Centre for Internet and Society

Tulu gets official Wikipedia page, but Mumbai linguists say more is needed

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T02:43:08Z

Sitting in his Sunkadakatte home in Bengaluru, Dr UB Pavanaja still recalls the moment when he was at the WikiConference India 2016 in Chandigarh earlier this month. Academicians from all over India had gathered at the event, to share their views about issues related to India on Wikipedia. While the talks were still in progress, Katherine Maher, executive director, Wikimedia Foun-dation, USA, paused to make an announcement.

The article by Anju Maskeri was published in Mid-day on August 21, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

“The Tulu Wikipedia page has just gone live,” she boomed into the microphone. “It was a moment of great joy because we were working on this project for the last eight years,” says Pavanaja, programme manager (Indian languages) at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and one of the mentors of Tulu Wikipedia.

UNESCO has listed Tulu as one of the endangered languages, which is at the risk of falling out of use, because it has a few surviving speakers. Pavanaja says the Wikipedia page is a medium for people to access material on Tulu. “Today, it’s the first page that appears on Google, so the accessibility of the language will hopefully increase manifold,” Pavanaja says.

The Mumbai connect

Sukesh Shetty, owner of Hindmata Hotel in Tardeo, who is continuing the tradition of running a restaurant business started by his grandfather, feels his connection with the language is restricted to his interaction at home. “I ensure I speak in Tulu with my children. But, my four-year-old speaks Marathi better than Tulu because we have a Mah-arashtrian maid,” he laughs.

The 46-year-old is part of the Bunta Sangha, an organisation devoted towards rallying the Tulu-speaking Bunt community.

Shetty feels the lack of availability of Tulu literature and movies in Mumbai are responsible for the declining interest in the language. “You don’t get to watch any Tulu films because they are never screened here. We don’t even have a channel that telecasts Tulu movies. But, the Wikipedia page is a step ahead,” he says.

The Tulu Wikipedia page (tcy.wikipedia.org) went live this month. Currently, there are around 200 registered users of the page

Accessing Tulu

Wikipedia is currently available in 22 Indian languages, including, Assamese, Bish-nupriya, Kashmiri, Konkani, Newari, Odia, Pali and Urdu among others. With the inclusion of Tulu, the count has gone up to 23. “There are about 200 registered users (editors) of Tulu Wikipedia. On an average, we have around eight to 10 active editors. Dr Vishwanatha Badikana, a Kannada professor, and engineer Bharatesha Alasandemaj-alu are the highest contributors,” says Dr Pavanaja.

Tulu Wikipedia was in “incubation” since 2008. This term is used to describe similar online encyclopedias, which are still waiting to go “live”. “Tulu is written in the Kannada script, but the language is believed to be 2,000 years old. But, to create a Wiki page, we needed to prove that it’s a classical language and deserves recognition. We had to submit sizeable amount of literature, ancient manuscripts and literary work for the language to qualify,” he says.

Dr Badikana, who works as a History professor at St Alosious College, Mangalore University, says they had to generate awareness about the language through workshops. “Tulu is predominantly an oral language, and hence, people don’t take interest in documenting it. With Kannada being state-recognised, it’s more popular. We had to hold writing workshops in Tulu to motivate people,” he says.

A languishing script

Of late, Tulu — believed to be one of the oldest Dravidian languages — has been generating great interest amongst linguists and academicians alike. The excavation of an ancient manuscript, Tulu Devimahatme, a prose work like the Mahabharata, from the 15th century and two epic poems written in 17th century, namely Sri Bhagavata and Kaveri by language experts in the last few years have revived interest in the language.

However, a major grouse in the community has been its non-inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which lists the official languages of the country. Presently, it recognises 22 languages with Tulu being the only Dravidian language to have been left out.

Professor Tukaram Poojary, who was instrumental in setting up the Rani Abbakka Tulu Research Centre in Bantwal, Karnataka in 1995, has sent a memorandum to Pranab Mukherjee, President of India for the inclusion of the language in the Eight Schedule.

“Scholars like the nineteenth missionary-linguist Bishop Robert Caldwell have called this language ‘peculiar and very interesting’,” says Poojary. According to him, Tulu is one of the most highly developed languages in the Dravidian family. “But it never received any royal patronisation as was seen with other Dravidian languages such as Telugu, Tamil or Malayalam,” he says.

