Centre for Internet and Society

Wikipedia in UG Education program at Christ University

praskrishna — 2014-05-27T10:19:48Z

On May 15, 2014, Prajavani published an article about Wikipedia in UG Education program in Christ University.

Click to read the online version published by Prajavani here.

A scanned version of the article is given below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/prajavani-may-15-2014-wikipedia-ug-education-christ-university

Wikipedia in St. Xavier's College, Mapusa, Goa

nitika — 2013-07-26T11:33:29Z

A three hour Wikipedia workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet & Society, Delhi, in the morning of December 14, 2012 at St. Xavier's College in Mapusa, Goa. Over 30 participants attended the session.

The workshop started with a short introductory presentation followed by a learning session on how to edit the Wikipedia. Since there were lesser number of computers, participants were divided in groups of 2 or 3 at the maximum. Each group made at least 3 edits with the help of volunteers present in the room.

A follow up session will be organised in January or February of 2013 to organise an edit-a-thon for all the interested and enthusiastic participants.

A special thanks to everyone who helped organising this event, especially to Harriet Vidyasagar, Frederick, Debanjan - all from the Wikipedia family and Nitin Volvoikar, the Head of Journalism Department from St. Xavier's.


Above is a picture of the whole group of participants at the St.Xavier's College at Mapusa, Goa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-in-st-xaviers-college-goa

Wikipedia in Indian Languages on Mobile Phones

praskrishna — 2013-10-25T06:00:28Z

Wikipedia in India's regional languages and accessible over mobile phones is revolutionising the way Internet content is used in this multi-lingual country, say information technology (IT) experts.

This post by Megha Prakash was published in Sci Dev Net on October 15, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

"Developing Wikipedia and other content in regional languages is a way forward to bridge the knowledge gap," says T. Vishnu Vardhan, programme director of the Access to Knowledge project at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore.

In September, CIS signed an agreement with Goa University to train students and foster collaborative content development with Wikipedia libraries and archives in view. A similar agreement was signed in August with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, while a third is due to be signed this month with Christ University, Bangalore.

India's 28 states and seven union territories are organised on a linguistic basis and three of its vernaculars — Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi — rate among the world's ten most widely spoken languages, each with its own script.

With 70 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people and the market flooded with affordable feature phones, the majority of India's 1.2 billion people potentially have access to IT. Current usage, however, is limited to downloading entertainment content and to such applications as mobile banking.

Vardhan tells SciDev.Net that attention is now being paid to developing knowledge repositories in India's regional languages.

M. Sampath Kumar, who heads the Telugu department at the University of Madras in Chennai, says the Telugu Wikipedia is regularly used by students and researchers and is a resource for speakers of the language living abroad but eager to maintain community links.

Kumar tells SciDev.Net that literary content is popular and that there is a future for regional Wikipedia in educating the younger generation and serving as a free repository for traditional knowledge in the vernacular.

Subbiah Arunachalam, a Chennai-based IT consultant, says the effort will benefit non-English speaking rural youth at school and college levels and help bring them on par with their urban counterparts in terms of knowledge.

A programme funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and due to end in June 2014 covers the Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, Bengali and Konkani languages. A Hindi version already has 100,000 articles and recorded eight million views.

'Lilavati's Daughters', a book on Indian women scientists published by the Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences, is currently being translated into the regional languages with a view to engaging women content developers and editors.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/sci-dev-net-megha-prakash-wikipedia-in-indian-languages-on-mobile-phones

Wikipedia Hackathon at BITS Hyderabad

praskrishna — 2012-10-25T08:42:56Z

CIS - A2K team and BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad Campus are organizing a hackathon for their tech fest — ATMOS on October 26 - 27, 2012, from 6.00 p.m. on October 26 to 6.00 a.m. on October 27.

An all night hackathon to get started in contributing technically to the world’s largest source of free information – Wikipedia. The code that you write (and eventually deploy) will be viewed/used 7,938,026,125 times a month! Write user scripts that fix annoying little things with the way Wikipedia functions. Write bots to import (and accurately maintain) large amounts of information from various sources into Wikipedia. Write tools to make it easier to maintain Wikipedia’s standards and fight spam. Most of all join the awesome Open Source community and have fun!

