Centre for Internet and Society

Improving Telugu Village Articles

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-11-26T02:27:39Z

Telugu wikipedians on 6 October 2016 held a discussion on improving the quality of Telugu articles. The event was organized by IIIT, Hyderabad, CIS-A2K and OpenGeo.

A possible collaboration between Wikipedia and free and open source enthusiasts and environmental groups was explored at the meeting. Subodh Kulkarni and Pavan Santhosh made a presentation about Wikipedia. The participants were from different groups such as SOUL (Save Our Urban Lakes), OpenGeo.org (organization that works for open source mapping) and Sweccha (organization working to expand free software movement in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh).

Prof. Madhav Gadgil moderated a discussion on how these organizations could collaborate for different Wikimedia projects. The discussion primarily revolved around improving ongoing Telugu village articles.

Prof. Gadgil stressed on compiling articles using reliable and verifiable sources. He also urged the participants to upload geo-tagged photos to Commons especially photos of lakes of which the authorities have denied existence. The discussion also focused on the synergy between OpenGeo and Wikipedia.

Post-lunch, Prof. Gadgil delivered a lecture on “Human Knowledge: An Evolutionary Perspective in IIT”. Prof. Gadgil explained that the next big leap in evolution of human knowledge is free knowledge in which everyone can contribute and utilize which was Wikipedia. He urged the scholars and students to contribute to Wikipedia which is the future for knowledge society.

Telugu and English wikipedians including Vinay, Lubna Sarwath, Undavalli Ravikumar, Raju and many more participated in the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/improving-telugu-village-articles

100wikidays: the journey so far

tito — 2017-06-28T10:04:33Z

In this article we'll chat with Bulgarian Wikipedian Vassia Atanassova (User:Spiritia) on the journey of 100wikidays so far, initial difficulties, and participation of Indian Wikipedia communities in the challenge.

100wikidays is a personal Wiki challenge, in which a participant attempts to create at least one new article on Wikipedia, for 100 days in a row. This initiative is a brainchild of Bulgarian Wikipedian Vassia Atanassova (User:Spiritia) and it started on 16 January 2015. As of 22 November 2016, 194 Wikipedians have taken this challenge and 63 of them have successfully completed it. A delighting fact is a large number of Indian Wikipedians have participated in this initiative and successfully completed this challenge. In this blog post we’ll try to focus on the project and its influence on Indian Wikimedians.

Let’s start the conversation with Vassia Atanassova, (User:Spiritia), the editor who started this initiative.

CIS-A2K: First, we congratulate you for the success of 100wikidays. When you started this challenge in January 2015, did you think that one day it would become so big?

Vassia: No, actually I wasn’t completely sure that I myself will be able to complete it. :) The story behind the 100wikidays is that earlier in 2014 I had already tried the so called “100happydays” challenge, in which you prove that 100 days in a row you have found happiness, even in the smallest things, by posting a photo of what made you happy. Needless to say, I failed it, around the 11-th day, which according to statistics happens with 7 out of 10 people. :) So, when in the end of 2014 I got the idea of retrying the challenge, already only knew that happiness was obviously not “my cup of tea” :) so I had to try something I am good in and have more chances for success, like writing in Wikipedia. :) But back then, I didn’t believe that I will be able to finish it myself – it was such a crazy idea – and no, I had never planned it as anything bigger than my own personal challenge. :)

CIS-A2K: Let’s talk about the initial days. What were the difficulties you faced?
Vassia: As I had already failed the happy photography challenge before, I was really nervous in the beginning. The challenge – as the rules of the #100happydays postulate – requires you to make a public commitment and announce your daily progress, and this is very demanding. You commit in front of a community you care for and don’t want to lose your face, or disappoint them. For me, this is half of the difficulty – and half of the magic.

The other half, of course, is to really find the time to create a decent encyclopedic article every day. We are definitely not talking about long featured articles, of course, but decent articles, giving the basic necessary information about a topic, referenced with reliable sources. I am not really eager about the idea of #100stubdays, although, of course, I have also had extremely busy days when I am not able to produce anything longer than a stub.

Thus, one of the first lessons I had to learn from the challenge was how to find the right balance between the inborn perfectionism and the unavoidable time limitations. I think that everyone who commits to the challenge and doesn’t quit it immediately, has such a period of adapting one’s style of contributing, of rearranging life priorities, and stealing from oneself precious time that would otherwise spend with the family, with friends, for other hobbies, or simply for sleeping. Oh, sleeping, how much I started appreciate sleep after the beginning of the challenge! #100wikidays is famous for jokes related with sleep deprivation. :)

CIS-A2K: How did you promote this initiative among the Wikipedia communities around the world?
Vassia: Hmm… I didn’t! It all happened naturally, by word of mouth. It is editors who are promoting it by getting involved in the challenge, I am not doing anything special. 100wikidays is living its own life. :)

In the beginning friends of mine who followed my Facebook wall liked and sometimes commented on the posts with the new articles. It took about one month before the first follower appeared, one of the ex-students in my university course “Wikipedia and Wiki Technologies”, Vladislav Nedelev. About that time I decided to propose the idea of the #100wikidays as a topic for talk at Wikimania. Funny detail is that initially this talk proposal got rejected, and it took weeks before it was reevaluated and approved :)

In the meanwhile, in early March, the next follower, or “victim”, joined, and happily that one was Asaf Bartov, Wikimedia Foundation’s senior officer in emergent Wikimedia communities. He didn’t want to be alone in the trouble :))) so one day he posted on his wall the question “Who will be the first Indian Wikipedian to commit to #100wikidays?” And by the end of the day there were four people (you, Tito, included)!!! And it was amazing, absolutely mindblowing!