Shimantur Chandrahas Suvarna, a popular Tulu writer based in Borivli has been diligently writing short stories, poems and novels in the language for the last 40 years. “Although, I write in both Kannada and Tulu, I have been focusing more on the latter, because if we don’t speak and document the language, it will die,” says the 61-year-old, who moved to Mumbai in 1979 after his father set up an Udipi hotel called Hotel Sadanand in Mazgaon.

Suvarna feels the lack of serious literature before the 15th century has hampered Tulu’s claim as one of the legitimate South Indian languages. “In the first half of the 19th century, the German missionaries popularised the language. They produced the Tulu lexicon and a Tulu-English dictionary. But, after the Christian missionaries started printing the Bible and related literature in Kannada, the old script was discarded and the Kannada script was adopted to write Tulu,” he said.

Today, there are no books or literature in the Tulu script and there are only a handful of tuluvas, who can read the script, says Suvarna.

According to him, during the last three years, there has been a surge in literary interest with more than 100 writers contributing articles, poems to a quarterly journal published by the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy Research.

Last year, the University of Mumbai, in collaboration with the Kannada department, and the Rani Abbakka Tulu Research Centre, held a series of lectures on the inclusion of Tulu in the Eighth Schedule. Professor GN Upadhya, head of the department of Kannada at MU, who was part of the series, feels the issue has now become political. “There’s no political willingness on part of the MPs and MLAs to lobby for this language, because it doesn’t constitute a vote bank,” he says.

A language in restoration

Around two million people in the southwest part of Karnataka and the Kasaragod district of Kerala speak Tulu. In Mumbai, about 10 lakh people speak the language. At the beginning of the 20th century, the practice of writing the language in the Tulu script witnessed a decline and was gradually abandoned in favour of the Kannada script. It was only in 2010 that Tulu began to be taught as a subject at the higher primary level schools of coastal Karnataka.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/mid-day-anju-maskeri-august-21-2016-tulu-gets-official-wikipedia-page-but-mumbai-linguists-say-more-is-needed

Tulu takes a major Wiki leap, all thanks to a dedicated team

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T16:38:47Z

Tulu is one of the five Dravidian languages but it has the least number of speakers. Though it has a script, lack of usage has made it almost obsolete, forcing Tulu writers to write in Kannada. This has, however, benefited Tulu today, allowing it to boast of its own Wikipedia

The article by Akram Mohammed was published in the Indian Express on August 21, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted. Also mirrored in Nyooz on August 22, 2016.

Anyone who proposes a Wikipedia in a new language knows the labour between the proposal stage and the period it goes live. The long phase usually erodes the enthusiasm and in many cases, the proposal never passes the incubation period. In the case of Tulu Wikipedia, there were a few determined to ensure it saw the light of the day.

Like Vasanth CN, who had rallied for the Wikipedia page since it was first proposed in 2008. A native of Dharmasthala, the language enthusiast detailed how tcy.wikipedia.org came into being. “When it was first proposed in 2008, there were six people behind it,” he recalled. After a while, the Board of Trustees and Language Committee of Wikipedia accepted the proposal.

Then came the incubation period, stretching over eight years, where enthusiasm ebbed and swelled among the parties working for a Tulu Wikipedia page. “If you see the Wikipedia homepage, you see a lot of system messages. Our task was to translate these system messages first. By 2011-12, we had succeeded in generating about 120 articles related to the Tulu language and the region in which it is spoken,” he said.The tricky part was to get the page active. It needed volunteers and they were hard to come by. “For a Wikipedia page to become live, we required at least 600 articles. Moreover, we also required at least five active volunteers who could contribute content or edit existing pages” he said.

It took several workshops at different venues to get the numbers.

Vasanth told Express that the motivation behind the project was to ensure a recognition for the language and to help it evolve. “It is important to have a knowledge base in the local language,” he said. At present, the page has over 780 articles. “If there is encouragement from government agencies such as the Tulu Academy, we can easily increase the content,” he said. He added that further support was required to upload works of ancient and modern Tulu literature, in online avenues such as wikisource.

