Centre for Internet and Society

విజ్ఞాన నిధి వికీపీడియా..

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:38:48Z

The article about Telugu Wikipedia appeared in Namaste Telangana on December 11, 2016.

సిటీబ్యూరో:ప్రాపంచిక విషయాలను, చారిత్రక ఘట్టాలను, శాస్త్రీయ విషయాలను ప్రపంచానికి చేరువ చేస్తున్న విజ్ఞాన నిధి వికీపీడియా. ఆధునిక సాంకేతిక పద్ధతుల ఆధారంగా ఆన్‌లైన్‌తో ప్రపంచంలోని పలు ఆసక్తికరమైన విషయాలన్నింటనీ ప్రజలందరికీ చేరువ చేసే నేస్తం ఇది. అందరికీ ప్రవేశం, అందరికీ ఉచితంగా అందుబాటులో ఉండే ఈ ఎన్‌సైక్లోపెడియాలో మన చరిత్ర, మన సంస్కృతి మరెన్నో విషయాలను జోడించేందుకు సమాచార సైనికులతో వికీపీడియా డేను పురస్కరించుకొని గోల్డెన్ త్రెషోల్డ్‌లో శనివారం ఓ కార్యశాలను నిర్వహించింది. విజ్ఞాన సమాచారం,భౌగోళిక, చారిత్రక అంశాలు, సాంస్కృతిక విషయాలను వికీపీడియాలో చొప్పించేందుకు చేపట్టాల్సిన కార్యక్రమాలను ఈ కార్యశాలలో చర్చించారు. వికీపీడియాలో అందరూ తమకు తెలిసిన ఆసక్తికరమైన అంశాలపై వ్యాసాలు రాయవచ్చని, ప్రపంచానికి కొత్త విషయాలను పరిచయం చేయవచ్చని ఆంగ్ల వికీపీడియన్ టిటో దత్తా అన్నారు. వికీ ట్రైనర్, ట్రైనర్ ద ట్రైనర్ కార్యక్రమంలో వికీపీడీయన్లు కశ్యప్, ప్రణయ్ పలు సాంకేతిక అంశాలను తెలుగు వికిపీడియన్లకు వివరించారు. చరిత్రకారుడు, కవి కట్టా శ్రీనివాస్ మాట్లాడుతూ గోల్కొండ వంటి పలు చారిత్రక ప్రదేశాల్లో ప్రజలకు తెలియని చారిత్రక, సాంకేతిక ప్రదేశాలు, ఆసక్తికరమైన అంశాలు ఉన్నాయని వాటన్నింటినీ సేకరించి, ప్రపంచానికి చేరవేయాల్సిన అవసరం ఉందన్నారు. ఈ కార్యక్రమాన్ని వికీపీడియన్లు చేపట్టి విజయవంతం చేయాలన్నారు. సీనియర్ జర్నలిస్ట్ బీవీ ప్రసాద్, మౌర్య, మీనా గాయత్రి పాల్గొన్నారు.

Link to the original in Namaste Telangana

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/namaste-telangana-december-11-2016-article-on-wikipedia

వికీపీడియాతో విజ్ఞాన విప్లవం

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:36:06Z

The article appeared in Andhra Bhoomi on December 11, 2016.