Pre-requisites:

Preferable working knowledge of HTML/CSS/Javascript *or* python.

Laptops, which you will have to carry with you.

To register for the event, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-hackathon-bits-hyderabad

Wikipedia Gains Massive Traffic Thanks To Vernacular Languages

praskrishna — 2013-08-19T04:18:24Z

The blog post was published in Before It's News on August 1, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

Click to read the original published in Before It's News

Non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, the parent company of knowledge-based article collating platform Wikipedia seems to be receiving enhanced traction on the portal from India. The reason for this upswing in activity is apparently its decision to expand the scope of the portal via multiple Indian Languages, revealed a recent study by the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society (CIS).

A while back Wikipedia, sensing the need of non-English speaking /understanding audience had opened its doors for about 18 Indian Languages. The main attractions seemed to be articles penned down in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam & Kannada, which managed to attract a lot of writers who have come forth & added “thousands” of new articles in these & other native languages, all within a span of 8 months ranging from September 2012 to April 2013.

Interestingly, the study reveals that though a lot of pages did get created, many of these articles did not enjoy equally massive visitor count. However, when Wikipedia subsequently extended the support to Marathi & Bengali, the reader-count picked up. Started just a few months back, about 40,000 articles written in Marathi have been getting 30 Lakh visitors & these pages have collectively managed to add another 10 Lakh monthly visitors, while Bengali articles has been steadily getting about 14 Lakh Page Views per month.

Wikipedia seems to have undoubtedly fueled the consumption of online content. It has proven that people actually craved for knowledge in the native language, but didn’t have a proper platform. However, there were a few technological hurdles as well. Web Browsers, in their formative stages, simply didn’t have the capability of pulling, processing & displaying languages or alphabets other than English. Additionally, having been used to type in English-only keyboards, penning information-laden articles in native languages did have a long & steep learning curve.

Thankfully, such petty, but pestering issues seem to have been ironed out & creation, publication & consumption of content in local languages has evidently picked-up steam. Now the writers, who are fondly called ‘Wiki foot soldiers’ have been forwarding the crusade of offering free knowledge to anyone interested & numbers at both the end is growing healthily.

Judging by the appetite for online content in their local avatar, T Vishnu Vardhan, Program Director, Access to Knowledge Project, CIS has aptly summarized the current state of altered necessities. He says “In the last two years, the demand for knowledge in Indian languages has grown as we have moved to the motto of ‘roti, kapda and internet” What do you think?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/beforeitnews-august-1-2013-wikipedia-gains-massive-traffic-thanks-to-vernacular-languages

Wikipedia Editing as Assessment Tool in the Indian Higher Education Classroom

Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashwin Kumar A.P. and T. Vishnu Vardhan — 2014-01-30T10:06:40Z

Getting students to create and edit Wikipedia entries in English and Indian languages can be a comprehensive assessment tool at the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels. Both levels of higher education require the demonstration of the ability to present knowledge in encyclopaedic form, which can be done by a good review of relevant literature and the showcasing of key arguments in the field.

Using the Dublin competency level descriptors,[*] we can put down what sorts of higher education skills Wikipedia editing can help evaluate. The most commonly accepted descriptors internationally are:

Demonstration of Knowledge and understanding
Applying knowledge and understanding
Making judgements
Communication abilities
Learning skills relevant to higher education

Wikipedia allows for assessing the ‘depth’ of an article which is the measure of the quality of an entry. The depth is a function of several parameters like the number of edits an article has seen, the length of discussion in the talk pages, the number of footnotes, references, hyperlinks and editors active on that page. In addition to this, providing Wiki-interlinks to key concepts within an article and categorization of articles exposes the students to a "semantic web" of interconnections between various fields of knowledge. Although, it may not be a complete substitute for the more formal modes of assessment, it provides a more rounded form of evaluation for student assessment. The ‘depth’ indicator also shows the relative significance of an article for the larger community of users, thereby providing a better model for student assessment in the long run.