U B Pavanaja from Centre for Internet and Society, said that efforts picked up in 2014 to make the page live. Commenting on the significance of the language, he said that Tulu had a rich heritage. Several religious books and works of literature had been translated to Tulu during the late 18th century, which included the Bible. In coastal districts, Tulu can be chosen as an optional subject today, he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/indian-express-august-21-2016-akram-mohammed-tulu-takes-a-major-wiki-leap-all-thanks-to-a-dedicated-team

Focus on India—WikiConference produces new apps; state government adopts free licenses

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T03:15:22Z

WikiConference India and its productive hackathon

The second WikiConference India, held August 5–7 in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, drew hundreds of new and experienced members from 20 language communities of various Wikimedia projects from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. This event was more thematic than the first WikiConference India (held in 2011), with numerous presentations, panel discussions and workshops on the gender gap, Wikipedia in education, Mediawiki, and state of the movement in India. The event was organized by the Community of Wikimedians in India, supported by Wikimedia India and the Centre for Internet and Society, and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. The newly formed user group Punjabi Wikimedians hosted the event. WikiConference India's main goal was to build community and increase participation among Wikimedians in India. Interest in the event was strong: 452 Wikimedians from more than six countries applied for ~100 scholarships. Wikipedia's well known gender gap was evident: only 55 scholarship applicants were women, but a strong focus on diversity resulted in ~25% of scholarship recipients going to women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. In all, about 250 people attended the conference. Several Foundation staff spoke at the event, including executive director Katherine Maher, Asaf Bartov, and Tighe Flanagan.

A highlight of the conference was the hackathon track, which spanned all three days of the conference. It proved highly productive, yielding seven apps that are expected to help Wikimedians in a variety of ways. I spoke with Santosh Shingare (Cherishsantosh), the Bangalore-based Wikimedian who organized the hackathon. Santosh had previously served as an organizer of the 2011 WikiConference, and has run hackathons annually since then. Santosh's primary motivation for holding such events is learning; he spoke of limited opportunities to learn about new areas of technology beyond his core skills in WebRTC and Android. He enjoys collaborating with other Wikimedians and sharing technical skills. This event was his first with an international draw, and he looks forward to opportunities to collaborate beyond India's borders in the future.

As Santosh outlined in a message to the Wikimania email list, the hackathon's 35 participants made substantial progress with the following projects:

WikiSpeak with native language (web and Android): Speaking the text of Wikipedia articles
Edit Tamil Wiktionary (Android)
Audio file upload to Wikidata (Android): Assists users in uploading small files that demonstrate the pronunciation of lexical items
A layer that shows local Wikipedia articles on a Google Map
Optical character recognition for Hindi and Malayalam
Communication platform [WebRTC] (Web Application): Santosh wrote this app himself; hackathon participants used it to communicate
Notifications: browser notifications for Wikipedia functions such as recent changes

Santosh highlights that the projects grew out of advance communication. To identify problems and generate ideas, the hackathon organizing team posted a survey ahead of the event. Requests from various language communities, including Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, and Malayalam, drove several of the projects. The software is all freely licensed, and there are no plans to generate revenue.

Santosh is not a prolific Wikipedia writer or editor, but rather sees value in his ability to communicate among Wikimedians who seek features from various language communities, including his native Marathi and other Indic languages in which he has varying degrees of fluency.

He plans to update the Wikimedia community shortly with further details on each of the seven projects. He is already planning the next of India's annual hackathons. Hackathon organizers worldwide might be interested in learning more about Indian Wikimedians' efforts, and Wikimedians around the world can expect to benefit from their projects.

The conference generated a number of media reports. P

Indian state of Tamil Nadu adopts Creative Commons license

The state of Tamil Nadu on the subcontinent

Last week brought a rare piece of good news in the world's uncertain progress towards the widespread free licensing of information on the Internet. Ravidreams announced on the Wikimedia India mailing list that the government of one of India's largest and most populous states—Tamil Nadu—has issued an instruction to Tamil University and "all other government departments and institutions to release all their publications, archives and collections under Creative Commons by Share-Alike license".