Asaf also proposed the idea of the Facebook group and the Meta coordination page, where people report their daily progress. In my opinion, he is the most efficient victims recruiter in the #100wikidays :)

As of today (22 November 2016) we have 194 “victims” from 54 language versions of Wikipedia – and several sister projects like Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wiktionary and Commons and about 1/3 of all who have started it, have also completed it successfully. So, yeah, somehow it really became a global thing :) And real life meetings very much helped for that. Nikola Kalchev’s lightning talk at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, my talks at Wikimania in Mexico, at the Central and Eastern European Meetup in Voore, and at WikiLive conference in Belgrade, Alex Stinson’s speech at WikiConference USA 2015, Asaf also. Everyone who has taken the challenge can become its ambassador.

CIS-A2K: Tell us about a few participants who performed really well in this challenge?
Vassia: Oh, there are so many wonderful editors in #100wikidays, so many examples to be followed, people who are trendsetters on their own! Of course, Antanana and Lord Bumbury, who couldn’t stop themselves after the 100-th day, and made more than 220 wikidays in a row, each of them! Armine, who is now doing her 5th run of #100wikidays. Adam Cuerden with his runs of #10commonsdays of restoring old photographs, pixel by pixel! Asaf, Rosiestep, Penny Richards, Patricio, Maor X, and others whose focus is solely on biographies of notable women. Mervat Salman who introduced the #WikiWomenWeeks driving even more attention to this topic. Everyone in the challenge has brought to it something new and unique. And the most beautiful of it all is when ideas spread virally among the #100wikidays community, and people inspire each other with their choice of articles, and the way they communicate them.

CIS-A2K: 100wikidays is a difficult challenge. If someone writes articles for 60 or 70 days in a row, and then for some reason fails to continue, would you call it a failure, or what would be your suggestions?
Vassia: Heh, my favourite question. :) The word “failure” does not exist in my #100wikidays vocabulary. If you quit before the end of the 100 days, or if it takes you more than 100 days to finish, you have still made contributions to Wikipedia and has allowed someone to learn from the free knowledge that you have shared with the world. :) I know, the challenge has rules that really seem to be discouragingly severe. And it is normal that not everybody opts for it. But once you dare to opt, in the FB group you receive enormous support and appreciation – every day, for every new article. Also, among the challenge rules, the last one is “Ignore All Rules”. So, it is only up to you to decide whether a missed day is really a failure or not. My advice to everyone in this situation is: continue as if nothing has happened and no one has noticed :)

CIS-A2K: Several Indian Wikipedia communities participated in 100wikidays. Tell us about the participation of Indian Wikipedians in this challenge.
Vassia: So far, there have been contributors in 9 Indian languages: Punjabi (17), Oriya/Odia (3), Telugu (4), Bengali (3), Tamil (5), Hindi (4), Kannada (1), Malayalam (8). Correct me if I am missing anything. :) The total figure makes Indians the most active participants in the challenge, globally, with Armenia scoring second with 27 editors by now. No less than 13 are the Indian alumni, so far, which is quite of a big percentage of all. And the projects covered are different, not just Wikipedia in all those different languages, but also Wikisource, Wiktionary. This is truly impressive because some of the sister projects, like Wikisource, are really very demanding in terms of human resources and time, and usually not so populated with editors, which makes it even a greater challenge to undertake #100wikidays there. And I can’t but mention the recent notable interest in the challenge, registered in Malayalam Wikipedia. I’d be really very happy to know that the challenge has helped for the substantial growth of their, and generally, to any language version of Wikipedia. :)

Credits

Image source: Wikimedia Commons, license: CC-BY-SA 4.0, author: Kacie Harold

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/100wikidays

CIIPC-NLUD Workshop on Wikipedia Editing and Open Source Knowledge Sources

praskrishna — 2016-11-23T08:04:16Z

Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Competition (CIIPC), National Law university, Delhi as part of its Open Science Project, had organised WikiEdit2016 a two day workshop regarding orientation on editing Wikipedia and hands-on-training session. The event was organized on November 11 and 12, 2016 at National Law University in New Delhi.

Rohini Lakshané and Tanveer Hasan conducted and facilitated this workshop.

The purpose of this workshop was to introduce students to diverse aspects of open knowledge resources and to motivate them to move beyond passive consumption of knowledge and become active producers of knowledge. The participants were briefed about the editing activity earlier, because of which they had come prepared with references for the topic that they had earlier selected. We hope that this group (20 students with majority women editors) would continue to edit Wikipedia with thematic (law) focus and contribute further.

More details on the workshop can be accessed here.

Photo courtesy: Prof. Arul George Scaria, National Law University, Delhi.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/ciipc-nlud-workshop-on-wikipedia-editing-and-open-source-knowledge-sources

33rd SCCR: CIS Statement on the GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment

sinha — 2016-11-18T15:28:21Z

Anubha Sinha, attending the 33rd Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”) at Geneva from 14 November, 2016 to 19 November, 2016, made this statement on the GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment on behalf of CIS on Day 5, 18 November, 2016.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit organisation in India that undertakes research on internet and digital technologies from an academic and policy perspective.

In an environment of monopolies controlling the distribution of software and digital services, which connect users and developers, such a comprehensive study assumes significant importance.

Such a study/or a parallel study after the scoping exercise must encompass the methods in which such digital corporations are enforcing their own IP rules on creators worldwide, and if there are fair systems in place to address violations, and restoration of works unfairly taken down from their platforms. It must be noted that there is a serious lack of transparency as far as the conduct of such corporations go, and often actions are taken without appropriate justification/explanation. Back in India, I have met several creators who have suffered as a result of such unilateral actions. In this, regard it will be useful to know how creators in developing countries are impacted by rules enforced by platforms largely situated in developed countries, which can help us build a framework for the benefit of all, equally.

