Centre for Internet and Society

Community Digest—Estonians working on a new feedback system for Wikipedia articles

subha — 2016-02-27T06:30:41Z

Community digest is a weekly publication on Wikimedia Blog. This week, I have authored a section on the Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary that is being celebrated today. It includes a small section from a longer interview with Kannada Wikipedian Vasanth S.N. The two blogs on creating Odia-language character encoding converters I had written before in the Huffington Post and the DNA are also featured in the digest.

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog here.

Sites that rely on the cooperation of people need to be able to easily exchange information. When there are some problems with an article, you could always add some templates to specific places or point to them on talk page—but that can sometimes be painful and time consuming.

The problem can grow even greater when articles are written inside a Wikipedia Education Program. You may need to follow up with hundreds of students and provide them feedback so that they can easily understand what should they fix. This can be a rather tricky job when dealing with people who have never before written to Wikipedia.

For example, in Estonia we have a course called “Estonian Composition and Conversation” in the University of Tartu, where there are on average more than 200 students per year writing articles on Wikipedia. We are keenly interested in providing good quality feedback, but with that number of students and with the use of the usual wikisystem, that is hard to achieve.

So we needed a solution.

When using the usual method (the talk page), you need to point out where are all of the mistakes located and then express your concerns about them. With a lot of comments, that does get rather messy and it’s hard to understand where are those comments directed to; it’s not an ideal medium for feedback in massive scale and not that useful for neither the students nor the person giving feedback. So the goal was simple: to ease the process of giving feedback to students who write wikiarticles as their coursework.

What we did was to create a system called WikiComment.

What does it do? Well, at first it allows to add comments to exact letters/sentences/paragraphs to speed up the commenting process and make it easier to locate the issues. In addition to adding comments, it also provides various highlighting options and a possibility to strike through text. Secondly, it allows for better monitoring of the articles of interest. That means the wikiComment user has information about which pages have been modified and he or she can easily check if the changes have solved the marked questions.

We hope that this will make it easier to focus on text and to the quality of writing.

Obviously WikiComment could be used outside the education initiative and in many other ways as well, but that is just how it all started. For example we’ll soon add support for sites like Meta-Wiki, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wikinews, and Wikiquote, among others. Having a discussion about some details in grant request or talking about local tourist sites may have just become easier. But to really optimize the system and to make it as good as possible we’ll need your feedback, so please go on and test that site—if you have any suggestions, just let us know.

Ivo Kruusamägi, Estonian Wikipedian

In brief

Kannada Wikipedia anniversary: The Kannada Wikipedia is all set to celebrate its 13th anniversary. The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on 12 June 2003 with a message “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia in Kannada). However, it took over a year—on July 12, 2004 the first article about a city Shimoga was created. Over the last decade Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for the Kannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name—there were about 700,000 pageviews in December 2015. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (February) being the highest and 22 (May) the lowest and 80 being the count in last December. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. Since its inception, the project has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles.

The biggest hurdle, as explained by Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig, has been cleaning up the articles created by paid translations of Google when Kannada Wikipedia along with many other Indian language Wikipedias were used as testing grounds for improving Google Translate, a multilingual machine translation tool. Vasanth S.N., a Kannada Wikipedian who has cleaned up over 60 such articles prefers to use an existing good quality encyclopedia like the 16 volume Kannada Vishwakosha, published by Mysore University and relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the university, as a resource to create and improve articles. To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians are gathering at Saint Aloysius College Mangalore, Karnataka this 14th. The larger community, including long time Wikipedians and new members like the students faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs, will gather and participate in a day-long edit-a-thon and chalk out plans for the future.

Innovation and revolution in the Odia language: Wikimedian Subhashish Panigrahi has written two pieces recently. In dnaindia.com, he described a Unicode converter that in revolutionizing Internet access in the Odia language; in the Huffington Post, he wrote about why contributing and adding to Wikipedias in Indian language is so important.

Coming together across the divide: Saanjh (ਸਾਂਝ سانجھ), a Punjabi word which means collaboration, was an online edit-a-thon between the Gurmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia and Shahmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia in January 2016. The plan came together after two editors, one from each side, met at Wikimania 2015. Organized by the Punjabi Wikimedians User Group, 23 editors participated; you can read more about their story on Meta.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate, Wikimedia Foundation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-community-digest-estonians-working-on-new-feedback-system-for-wikipedia-articles

Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER

subha — 2016-02-27T06:00:20Z

My submission titled "Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER" under the theme of "Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education" has been selected for the OER16 conference to be held in Edinburg, Scotland from 19 to 20 April 2016.

GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) is a global initiative for making cultural data open targeting galleries, libraries, archives and museums in particular. GLAM projects are run in collaboration with these cultural institutions where the artifacts and other institutional collections get all sorts of digital treatment, from digitizing manuscripts and books to creating meta data and developing tools to automate and ease the life of contributors, building and 3D models of artifacts and creating multilingual virtual museum experience by using Wikipedia.