The move comes one year after the collaboration between the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community and the Tamil Virtual Academy, an independent institution set up by the state government in 2001 to provide online resources for Tamil-language communities around the world. TVA and the Tamil-language Wikimedia community collaborated to persuade the government to make the order. Wikimedia India (one of three Creative Commons affiliates in the country) served as an institutional partner, signing the initial agreement on behalf of the Indian Wikimedia community, and funding a Wikimedian in Residence at TVA.

Ravi, who also serves on the TVA committee for outreach, told the Signpost that the TVA is very keen to share its collection of encyclopedic resources with Tamil Wikimedia projects. The community contributed strategic knowledge of free-content licensing, providing precedents for free content release by other governments in India and other countries, and helped in the drafting of the actual order. "But it takes a lot of time, effort, high-profile connections to change how government institutions work", he said.

An example of the distinctive Tamil script

“

Almost 99% of the time it's about the right officer/minister who cares for our mission being in charge of the right department at the right time. It's very hard to bring change through a bottom-up approach. These precedents help when someone at the top gets interested in changing things. So, any community that expects to influence public policy should be prepared to do a lot of groundwork.

”

Tamil-language Wikipedian Thamizhpparithi Maari serves as Assistant Director, TVA and state coordinator of its computing outreach unit, which the government is funding to encourage students in the state to use open-source media and software; this program includes the development of mobile apps and the running of contests to enhance students' computing skills. He described to the Signpost the elaborate process of finally gaining legal and administrative approval for the CC-by-SA release order. Thamizhpparithi has already started a process of digitising books from the universities to share with the Tamil wiki community, involving between 400,000 and 500,000 pages in some 200 books, using Google optical character recognition (OCR).

"This is just the beginning; we expect millions of pages to be uploaded to Tamil Wikisource", Ravi said. Most of the content that will become available for uploading is in Tamil, although some will be in English and other Indian languages; this will present significant opportunities for the Tamil Wikimedia community.

A rare Tamil-language book in an archival exhibition

There are about 70 million native speakers of Tamil, and another eight million second-language speakers. It is an official language in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka (with which the state shares a maritime border), and Singapore, and is also used in Malaysia and the African island of Mauritius. The language, written in a distinctive curvilinear script, has a rich literature of poetry reaching back thousands of years, and of novels over the past few centuries; this is attested by a related category on the English Wikipedia that is already of impressive size.

The Open Policy Network, a project of Creative Commons, published an overview of the value of this kind of work in 2014; the Network advocates for governments around the world to adopt free content licenses. T

In brief

Mobile app provides offline access to 8,000 medical articles in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, and Spanish: The apps, which supplement a popular English language app, were announced by the WikiProject Med Foundation and Wikimedia Switzerland. More language editions are planned.
Wikimedia Foundation appoints five volunteers to its Board Governance Committee: Newly appointed trustee Nataliia Tymkiv announced the selection of the advisory group. Board governance issues have been the subject of much discussion since the tumultuous events at the WMF over the last year. The four members of the BGC are Tymkiv (chair), Kelly Battles, Christophe Henner, and Dariusz Jemielniak.
WikiConference North America will take place October 7–10, 2016 in San Diego. Scholarship applications are open until August 23; conference submissions until August 31.
WikiConvention Francophone will take place in Paris August 19–21.
New help page takes aim at common newbie obstacle: Many articles carry banners, to flag problems with the articles. New contributors often lack an understanding of how to go about removing the banners, if they address the underlying issues. In recent months, Fuhghettaboutit created a help page to explain the process, and advocated for linking to the page from the templates. The help page now gets several thousand views per day, suggesting that it is filling a significant gap.
Machine-assisted translation of Wikipedia articles, which has increased with the introduction of the Wikimedia Foundation's Content Translation Tool (covered by the Signpost in a June 2015 op-ed, in June 2016, and in various other pieces), has sparked a controversy in recent weeks. See here: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT.
Wikidata RfC on defining data quality underway: Alessandro Piscopo, a guest of Wikimedia Germany, asserts that: "to achieve high quality, it is important to define first what data quality is on this knowledge base." Join the discussion: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Data quality framework for Wikidata. P

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-signpost-august-18-2016-pete-forsyth-and-tony-focus-on-india