I welcome the proposal.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Access the proposal here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/33rd-sccr-cis-statement-on-the-grulac-proposal-for-analysis-of-copyright-in-the-digital-environment

33rd SCCR: CIS Statement on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations

sinha — 2016-11-16T13:37:41Z

Anubha Sinha, attending the 33rd Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”) at Geneva from 14 November, 2016 to 19 November, 2016, made this statement on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations on behalf of CIS on Day 3, 16 November, 2016.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Centre for Internet and Society is a civil society organisation from India. We would like to associate ourselves with the statements made by KEI and Karisma Foundation.

First, Mr. Chair, on SCCR/33/5 Note on the Draft Treaty to Protect Broadcasting Organizations which is a document presented by the delegations of Argentina, Colombia and Mexico – which was flagged off as relevant for SCCR/33/3. Mr. Chair, this document is problematic as it in essence, tries to extend the scope of the treaty to apply to internet-originated content, and thus by extension internet transmissions. This manifested in the push for protection of on-demand material and catch-up services as well in the discussions over the past two days.

Mr. Chair, I’d like to reeiterate that the mandate of the General Assembly was confined to broadcasting and cablecasting organizations in the traditional sense; the definition of broadcasting, protected by the scope of the Treaty, should as such be limited to the type of transmission exploited by traditional broadcasters – as stated by the delegation of Iran.

Further, Mr. Chair where as EU, China, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico continue to speak of technological advancements to justify expansion of rights under the treaty, there has still been no discussion on the inadequacy of existing international legal instruments to address these technological advancements, to justify the broadcasters’ ask of an additional layer.

Finally, reiterating the Asia-pacific group, the canvassing of this treaty should be balanced: it should take into account commercial interests in copyright and right holders, and equally important, it should also take into account other competing interests in copyright, including the public interest in scientific, cultural, social progress and promoting competition.

Thank you.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/33rd-sccr-cis-statement-on-the-proposed-treaty-for-the-protection-of-broadcasting-organizations

33rd SCCR: Opening Statement by India on behalf of the Asia and the Pacific Group

sinha — 2016-11-14T11:04:27Z

Dr. Sumit Seth(Economic Affairs) of the Permanent Mission of India in Geneva delivered the Opening Statement on behalf of the Asia and the Pacific Group at 33rd Session of the of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights on 14th November 2016.

Mr. Chair,
India has the honor to deliver the Opening Statement on behalf of the Asia and the Pacific Group in this 33rd Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights.
Asia & the Pacific Group would like to express its confidence in your experience and your leadership skills. We are confident that your hard work and diligence will yield desired results and help this committee reach a mutual understanding on all outstanding issues. Our group would also like to thank the WIPO Secretariat for the preparation of this meeting.

Mr. Chair,
The SCCR is an important committee of WIPO dealing with three issues of critical importance to member states, namely protection of broadcasting organizations; limitations and exceptions for libraries and archives; and limitations and exceptions for educational and research institutions and for persons with other disabilities.
These three issues are of great importance to our group. Going by the discussions in this committee since its 27th session, it would not be wrong to say that we are facing difficulty in finding agreement on how to continue our work on each of the three important agenda items. We believe, in order to further our work, we have to refer to the 2012 General Assembly guidance to the SCCR on the work plan on the three issues.

Mr. Chair,
Our group believes that these issues have not received the equal level of commitment and understanding proportionate to their importance based on the differential socio-economic development of the Member States.
In this spirit of multilateralism, Asia and the Pacific Group reaffirms its commitment to engage constructively in negotiating a mutually acceptable outcome on all three issues before the committee. Our group would like to put on record its support for the proposed program of work.

Mr. Chair,
Determining whether and how intellectual property rights should apply with respect to broadcasting is a developmental issue that requires careful balancing. Members of the group would like to see the finalization of a balanced treaty on the protection of broadcasting organizations, based on the mandate of the 2007 WIPO General Assembly to provide protection on the signal based approach for cablecasting and broadcasting organizations in the traditional sense.

Mr. Chair,
For our Group, exceptions and limitations are of critical importance. Application of copyright system should be balanced, it should take into account commercial interests in copyright and right holders, and equally important, it should also take into account other competing interests in copyright, including the public interest in scientific, cultural, social progress and promoting competition.
Exceptions and limitations have an important role to play in the attainment of the right to education and the access to knowledge, actualization of which in many developing countries is hampered due to lack of access to relevant educational and research material.
However, there is no denying the fact that some divergence on how exceptions and limitations should be approached exists among member states.
It is unfortunate that absence of adequate will to discuss and develop the two exceptions and limitations before this committee has resulted in a stalemate on the work of this committee.
We hope that all member states shall engage constructively in this session on these two issues based on previous discussions and new inputs so that we are able to develop a mature text to discuss and work on

Mr. Chair,
Asia and the Pacific Group has taken note of the proposal submitted by the GRULAC in the 31st session to discuss the current digital environment and copyright interface. Members of my group will make interventions in their national capacity under this agenda item and will proactively participate in the discussion on this contemporary topic.