These institutions historically being the reservoir of knowledge need more attention with more digital innovation coming in day by day. There being a synergy between the fundamental focus of OER and GLAM initiative, it leaves scholars and GLAM and/or OER practitioners to explore this area that is currently not widely covered. GLAM projects are centered around data mining, digitizing and publishing the work in both machine and human readable forms. The output of all the GLAM projects could directly contribute to creating OERs classifying and customizing the OERs for different age groups and people with accessibility needs. This, in return will also benefit the GLAM projects and institutions for both expanding their reach and replicating these initiatives. The presentation will be around the best practices of several GLAM initiatives and how these projects could lead to create useful OERs. I will also shed some light on the methodology of creating OERs during the development of a GLAM project.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cultural-institution-aka-glam-for-more-oer

Books at a Click

praskrishna — 2016-06-18T17:52:06Z

The OdiaWikimedia community and Bhubaneswar-based Srujanika have come together to make rare science books available online for readers, students & science educators.

The article by Diana Sahu was published in the New Indian Express on January 9, 2016.

Readers can now access rare science books in Odia language at Odia Wikisource, an online library of popular books in the language. The Odia Wikimedia community and Bhubaneswar-based Srujanika have come together to make these books available online for readers, students and science educators. This apart, books of Sahitya Akademi award winning writer Jagannath Prasad Das have been added to the library. Srujanika's co-founder Puspashree Pattnaik recently provided 700 popular science books that were published by the organisation to the Wikimedia community for digitisation. “These books were appreciated by many and even in demand after going out of print. Hence, we thought if these can be shared under free licence then they can reach a wider population. Wikipedia contributors can use these as resources and enhance science content in Odia Wikipedia as well", says Puspashree, a former teacher. She along with her husband Nikhil Pattnaik, a former scientist with the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, had published several science books as part of their project to popularise the subject among children. With support from Vigyan Prasar in New Delhi, the couple had also documented rare works of science published in books, magazines, periodicals and newspapers from 1850 to 1950 in electronic format, a few years back. Around science 765 articles written over a century have been put on CDs and DVDs according to the names of authors and year of publication. The science books have been digitised by volunteers of the Odia Wikimedia community and the Centre for Internet and Society, a non-profit working for supporting Indian language Wikipedia projects and the communities.

Pushpashree Pattnaik

Similarly, the Wikimedia community has re-licensed 30 books of Das under a free license CC-by-SA 4.0. His books can now be accessed at https://orwikisource.org and anyone can use them for academic or research work. “My tryst with internet started very late. I was introduced to digital books through Srujanika's online version of Purnachandra Odia Bhashakosha - comprising 9,500 pages in seven volumes- which was impossible to handle on the writing table. That made me think how convenient it would be to have Odia books avail. able on the internet. As a beginning. I decided to put my own writings on the internet", said Das. Prior to Das, eminent writers and litterateurs Debi Prasanna Pattanayak, Manoj Panda, Subrat Prusty, Bharat Majhi and organisations like 'Manik Biswanath Smrutinyasa' and Aama Odisha' had come forward to make their books available online for free using Odia Wikisource as a platform. At present, Odia Wikisource has 280 Odia books and all are either under Public Domain or Creative Commons Share Alike licences. A team of 10 active contributors, known as "Uikiali' in Odia, are digitising books of various genres ranging from science writing, fiction to 0dia classics. “Apart from the science writ. ings, we are also working on digitising the biography of Nandini Satpathy which has been published by Ashisa Ranjan Mohapatra of Srimati Nandini Satpathy Memorial Trust,” says Mrutyunjaya Kar, administrator of Odia Wikisource and Odia Wikipedia who has been contributing to the Wikimedia projects in Odia, Hindi, Sanskrit and English for the last four years. Odia Wikisource is a sister project of Odia Wikipedia.

These books were appreciated by many and going out of print. If these can be shared under free licence then they can reach a wider population.
Pushpashree Pattnaik

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/new-indian-express-january-9-2016-diana-sahu-books-at-a-click

Wikipedia initiative - Celebrating legacy of Bangalore Blue grapes online

praskrishna — 2016-01-29T15:44:36Z

Black is beautiful, and it can go places if it is well researched. When HL Omshivaprakash wrote a Wikipedia article about Karnataka's bidriware, the metal handicraft where gleaming black bowls and hookahs are dotted with delicate silver strips, he didn't expect it to be picked up by the French and Swedes.

Read the article published in the Times of India here. Subhashish Panigrahi gave inputs.

His article has now been translated into their languages. Though it might not lead to more money for the struggling artists of Bidar, they might get an edge while marketing their wares, says Omshivaprakash. This is the advantage that a week-long editathon hopes to achieve. Editors of the online encyclopaedia are celebrating Republic Day by encouraging people to upgrade and contribute articles on those arts, crafts and goods unique to various parts of India. "People are already working on 15 products from Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Assam and West Bengal," says Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikipedian and language activist.

India has 213 goods and crafts with geographical indication (GIs) tags. The GI mark is a kind of trademark, which indicates that a product's reputation is linked to its origins in a particular area. Of 213 GI tags, only 70 have English entries. So while intricacies of Muga silk-making in Assam and cultivating Bangalore Blue grapes are explained in detail in English, Alleppey coir has only a sketchy Malayalam entry.

"People should know the history of each item. For example, they should know how Kondapalli toys from near Vijayawada are made,"says Nageswara Rao Gullapalli.

Omshivaprakash, who created a signboard outside Bidar Fort last year, with a QR code that allows users to read the relevant wiki entry on their mobile phones, says a change in design can make a difference."The QR code was etched in bidri to create a socio-economic link between readers and artisans. Though the art is expensive, the artists are not paid well,"he says.

