Centre for Internet and Society

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at Academy of Media Learning

subha — 2013-07-17T07:06:59Z

Odia Wikipedians were invited to Academy of Media Learning (AML), Bhubaneswar for a guest lecture and a workshop on contributing to Odia Wikipedia. The event was organised by the Centre for Internet & Society on November 10, 2012. This is a report about the activities in AML.

Soon after Odia Wiki community got felicitated by OdishaDiary.co for Youth Achievement Award for their outstanding contribution for Odia language many institutions have started taking the work of the wikipedians with more seriousness. To empower the community with more activities active members took part in a discussion to start more long term projects like "education programs". In early November, a couple of meetups and workshops were organized in different institutions in Odisha. One of those institutions in Academy of Media Learning. It is a budding institution for journalism and digital media in the city of Bhubaneswar. The institute is led by the Founder-CEO of this institution Nilambar Rath, a veteran journalist and news producer and Saumya Parida, Executive Editor and journalist in the Odia media circle. Subhashish Panigrahi of CIS was invited to AML along with other fellow Wikipedians for a guest lecture and workshop about "Contibution to Wikipedia and its Benefits for Students".

Odia wikipedians like Ansuman Giri, Manoranjan Behera and Diptiman Panigrahi also came over for the event.

Meeting with Nilambar Rath and Saumya Parida

Prior to the lecture and workshop, wikipedians discussed about the education program with the faculty members on how it is essential to engage students in such a program. Subhashish explained the older education programs for other language and the recent Odia Wikipedia Education Program initiated at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal. During this meeting Mr. Rath also suggested to include more linguists and Odia language professors in the community who would guide on standards of language, writing style and grammar as Odia Wikipedia is being accessed more on a daily basis by the main stream media.

Workshop

There were a small set of enthusiast communication students gathered for the event. Subhashish took them through a presentation explaining about Wikipedia, how people like them contribute to Wikipedia and make it grow day by day and how Odia Wikipedia was started. The participants were surprised to see Odia Wikipedia for the first time! Even being communication students and working closely with Odia media they have never came through it. After the presentation he emphasized about the reason why we are focusing on long term support programs like "education program" and how it would be beneficial for students. Students were given a small break for asking queries before a training workshop on editing Odia Wikipedia. One of the students was invited to create his user account. Wikipedians explained how to type in Odia using the typing scheme. Few of the students were invited to edit and make small changes in various articles. Going forward, students were shown Chatasabha and the facebook group page to ask queries online.


A picture of the participants at the Odia Wikipedia workshop at Academy of Media Learning

Picture credit: Manoranjan Behera

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wiki-workshop-at-aml

An International Conclave of Odia Language

praskrishna — 2015-03-08T05:06:14Z

Subhashish Panigrahi is participating in this event.

See the invitation letter and the concept letter.

The Odia language traces its roots back to 4th Century BC. Odisha was the first state to be carved out as a separate state on the basis of the language. The dawn of 20th February 2014 was a proud moment for all Odias as Odia language was accorded the ‘Classical language’ status of our country and occupied the 6th position. This achievement was due to the relentless effort of many scholars and activists. Now it becomes the responsibility of all the Odias to preserve, propagate and carry forward the legacy of the Odia language which is spoken by around 40 million people in India and around 45 million people globally. We will see that a day will come when it will be used as the first language in all government offices for official communications.

THE INTELLECTS, a forum of progressive individuals and intellectuals in Delhi, believes it as an utmost duty and responsibility to promote Odia identity in India and abroad. In its bid to impart our language to Pravasi Odias living in and around Delhi, THE INTELLECTS is on a missionary zeal. It has started its mission called “ASA SIKHIBA AMARI BHASHA” in National Capital region.

And now, the forum in association with SHRI JAGANNATH MANDIR, TYAGRAJNAGAR is organizing a two days conclave, on 20th & 21st February 2015, to celebrate the 1st anniversary of Classical status to Odia language & the World Mother tongue Day with a special focus on our mother tongue Odia.