Bachelor's Level

By getting students to edit on Wikipedia at the Bachelor’s Level, you can test the following, and appropriate weightage can be given to each aspect of the work:

Comprehension of the theory, concepts and processes pertaining to a field or fields of learning
Demonstration of knowledge, supported by the use of advanced textbooks and other reading materials, of one or more specialised areas
Ability to apply this knowledge and comprehension in a manner that indicates a thorough and informed approach to the work, and have competences typically demonstrated through devising and sustaining arguments
Ability to gather and interpret relevant data to inform independent judgements which include reflection on relevant social, scientific or ethical issues
Ability to communicate information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist audiences [in the case of Wikipedia, the audience would usually be a non-specialist one]

Master's Level

By getting students to edit on Wikipedia at the Master’s Level, you can test the following, and appropriate weightage can be given to each aspect of the work:

Demonstration of knowledge and comprehension that is founded upon, extends and enhances that associated with the Bachelor’s level and is at the forefront of a field of learning
Critical awareness of current problems and new insights, new tools and new processes within their field of learning (ability to do a good literature review, which can be seen through the citations provided for a Wikipedia entry)
Ability to apply their knowledge, comprehension, and critical awareness in broader or multidisciplinary areas related to their fields of study
Ability to integrate knowledge and handle complexity, to formulate judgements with incomplete or limited information, with an awareness of the social and ethical responsibilities linked to the application of their knowledge and judgements
Ability to communicate their conclusions, and knowledge, rationale and processes underpinning these, to specialist and non-specialist audiences clearly and unambiguously
Ability to reflect on one’s own writing by engaging with feedback received from a collaborative network.
Ability to form peer knowledge networks through collaboration and interaction with other contributors

Risks and Mitigation

It is helpful to be aware of the typical risks a faculty may face in using Wikipedia entries as an assessment tool.

New article creation: Wikipedias, especially the English Wikipedia, are closely monitored by thousands of volunteers from across the world. Often, articles created by new users come under a lot of scrutiny. It is advisable to first encourage the students to edit and improve the existing articles before creating a new article all by themselves. Also taking the help of an experienced Wikipedian will go a long way in mentoring the students on the nuances of the Wikipedia platform and the volunteer community that strives in good faith to preserve the quality of entries.
Copyright violation: Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v (i.e., plagiarism) is a major challenge for the higher education sector across the world. Often the students find that copy-pasting the content from various sources is an easy way of doing an assignment. On Wikipedia, plagiarism is taken very seriously and a student editor can get banned from further contribution to Wikipedia, which may de-motivate the entire class. It’s useful for the faculty to give a detailed orientation on this aspect before encouraging the students to take up writing a Wikipedia entry as an assignment. There are numerous resources (text and videos) made available by Wikimedians across the world explaining the problem of plagiarism. These could be used by the faculty.
If you are encouraging students to write an entry in an Indian language Wikipedia, special attention and support needs to be planned to train the students in typing in that particular Indian language script. Wikipedias have a useful tool called Universal Language Selector (ULS) which makes it very easy for the student to start typing in any script using the transliteration method. There is increasing support for Indian language scripts, however. You could check whether your University computer lab has Unicode compliant computers/systems. This will help the students to work offline on their assignment, if required.
One of the biggest challenges for a teacher is to get the student to see the value of taking up a Wikipedia entry as an assignment. Some of the students may see this as an additional task or extra-curricular activity and may not put in a committed effort, which could affect the goals you have set for your course. Faculties are encouraged to find various means of integrating/dovetailing the Wikipedia assignment into the curriculum or course.
Faculty may also feel this as an additional burden on them, especially in terms of evaluation of the assignment. There are various tools available to measure most of the assessment parameters set out above, which will not take much time. It is in fact possible to save faculty time if the evaluation is planned meticulously.
A pragmatic challenge for the faculty would be to deal with a scenario where the entire class submits the assignments on Wikipedia on the last day. This will not only increase burden on the faculty but can also result in a lot of plagiarism. An effective way to address this challenge is to make the Wikipedia entry assignment part of a formative assessment, whereby the student develops the entry over a period of time (e.g. one month or during the course). There are various tools through which you can track the students’ contribution continuously and share feedback with them periodically.