Tools orientation session for Telugu Wikimedians of Hyderabad

Pavan Santhosh S. — 2016-08-17T14:35:54Z

A tools orientation session is being organised on July 10 at Hyderabad during the regular monthly meetup. Telugu Wikimedians who would be interested to learn about advanced editing tools like citation templates and Twinkle are welcome to join.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/tools-orientation-session-for-telugu-wikimedians-of-hyderabad

Training-the-trainer programme and Mediawiki training at Pune

garule — 2016-08-18T11:14:57Z

A two-day long train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training programme was organised during May 28-29 in Pune to better capacity of Wikimedians both technically, and outreach and community building.

The participants were trained about planning, organising and reporting for outreach programmes, public speaking, advanced editing skills and and the Wikimedia grants structure. Similarly for the Mediawiki training, the major topics covered in the Mediawiki training sessions were Six Wikimedians; bug triage, bots, Mediawiki extensions and scripts, and Wikidata. The sessions were discussed and planned in the Marathi Wikipedia Village Pump in advance. Rahmanuddin Shaik and I facilitated the individual sessions. Thanks to Sanket Oswal, Treasurer, Wikimedia India who shared about the chapter’s ongoing activities, especially the Wiki Loves Earth project. The community members from Nashik shared about their plans for a meetup in the city of Nashik in June.

Santoshi Tiwari, a Wikimedian from the city of Nashik who was attending a programme like this for the first time feels that there is need for more such programmes more often in multiple cities as there are already 16 Wikimedians from her city who are eager to learn more advanced editing skills. “I learnt about many interesting aspects of the Wikimedia world, like the Wikipedia Adventure game, Wikidata and Wikipedia policies and guidelines

. Until this time, I was contributing to Wikipedia on my own but I started contributing to Wikidata after this event. Now I am enjoying playing the Wikipedia Adventure. I also got the opportunity to meet many Wikimedians in person” shares Santoshi. She explains, “this was good as an introductory event but I would like to participate in sessions that are more detail-oriented. Also, having edit-a-thons during such events will be very useful. With a total of about 19-20 people participating in total, 7 female participants is still a good starting point to have a balanced community. However there should be plans for accommodating more people in the upcoming events”.

Going forward, there are plans to have at least one session in four month in cities where there are higher number of Marathi Wikimedians.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/training-the-trainer-programme-and-mediawiki-training-at-pune

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: Gender Gap in Indian Language Wikipedias – Projects, Outreach and Outcome

pavanaja — 2016-08-17T02:43:54Z

India is not much different from the global statistics when it comes to gender gap issues in Wikipedia. Indian language Wikipedias are known to have similar ratio of male to female editors.

The submission was included as part of a panel related to the gender gap at the WikiConference India 2016.

Many activities are being made to bridge the gender gap in Indian language Wikipedias. These are aimed both at improving the ratio of female to male editors and increasing women related content in Indian language Wikipedias. Some of the notable projects are Art+ Feminism editathon, Lilavati’s daughters editathon, International Women’s day or month editathon, editathon to add articles about woman writers of coastal Karnataka. Sizeable number of students who are part of the Wikipedia in Education Program which are being run at many educational institutes of India are female. Some of these students continue editing and contribute to Wikipedia. Some female students worked as interns and have contributed by improving the quality of articles written by their peers. Outreach is one of the regular activities of taking Wikipedia to people. Outcome of the projects and the data on retention of the participants of outreach activities as regular contributing Wikipedians, survival of the newly created editors for short and long periods are documented and will be presented at the conference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-gender-gap-in-indian-language-wikipedias-2013-projects-outreach-and-outcome

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: We, Men, Women: Collective Learning in Bridging Indic Wikipedia Gender Gaps

Elisachang — 2016-08-17T02:37:01Z

There is no denying that non-English Wikipedias are disproportionally underrepresented in scholarly focus despite the significant role of an open knowledge society can play in smaller linguistic groups – local collaboration and communication, knowledge dissemination, as well as preservation of local language resources.

A presentation was made at the WikiIndia Conference 2016.

Likewise, for the issue of the Wikipedia gender gap, missing the discourse and context of the Indian language Wikipedias’ gender imbalance will be a great loss considering the potential it possesses in gender empowerment and the recognition of female’s accomplishment in the local communities.