హైదరాబాద్, డిసెంబర్ 10: అన్ని భారతీయ భాషల్లో వికీపీడియాను అభివృద్ధి చేసేందుకు అవసరమైన శిక్షణ అందిస్తున్నామని వికీ ట్రైనర్, ఆంగ్ల వికీపీడియన్ టిటో దత్తా పేర్కొన్నారు. వికీపీడియాను అభివృద్ధి చేసేందుకు వివిధ కార్యక్రమాల నిర్వహణకు అవసరమైన నాయకత్వ శిక్షణ, వికీపీడియాలో పనికొచ్చే ఉపకరణాల గురించి రెండు రోజుల శిక్షణ కార్యక్రమాన్ని ఆయన శనివారం ప్రారంభించారు. తెలుగు వికీపీడియాను అభివృద్ధి చేయడం ద్వారా తెలుగు భాషాభివృద్ధితో పాటు ప్రపంచవ్యాప్తంగా ఉన్న తెలుగు వారికి తెలుగు విశేషాలు అందించిన వారమవుతామని, దీంతో సరికొత్త విజ్ఞాన విప్లవం వస్తుందని ఆయన పేర్కొన్నారు. వికీపీడియాను అభివృద్ధి చేయడానికి కాలేజీల్లో కార్యశాల, ఫోటోవాక్, ఎడిట్ ఆ థాన్ తదితర కార్యక్రమాలను నిర్వహించవచ్చని చెప్పారు. చరిత్రకారుడు, రచయిత, తెలుగు వికీపీడియన్ కట్టా శ్రీనివాసరావు మాట్లాడుతూ గోల్కొండ వంటి ప్రదేశాల్లో కూడా ప్రజలకు తెలియని చారిత్రక, సాంకేతిక ప్రదేశాలు అంశాలు ఉంటాయని అన్నారు. వాటి ఫోటోలు తీసి వికీమీడియా కామన్స్‌లో చేర్చవచ్చని తెలిపారు. ఈ కార్యక్రమాన్ని సిఐఎస్-ఎ2కె ప్రతినిధి పవన్ సంతోష్, వికీపీడియన్ ప్రణయ్ రాజ్ వంగరి నిర్వహించారు. కార్యక్రమంలో తెలుగు వికీపీడియన్లు కశ్యప్, నాగేశ్వరరావు, మీనా గాయత్రీ, వౌర్య వంటి వారితో పాటు కొత్తగా వికీపీడియాలో చేరిన వారు కూడా పాల్గొన్నారు.

Read the original published by Andhra Bhoomi on December 11, 2016

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/andhra-bhoomi-december-11-2016-article-on-wikipedia

Changing the typographic landscape of a country: one letter at a time

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:06:51Z

My interest in designing typefaces in Indian scripts grew out of years of disappointment with the way most Hindi books I came across looked. Apart from a few exceptions, they looked like poor cousins of English books. Whether it was a children’s story book or a novel or magazine, there was usually the same drab typeface.

The blog post by Pooja Saxena was published in Storyweaver on December 1, 2016.

Some letters didn’t look like what we were taught in school, on others the matras (vowel marks) didn’t arch at the right places. Overall, the books and the letters inside them had an air of neglect. They looked old and completely unexciting. When I first learned that designing typefaces was a real job, I thought here was the opportunity to change all that.

Cambay, Devanagari typeface designed by Pooja Saxena for Google Fonts

Changing the typographic landscape of a country as diverse as India is not a one-woman job, but every now and then a project comes by that has the potential to make a small difference. Two years ago, as a result of a conversation with Subhashish Panigrahi, the Access to Knowledge programme at the Centre for Internet and Society commissioned a Ol Chiki typeface family. The Ol Chiki script, about which I knew precious little at the time, is used to write the language Santali, which is spoken by over six million people in India and its neighbouring countries. At the time that we started working on this project, there was no Unicode compliant typeface available in the script, making it impossible for it to be used on computers and cellphones, and online in a consistent and future-proof way. We hoped to change that by designing a small, but useful typeface family (it comes in regular, bold and italics) along with input methods and keyboard layouts that would allow a person to type Ol Chiki text easily.

Guru Gomke, Ol Chiki typeface designed by Pooja Saxena with research inputs from Shubhashish Panigrahi,for the A2K Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society.

This project was especially challenging because not only was Ol Chiki a completely unfamiliar script to me and Subhashish, but there was limited material available for us to consult. While designing a typeface in a script one reads and/or writes, or is at least familiar with, one’s experience with those letters can act as a guide. By writing them and seeing them printed in different fonts, in many people’s handwriting — some good, some bad — and on hand painted signs, one develops an instinct for identifying which parts of a letter make it recognisable. That way we know what parts of the letter can be exaggerated, and what others can be played down without compromising legibility. For an unfamiliar script, this visual vocabulary and the traditionally correct way of writing letters must be learned. Manuscripts, printed documents, handwriting manuals and samples, metal type, linguistic information about the script, feedback from native readers — all form parts of a puzzle that needs to be put together to design a competent typeface.

The story of Ol Chiki script is fascinating. The script is less than a century old, and was devised by Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who wanted to create a script that could accommodate all the features of the Santali language — something that the scripts used to write Santali so far had failed to do. Legend has it that he based the design of the letters on objects commonly found in the everyday environment of the Santals. Even though the script was created between 1920 – 1940, the Santal community has many myths about how it was created. One says that the script came to be at the time when the Earth itself was created, another says that the script was given as a divine gift to a learned man, Pandit Raghunath Murmu. It is after Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who is reverentially called Guru Gomke, that the Ol Chiki typeface that I designed was named. You can find out more about the Ol Chiki typeface and input methods project here.