[*].Available at http://www.tcd.ie/teaching-learning/academic-development/assets/pdf/dublin_descriptors.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-as-assessment-tool-in-indian-higher-education-classroom

Wikipedia Editathon on India Women's History at CBIT, Hyderabad

syed — 2014-04-07T01:32:57Z

“Wikipedia Editathon on India Women's History” and “Work-Life Balance: Women in Engineering” were organized parallelly at Chaitanya Bharati Institute of Technology (CBIT), Hyderabad on March 8, 2014. These events had a common session during the morning and a separate sessions in the afternoon.

The speakers for the morning session included Dr V Malakonda Reddy, Chairman,CBIT, Y Hemalatha, Chief Guest, CBIT staff Members V Hari Leela, Dr D Sandhya Sri and Dr B Chennakesava Reddy. Dr V Malakonda Reddy emphasised that the high position given to women is by no means a gift of the western society. He recalled the historic role played by women in India. Other speakers also stressed on importance of the day and the need for women as leaders and proactive members of the society.

During the morning session, Vishnu Vardhan, Director, Access to Knowledge, Centre for the Internet and Society, recalled that first computer programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace, which clearly necessitates a need for women to play an even more significant role in the Information technology era. He also spoke about the Ada Initiative (http://adainitiative.org/) which supports women in open technology and culture. He concluded by showing the English and Telugu project pages of the ediathons running concurrently and especially encouraged the girl students to participate in the editathon.

During the second session of the “Wikipedia Editathon on India Women's History”, Vishnu Vardhan explained the concept of “Wiki” and Wikipedia editing basics. On this occasion, a student volunteer Gayathri demonstrated the editing basics of Wikipedia on the stage.

She was later felicitated. All volunteers wore Wikipedia t-shirts which were provided prior to the event.

The practical session in the afternoon was handled by Syed Muzammiluddin, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, Centre for the Internet and Society. Later, in the evening there was a separate session with student volunteers. During the course of the session, the volunteers led by Ranjit and Ashraf showed CBIT Wiki (http://www.3mb.in/ES).They said that contributing to Wikipedia will definitely help them to build their college Wiki. It was pointed out that most of the CBIT students have registered on Wikipedia and many contributions are in the offing. The volunteers also informed that they have also signed up for Wikimedia India mailing list as they want to see more collaboration among the Wikimedia India community in future and be part of it. Prof Swamidas of the Information Technology Department supervised all the day long activities of the event.

Media Coverage

Andhra Prabha (March 8, 2014)
Andhra Bhoomi (March 8, 2014)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-editathon-on-india-women-history-at-cbit

Wikipedia edit-a-thons to add content on LGBTs

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T06:41:42Z

From Monday, Wikipedia will hold a series of “edit-a-thons” to encourage people to add content to the site about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

The article by Renuka Phadnis was published in the Hindu on July 7, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

It is inspired by “Wiki Loves Pride”, a global campaign to expand and improve LGBT-related content across Wikimedia projects. The campaign focuses on the June to October period, when LGBTs around the world celebrate their community.

An “edit-a-thon” is a workshop where people are trained in how to edit the Wikipedia and add content to it, usually focussing on a particular topic.

The aim is to make Wikipedia inclusive and reflect diversity by creating content on the LGBT discourse: history, culture, rights, equal opportunities and Article 377. The focus is also on generating content in regional Indian languages which do not have equivalents for terms such as “gay”, “lesbian” or “bisexual”. The website https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/ Events/Wiki_Loves _Pride_2014 has listed 11 languages.

The edit-a-thon will culminate in two offline events in Bangalore and Delhi on July 19, creating a forum for the community. While anyone can participate in the edit-a-thon, Vishnu, programme director for Access to Knowledge at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore, which works on improving Indian language Wikipedias and India-related content on Wikipedia, said, “We hope the [LGBT] community takes the lead.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-july-7-2014-renuka-phadnis-wikipedia-edit-a-thons-to-add-content-on-lgbts

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon workshop & Talks on Gender Gap in Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T07:33:32Z

Open Minds (a student group advocating free and open movement) in association with the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team is holding a workshop at Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Science and Technology, Gandipet, Serilingampalle, Andhra Pradesh on March 8, 10.00 a.m. to 1.30 p.m.