It is this desire to unearth new facts that will see Santosh Shinga, an IIT-B researcher, delving deep into Nagpur oranges, Nashik grapes and Mahabaleshwar strawberries. "I am from Nagpur and interested in fruits,"says Shinga, who knows a bit of orange farming.The only exception in his list is Puneri pagadi, the elaborate headgear recently spotted on actor Ranveer Singh in Bollywood movie 'Bajirao Mastani'.

Panigrahi hopes to finish the edits in English by January 30, right in time when the event wraps up by January 31. Karnataka, which tops the list with 30 GI goods, has only a handful of articles and images, says Panigrahi.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/times-of-india-january-27-2016-wikipedia-initiative

GI-tagged products to get Wiki pages

praskrishna — 2016-01-27T16:33:47Z

Ever realised that the famous, red hot Naga Mirchi (a special variety of chilli from Nagaland) doesn’t have a Wikipedia page?

The article by S. Anandan was published in the Hindu on January 26, 2016.

And that Cannanore Home Furnishings — textile home furnishings from Kannur — is a brand with geographical indication (GI) registration? Wiki, which is an open and free repository of knowledge on the Internet, does not have pages, in English and other recognised Indian languages, on most GI-tagged Indian products.

The Centre for Internet and Society-Access to Knowledge — popular as CIS-A2K— which is a not-for-profit movement to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development, launched an India Edit-a-thon for seven days from January 25 to generate Wikimedia pages in English and Indian languages on Indian products recognised by the GI Registry of India.

“Kerala alone boasts 23 products, mostly agricultural, with the GI tag. But Malayalam Wiki doesn’t have information on all of them. Besides the Aranmula Kannadi, none of the other GI-tagged products from Kerala have Wiki pages in English. Nationally, there are about 213 GI-tagged products and we know nothing of most of them. There isn’t a single article on many of them even in English. It’s in this context that the Edit-a-thon becomes extremely relevant. It’s being held to celebrate the Republic Day,” says Wiki activist Manoj Karingamadathil.

13 pages already

The campaign, launched on Monday, has evoked enthusiastic response from Wiki activists who have begun to create pages on most of these products. At the time of going to press, 13 GI-tagged Kerala products have got Wiki pages and editors are at work to generate content for these products in English.

Apart from existing Wiki editors, freshers may also be part of the campaign. “All they have to do is to create a Wiki account before sending in researched content,” points out Mr. Manoj. The campaign will be on till January 31.

Seven-day India Edit-a-thon begins; Wiki activists begin creating pages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-hindu-s-anandan-january-26-2016-gi-tagged-products-to-get-wiki-pages

This Multilingual Edit-a-thon wants to Improve Indian Content on Wikipedia

subha — 2016-01-28T07:23:09Z

Ever wondered how many articles the Kannada Wikipedia or the Hindi Wikipedia have relating to India, its social history, literary and cultural heritage and the journey of over 1600 languages?

The article was published in DNA on January 26, 2016.

India has over 235 Geographical Indications (GI) spread over the length and breadth of the 29 states and 7 union territories. GI identifies goods or products as originating in a region or locality and indicates the unique characteristic or particular qualities it has as a result of being made in that area. Out of India's 235 GI, as identified by the Geographical Indications Registry of the Government of India, there exist only about 70 English Wikipedia entries. The state of many Indian language Wikipedias is even worse where a vast majority of the identified GIs and other important topics related to art, craft, cuisine, culture, attire and tradition are missing from Wikipedia. Even Karnataka, which has the maximum number of GIs at 30, has only a handful of articles and a few images on Wikipedia.

This Republic Day, 75 Wikipedia editors who are volunteers and represent 18 Indic languages are coming together online to show their patriotism in a unique way. It is not by hoisting the tri-colour and talking about India's glorious past, but by enhancing Wikipedia content related to the GIs of India in their own languages. Those who are multilingual are even going to create Wikipedia articles in two or three different languages. The multilingual edit-a-thon started on January 25 and will go on until January 31. The event is focused on improving existing Wikipedia content related to GIs of India, translating them into Indic languages and also creating new articles. Being an online event, it has also opened up the door to many contributors outside India. A few participants from Nepal and Bangladesh have signed up for the event.

So little of the great journey of our products with unique quality is available in the public domain. The saddest part is that there is literally a bottom level existence for content related to Indian GIs on Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia, which is often the first link a web search throws up. This sort of lack of access to knowledge related to India is not new. Even outside of Wikipedia, there is very less that exists about the many stories worth telling from our country. However, crying over the low access to knowledge would never solve the real problem.

This edit-a-thon is just a digital experiment but can be a great way of doing digital activism for the preservation of languages and taking the uniqueness of India to millions of people in their own languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/this-multilingual-edit-a-thon-wants-to-improve-indian-content-on-wikipedia

Why It's Essential To Grow Indian-Language Wikipedias

subha — 2016-05-28T06:52:53Z

On 15 January, Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia celebrated its 15th birthday, meeting this milestone with 36 million articles in more than 290 languages (the English-language Wikipedia alone has crossed the 5-million article mark). But here I want to address some major questions that we need to ask as Indians.