Custom lettering for the Tamil branding of the Coovum Art Festival, designed by Pooja Saxena

If you’re interested in Indian type design and le ering, consider following the work of these exceptional designers — Noopur Datye, one of the co-founders of type design collective, Ek Type, who has designed custom typefaces TV channels like LifeOK; Kimya Gandhi, who is partner at Mota Italic, and recently designed an inventive Devanagari handwriting font; or Lipi Raval, whose flamboyant Gujarati typeface Mogra is a complete head-turner.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/story-weaver-december-1-2016-pooja-saxena-changing-the-typographic-landscape-of-a-country

Pranay Raj record in 100 days-100 articles

pavan — 2016-12-19T18:16:03Z

Telugu Theatre scholar Pranay Raj Vangari from Motkur of Yadadri District, Telangana created record by completing a challenge that is famous worldwide in Wikimedia community - "100 Days-100 Articles". Pranay Raj is a theatre scholar and artist who used to travel length and breadth of Telangana & Andhra Pradesh for research and performances.

Even in that situations, he started first article in challenge on September 8th and completed 100 articles in December 16th. Telangana State Language & Cultural department director Mamidi Harikrishna felicitated Pranay Raj after completion on completing 100 Wikidays challenge. Pranay said that two other Telugu Wikipedians completed this challenge successfully before him and he told they inspired him to take this up and complete. Pranay agreed that he faced some difficulties in writing articles in places where network is low. He said that he wouldn't stop with 100 wikidays but would continue challenge for whole day by creating 365 days and also said he would create more Telangana related articles.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/pranay-raj-record-in-100-days-100-articles

వంద రోజులు.. వంద వ్యాసాలు - తెలుగు వికీపీడియాలో మోత్కూరు యువకుని రికార్డు (100 Days...100 Articles: Wikipedian from Motkur created record in Telugu Wikipedia)

pavan — 2016-12-18T15:09:54Z

Pranay Raj Vangari of Motkur Padmashali colony created record in Telugu Wikipedia. "100 Days- 100 Articles" is already going on in many languages worldwide and Pranay Raj took challenge in Telugu Wikipedia, completed it successfully. Pranay is theatre scholor. He started first article in this challenge on september 8 and continued to write articles on every day till December 16 to complete 100 articles. Pranay said that two other Telugu Wikipedians (Pavan and Meena) successfully completed the challenge and explained that he inspired from them to complete it. Telangana state language & cultural department director Mamidi Harikrishna felicitated Pranay in His chamber on this occasion and appreciated for his work.

Clipping of the article in Andhra Jyoti:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/100-days-100-articles-wikipedian-from-motkur-created-record-in-telugu-wikipedia

Wikipedian Pavan Santhosh says Telugu Wikipedians are creating Knowledge revolution (in Telugu)

praskrishna — 2016-12-17T01:35:04Z

Pavan Santhosh said that Telugu Wikipedians are creating a knowledge revolution in Telugu. On Sunday, December 12, 2016, in Golden Threshold, Abids, Telugu Wikipedians celebrated Telugu Wikipedia day. Telugu Wikipedians Pranay Raj and Meena Gayathri who successfully completed 100 Wikidays challenge successfully were given mementos and cut a cake on this occassion.

Clipping of the article that appeared in Andhra Jyoti on December 12, 2016:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/andhra-jyoti-december-12-2016-telugu-wikipedians-are-creating-knowledge-revolution

Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in Kolhapur

subodh — 2016-12-16T23:34:10Z

On behalf of CIS-A2K team Subodh Kulkarni conducted a Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Shivaji University in Kolhapur on 15 December 2016. The goal of the Wikipedia edit-a-thon was to build resources in the field of Political Science on Marathi Wikipedia and equip its participants with the process of contributing to Wikipedia, and to introduce it as a concept to them.

The workshop was conducted at the Political Science Department of Shivaji University for post graduate and research students and professors. The Head of the Political Science Department, Dr. Prakash Pawar actively took part in all the process. In all 22 new editors began their contribution on Wikipedia. The effort is the first step towards building long term institutional partnership with Shivaji University where many courses are run in Marathi language.

The Department of Mass Communication and the Department of Environment and Science have also evinced interest for conducting edit-a-thons for their students.