The Event

International Conclave of Odia Language:
The event will be a two days festival showcasing the Odia identity in the national Capital and bringing some best minds of the country to discuss on various issues of immense need on language and culture of Odisha. Around 200 eminent people from across the world including many renowned experts from various walks of life are the invited speakers.

It will be our proud privilege to have you with us for the occasion.
With Kind Regards

Debendra Rout
Convener of the conclave & Chairman of The Intellects
Email: cm.intellects@gmail.com
Mob: +91-9350127370

Programme

Celebration of 1st Anniversary of Classical status of Odia language
Date: 20th February, Friday, Time: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Venue: Constitution Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi

Welcome
Inauguration of Conclave
Inauguration of Special Report on the Conclave
Felicitation of prominent personalities for their contribution to
Odia language
Addresses
Vote of Thanks
Cultural Programme
Dinner

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/international-conclave-odia-language

An Article on Kannada Wikipedian H R Lakshmivenkatesh

praskrishna — 2014-07-03T08:28:04Z

Karnataka Sangha Mumbai published an article on Kannada Wikipedian H.R.Lakshmivenkatesh in its March 2014 edition.

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was instrumental in highlighting this fact and making people of Mumbai come to know about this. The article can be downloaded here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/an-article-on-kannada-wikipedian-hr-lakshmivenkatesh

An Article on Kannada Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2014-12-05T01:22:53Z

I wrote an article on Kannada Wikipedia which was published in the Yojana magazine on November 2014 issue.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/yojana-november-2014-pavanaja-article-on-kannada-wikipedia

ALC signs MoU for better net access

praskrishna — 2014-08-20T06:50:48Z

Andhra Loyola College (ALC) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society – Access to Knowledge (CSI-A2K) here on Thursday.

The MoU will enable faculty and students to have more access on internet world, said the ALC management.

Read the original article published in the Hindu on August 15, 2014.

Institute principal Fr. G.A.P. Kishore, vice-principals Fr. P. Anil Kumar and Fr. Rex Angelo, correspondent Fr. Raju and CSI-A2K programme director T. Vishnu Vardhan signed the papers. Faculty of various departments participated in the programme. Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Kishore said for the first time in AP, ALC has made the MoU with CSI-A2K to work collaboratively to improve Telugu Wikipedia. Very soon the digital content in botany, physics, Telugu, chemistry, ethics, religion, music and other subjects of the institution would be produced in Telugu Wikipedia, said the principal.

“A ten-member core committee has been constituted to train the faculty in each department in the college on A2K, who will teach the students. CSI will train the trainers and upload the material from time to time,” said Mr. Rex Angelo. Mr. Vishnu Vardhan said that CSI is promoting institutional partnerships across the country to promote regional languages. The society has plans to team up with more colleges in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and take up more outreach programmes in the next few days.

“Wikipedia has access to over 287 languages and 3.5 crore essays in the world. It is very unfortunate, that it has very few items in Indian languages,” said the programme director.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-august-15-2014-alc-signs-mou-for-better-net-access

Aircel & Wikimedia Foundation announce Wikipedia Zero

pavanaja — 2014-07-07T05:58:08Z

Aircel and Wikimedia Foundation came together to announce Wikipedia Zero. As per this, users of Aircel need not pay for data for accessing Wikipedia. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja wrote a report on this in Prajavani.

Click here to read the article published in Prajavani on July 3, 2014.

ಗ್ಯಾಜೆಟ್ ಸುದ್ದಿ

ಏರ್‌ಸೆಲ್ ಬಳಸುವವರಿಗೆ ಉಚಿತ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ

ಮೊಬೈಲ್ ಫೋನ್ ಸೇವೆ ನೀಡುವ ಏರ್‌ಸೆಲ್ ಕಂಪೆನಿ ಮತ್ತು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯವನ್ನು ನಡೆಸುವ ವಿಕಿಮೀಡಿಯ ಫೌಂಡೇಶನ್ ಜೊತೆಗೂಡಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ಏರ್‌ಸೆಲ್ ಗ್ರಾಹಕರು ತಮ್ಮ ಸ್ಮಾರ್ಟ್‌ಫೋನ್‌ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯವನ್ನು ಬಳಸಿದರೆ ಅವರು ಅಂತರಜಾಲ ಬಳಕೆಗೆ ಹಣ ನೀಡಬೇಕಾಗಿರುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಇದು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಳಸುವವರಿಗೆ ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಸುದ್ದಿ. ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಝೀರೊ ಎಂಬುದು ಆಫ್ರಿಕದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭವಾದ ಯೋಜನೆ.