This was published by Huffington Post on January 25, 2016. Also mirrored on Global Voices on February 26, 2016. The post was translated into Greek by Maria Souli. It was translated into Spanish by Daniela Diaz and into Russian by GV Russian

First, what is the state of Indian-language Wikipedia projects? What does India have to take from and give to Wikipedia?

With the growth of free and open source software in India, people are equipped with more freedom than ever. Especially with the recent federal policy-level changes, the nation is enjoying better collaboration with people of different cultures speaking different languages.

According to UNESCO, 197 of the total of 1652 Indian languages are dying despite having a long literary and linguistic heritage.

However, there is a huge gap in the access to knowledge on the internet domain. Of a population of about 1.26 billion only about 15-18% people are connected online, largely from mobile devices. A tiny fraction of this population comprises the technical community. It would be useful to have a metric on the percentage of this community's contribution to grow the languages of this country and its cultural heritage.

Wikipedia as a family

Wikipedia is not just an encyclopaedia. It is also a "family" of several other Open Knowledge members. Wikipedia itself is available in over 290 languages, but it also has other multilingual sister projects such as Wikisource (an online library of many public domain and other important texts), Wikimedia Commons (the world's largest repository of media files and documents), Wikibooks (a free library of educational textbooks), Wikivoyage (a free and open travel guide) and Wiktionary (a database of various languages).

These projects don't just house millions of images, videos, documents and texts, but allow anyone to contribute their knowledge to this ever deepening pool of information. Four Indian languages made an early entry to the Wiki-world back in 2002 -- Assamese, Malayalam, Odia and Punjabi.

Language neutrality

According to UNESCO, 197 of the total of 1652 Indian languages are dying despite having a long literary and linguistic heritage. It's quite shocking. In a blog post on content localisation, social entrepreneur Rajesh Ranjan asks if free and open source software can help save these dying languages. In the context of Wikipedia, there are already 23 South Asian-language projects. Out of these 20 are languages listed in the 8th schedule of the Constitution of India. Many might not have noticed that the "en" in the URL of Wikipedia that denotes the language code of English could be altered with "or" for Odia Wikipedia or "pa" for Punjabi Wikipedia.

Most Wikipedia projects in Indian language projects are relatively small compared to their counterparts. But the Wikimedia communities are thriving.

There are a fairly large number of native speakers waiting out there to access knowledge in their own languages.

When only parts of government websites are available in Hindi, the Hindi Wikipedia has crossed 10 million articles already. The Tamil and Malayalam Wikipedia communities have played a central part in implementing Wikipedia basics learning in the state-run school syllabus. Needless to say that these communities have played a significant role in implementing several free and open source software by pushing for policy-level change. Many Indian languages are in the pipeline to become active Wikipedia projects under the scope of the Wikimedia Incubator.

Maithili Wikipedia and Goan Konkani Wikipedia are the two Indian-language Wikipedias that have gone live in recent years. The world has seen how digital activism has brought a new life to the Hebrew language. There are a fairly large number of native speakers waiting out there to access knowledge in their own languages. Wikipedia could be a great tool for digital activism with openness and sharing.

Addressing gender bias in Wikipedia: Implications for India

India tops South Asia in the gender inequality index in the entire South Asia. The female literacy rate is an alarmingly low 65.46% as compared to 82.14% for men. This disparity is evident in many other sectors as well as in politics.

Digital India aims at digital literacy and availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages. This is closely aligned with the Wikimedia movement's goal....

But gender bias is not just a problem in India. The global free and open source software (FOSS) community has always been worried about the low presence of women contributors -- in the range of 2-5% range. Wikimedia Foundation's former executive director admitted that Wikipedia, like many other collaborative and open projects, does not have a conducive environment for women. But the Wikimedia community and Wikimedia Foundation are both working on improving this state of affairs. Indian-language Wikipedia projects are directly impacted by this global drive, be it the Women's History Month edit-a-thon where Wikipedia content largely related to women are improved every year or the Lilavati's Daughters project where biographies of Indian women scientists were created and enriched in Wikipedia projects.

Complementing Digital India

With a population of over 354 million netizens India still has a long way to go in increasing Indian language content on the web. The Government of India's new campaign Digital India aims at digital literacy and availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages. This is closely aligned with the Wikimedia movement's goal to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge. In addition to Wikipedia, many other open educational resources and free knowledge projects that are not already a part of the Digital India campaign signal the need for the federal-run campaign to be more collaborative and open. Community-government collaborations like the NROER project to make NCERT books under Creative Commons licenses and IT@School project in the state of Kerala to provide education using free and open tools have gained massive traction and helped more Indian language content come online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/huffington-post-subhashish-panigrahi-january-25-2016-why-its-essential-to-grow-indian-language-wikipedias

Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon

praskrishna — 2016-01-26T15:19:56Z

Between 25 January and 31 January 2016, CIS-A2K is organizing an edit-a-thon to celebrate India's republic day. The goal of this edit-a-thon is to create and improve Geographical Indications articles.

Expectations

We expect that if you participate in this edit-a-thon, you'll create or expand at least 3 articles. However you may work on as many as articles you want.