Mr. Chair,
This is the same committee which has given us the Beijing and the Marrakesh Treaties. My group is optimistic that with the noble intentions and the right will we can pave the path for the development of appropriate international instruments on all three issues.
We look forward to productive results and tangible progress in this session
I thank you once again Mr. Chair for the opportunity.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/33rd-sccr-opening-statement-by-india-on-behalf-of-the-asia-and-the-pacific-group

Using Kannada in technology made easier with smartphones

praskrishna — 2016-11-01T05:19:17Z

With the IT revolution, many believed that the younger generation would prefer to type and communicate in English than Kannada.

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was interviewed by the New Indian Express. The article was published on November 1, 2016.

But U B Pavanaja, a member of Kannada Software Committee and a Kannada Wikipedia administrator, believes with latest technology, the use of Kannada has only been increasing. As the state celebrates Karnataka Rajyotsava today, Ashwini M Sripad spoke to Pavanaja on adapting Kannada language to the latest technology.

Where does Kannada stand when it comes to adopting technology?

Quite good. But not the best. Most tools needed to use Kannada in technology are available now. They are almost perfect.

Has there been any change in the use of Kannada in computer/mobile by youngsters in the last decade?

Yes. Due to the availability of Kannada input methods, and advent of smartphones, many youngsters are now using Kannada on their computers and smartphones. More people are typing in the Kannada script itself.

What should the state government do to popularise Kannada in technology?

A lot needs to be done. There was a committee to look into the standardisation and proper implementation of Kannada in technology. The committee submitted its report. The government implemented some parts of the report. After that nothing has been done. Now the committee does not exist. Standardisation is a continuous process. There must be a permanent committee to look into this. For example, domain names (website names) are available now in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, etc., but not in Kannada. This is due to the fact that no one represents Kannada in meetings of W3C India, an international community to develop web standards.

How is the response to Kannada Wikipedia?

A lot of awareness has been created among people about the existence of Kannada Wikipedia in the last three years. But more needs to be done.

What can be done to improve it further?

At present, the articles are written by enthusiastic Kannadigas who are not really writers. They are doing this out of passion for the language. But well-known Kannada writers don’t edit Kannada Wikipedia. Kannada has a good number science writers, but they are not editing Kannada Wikipedia, which is very badly needed at this time. Also, there is no comprehensive printed encyclopaedia in Kannada for science and technology. The last one came out 18 years ago. Therefore students in Kannada medium schools need a good Kannada encyclopaedia. This requirement can be met by Kannada Wikipedia. But the number and quality of articles is far from sufficient. Writing for Kannada Wikipedia could be made compulsory for degree and post-graduate students to bring in some well-researched articles. Such programmes already do exist in some colleges in the state but we need more.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/new-indian-express-november-1-2016-using-kannada-in-technology-made-easier-with-smartphones

Wikipedia Asian Month — 2016 iteration starts on 1 November

tito — 2017-06-28T10:05:20Z

The second iteration of Wikipedia Asian Month (WAM), a month-long edit-a-thon to create and improve Asia-related articles on Wikipedia, is going to start on 1 November 2016. In this blog post we'll revisit the stats of the 2015 iteration of the event. We'll also talk to Addis Wang, an organizer of WAM, to know more about their progress and preparation.

Wikipedia Asian Month (WAM) is a month-long online edit-a-thon where the participants create or expand Asia-related articles on Wikipedia. The main rules of this initiative are: a) the articles must be created or expanded during the mentioned period (i. e. November), b) new articles must not be stubs and should be at least 3,000 bytes and around 300 words in length, c) the article must follow Wikipedia guidelines such as Neutral point of view, notability, verifiability, copyright etc.

The first iteration of Wikipedia Asian Month was conducted between 1-30 November 2015 and saw enthusiastic participation from Asian Wikipedia communities. These are some statistics from the last iteration of WAM:

1,286 editors from 43 different communities participated in 2015 edition of WAM. The following Indic Wikimedia communities participated in the challenge- Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.
6,096 articles were created or expanded over-all, and of these 4,306 articles followed all the suggested rules.
During the Asian Month, 42,067,774 bytes were added on Wikipedia.
190 new editors participated in this challenge.

Now after the successful first iteration, the organizers of Wikipedia Asian Month are all set to kick off the second iteration of the event. This year's WAM edition will be organized between 1–30 November 2016. Before the beginning of this event, we have taken an interview of Addis Wang, a primary organizer of the event.

CIS-A2K: So, you are all set for another edition of Wikipedia Asian Month. Are you excited?

Addis Wang: Yes. I’m excited to see our Asian community collaborate together once again and looking forward to make more contributions in this years’ edition.

CIS-A2K: Tell us a few things you learnt during the last edition of WAM? Are you going to bring any changes this year?

Addis Wang: The most important thing we will change from the experience of last year is speeding up the postcard processing. We did not start collecting address until we had all the language communities finish the analysis of contributed articles. So this year, we will have multiple rounds of address collection to ensure most people receive their postcards by the end of the year. We will also ask local communities who are making the postcards to finish the process before the end of the November, and be prepared to send postcards in early December.

CIS-A2K: 2016 edition of WAM will start soon. How are the responses so far? Do you feel that this edition will be bigger than the earlier one?

Addis Wang: I think we will have a bigger Edit-a-thon in term of number of new articles, and number of editors participating. Supporting communities were comparatively less than the number of active editors during last WAM. Increasing the number of supporting communities is also one of our goals and we are working to get more communities involved.

CIS-A2K: That’s a good point. How are you going to support such communities?

Addis Wang: We provide easy set-up guideline so there is not much work needed to do to organize the Wikipedia Asian Month. We are also using Central Notice so there will be a good opportunity to get publicity, and opportunity to engage both old and new editors. Making and sending Wikimedia souvenirs could be difficult for many communities, but they can easily achieve these by joining the Wikipedia Asian Month.