ಇದರ ಪ್ರಕಾರ ಮೊಬೈಲ್ ಸೇವೆ ನೀಡುವ ಕಂಪೆನಿ ತಮ್ಮ ಗ್ರಾಹಕರು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ವೀಕ್ಷಿಸಿದರೆ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಪ್ರವಾಹಕ್ಕೆ (ಡಾಟಾ) ಹಣ ನೀಡಬೇಕಾಗಿರುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಭಾರತದಲ್ಲಿ ಈ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಝೀರೊ ಯೋಜನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸದ್ಯಕ್ಕೆ ಏರ್‌ಸೆಲ್ ಮಾತ್ರ ಭಾಗಿಯಾಗಿದೆ. ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ಮಾತ್ರವಲ್ಲದೆ ಇತರೆ ಭಾರತೀಯ ಭಾಷೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಳಸುವವರಿಗೆ ಇದು ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಸುದ್ದಿ.

See the portion about Wikipedia Zero below:

Click to download the PDF here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/prajavani-july-3-2014-article-on-wikipedia-zero

AIKWO to organize Wikipedia Workshop

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T03:49:36Z

All India Konkani Writers’ Organisation (AIKWO) in association with Wikipedia is organising a one-day Wikipedia Workshop for Konkani writers writing in the Kannada script on Sunday, April 6 at Kalaangann, Mangalore.

The report was published in Udayavani on April 3, 2014.

The workshop is organised to popularise Konkani literature in the Kannada script, on the internet (in Wikipedia) and to increase the presence of Konkani information on the internet.

The workshop will be conducted by Dr U. B. Pavanaja, Programme Officer, Indian Languages, Access to Knowledge Programme, The Centre for Internet and Society. He will be assisted by Harriet Vidyasagar, a Wikipedia volunteer.

Those interested, may call 0824-2232377 and register their names.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/udayavani-april-3-2014-aikwo-to-organize-wikipedia-workshop

AIKWO Holds Wikipedia Workshop for Konkani Writers

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T04:22:10Z

A Wikipedia Workshop for Konkani writers writing in the Kannada script, was organised by All India Konkani Writers’ Organisation (AIKWO) in association with Wikipedia at Kalaangann Shaktinagar here on April 6.

Read the original published in Mangalorean.com here

Dr U B Pavanaja (Programme Officer – Indian Languages, Access to Knowledge Program, The Centre for Internet and Society), conducted the workshop. Harriet Vidyasagar, Wikipedian volunteer, was also present.

The one-day hands-on workshop included presentations on Wikipedia in general, and Konkani Wikipedia in particular, and the participants were taught how to add and edit Konkani articles in the Kannada script in Wikipedia.

On behalf of Mandd Sobhann, Dr Pratap Naik SJ handed-over three research works published by Mandd Sobhann – 1. Konkani Songs Among Mangalorean Catholics, 2. Anthology Of Konkani Literature In The Kannada Script and 3. Mandd Sobhann And Its Impact On Konkani Language And Literature – the representatives of Wikipedia – Dr. U. B. Pavanaja and Ms. Harriet Vidyasagar, to be updated in the Konkani Wikipedia. Shri Eric Ozario, Gurkar – Mandd Sobhann, Ms. Irine Rebello, Secretary – Mandd Sobhann and Dr. Edward Nazareth, General Secretary – AIKWO, were also present.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/mangalorean-april-6-2014-aikwo-holds-wikipedia-workshop-for-konkani-writers

Ahmednagar — Marathi Wikipedia Workshop

Tanveer Hasan — 2013-07-26T09:34:47Z

Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications Programme (HEIRA), CSCS Bangalore organize a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in this report.