Rules

For an article to be considered as part of this Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon, it must adhere to the following rules

The new article must be created between 0:00 UTC on 25 January 2016 and 23:59 UTC on 31 January 2016.
Creation/Expansion rule: If you are creating a new article the new article must have a size of at least 3,500 bytes and a minimum length of roughly 300 words (the word count excludes templates, infoboxes, references, etc.), If you are expanding an existing article, you need to expand this article by at least 3000 bytes, (the word count excludes templates, infoboxes, references, etc.)
The articles should not copyvio content and should follow verifiability and other important policies of Wikipedia.
The articles should have decent references;
The article must not be purely machine translated.
There should not be any maintenance tags in the articles
The article must have a direct relation to Geographical Indications in India (see Proposed articles).

Participants

Please add your username below. If you can not find your community name, please add a section using level 3 header (eg. === Ukrainian Wikipedia ===). We also encourage you to start an event page on your Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/geographical-indications-in-india-edit-a-thon

Kannada Wikipedia edit-a-thon for Mechanical Engineering students of Sagara

Ananth Subray — 2016-03-01T13:56:54Z

In Sagara, Karnataka, a Kannada Wikipedia edit-a-thon is being planned to be organised during January 26-27.

Kannada Wikipedia has turned 13 this year. Started in June 2003, the free Kannada-language online encyclopedia is one of the major resources in the language on the Internet. With over 19700 and even with many broader topics like art, literature, politics, science and culture covered in Kannada Wikipedia, there is significantly low content about Mechanical Engineering. Mechanical Engineering enthusiasts of the city are coming together to bridge this gap by creating and enhancing content in Kannada on the internet. Out of the three days, the whole day of the 25th is dedicated for clicking pictures of historical places of the city which will additionally contribute to articles related to the city. The event is being organised by the Kannada Wikimedia community that voluntarily contributes to grow Kannada Wikipedia and several other Kannada Wikimedia projects, and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge programme. The edit-a-thon will include demonstration and practice sessions of input in Kannada script, basics of Wikipedia editing and its policies and guidelines, searching for references from various journals and notable books, and translation of technical content, and is open to all. Anant Subray, Programme Associate who is the organiser of the event could be contacted at 9739811664 for more information.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/kannada-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-for-mechanical-engineering-students-of-sagara

Read Bengali, Malayalam classics online as free Wiki libraries grow

praskrishna — 2016-01-29T15:51:09Z

Content Includes Classics In Malayalam, Bengali.

The article by Sandhya Soman was published in the Times of India on January 10, 2016.

It was a hunt that took Shiju Alex to many places. Finally, his quest ended at Dharmaram College library in Bengaluru as Alex got hold of a copy of the firstever printed book in Malayalam. He scanned it promptly and volunteers uploaded the text on to Malayalam Wikisource, one of the free online libraries run by Wikipedia. Nasim Ali returned to Wikipedia editing only because fellow Odias were reaching out on social media to help upload the 13-volume Bhagavata Mahapuranam.Now, the entire work is available for free at Odia Wikisource.

Actions speak louder than words when it comes to preserving books in regional languages. Indian versions of Wikisource have more than 1 lakh pages of classic epics, philosophical tracts, and novels and poems in 10 languages. And the num bers are growing. “These are the books that we grow up with and connect emo tionally. Most of us would like to see them online,“ said Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikipedian and programme officer at the Centre for Internet and Society .

As Wikipedians come together in Bengaluru on Sunday to celebrate 15 years of editing and curating the encyclopedia in India, more such stories will be told. The growth has been tremendous in Indian language content creation, especially when it comes to setting up Wikisources, said A Ravishankar, programme director at the Wikimedia India chapter. Malayalam has 26,332 pages, including around 200 of the seminal books in the language. While Telugu has 29,039 pages, Bengali has around 11,000. Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada, Oriya, Marathi, Gujarati and Assamese libraries are also getting bigger. The content ranges from religious texts such as Ramayan and Bible to first-ever printed literary works.

“Most of these are books in the public domain or the ones relicensed with Creative Commons licences. This allows anyone to edit or make a copy of the work, making it reusable,“ said Panigrahi. Some of the relicensed works include the Kannada Vishwakosha brought out by University of Mysore.

It isn't easy to get works online. Alex finds it difficult to procure the original texts to create their PDF versions. “Every time I go to Kerala, I look for old books,“ said Alex, who uploads the PDFs on a public domain for others to upload them. Editors are also not easy to come by . Panigrahi took to social media to find a new set of editors when he was trying to upload the Bhagavatha volumes. “Wiki's volunteer-editors have their hands full. So we appealed on social media and many people signed up,“ he said.

But the effort is worth it, said Alex. Every time he unearths an old book and posts the link on his Facebook page, the reactions are full of surprise. “Many from the younger generation don't know that Samkshepa Vedartham (the first printed work in Malayalam) was printed in Rome. Also, researchers write to me saying they are happy to see the old books online,“ he said.

Students Pitch In

The Wikimedia Foundation has tied up with various colleges to help with typing and proof-reading. Around 120 students of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences in Bhubaneswar typed stanzas from the Bhagavata while Christ University students from Bengaluru uploaded chunks of the Kannada Vishwakosha as part of their curriculum.