CIS-A2K: Let’s talk about Indic Wikipedia communities. You saw very enthusiastic participation from Indic Wikipedia communities, is it not?

Addis Wang: Yes! As the one of the largest Wikimedia community in the Asia, and maybe the most diverse comunity in the world, Indic community is highly involved into the Wikipedia Asian Month since the idea was proposed during Wikimania 2015. In the last year edition, India is the country that received most postcards sent by Wikipedia Asian Month. Also, Wikipedian Asian Ambassadors of English Wikipedia, who created most articles during the Asian Month, are from India.

CIS-A2K: Thanks Addis for your time. We wish you all the best.

Addis Wang: Thank you.

Collaboration attribution: Tanveer Hasan

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/wikipedia-asian-month-2014-2016-iteration-starts-on-1-november

How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias

subha — 2016-10-25T01:39:42Z

Mobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like India in which only a handful of journals are available in Indian languages, open access to research and educational resources is hugely important for populating content for the various Indian language Wikipedias.

This was published by Opensource.com on October 24, 2016.

Indian-language Wikipedias and open access

Most commonly spoken Indian languages have had Wikipedia projects for almost a decade. Languages like Konkani and Tulu are new entrants in the Wikipedia family, and currently there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias. One example of high-quality open access content is the Open Textbook of Medicine, an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine, which was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happen to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high-quality, open content like this.

To help fuel the growth of Wikipedia and its various projects, such as the Indian-language Wikipedias, the Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem with Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates, which are run by both volunteers and paid staff from the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization responsible for fundraising, technical, and community support. In India, Wikimedia India, the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates working on catalyzing the growth of the content and the communities.

Whereas Wikimedia India focuses on expanding all the Indian-languages content, Punjabi Wikimedians focus on Punjabi language content (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), and CIS-A2K focuses on five languages: Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu.

Indian-language Wikipedia projects can only grow with the help of volunteers editing their own language Wikipedias and adding missing information from a reliable sources, which is where open access content can help.

Open in action

The 2016 International Open Access Week will be held October 24-30, 2016. The theme this year is Open in Action. The announcement explains, "International Open Access Week has always been about action, and this year's theme encourages all stakeholders to take concrete steps to make their own work more openly available and encourage others to do the same. From posting preprints in a repository to supporting colleagues in making their work more accessible, this year’s Open Access Week will focus on moving from discussion to action in opening up our system for communicating research."

Indian contributors show the spirit of Open in Action as they help add content to the various Indian-languages Wikipedias. They depend on open access to research and other publications to help millions of people, including those living in rural areas, who are joining us online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-october-24-2016-open-access-growth-indian-language-wikipedias

‘Entrepreneurship will become a common, respectable profession’ – 25 quotes from Indian startup journeys

praskrishna — 2016-10-25T00:40:09Z

From success to status, witness the memorable journey of Indian entrepreneurship in these excerpts and stories! StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week (see the previous post here). Share these 25 gems and insights from the week of October 16-22 with your colleagues and networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights!

The article by Madanmohan Rao was published by Your Story on October 23, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi was quoted.

When it comes to e-commerce, IoT will exceed overall expectations. – Avinash K Gautam, Silvan Innovation Labs

Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service. – Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk

The customer experience is important, especially when things go wrong. – Radhika Aggarwal, ShopClues

Organisations will have to prepare for a digital future and they will have to use technology skills that offer artificial intelligence and design thinking. – Vishal Sikka, Infosys

Design isn’t only about ‘wow’ features. Learn about user preferences and behaviour. – Jay Dutta, SAIF Partners

Overall, there are 30–40 million sarkari naukri aspirants in the country. - Konark Singhal, Sarkari.Jobs

The growth of energetic startups is sure to translate into growth for the agriculture sector if channelised appropriately. - Varun Khurana, Crofarm

Awareness with respect to organic food is on the rise. - Likhita Bhanu, Terra Greens

Almost 100 percent of adhoc transport still happens through truck stands or ‘nakas’. - Kausalya Nandakumar, SmartShift

The opportunities to build connected mobility and electric vehicles in India are immense. - Chetan Maini, Reva

We foresee a paradigm shift in corporate outlook towards on-site childcare. - Chirag Shah, Little Big World

There is need for collective action towards bolstering growth for our cottage industry. - Parul Mehta, Ishanya Foundation

India has more than 250 million students enrolled in government and private schools. Unfortunately, more than 70 percent of children never complete their education. - Anil Bhansali, Microsoft India

Sales this festive season have probably not changed too much over last festive season. - K.Vaitheeswaran, retail entrepreneur

India has become our largest market outside of the Chinese mainland. - Lei Jun, Xiaomi

There is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language. - Subhashish Panigrahi, Centre for Internet and Society

Both men and women have to balance work and life, however, a woman is at the receiving end of prejudiced approaches more than men. - Shweta Jain, William Grant & Sons

Mistreating and disrespecting women doesn’t make a man cool, it makes him a monster. - Sunny Leone

Social crowdfunding is here to change the face of social activism. - Piyush Jain, Impact Guru

It’s beneficial that angel investing is considered sexy. - Siddhartha Ahluwalia, Babygogo

Future growth depends on empowering people. Innovation and globalisation have created opportunity the likes of which has never before existed. – Alec Ross, ‘The Industries of the Future’

Live in the present and be grateful for what you have in life. - Anni Sharma, SelfV Survivor

Follow your dream and passion consistently. - Shyamala Ramanand, Akanksha

Life’s not an easy journey. We live only once and we are responsible for own happiness. - Haritha Khandabattu

If you solve a real problem, you will do well. And God knows we have a lot of problems to solve. – Suveen Sinha, ‘Tip of the Iceberg’

Entrepreneurship should be a happy and joyous journey and a journey filled with purpose to be called truly successful. - Ashok Soota, Happiest Minds

Entrepreneurship will become a common, respectable profession. - Sanjay Padode, DaRT

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/your-story-madan-mohan-rao-october-23-2016-startup-journeys-quotes-respectable-profession

What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India

subha — 2016-10-22T04:12:40Z

The number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.