Certificaton: All the participants will be awarded by "participation certificate from Wikipedia"
Come meet your fellow editors and help improve Wikipedia articles related to women. Don't know how to edit Wikipedia? That's ok, friendly, experienced editors will be here to help! Everyone is welcome to come edit Wikipedia with us at this event. New editors, those who want to learn how to edit or can teach others how.
Speakers :
T. Vishnu Vardhan,Programme Director, Access To Knowledge, Centre for Internet and Society,Wikipedia.
--Muzammi,Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge, Centre for Internet and Society, Wikipedia.
Shedule :
Timing Activity
10:00 to 10:30 am Registration
10:30 to 11:00 am The Politics of Gendered Knowledge . Production in the Age of Internet
11:00 t0 11:30 am Wikipedia demonstration + Basics of Wikipedia . Editing (hands on activity)
11.30 to 01:30 pm International Women's Day Edit-a-thon
01:30 to 02:15 pm Lunch Break
02:15 to 05:00 pm International Women's Day Edit-a-thon . . continues
What to Bring :
Anything! Bring your laptops, smart phones, tablets etc. but above all, your energy and your brains!
We’re trying to make this event very hands on, so feel free to bring all your wacky geektronics so that you can participate in all the fun.
==Don’t worry if you don’t bring anything since there will still be tons of stuff to do.==

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/wikipedia-edit-a-thon-workshop-talks-on-gender-gap-in-wikipedia

Wikipedia edit-a-thon in mind? Kindly start here

tito — 2018-05-11T08:15:56Z

Are you thinking to conduct a Wikipedia edit-a-thon? You may use this document as an initial guide. Please note: this article is written keeping specially organisations, institutions, and individuals in mind, who are new to Wikipedia world. We are starting this post with some basic questions. Please feel free to ask questions by mailing tito "at" cis-india.org

Are you thinking to conduct a Wikipedia edit-a-thon? That's great. In this article I'll explain a few thinks, which might help to plan your ediit-a-thon your better?

First thing first, a few questions:

Do you want to contribute to Wikipedia or other projects? Other than Wikipedia, there are a few other interesting projects such as Wikisource, Wikidata, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons.
Do you want to contribute to other language Wikipedias/projects such as Tamil Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Telugu Wikisource, Bengali Wikisource etc., other than the same old English Wikipedia?

If you are planning to do an English Wikipedia edit-a-thon, it is comparatively more difficult, and needs much more preparation. I'll explain some of these things below.

Now let's talk about edit-a-thon structure:

Do you want to do it an offline edit-a-thon? Or is it going to be an online edit-a-thon?
What is the duration?
How many people are going to participate? Are they already Wikipedians or new to Wikipedia?

Help pages: Getting started with Wikipedia

Let's start by gathering a few help pages' link which will help to get started with Wikipedia:

Introduction to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction
CheatSheet: learn how to write using Wikicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Cheatsheet

Policies and guidelines

It is really important to know about a few policies before you start editing Wikipedia. Please explain these policies and guidelines to edit-a-thon participants as well.

Notability: we have "notability" policy. What are the topics we can write about? Please read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability Now, these are "General Notability Guidelines or in short we call it GNG (please read the "General notability guideline" in the page). Now, we have detailed explanation pages on different notability topics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Notability_guide, please read the pages you need such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people). Now in every guideline page you'll get something called "basic criteria", and/or "additional criteria". These are the guidelines you need to pass. A good argument goes like this: "The article meets Wikipedia notability because it meets "this", "this", "this", and "this" (or #1, #3, #4, and #5) of the mentioned notability guideline.
Verifiability: The next important policy is Verifiability. Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability. Please also read, what are reliable references or how to identify reliable sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipediaa:Identifying_reliable_sources. There is a fine list of references such as forum posts, personal blogs, eCommerce websites, press releases, user-generated content etc. etc. we should not use as references on Wikipedia.
Neutral point of view: Neutral point of view is absolutely important. Please read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

Frequently asked questions

Question: I do not have references, can I create pages or add information?