Ahmednagar College is one of the participant colleges in the ‘Pathways to Higher Education’ programme anchored by HEIRA, and run in collaboration with CIS. This programme works closely with undergraduate students in three states to address the problem of quality of access to higher education. The focus of the programme is on inculcating critical and analytical skills which play a very important role in gaining access to knowledge.

The Wikipedia workshop in Marathi held at the Ahmednagar College intended to introduce the students to the concepts of open and free sources of knowledge, and encourage active Marathi editors to edit and populate the Marathi Wikipedia domain.

Yogesh Khandke was representing the Wikipedia community. He started off by explaining the five pillars of Wikipedia, the copyright issues and the importance of references and citations. As most of the students were new to the concepts of both editing and knowledge production, we faced a few problems in the beginning. Since the IP addresses were already cleared for multiple registrations we did not face that particular problem.

The students were asked to come up with material and information that they would want to add to the Marathi Wikipedia domain. We conducted a group activity where the groups exchanged the information they were planning to use. These groups researched, proof read and added to the information collected by their friends. We had stressed that all the information needed to be cited from a reliable source and must have a clear reference. Hence, a lot of unnecessary and opinionated information was cleared at the first level itself.

The hands-on editing session proved to be challenging as most of the students did not know how to type in Marathi and ended up using phonetic keyboards. The session ended with all the students having been registered as Wikipedia editors and most of the groups were successful in editing. A couple of groups created new pages as well.

Yogesh Khandke was of immense help and he was ably supported by Nagesh Shelake, Dept. of Sociology, New Arts and Science College, Ahmednagar.

A special thanks to Dr. S.B Iyyer, Department of Physics, Ahmednagar College and Coordinator of Pathways Cell, and Raikwad, Department of Commerce and Assistant Coordinator of Pathways Cell.

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

Aditya 365

pavan — 2018-11-07T02:32:27Z

Telugu Wikimedian Aditya Pakide successfully completed 365 Wiki Commons Days. Aditya started contributing to project after a Facebook comment by A2K community advocate suggesting that the same picture would get more utilization in Commons and a brief training followed.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/aditya-365

Adikavi Nannaya University Telugu Wikipedia Workshop

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-16T08:57:21Z

A Telugu Wikipedia introductory workshop was conducted for the students of Adikavi Nannaya University, Rajahmundry between 6- 7 January, 2017.

A two-day Telugu Wikipedia workshop was conducted for the students of Adikavi Nannaya University in Rajahmundry between 6- 7 January, 2017. The participants were post-graduate students of the Telugu Department of the University with a notable gender ratio of 13 male and 21 female participants.

The aim of the workshop was to introduce students to Wikipedia and contributing to Wikipedia projects. They were taught basic Wikipedia editing and the usage of Google's advanced tools. This would also help them create tertiary sources using primary and secondary sources. The students improved articles about their villages using references available on the Internet. The workshop, conducted jointly by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community members, was key to increasing the base of Telugu Wikipedia across the Telugu-speaking region, to cities like Rajahmundry. Says User:విశ్వనాధ్.బి.కె., "from initial days, Wikipedia offline activities development is Hyderabad-centric and Wikipedia activities should be done in all areas (of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh). As this event in Adikavi Nannaya University helps in that aspect, I would like to offer all of my effort to these kind of events."

Overall, the event saw the creation 32 new pages on Telugu Wikipedia by 33 newly registered users with 99118 bytes being deleted/ added.

The link to event page on meta can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/adikavi-nannaya-university-telugu-wikipedia-workshop-1

Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014

praskrishna — 2014-10-13T06:30:08Z

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon is being held at Urban Solace on October 14, 2014 from 10.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. The event is being organized by IndiaBioScience in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team. CIS-A2K will conduct the first three edit-a-thons.

In India, Science as a discipline is subject to many of the same gender issues as it is worldwide - women scientists are fewer in number than men, they occupy fewer positions of power, and face distinct issues by virtue of their gender and the accompanying societal pressures. Women Scientists in India also tend to be less visible than their male counterparts, and public awareness of Indian Women Scientists is low.