In this action research, we approach the issue with localized lens to investigate the gender gaps in five Indian language Wikipedias (Kannada, Konkani, Telugu, Odia, and Marathi) and to recode female participants' experiences in editing, negotiating, and communicating. However, this is not an ordinary gender gap bridging plan, we are not only promoting the idea of female-inclusive open knowledge society, but also actively searching for effective incentives, tangible outcomes, and sustainable strategies to cope with the challenges in respective contexts. Most importantly, we hope to create an example for the establishment of “community feedback loops” for reflective learning. Combining practical approach with theories in Feminism and Social Network, we ask.

How do female and women’s organizations perceive Wikipedia and its use on knowledge production?
How do we incentivize females and various female organization and make them feel empowered through online contribution?
What type(s) of network are ideal for female newcomers? How can we improve cross-community/gender communication?
How can we build a more welcoming platform for collaboration?

Indian language Wikipedias may be small, but they are in the phase of much flexibility and opportunities to shape and reshape the cultures and dynamics. Through the cyclical process of an action reaction, narrowing gender gaps in our local Wikipedias is no longer discrete events of individual efforts – but a collective action, a mutual learning, as what Wikipedias were built for.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-we-men-women-collective-learning-in-bridging-indic-wikipedia-gender-gaps

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: How to better tell your Wikimedia Community Story using Media as a Tool

subha — 2016-08-17T02:24:19Z

The Wikimedia community has constantly struggled to a) reach out to masses and tell them about their contribution, and motivate people to contribute to the Wikimedia projects. Media plays a very important role in spreading the word about Wikimedia projects and the contributor community, and at times, encouraging the audience to contribute.

A presentation was made at the WikiConference India 2016. This was one of the submissions which was accepted.

This has not been a very successful trend in the movement so far that a large number of people have engaged on Wikimedia projects because of a media shoutout. But there is no doubt about media being a great tool to engage with a large number of people. Apart from the mainstream media, social media has also been a gamechanger in mobilizing masses. The audience in both these kinds of media demand a certain kind of content and storytelling. And it is not easy to create relevant content for an audience that is hungry for new stories. Also, dealing with mainstream media has a lot to do with interpersonal skills.

This workshop would cover a few best practices from lessons learned from several media-related exercises in the recent years. Some of these exercises come with success and some with failures with some specific learning. And these important takeaways will hopefully lead a path in creating some kind open education resources (OER) for the Wikimedia community. However, none of the methodologies that are going to be discussed here are going to be ready solutions to change the awareness about the Wikimedia movement overnight. But these will certainly help the participants map their own community stories. The interactive workshop will help the participants to make some roadmap for a regular and sustained engagement on media.

Those who are keen on learning about using different media tools and take their Wikimedia stories to a wider world should consider participating this. It would be beneficial if they come prepared with a list of challenges that they are facing in media outreach.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-how-to-better-tell-your-wikimedia-community-story-using-media-as-a-tool

Tulu Wikipedia Conference in Mangaluru

praskrishna — 2016-09-22T23:50:18Z

A Tulu Wikipedia conference organized by the Times of Kudla (Tulu name for Mangaluru) newspaper was held at Malki, near Mangaluru on August 13 and 14, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a presentation on Tulu Wikipedia.

Prominent Tulu Wikipedians Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana and Dr. Kishore Kumar Rai also talked about their experiences of making Tulu Wikipedia live.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/tulu-wikipedia-conference-in-mangaluru

Telugu Wikipedians create Articles on Punjab in Telugu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2016-08-12T14:02:20Z

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

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

Media Coverage

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

Coverage in Sakshi

Coverage in Eenadu

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

Wikipedia WikiMeetup at Bangalore

praskrishna — 2016-08-12T13:31:04Z

Bangalore based Wikipedians will gather for a meeting at the Centre for Internet and Society on Sunday, August 14, 2016 at 3.00 p.m.