Answer: No, references are important. Specially, on English Wikipedia, where content are reviewed more, reliable secondary references are absolutely needed.

Question: But, I am writing the "truth".

Answer: Wikipedia works with :verifiability, and not truth. Please read: Verifiability, not truth

Question: I can not provide the things you are asking, but I am working for a cause. Can't you help?

Answer: That's a good question. A2K cares about bridging gender gap, knowledge revolution, and diversity. However, please note, it is a standard practice Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion, and Wikipedia is also not a place to do advocacy, propaganda, or recruitment of any kind. If you really want to advocated about your cause, why not try your own website, blog, or some forums?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-mind-kindly-start-here

Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore to bring Tulu Wikipedia live

pavanaja — 2015-09-15T09:07:24Z

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon was organised in Mangalore, Karnataka this 14th to encourage more Tulu-language speakers to contribute to Tulu Wikipedia. Tulu Wikipedia is is currently in the Incubator but the enthusiastic editor community is putting their best effort to bring it live out of Incubator. This edit-a-thon is one of the many activities the Tulu Wikimedia community has organised.

30 Wikipedia editors participated and created about 89 new articles. Interestingly, 12 of these 30 participants crossed more than 10 edits. Some of the new participants faced problems with using the input methods and the Wiki-markup. It is important to note that because of the lack of addition of Tulu-alphabet code points in the Unicode chart, and the speakers being well conversant in Kannada, they are using Kannada script for Tulu Wikipedia Incubator project. There is a plan to organise a monthly meetup and/or edit-a-thon to continue the momentum these editors have brought in. Tulu Sahitya Academy has kindly supported the event.

More details in the event page (in Tulu).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-mangalore-to-bring-tulu-wikipedia-live

Wikipedia edit-a-thon at TEDSummit 2016, Banff, Canada

garule — 2016-06-13T06:44:49Z

The TEDSummit 2016, an annual conference of the TED community, is taking place during June 26-30, 2016 at Banff, Canada. Wikimedians Netha Hussain, Ayyappadas along with Abhinav Garule, Programme Associate, CIS-A2K will be conducting a 90-minute long workshop to educate the participants through Wikipedia's guidelines and help them write their first articles.

A list of articles have been suggested in the event page that participants can create. They can also play with a mock article. Please note, this is an invite-only event and only the conference participants that have registered beforehand can attend this edit-a-thon.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-edit-a-thon-at-tedsummit-2016-banff-canada

Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad!

noopur — 2013-02-13T11:40:06Z

This post is a report on the series of Wikipedia meets organized in the city of Hyderabad on September 29-30, 2012. These workshops were a a part of the larger effort to help Wikipedia contributors in the same city to meet each other and strengthen the local community.

The city of Hyderabad is not only an IT hub but also home to many English and Indian language Wikipedians. In a recent series of weekend workshops and meet-ups conducted within the city, I had the opportunity to interact with many of them. We conducted a Wikipedia workshop at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad, an Odia Wikipedia workshop as well as a general Wikipedia workshop for people interested in contributing to all language Wikipedias. I would like to convey my gratitude to the Computer Science department students at BITS, Hyderabad, Odia Wikipedians Swetapadma and Amaresh and English Wikipedians Tausif and Abhijith for making these events happen despite festivities and protests in the city.

To provide a brief report on the events, the BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad workshop was organized as a general introduction to Wikipedia. The event was organized with the support of the Computer Science department at the college and saw a presence of more than 60 students. It was 2 hour session where 6 students created their Wikipedia user accounts and entered their names on the BITS project page. They were also shown how Wikis work – live and global.

Students were encouraged to make changes to their college article and they discovered how to view recent changes, page views and other functions. It was a particularly informative session because majority of the group did not know that Wikipedia articles are written by common people from all walks of life! The session ended with a proposal to start a Wiki club for their college. The Odia Wikipedia meetup organized on the same day registered 11 participants while the general meetup on the next day had over 20 participants. In all three workshops, the majority of participants were not aware how one could contribute to Wikipedia articles.