This was published by Your Story on October 20, 2016.

State of Indian languages on the internet

Based on a study, Internet activist Anivar Aravind mentioned that in 2014, although 89 percent of Indian population used mobile phones, only 10 percent of the population used smartphones (contributing to 13 percent of total mobile users). This means we can safely assume that a large section of online activity in India is through mobile devices ‑ thanks to the declining data charges because of high competition. That said the mobile internet connectivity in rural India is growing at a fast pace and vernacular content plays an important role in this great journey. With over 90 percent of the users being comfortable in their own native languages, websites that are producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this bandwagon.

Why open access is important for Indian languages?

Open access, in a nutshell, would mean research outputs and other educational resources that are free from restriction of access and use. The former includes resources like journals that are not paywalled, and the latter is freedom from copyright restriction. Open access as a movement encourages license migration ‑ a process of migrating from several copyrighted license terms to Creative Commons licenses and several other licenses that provide freedom to use, share and remix. In a country like India where there are only a handful of research journals available in vernacular languages, the need for open content becomes much more important. The more the restricted content, the less will be the access to knowledge. Creating more vernacular content with open licenses is like digging a well in a dessert.

Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals

It’s been almost a decade since most largely spoken Indian languages started having a Wikipedia project of their own. Presently, there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias, including newest entrants like Konkani and Tulu. That said, these projects are growing with more and more encyclopedic content written with a neutral point of view, which any internet user will find useful. Wikipedia is considered as the people’s encyclopedia and hence can have quite contrasting content ‑ some being poor because some volunteer editors lack expertise in high quality articles written by professionals. A great example of creating very high quality content in one particular subject area is Open Textbook of Medicine ‑ an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine that was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happened to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high quality content.

How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool

The list of challenges to grow Wikipedia-like projects with volunteer effort could be endless. And one of the biggest challenges is bringing self-motivated people who are willing to contribute as volunteers. Also, there are many such people who are not aware that they can contribute to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem by having several Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates that are run by both volunteers and paid staff ‑ the Wikimedia Foundation, a paid staff-run organisation that is responsible for fundraising, major technological and some community support. In India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K) and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates that are working on catalysing the growth of the content and the communities. Where the affiliate Punjabi Wikimedians focuses on Punjabi language (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), both Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K focus on all the Indian languages. CIS-A2K also specially focuses on five languages; Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu. Indian language Wikipedia projects can only grow if people can edit their own language Wikipedias.

With the Open Access Week—a week dedicated for promoting Open Access globally—around the corner with “Open in Action” as the theme of the year, there is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india

Workshop on Competition Law and Policy

praskrishna — 2016-10-23T01:51:25Z

National School of Law India University and the Delegation of European Union to India jointly organized a workshop at Competition Commission of India in New Delhi from October 19 - 21, 2016. Anubha Sinha and Rohini Lakshané participated and made presentations.

The workshop was organized under the broader EU-India project titled "Capacity Building Initiative in Competition Area under Trade Development Programme" sponsored jointly by European Union Delegation and National Law School of India University, Bengaluru.

Download

Workshop brochure
Anubha Sinha's presentation on "Investigation into the sub $100 Mobile Device Industry from IPR + Competition law lens"
Rohini Lakshané's presentation on CCI Workshop on Competition Law and Policy Competition Policy and Internet

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/workshop-on-competition-law-and-policy

Querying Wikipedia Data

pavanaja — 2016-10-21T14:51:01Z

Recently I wrote a blog about the stub article length of Wikipedia articles. I mentioned the difference in actual number of characters and the number of bytes used to define stub articles between English and Indian language Wikipedias. One can open any language Wikipedia, type Special:ShortPages in the search box to get the list of articles which have less than 2048 bytes.

Originally published blog can be accessed here.

However, as already mentioned in that blog, the number of bytes for Indian languages to be considered as stub should be actually 2048*3 = 6144 bytes employing the same criteria. How to find the list of articles fulfilling this condition?

This brings us to the topic of querying Wikipedia data. Wikimedia Foundation Labs has put up a website wherein one can run SQL queries on Wikimedia data. The URL of the website is quarry.wmflabs.org. When we open the website, we get a textbox wherein one can type the SQL query which will run on Wikimedia data. In this example I will consider Wikipedia only. But the queries can be run on the data of other Wikimedia projects like Wikisource, Wikidata, Wiktionary, etc.

One has to login with his/her Wikimedia login. After logging the SQL query can be typed in the textbox and the Submit Query button has to be clicked. The result of execution of the query on Wikimedia data will be displayed. In this blog I will throw more light on Kannada Wikipedia. The database for Kannada Wikipedia is called knwiki_p. Complete list of databases can be obtained by running the SQL query “show databases”.