Anyone interested in Wikipedia (user, contributor or curious about it). Wikipedians from any part of India or the world and anyone who is interested in Wikipedia! Meetup is open to members of all Wikimedia projects and Wikipedians from all languages. All are welcome, and we are especially interested in seeing newcomers to join the experienced Wikipedians/Wikimedians.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/wikipedia-wikimeetup-at-bangalore

Wikipedia launches in Tulu, its 23rd Indic language

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T13:56:00Z

Wikipedia has launched in Tulu, making it the 23rd Indian language Wiki, reports domain-b. The announcement was made at the Wikiconference India 2016 held in Chandigarh last weekend.

This was published on Medianama website on August 9, 2016.

The Tulu wiki is located at tcy.wikipedia.org, and has been in ‘incubation’ since 2008, basically still waiting to go live or active. However, it was reactivated in 2014 following meetings and workshops at the ‘World Tulu Conference’ held the same year. As of now, the Wiki has about 200 registered editors, of which it claims around 100 have more than 10 edits, with 8-10 active editors online on an average. Note that there are around 2 million Tulu speakers.

Other Indic language wikis: In September 2013, the Goa University had entered into a three year memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani Wikipedia, which was launched 6 months later. Similarly in August 2014, former Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar launched the ‘Bihar on Wikipedia’ campaign inviting people of the state to write about their villages, towns, and the unique culture of the state, its history, development over the years, eminent personalities and other important aspects of the state.

Wikipedia is currently available in 23 Indian languages including Tulu, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Note that in 2012, Wikipedians were digitizing Indian language, out-of-copyright texts online, trying to address the comparative paucity of Indic language texts online.

Wikipedia Indic language stats: As of June 2016, Wikipedia had 16 million page view per month on the Hindi wiki, with overall 106,844 articles. This is not a significant increase. According to this August 2011 report, there were 0.1 million Hindi articles on the platform, and 9 million overall views.

Ban for paid advocacy: In September last year, the editors at the English Wiki blocked 381 user accounts for ‘black hat’ editing. The platform claims that these users were engaged in undisclosed paid advocacy, the practice of accepting or charging money to promote external interests on Wikipedia without revealing their affiliation, a violation of Wikipedia’s terms of use.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/medianama-august-9-2016-vivek-pai-wikipedia-launches-in-tulu-23rd-indic-language

India's 23rd Regional Wikipedia Launches

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T03:14:58Z

A Tulu version has gone live on Wikipedia, making it the 23rd one in an Indian language to do so.

The blog post by Ranu P. was published by CCM.net on August 8, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

Tulu, an Indian language that is popular in the southern part of the country has received its own Wikipedia version — for which over 100 editors created 1,100 articles. The announcement was made on Aug. 6 during the Chandigarh-based WikiConference India 2016 by Vishwanatha Badikana and Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, two community organizers who made an 8-year-old dream come true. The greatest hope is that the Tulu wiki will lend support to the struggling language, which is used by just over 2 million native speakers who largely reside in Karnataka. Some research even suggests that it is among the earliest of Dravidian languages, which would make it roughly 2,000 years old.

"After we became [sic] live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump,' set up policies, administration structure, info boxes, and templates," said Dr. UB Panavaja, an engineer and a longtime supporter of regional language computing. In addition to the 23 already-launched Indian Wiki versions, which include Bengali, Manipuri, Hindi, Nepali, Punjabi, and Urdu, there are another 18 Indian languages that are still in the incubator stage awaiting publishing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/ccm-august-8-2016-ranu-p-india-23-regional-wikipedia-launches

Wikipedia now available in Tulu

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T03:05:28Z

In another boost to yet another Indian language, the Wikipedia in Tulu has gone live.

This was published by domain-b.com on August 8, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

The news was announced by two key community organisers on Saturday who helped to make an eight-year-dream come true, IANS reported.

Dr Vishwanatha Badikana, a PhD in Kannada literature in Mangalore (Karnataka) and Bharathesha, a mechanical engineer based in Muscat announced at the Wikiconference India 2016, India's second national Wikipedia meet in half a decade which is being held in Chandigarh this weekend.

Tulu, which is spoken by around 2 million speakers mostly in southwest Karnataka and in Kasaragod district of Kerala belongs to the family of Dravidian languages. According to some scholars, Tulu is among the earliest Dravidian languages with its roots going back some 2,000 years.