IndiaBioScience will be organising a series of public events to raise the profile of women scientists on one of the most-popular online encyclopaedias - Wikipedia. At these events, participants will be encouraged to create and complete profiles of Indian Women in Science.

The last of these events, on October 14 coincides with Ada Lovelace Day, an international day to celebrate the achievements of women in Science, Technology and Math.

To participate sign up below or click here (http://www.indiabioscience.org/content/women-science-wiki-edit-thon)

Lunch and snacks will be provided.

At the venue, the events will begin with a short, hands-on introduction to Wiki editing. Participants can then go on to pick the scientist they would like to work on. There will be an interaction session with a guest Woman Scientist around lunch, with a discussion of issues commonly faced by women in science. In the afternoon session, participants can continue working on the Wiki pages, with a break for tea. Participants are requested to bring their laptops. We have a few desktops available at Saturday's venue for those who cannot do so.

Online participants can find us via Google Hangout. Chat with us or dial in for interactions, questions, help or simply to socialize.

Speaker: Rohini Godbole

See the event page on Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/ada-lovelace-edit-a-thon-2014

Access to Rare Books Made Easy

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T01:56:57Z

Rare Odia books that are out of print and not easily accessible on the internet, will now be available at the click of the mouse. In a bid to make them available online, the Odia Wikipedia community last week launched WikiSource, an Odia e-library and a sister project of Odia Wikipedia that has been trying to popularise use of Odia language on the Internet since 2002.

The article by Diana Sahu was published in the New Indian Express on December 5, 2014

The online library has 69 books by authors Jagannath Mohanty, Upendra Bhanja, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Gopabandhu Das, Baladeva Rath and Ram Das. Besides, the complete volume of Bhagwad Gita in Odia language is available on WikiSource.

The project has been implemented by Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to knowledge programme. Odia Wikipedian Subhashish Panigrahi, also a programme officer of the Centre for Internet and Society, said work on digitisation of the books was started in April this year by a team of 12 Wikipedians, comprising mostly students and working professionals.

Apart from them, 50 tribal students and nine faculty members of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) helped them with the digitisation job. As most of the books were typed in Akruti font - a proprietary Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) compliant font - the font was converted to Unicode text type to make the books searchable and accessible universally in all mobile and web platforms.

In the first phase, 11 books focusing on children’s literature, travelogue and biographies of noted people from Odisha by eminent Odia author Jagannath Mohanty were digitised. Subsequently, works of other authors were added to the e-library and made available on the internet with open access through free licence.

Subhashish said the WikiSource project was started in 2013 as an incubator project. It went through a tough process of being accessed by the Wikimedia Language Committee and Wikimedia Foundation’s board before being released last week. “There are several precious books that are out of print and not easily accessible on the internet. So we thought of digitising them and taking them to the masses. Apart from the 69 books, 81 of seven Odia authors that were already scanned and digitised by Bhubaneswar-based voluntary organisation, Srujanika, have been re-licensed and added to the library,” he said. Srujanika has digitised 740 old Odia magazines and books so far.

Generally a technique called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used for digitising scanned books, which currently is in testing phase in Odia. “Faculty member of ITER in Bhubaneswar Ajit Nayak along with his students have rectified the bugs and made character recognition more accurate.

But because of problems with OCR, the books had to be re-typed by the students of KISS on Odia Wikisource, Subashish added. Old books apart, books by contemporary authors like Debiprasanna Pattanayak, Ramakrushna Nanda, Subrat Prusty, Bharat Majhi and Nirmala Kumari Mohapata, and many other authors have been taken up for digitisation by Odia WikiSource team. Odia WikiSource is now live at or.wikisource.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/new-indian-express-december-5-2014-diana-sahu-access-to-rare-books-made-easy

Access to Knowledge Workshop @ NMAMIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka

praskrishna — 2012-12-19T07:20:31Z

The Centre for Internet & Society in collaboration with Metawing Technologies (P) Ltd. is organizing a Wikipedia workshop at NMAMIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka on December 21, 2012, from 9.30 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

Over 100 students are expected to participate in this workshop. The primary aim of the workshop is to educate them about Wikipedia in Indian languages and tell them how they can contribute to Wikipedia.