To get the list of tables in Kannada Wikipedia, the following SQL queries have to be executed:

use knwiki_p;
show tables;

To know the scheme of any table, run the query desc <tablename>;. For example, to know the details of the table by name, issue the query desc page;. The fields which are of importance in the current case is page_title and page_len. The following query will list all articles in Kannada Wikipedia which are having less than 6144 bytes.

use knwiki_p;
select page_title, page_len
from page where page_len < ‘6144’ and page_namespace = 0 and page_is_redirect = 0 order by page_len ;

Some other useful queries are listed below:

Query	What it does
Select Count(*) from page where page_namespace = 0 and page_is_redirect =0;	Number of articles without redirect
Select Count(*) from page where page_namespace = 0 and page_is_redirect =0 and page_len < 6144;	Number of articles which are having bytes less than 6144
select * from user where user_name Like “P%”;	List all users whose username starts with letter “P”
select user_id, user_name, user_editcount from user where user_editcount >3000 order by user_editcount desc;	List all users with editcount more than 3000
SELECT page_namespace, page_title, page_len FROM page WHERE page_len > 175000 AND page_title NOT LIKE “%/%” ORDER BY page_namespace ASC;	List of long articles (articles having bytes more than 175000)
SELECT rc_title as title, rc_comment as comments, count(*) as Edits FROM recentchanges WHERE rc_namespace = 0 GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 3 DESC LIMIT 100;	Most edited 100 pages during past one month
SELECT log_title, COUNT() FROM logging WHERE log_type=”thanks” GROUP BY log_title ORDER BY COUNT() DESC LIMIT 100;	Who have been thanked most

Useful links -

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/querying-wikipedia-data

UTF-8, Indic and Stub Length Article in Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2016-10-20T02:26:29Z

One of the activities conducted as part of Wiki Conference India 2016 was the Punjab Editathon. It was about adding articles related to Punjab to Indian language Wikipedias and English Wikipedia. There was also an announcement made about some award for highest contribution.

See the original blog post at Dr. Pavanaja Blog

This lead to continued discussions in a closed chat group on how do we decide the winner. People thought it is very simple to announce the winner just based on highest number of bytes added. On first look, it looked very trivial and a simple case. I pointed out during the discussions about the encoding used in Wikipedia is UTF-8 and it uses different number of bytes for English and Indian languages. Before giving more details I would like to draw your attention to a simple experiment.

I typed Kannada letter ಅ (a) in my Sandbox in Kannada Wikipedia and saved it. Then I checked the RecentChanges page in Kannada Wikipedia. That showed that I have added 3 bytes to my Sandbox page. But I had added just one Kannada character. I did the same experiment in English Wikipedia. I just added one letter, the English letter “A” to my Sandbox in English Wikipedia and checked the number of bytes added. It showed just one byte.

What is going on? Here is the explanation. There are different ways Unicode text can be stored. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are the prominent ways. UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for all characters. UTF-32 uses 4 bytes. UTF-8 is a special kind of encoding. It uses series of single bytes to represent Unicode data. The first character, called Byte Order Mark (BOM) indicates what encoding is being used. Unicode website has more details on these. UTF-8 was mainly used for web as the networking devices used on the initial days of Unicode could handle only 8 bits (1 byte) of data. In other words, UTF-8 was used for backward compatibility with ASCII, the original 8-bit encoding used prior to the advent of Unicode. Even today the default encoding used by HTML is UTF-8.

Does these answer our original question? Not yet. I said UTF-8 uses series of single bytes. It uses 1 byte for English, 2 bytes for European languages and 3 bytes for Indian languages. That is the reason why we saw 3 bytes for one Kannada character.

This pops up another interesting question regarding the definition of a stub article in Wikipedia. As per Wikipedia, an article which has less than 2048 bytes is considered as a stub article. Go to any language Wikipedia’s search page and type Special:ShortPages to get the list of all articles which are having less than 2048 bytes. If we convert this into number of characters it turns out to be 2048 for English but about 682 for Indic. That means the length of a stub article will be different for English and Indian language Wikipedias. Should we have a different yardstick for the definition of a stub article for Indian language Wikipedias then? I think yes.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/utf-8-indic-and-stub-length-article-in-wikipedia

(Lack of) Representation of Non-Western World in Process of Creation of Web Standards

gupta — 2016-10-20T01:44:41Z

World Wide Consortium (W3C) as a standard setting organization for the World Wide Web plays a very important role in shaping the web. We focus on the ongoing controversy related to Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and found that there was a serious lack of participation from people from non-western countries. We also found serious lack of gender diversity in the EME debate.

W3C is the organization which sets the standard for HTML 5. Recently it got surrounded by controversy due to the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) draft specification (David Dorwin et al. 2016). EME aims to prevent piracy of digital video by making it hard to download the unencrypted video stream. But it also raises lots of issues regarding implementation in Free and Open Source Software, Interoperability, Privacy, Security, Accessibility and fair use. (Cory Doctorow 2016)

In this study we looked at aspects of the debate which both of the sides ignored, the third world! We found that out of 48 people who participated in the debate around EME on W3C's public-html mailing list, none of them were from the continents of Asia, Africa or South America. These regions make up almost 80 % of the world's population and more than 60 percent of world's internet users (Stats 2016). When a group of people doesn't get represented a in the standard making process it is expected that their concerns don't get represented either. The representation of people is specially important in the EME debate because laws around Digital Rights Management around the world are different. For example Indian laws does not disallow manufacture and distribution of circumvention tools whereas the law in USA does (Prakash 2016b). The cultural norms around the world are quite different and also the conditions under which people use the internet are different. India has the lowest average internet speed across the world (Akamai 2016). A large of fraction of Indian population (37% in 2010) accesses internet through Cyber Cafés (TRAI 2016). These factors makes the ability to download digital content much more important for an Indian internet user than a North American or European internet user.