Wikipedia itself is available in 22 Indian languages, with Tulu becoming the 23rd. There are another one-and-half dozen Indian language Wikipedias under development at present. However, not all languages have an active wiki community.

Located at tcy.wikipedia.org, the Tulu Wikipedia had been in "incubation" since 2008 and the term was used to describe such online collaborately-crafted encyclopedias which were still waiting to go "live" or active and come online.

It was reactivated around 2014, following some meetings and workshops and the concept was also showcased that year at a "World Tulu Conference" stall in December.

"There are about 200 registered users (editors), out of which around 100 have more than 10 edits. On an average, there are about 8 to 10 active editors," Dr UB Pavanaja from the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and one of the mentors of Tulu Wikipedia, told The Hindu newspaper.

He further added that, "Vishwanatha Badikana, a Kannada professor, followed by Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, an engineer, are the highest contributors."

According to Pavanaja, the achievement would help create pressure on the government to include Tulu in the Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution.

Wikipedia is available in 22 Indian languages including, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

The inclusion of Tulu takes the count to 23.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/domain-b-august-8-2016-wikipedia-now-available-in-tulu

India's 23rd Regional Language Wikipedia Goes Live in Tulu

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T03:02:16Z

The Tulu Wikipedia has just gone live, giving another boost to yet another ancient Indian language otherwise struggling to keep up with the times and speedily changing technology.

Originally published by Indo Asian News Service, the blog post was mirrored by NDTV on August 8, 2016.

The news was announced by two key community organisers on Saturday who helped to make an eight-year-dream come true. Dr Vishwanatha Badikana, a PhD in Kannada literature in Mangalore (Karnataka) and Bharathesha, a mechanical engineer based in Muscat, announced this while attending Wikiconference India 2016, India's second national Wikipedia meet in half a decade being held in Chandigarh this weekend.

Tulu is a language spoken by around two million native speakers mainly in southwest Karnataka and in Kasaragod district, Kerala. It belongs to the Dravidian family of languages. Some scholars suggest Tulu is among the earliest Dravidian languages with its roots going back some 2000 years.

Wikipedia itself is available in 22 Indian languages, with Tulu becoming the 23rd. There are another one-and-half dozen Indian language Wikipedias in the incubator stage at present. Not all languages have an active wiki community.

Located at tcy.wikipedia.org, the Tulu Wikipedia has been in "incubation" since 2008. This term is used to describe such online collaborately-crafted encyclopedias which are still waiting to to go "live" or active and come online.

Around 2014, it was reactivated. Following some meetings and workshops, the concept was also showcased that year at a "World Tulu Conference" stall in December of that year.

After much work, some 1,100 articles (or 1,050 if one could ignore those which are not redirects) went live. There are currently about 100 editors who have made over 10 edits each.

"Dr Vishwanatha and Bharathesha are the number one and number two contributors," said Dr UB Panavaja, a former scientist and techie and long-term supporter of Kannada computing. Pavanaja currently looks after the CMR (Creating Movement Resources) of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society which works with some language groups to promote their Wikipedia presence.

"After we became live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump', set up policies, administration structure, info boxes and templates," said Pavanaja, describing the tools that any new Wikipedia needs to set up.

Scholars like the nineteenth missionary-linguist Bishop Robert Caldwell have called this language "peculiar and very interesting". According to him, "Tulu is one of the most highly developed languages of the Dravidian family. It looks as if it had been cultivated for its own sake."

The language has a lot of written literature and a rich oral literature such as the Epic of Siri, according to the Wikipedia itself.

In coastal Karnataka, both the Mangalore and Udupi areas today allow the language as an optional third-language in local schools.

This role in schooling makes it all the more mandatory to create encyclopaedic texts in the language, say its Wikipedia promoters. Mangalore University also has a Tulu language chair while St Aloysius's Radio Sarang community radio station broadcasts daily in this tiny language and the local All India Radio also broadcasts in the language.

Some five Kannada language representatives and one from Tulu are presently in Mohali-Chandigarh attending Wikiconference India 2016.

Indian Wikipedias include Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, besides, now, Tulu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/indo-asian-news-service-ndtv-august-8-india-23-regional-language-wikipedia-goes-live-in-tulu