Tech Hurdle

Though the project started in 2006 with Malayalam Wikisource, it spread to other Indian languages around five years ago. The biggest hurdle remains technology as the open source optical character recognition (OCR) software isn't compatible with many Indian languages. “Google's OCR that was launched last year is much better as it works with most Indian languages,“ said Ravishankar. The new software “extracts text from images of any printed text -and sometimes even handwriting, which opens the door to old texts, manuscripts, and more,“ reads Panigrahi's blog post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-times-of-india-january-10-2016-sandhya-soman-read-bengali-malayalam-classics-online-as-free-wiki-libraries-grow

Report of Konkani Wikipedia's progress (July-December 2015)

rahim — 2016-02-05T02:49:29Z

Konkani language is one of the 22 languages recognized by Indian union in 8th schedule. As per the 2007 census there are about 7.4 million Konkani speakers.[1] Konkani language has its own Wikipedia created on 15th June 2015. This blog post will try to put out Konkani Wikipedia's growth from a perspective based on Wikimedia stats.

Konkani language has varied scripts used by its speakers. There are more than six different scripts in which Konkani people seem to be writing, of these, Devanagari (same as Hindi, Marathi), Romi (Roman or Latin script) and Kannada script are more popular. The project went out of incubation and became a live Wikipedia project as Goan Konkani Wikipedia (language code gom and is available at gom.wikipedia.org).The Konkani community that contributes on Wikipedia is mostly present in Goa with a few contributors living elsewhere.

Below is the last 6 months' statistics of Goan Konkani Wikipedia:

	Total Editors	New editors	Active editors	Very active editors	Article count	New article created per month
July 2015	124		8	4	2100	8
August 2015	125	1	6	3	2300	6
September 2015	125		5	4	2400	1
October 2015	125		5	3	2400	1
November 2015	125		2		2400

Observations:

As we see the total number editors is at a good state as compared to other language Wikipedia projects that have gone live recently. Also the article count seem to be significant.
But the growth in total number of editors is not that encouraging and needs to be worked upon. This might be probably because of unawareness of Konkani Wikipedia among the native language speakers.
The active editor count has been declining over the 6 months. For the month of December, there has been no activity from the active community on Konkani Wikipedia.
Number of the most active Wikipedians will grow once we proactively engage with the existing community in organising outreach to bring new editors.
There has been no new article created on Konkani Wikipedia in November and December at all. This is an alarming issue.
This is slightly disturbing as we can see from stats tables.
Of the 40 or so active Konkani Wikipedians, only 2 of them have done some small activity on Konkani Wikipedia, whereas the rest have not visited the site for almost 3 months.
The community needs to be engaged with more and there is a need for bringing leadership. May be Konkani language encyclopedia Konkani Vishwakosh that was relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license by the Goa University will be a useful resource to enhance the Goan Konkani Wikipedia.

Note:
1. Mikael Parkvall, "Världens 100 största språk 2007" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/konkani-wikipedia-progress-from-july-to-december-2015

TTT 2015

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:36:25Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) conducted a four day training workshop for Wikimedians all over India in order to facilitate conducting and organising outreach activities for promotion of Wikimedia activities within Indian language communities. Wikimedians from 21 language communities had participated in this training workshop including Wikipedians working for Nepali and Maithili Wikipedia.

CIS-A2K was successful in providing an idea exchange platform during the TTT workshop. Wikipedians from all over India got a chance to discuss their respective Wikimedia projects and identify best practices that could be customised for their own Wikimedia projects.

CIS-A2K conducted TTT 2015 with a clear objecive of training Indian Wikimedians in conducting effective outreach activites, As a reflective exercise on the efficacy of our TTT camp held in Bangalore during February, 2015 we are now conducting follow-up with the participants and I have contacted three Wikipedians (for the month of November 2015) and following are the updates:

Sailesh Patnaik (Odia Wikimedian):

Activities till now:

Attended Google I/O Bhubaneswar to deliver a talk about Wikipedia movement.
Has organized a workshop at KIST Bhubaneswar with 50+ participants.
Was invited by GDG Bhubaneswar group to deliver a talk about Wikipedia project during Google Dev Fest.
Presented a seminar at CET Bhubaneswar after the invitation from the organizing committee of the Perception (The Annual tech fest of CET , Bhubaneswar).

Upcoming Activities

Planning to organize a Wiki Takes Bhubaneswar photowalk and am also planning a GLAM project with a Cooperative society powered by Central Government and spread Open Source movement in Odisha.

V.T. Narayanan and Sayant Mahato (Samskritam Wikipedians):

Activities till now:

In May 2015, Samskrita Bharati organized a camp in Kalladka.
In July 2015 : Rashtriya Sanskrit Samsthan, Sringeri (Now Sringa Giri) organized a symposium for their staff and students.
In August 2015, Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidya Peeta, Tirupathi organized introductory classes on Wikipedia. Sayant Mahato attended the programme and expained in detail about Sanskrit Wikipedia.
Later in August 2015, at Aksharam, Bangalore, Samskrita Bharati conducted a " Medha Shibiram" exclusively oriented to youngsters and students who are based outside India like in USA. The Shibiram was well received both by the students and their parents. The participants were very interested to know about Sanskrit Wikipedia.
Samskrita Bharati is engaged in the work of editing the existing articles in Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ttt-2015

Touch Point Report: Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University and St. Aloysius College, Managalore

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:37:14Z

CIS-A2K conducts Wikipedia in Education programme at St. Aloysius colege, Mangalore. This partnership is unique as it provides to us a pool of editors for three Wikimedia projects, i.e: Kannada, Tulu and Konkani.

