. Eenadu published a special item on photowalk on December 13, 2015.

Andhra Jyoti published an article on photowalk on December 18:

Eenadu news report on photowalk on December 18:

Namaste Telangana on Photowalk on December 18:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/telugu-wikipedia-day-2015-photo-walk

Telugu Wikipedia completes 10 years

rahim — 2013-12-31T04:40:40Z

Telugu Wikipedia completed 10 years on December 10, 2013. Several training sessions, aka Wiki Academies, were planned by the Telugu Wikipedia community to mark the occasion.

The article by Rahmanuddin Shaikh was published by DNA on December 16, 2013. It was edited by Rohini Lakshané.

Telugu Wikipedia completed 10 years on December 10, 2013. Several training sessions, aka Wiki Academies, were planned by the Telugu Wikipedia community to mark the occasion. One such session, the Te-Wiki Shikshana Shibir was organised at Hyderabad on December 8. It was the fifth Wiki Academy ever held in the city.

The Wiki Academy saw a turnout of around 21 people coming from various teaching backgrounds, right from a professor of Telugu from Osmania University to a teacher at a private school. Teachers, professors, student-teachers, and instructors participated in the event. It has carved the way for organising Te-Wiki Dasabdi (Telugu Wikipedia decennial celebrations) with more enthusiasm.

The Telugu teaching community has affirmed that it would make use of the Telugu Wikipedia in and out of the classroom. Many of the participants have already turned into Wikipedia editors. "A few of the difficulties the Telugu teaching fraternity faces have been solved by the Telugu Wikipedia," said one of the participants hailing from Mysore CIIL. "I've been horrified by the mere touch of keyboard and mouse, this Telugu Wikipedia seems promising to deal with my Computerophobia," said HoD, Telugu Osmania University, Prof S.V. Satyanarayana. The professor also urged the organisers to conduct one such workshop for his students in the coming days.

Resources:

Event page on Telugu Wikipedia
Photos of the WikiAcademy
Cross-posted at Wikimedia India Chapter blog

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dna-december-16-2013-rahmanuddin-shaikh-telugu-wikipedia-completes-10-years

Telugu Wikipedia at JNTUACEP

praskrishna — 2014-04-15T11:13:00Z

CIS along with the Department of Computer Science, JNTUACEP invite you to a Telugu Wikipedia workshop on March 28, 2014.

Rahmanuddin Shaik, Program Officer from CIS-A2K participates in the event as a speaker.

10.00 10.30	సుస్వాగతం మరియు పరిచయం
10.30 15.00	వికీపీడియా ఒక అవగాహన, వికీపీడియా ఎలాపనిచేస్తుంది ?
15.00 15.30	వికీపీడియా ప్రదర్శన+ వికీలో రాయడం (hands on activity)
15.30 15.45	తేనీటి విరామం
15.45 18.15	Basics of Wikipedia Editing (Hands on activity) – LAB SESSION- వికీలో రాయడం ఎలా మొదలుపెట్టాలి, వనరుల ఉపయోగం
18.15 18.30	Feedback and Closing Session

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/telugu-wiki-jntuacep