Methodology

We used BigBang[1] python package to download the achieves of the public-html mailing list at W3C.[2] Our dump contains all the messages between 31st August 2010 to 15th May 2016. Then we filtered out all the emails with EME, encrypted media or DRM in the subject line. There were 472 such emails. We then de-duplicated the list of senders as some senders used multiple emails in the course of discussion. There were 48 unique senders afters de duplication. Then we looked up their social media profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, Github), personal website or page at employers site to determine the region they belong to and their gender. All the source code used for the analysis is available on our github repository.[3]

Result

Regional Diversity

Region	Participant (%)	Email (%)
Africa	0 (0)	0 (0)
Asia	0 (0)	0 (0)
Australia and New Zealand	5 (10.4)	16 (3.4)
Europe	13 (27.1)	146 (30.9)
North America	30 (62.5)	310 (65.7)
South America	0 (0)	0 (0)
Total	48 (100)	472 (100)

As mentioned in the Introduction above there was absolutely no participation from the whole continents of Africa, Asia, or South America with most of the emails being sent by North Americans.

Gender Diversity

Gender	Participant(%)	Email(%)
Male	47 (97.9)	466 (98.7)
Female	1 (2.1)	6 (1.3)
Total	48 (100)	472 (100)

There was only one women participating in the discussing contributing 1.3 % of the emails sent. The numbers reflects widely discussed lack of gender diversity in Tech and Open communities.

The debate inside W3C around EME also seriously lacked in gender diversity, which is typical of open communities.

Stakeholder Community

Stakeholder Community	Participants per work category	Emails sent per stakeholder category
FOSS browser developer	5	56
Digital Content Provider	9	186
DRM Platform Provider	15	100
Accessibility	4	47
Security Researcher	0	0
Privacy	2	2
Other W3C Employee	3	10
None of the Above	10	71
Total	48	472

We observe that there was no participation from the Security Researcher community and negligible participation from privacy community. Voice of Digital Content Provider was overrepresented with almost 40% of emails sent by them.

Methodological remarks:

Participants are categorized on the basis stakes of their employer and not specifically on the work they do. For example someone who works on privacy in Google will be placed in "DRM platform provider" instead of "Privacy".
W3C and Universities are considered to neutral and their employees are categorized by the work they do.
Google's position is very interesting, it is a DRM provider as a browser manufacturer but also a content provider in Youtube and fair number of Google Employers are against EME due to other concerns. Therefore Christian Kaiser has been paced as Content provider because he works on Youtube, and everyone else has been placed as DRM provider.

Discussion and Future Work

The lack of diversity in W3C is not unique. (Graham, Straumann, and Hogan 2015) showed a significant western bias in Wikipedia, gender bias in Wikipedia has also a well known and is being actively worked upon. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has also been criticized for under representing interests of non North American and West European world (Prakash 2016a).

We hope that W3C and other organizations will increase the diversity in their standard making process so that global voices actually shape the global internet.

Acknowledgement

This work was done during my internship at The Center for Internet & Society, India. I thank Sunil Abraham for useful and timely feedback and Pranesh Prakash, Amber Sinha and Udbhav Tiwari for informed discussions.

References

Akamai. 2016. “Akamai State of the Internet Q1 2016.” Accessed August 20. https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/akamai-state-of-the-internet-report-q1-2016.pdf.
Cory Doctorow. 2016. “Interoperability and the W3C: Defending the Future from the Present.” Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present.
David Dorwin, Jerry Smith, Mark Watson, and Adrian Bateman. 2016. “Encrypted Media Extensions, W3C Editor’s Draft.” Accessed May 13. https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/
Feminism, Geek. 2016. “Geek Feminism Wiki FLOSS.” Geek Feminism Wiki. Accessed October 5. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS.
Graham, Mark, Ralph K. Straumann, and Bernie Hogan. 2015. “Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105 (6): 1158–78. doi:10.1080/00045608.2015.1072791.
Prakash, Pranesh. 2016a. “CIS Statement at ICANN 49’s Public Forum.” The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed August 20. http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/icann49-public-forum-statement.
Prakash, Pranesh. 2016b. “Technological Protection Measures in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010.” The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed August 20. http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/tpm-copyright-amendment.
Stats, Internet Live. 2016. “Number of Internet Users (2016) - Internet Live Stats.” Accessed August 20. http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/.
TRAI.. “Recommendations on National Broadband Plan.” Accessed August 20. http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/Recommendation/Documents/Rcommendation81210.pdf.

^{^[1]} https://github.com/datactive/bigbang

^{^[2]} https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/

^{^[3]} https://github.com/hargup/eme_diversity_analysis

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/lack-of-representation-of-non-western-world-in-creation-of-web-standards

Centre for Internet and Society

Improving Telugu Village Articles

100wikidays: the journey so far

See also

Credits

CIIPC-NLUD Workshop on Wikipedia Editing and Open Source Knowledge Sources

33rd SCCR: CIS Statement on the GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment

33rd SCCR: CIS Statement on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations

33rd SCCR: Opening Statement by India on behalf of the Asia and the Pacific Group

Using Kannada in technology made easier with smartphones

Wikipedia Asian Month — 2016 iteration starts on 1 November

How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias

Indian-language Wikipedias and open access

Open in action

‘Entrepreneurship will become a common, respectable profession’ – 25 quotes from Indian startup journeys

What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India

State of Indian languages on the internet

Why open access is important for Indian languages?

Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals

How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool

Workshop on Competition Law and Policy

Download

Querying Wikipedia Data

UTF-8, Indic and Stub Length Article in Wikipedia

(Lack of) Representation of Non-Western World in Process of Creation of Web Standards

Methodology

Result

Regional Diversity

Gender Diversity

Stakeholder Community

Discussion and Future Work

Acknowledgement

References