Touch point Report:

St. Aloysius

With editors from St. Aloysius college taking lead in organising 13^th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia anniversary, Kannada Wikipedia is growing in Mangalore and can be expected to produce content and engagement regularly similar to Bangalore and Mysore volunteers.

Activites

Translation of system messages for Tulu Wikipedia
Creating Tulu WP tutorial videos
Guiding St Aloysius College Student interns
Planning of 13^th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia anniversary

Reporting on the learning: PEG application created after extensive discussion with the student volunteers and Mr. Vishwanth Badikana who is primary coordinator of the event.

New developments: A possible partnership with Karnataka Tulu Academy is being explored, this could lead to content donation.

Failures: Non-availabilty of scanners hampered our chances of securing some important primary resources that would have been useful for content generation.

Primary Contact: Mr. Vishwanath Badikana,

Christ University

Introduction: A2K team is implementing its largest Wikipedia in Education programme at Christ University. This programme has been under operation since 2013 and has seen multiple revisions regarding: faculty engagement, evaluation process, student contributions and A2K team's responsibilties.

Activites: Edit-a-thon on Wikivoyage organised at Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University, Bangalore

Reporting on the learning: 1) As the edit-a-thon was happening on English Wikivoyage and A2K team had not intimated about the event to the larger community, there were instances of accounts being blocked and ip address being blocked as well.

A2K conducted Wikivoyage edit-a-thon and was surprised to see that many tourist places in India do not find mention on this Wikimedia project.

New developments: Interest shown by the faculty of Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University to host the student assignments on Wikimedia projects.

Failures: A2K was unable to help students to upload images onto commons.wikimedia.org during the session. A follow up session is being planned.

Primary Contact: Ms. Mugdha Kulkarni, mugdha.shailendra@christuniversity.in

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/department-of-tourism-studies-christ-university-st-aloysius-college

Analysis of Institutional Partnerships: University of Mysore and Guru G Learning Labs

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:39:15Z

University of Mysore considered to be one of the most prestigious institutions in the country has been famous for its innovative pedagogic techniques and opening up for students various avenues of knowledge acquisition.

The Kannada Encyclopedia project that was taken up by the Kuvempu Kannada Adhyana Samsthe, (KIKS), Manasagangothri, Mysore was one of its kind during its inception. It is safe to say that though Kannda has seen many other projects and attempts towards compiling encyclopedias, to this day the Vishwakoshas produced by University of Mysore are among the top picks regarding quality of the content, scope of the information and its reach with the general public. Many other encyclopedia projects such as “Bala Vignana Kosha” compiled by Shivaram Karanth, “Jnana Gangothri” by Niranjana, the “Kananda Sahitya Vishwakosha” from the Kannada University, Hampi have provided encyclopedic content to the Kannada readers.

The idea of the University of Mysore complied Vishwakoshas was simple. It seeked to provide basic and elemenatry information about key topics all around the universe (physical, spiritual, material, cultural, social, behavioural, political and many other domains of knowledge) to the general public. The intention was to make information accessible and easily understandable. It was not expected to educate or assist people in gaining profieciency regarding a certain topic but was expected to provide salient features, brief history and concise introduction.

Rationale for Institutional partnership:

The compilation of topics that were to be part of the Vishwakosha was done alphabetically and till date 13 Vishwakoshas have been produced along with one Kannada Vishaya Vishwakosha which exclusively deals with matters pertaining to Kannada land, language, literature, politics, culture, entertainment and other aspects of Kannada life. The Vishwakosha project was a method to democratise the process of production of knowledge. People from all walks of life were invited to contribute to the Vishwakosha along with the academicians and researchers. The submissions were then scrutinised by the review committee and was edited, information added as per the requirements. As this was not a text only Vishwakosha many attempts were made to source images as well. These were not used as ornamental or page filling purpose but was also informative in its own way with adequate meta data.

These encyclopedias have been extremely popular with the Kannada audience both for the content and for its competitive pricing. Prasaranga, the publication division of University of Mysore had also offered an discount for people who would purchase the entire set of Vishwakoshas at a special rate. The Vishwakosha project faced many problems and the last volume of the Vishwakosha was released in the year , while the first volume was released in . University of Mysore has also digitised the Vishwakoshas and made it avaialable for general public on a CD.

Plan of Action:

Access to Knowledge team sought to bring these treasure troves of Knowledge onto the digital platform and update the information available on these Vishwakoshas. It was a shot in the arm for the activities being conducted by CIS-A2K when University of Mysore agreed to re-release all of its encyclopedias under free licence for the benefit of larger Kannada community. University of Mysore also agreed to handover soft copies of the few encyclopedias (that were already digitised) to create and redirect content towards Kannada Wikipedia.

A2K team has conducted three skill building and Wikipedia orientation workshops with the students of University of Mysore in order to kick start the content generation activities. These workshops were received very positively by the students. However due to lack of an active community and serious infrastructural issues the students could not continue with the activities that had been planned. Due to the inactivity of these new volunteers we have witnessed a decrease in the activity of content generation effort as aimed earlier.

CIS-A2K facilitated extracting the legacy text from the soft-copies, converting them to Unicode, distributing the files among volunteers and Christ University interns and uploading them to Kannada Wikisource. These articles will serve as primary material for new content generation on Kannada Wikipedia. CIS-A2K celeberated Open Knowledge Day in collaboration with University of Mysore.