Overall the primary goals of the project include:

To introduce Wikipedia as an encyclopedia for research and a concept to new editors.
To Promote Marathi Wikipedia Community & promote the use of regional languages in Wikipedia.
To have an open interaction within the editors, existing as well as new.
To spread the awareness of Wikipedia as a powerful tool.

For more info, read the meta page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-kolhapur

Writing skills improve with Wikipedia editing

praskrishna — 2016-12-15T02:21:23Z

Pavan Santhosh said that contributing to Wikipedia and working in Wikimedia community improves our leadership qualities and writing skills. In an awareness session conducted about "You can edit Wikipedia" in JKC college, Guntur, Santhosh explained how to create and improve articles about Wikipedia in this program. Principal I.Nageswara Rao presided over this meeting.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/eenadu-december-3-2016-writing-skills-improve-with-wikipedia-editing

Odia Wikipedia: Sambalpur University Workshop

Sailesh Patnaik — 2017-04-17T06:44:47Z

An Odia Wikipedia orientation-cum-workshop program was organised for the students of Sambalpur University on 27 November, 2016.

Over the last couple of years, the Odia Wikipedia community has been successful in organising workshops and outreach programs in different parts of coastal and central Odisha. With over 38 active Wikipedians (as of 2016), the Odia community is growing everyday and expanding across different parts of Odisha. The recent increase in the number of Wikipedians in western Odisha inspired the community members to conduct an introductory Wikipedia workshop in Sambalpur University.

On 27th November 2016, an orientation-cum-workshop program for Odia Wikipedia was organised for the students of Computer Science and Application Department and the Odia Department in Sambalpur University. 57 participants, comprising 30 male and 27 female participants attended the event. 5 faculty members were also present. Dr. Chitta Ranjan Dash, the Vice Chancellor of the University was the Guest of Honour for the workshop. Three Odia Wikipedians- Mrutyunjay Kar, Jnanaranjan Sahu and Nistha Ranjan Dash facilitated the workshop as mentors.

The workshop began with an introduction to Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource digitisation efforts by Dr. Sarada Baboo, a professor from the Computer Science and Application department. The first session introduced the various Wikimedia projects to the participants. The participants were given an introduction on how to contribute to the different Wiki projects. They were also given an orientation on Wikipedia policies and guidelines. After this, the participants were introduced to Odia Wikipedia and its development over the years. The post lunch session trained participants on creating user accounts, articles, and other basic dos and don’ts on Wikipedia. During the training session, over 20 Wikipedians were able to create accounts.

The Wikipedia workshop in Sambalpur University was an important step to raise awareness about the Wikipedia movement in western Odisha, This was the first workshop in Sambalpur University and the second workshop in western Odisha after three years. Over 196 colleges are affiliated to Sambalpur University, in seven different districts in western Odisha. A regular follow up with the University, the faculty and the students will help in furthering the free knowledge movement in western Odisha.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikipedia-sambalpur-university-workshop

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

Kannada Wikipedia Education Program at Christ university: Work so far

Ananth Subray — 2016-11-18T02:45:05Z

As you know we are working closely with Christ university in Bengaluru for the Education Programs in Kannada Wikipedia and Kannada Wikisource, we worked on redesigning the programme for this academic year 2016-17 based on the lessons learned from the earlier intervention.

Before beginning this programme, we provided training for campus ambassadors who in turn provided training to the faculty and fellow students. This new design of the programme allowed us to spend more time with the undergraduate students of various disciplines in Arts, Science and Commerce that are part of the programme. And this exercise resulted in improving the quality of the articles created by the students. So far, 218 second-year students in total have created 108 good quality articles in Kannada Wikipedia and 70 start class articles. The latter ones will need further work like adding images and citations. 20 of the articles are stub-start class articles, and 20 more are stubs of poor quality. The articles are still in the user sandboxes for the evaluation work and will soon be moved to the article namespace.

The freshman year students contributed in digitising books on Kannada Wikisource by proofreading about 2000 folios from four books.

How we did things differently this time?

Focus on multiple workshops that were conducted by multiple facilitators to ensure the series does not become monotonous. Facilitators included myself, some of the faculty and the Campus Ambassadors where the latter was useful for more peer-to-peer to learning.
Sessions were made more interactive and were spaced evenly that gave the students go through a learning curve.
Faculty support and engagement that was less last year was increased this year.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/kannada-wikipedia-education-program-at-christ-university-work-so-far

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

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

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