Next steps:

It was great to see existing Wikipedians discuss the idea of having a Hyderabad SIG (special interest group) to conduct regular meetings, workshops, photo walks and more! Since the participants have shared their email-IDs, we will stay in touch and inform them about upcoming Telugu and English editing workshops. Students at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad have also requested a Wikipedia workshop and hackathon for their upcoming techfest this month. A Telugu Wikipedia workshop has been proposed for the second week of October.

For more information on how to conduct a Wikipedia workshop in your city, you could contact noopur@cis-india.org

There was newspaper coverage about this event:

Wiki Meetup, Hindu, September 28, 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-hyderabad-report

Wikipedia can establish Tulu in a wider way

praskrishna — 2014-10-24T16:01:07Z

In his predential address after inaugurating the three-day workshop on ‘The use of internet for promotion of Tulu language,’ organised by Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy, Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy President Janki M Brahmavar opined that internet media, especially Wikipedia, can contribute to a large extent towards the promotion of Tulu language. The president said there was a need for the effective use of Unicode for the digital interpretation of Tulu.

This was published in Mangalore Today on October 17, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave his inputs.

Delivering a talk on the occasion, Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore) Indian Languages Programme Coordinator and Wikipedia representative Dr U B Pavanaja said that Tulu Wikipedia is in the process of getting life. He said that minimal work has taken place in Tulu language and that too, is not up to the mark, to be considered for the inclusion of the language to the 8th schedule. There is a need for Unicode, which would enable the language to acquire wide recognition, though it positively qualifies as a classical language of ancient times.

There should at least be 500-600 articles in Wikipedia to consider it as live. At least 8-10 articles should be uploaded every month. He added that only eight people had updated their Tulu articles into Wikipedia, during previous year, when the workshop was held at Mangalore. At present the number has gone up to 320. Until March, the number of articles uploaded was 137. The government should work towards it. Dr Pavanaja added that Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, and is in 287 languages across the world. Anyone who is interested can update his or her articles into the encyclopedia. There are nearly 6000 languages across the world. The people who avail the internet facilities at home can also work on some articles and upload their write ups into Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/mangalore-today-october-17-2014-wikipedia-can-establish-tulu-in-a-wider-way

Wikipedia boom in vernacular languages

praskrishna — 2013-08-12T04:29:28Z

The number of Wikipedia entries in vernacular languages has grown substantially in the last eight months

This article by Divya Saboo was published in DNA on August 1, 2013. The Centre for Internet and Society is mentioned.

In the last eight months, the number of Wikipedia entries in vernacular languages has grown substantially, says a Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia, where anyone can write and publish, was mainly written in the English language until a few years ago. There is a sudden boom of interest in regional languages on the internet because browsers now support Indian language scripts. Thus, people are now more interested in typing in their mother-tongues. Interestingly, this initiative is fueled by diaspora.

Mahit Gar, who has been working with the Marathi Language Wikipedia, said, “Since the last one year, we have concentrated on improving the quality of the content more. We are ranked #20. There are also some new editing facilities that are being introduced by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMS). We can now write in Marathi as well. 40 per cent of the people can type Marathi well but the rest still find it difficult to do so. The rural people interact mostly with Marathi."

He adds, "We have had this sudden boom because in 2011, we had some conferences with the English Wikipedia team and we talked about how people are not able to communicate without their mother tongues in place. Also, we don't spam. Most people love their mother tongue so they don't touch the content inappropriately (this is not the case with the English Wikipedia).”

Tinu Cherian Abraham who was on the Wikimedia India Chapter talks about how an NRI's love for Malyalam kick-started the project. There are people from all walks of life involved in this project. The collective passion for knowledge of a visually challenged editor of Hindi Wikipedia along with an elderly contributor from Kerala, has aided him in forgetting his ailments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dna-august-1-2013-divya-saboo-wikipedia-boom-in-vernacular-languages