The non availability of infrastructual requirement, administrative difficulties such as scheduling of academic calendar offered the A2K team many invaluable lessons towards fostering an institutional partnership. A2K team adopted corrective measures and has been using the encyclopedias donated by University of Mysore as a primary reference for the subsequent edit-a-thons. A2K has also created a project page on Meta to attract Kannada Wikimedians towards content generation.

Outcome and Output:

A2K team utilised its institutional partnership with Christ University in the initial stages and digitised volumes of Kannada Encyclopedias. These were used both as references for the edit-a-thons conducted by CIS-A2K and as a primary reference material that was curated into an independent article on Kannada Wikipedia. Many Kannada Wikimedians have joined hands with A2K in acheiving this. This is an on-going activity.

Plans for Future:

As University of Mysore has rich archival collection particulalry in Indian Languages, A2K team intends to talk to individual departments to bring this content to Open Knowledge repositiries.

A2K team would like to involve various Departments to dedicate some staff on an hourly basis towards speedy completion of the project.

The existing MoU is understood as a one time activity of content donation (print and e copy of Vishwakosha) where as A2K would like to continue this activity as a long term engagement that will facilitate in building research skills and writing skills.

A2K team intends to request to University of Mysore should select/suggest some student volunteers for the digitisation project. With the inclusion of Kannada PA A2K team would collaborate with key Departments at the University of Mysore to conduct digitisation and translation sprints that will be facilitated by and other Wikimedians.

A2K team would like to collate all the new articles created with the help of the content donated by University of Mysore and circulate it as a newsletter on a monthly basis and sent to the Kannada community and University of Mysore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/analysis-of-institutional-partnerships-university-of-mysore-and-guru-g-learning-lab

Community Prioritisation of Content Donation: Kannada Wikisource

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:42:09Z

CIS-A2K has initiated a community consultation in order to prioritise and streamline the work on Wikisource projects across FLA. Due to the commitment of volunteers from the respective FLA and the institutional partnerships that A2K has developed we have been able to bring a large corpus of content under free licence into our Wikisource projects. CIS-A2K promotes both content donation and content acquisition strategies in order to bring in free licence content.

The re-releasing of the content under CC-BY-SA is a difficult task no doubt, but the even more difficult task is to get the donated content digitised and made available on Wikisource. As this activity involves three intermediary steps of scanning the original document, uploading the same on commons.wikimedia.org and finally recreate the same page on Wikisource by typing.

It is common knowledge that Indian Language Wikimedia communities consist of very few volunteers and in many communities it is Wikipedia that is the chief attraction for volunteers. This compounds the problem towards work that has to be done on Wikisource. To overcome this problem CIS-A2K has initiated a community consultation and prioritisation effort. CIS-A2K consults community in form of posts on Village pump, mailing lists and other channels of communication and update them about the overall content donated towards Wikisource projects and requests for suggestions and feedback as to the plan to digitse and bringing the content on Wikisource.

For the month of November, 2015 CIS-A2K discussed the plan with the Kannada community Wikimedians and proposed a plan of aggregating all the content that has been donated towards Kannada Wikisource and copyright lapse content that has been identified by Wikimedians. A2K team is currently utilising its institutional partnership with Christ University in digitising the content of Sri. Niranjana a prominent Kannada author that was donated by Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana. As a result of this collaboration with the community A2K team shall be posting a comprehensive list of the content donated to Kannada Wikisource along with copyright lapse books that are available digitally on Digital Library of India and Osmania University Digital Library and other such platforms.

This consultation process with the Kannada Wikimedia community also seeded an idea of creating a 'Book Bank' for Kannada Wikimedians. The objective of the book bank is to provide authentic references, citation material and other primary sources of information for content generation. As a first step towards building of the proposed book bank, we have purchased encyclopaedic material on Stone Inscriptions found in Karnataka, Women writers of Karnataka, Literary history of Karnataka and Kannada Dictionaries. The material acquired under 'Book Bank' will serve as resources for community and will be provided to the community members upon request for the same.

Following lists provide information about the current status of projects undertaken on Kannada Wikipedia:

Projects which are active on Wikisource:

Vimochane - 50 pages to be typed out of 355
Abhaya - 63 to be typed of 326 pages
Doorada Nakshatra - 23 typed out of 175
Rangammana Vathara - 23 to be typed of 209 pages
Ekangini - 41 typed of 228 pages
Kalyanaswami - 100 typed of 251

These books are scanned and uploaded on Kannada Wikisource

Books to be uploaded on Wikisource:

Chirasmarane
Mrutyunjaya
Deekshe
Navodaya
Palike banda panchamruta
Swami Aparampara

Books available to be scanned:

Banashankari
Nandagokula

CIS-A2K has visited the following libraries in order to optimise the efforts put into Kannada Wikisource:

1) Central Library, Cubbon Park, Bangalore

2) Kannada Shaitya Parishat, Chamarajpet, Bangalore

3) B.M. Shri Pratishtana Library, Bangalore

4) Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs, Basavanagudi, Bangalore

The visits have resulted in identifying many books that were hitherto unavailable with A2K team. We are in process of getting these books and digitise them so that they can be uploaded on Kannada Wiisource. A2K team is hopeful that the increased levels of activity and consultation held with the community will help the overall progress of Kannada Wikisource project.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-prioritisation-content-donation-kannada-wikisource