CIS is willing to bear the travelling expense for upto two wikipedians to and from Bangalore (or any other place in Karnataka that is close to Karkala).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/a2k-workshop-at-nmamit

Access to Knowledge Work Plan: Synopsis of Feedback by Wikipedians

nitika — 2013-06-05T05:39:31Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team shared its annual work plan with the larger Wikipedia community. Over the last one month, Access to Knowledge team members were involved in receiving feedback from community members over mailing lists, private emails, Wikimedia Meta, IRC, and one-on-one conversations. In this post, we are sharing a brief summary of the feedback received.

Odia

by Arjun Rao C.
Village/Block/District project in Telugu Wikipedia was not useful for growing Wikipedia, as even five years after stubs were created using a bot, large percentage of articles never grew into regular articles. It is better to take the top down approach of district articles and then based on that experience, expanding to include Block/Village articles.

Kannada

by Arjun Rao C.
Recently we had a press- Wikimedia panel discussion as part of Telugu Wikipedia Celebration in April 2013 at Hyderabad. I also made attempts to do wiki academies for Jouranlists in the past few years in Telugu and Kannada. Based on what I understand, journalists are always pressed for time and while it will be useful for them to know about Wikipedia, they may not turn out to be editors. At best they will be able to provide a good coverage for Wikipedia events. It is better to target journalism training schools and incorporate Wikipedia during their course, as a way to hone their skills while helping Wikipedia. Also my experience with engineering colleges is not that great for promoting Non English Wikipedia’s. Engineering colleges provide is good computing infrastructure. If we can get the non-engineering students to utilize that infrastructure or provide alternate computing infrastructure that can be very helpful.

by Sharihareswara (WMF)
One additional institution to perhaps partner with: the Mysore Folklore Museum.

Konkani

by Frederick Noronha

There is definite interest in a Konkani Wikipedia, but we seem to have hit an air pocket due to lack of interest.
There is a need to build two communities (i) the literary community, who has the content (ii) the tech guys, who can sort out keyboard and other issues -- or popularise available solutions being used by other same-script groups. As of now, there is no bridge between the two.
Volunteering needs some priming. Maybe we should work with a handful of volunteers who are willing to convert the basic strings needed to set up a Wikipedia. I've already been working (at the personal level) with Isidore Dantas, urging him to help with it... and he has been doing a good job (Romi-script Konkani).
Instead of getting caught up with contentious issues like which script is official or the most suited, in my view it would be helpful to build Wikipedia for at least the main three scripts (Kannada, Roman and Devanagari) and let all coexist. The dialectical differences that exist between different scrips makes for difficulties in machine translation and differing comfort levels to use scripts which one is not used to.
Some institutions have been approached too by various quarters (Goa Konkani Academy, Dalgado Konkani Academy in Panjim, Goa University staff) but unless we get something actually going to show, it would be hard to convince people to start volunteering. For a number of reasons, I'd think that Konkani writers are often less computer-savvy than writers of other Indian languages... It's now changing, but still...

Konkani

by Outofindia
Please add St Aloysius College Managlore as an institution where we could consider having workshops like we did at the Nirmala Institute in Goa. I will help set it up. As Frederick suggests, we could have all the three script tracks (Kannada, Roman and Devanagari)and working together in a physical space will probably be helpful.

Bangla

by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
<http://tagoreweb.in/>, SNLTR's hosted instance and <http://sarat-rachanabali.becs.ac.in/> are limited in their utility that they provide no means of using the text as a corpus or, trainer. These are efforts worthy of appreciation. However, providing the means for others to re-use the content as opposed to passive browser based viewing is equally important.

I hope your assessment included that fact. Plus, I am always wary when I read statements like "SNLTR has established that Unicode 5.0 and above as the standard that can be adopted for different e-governance applications and is also in parity with the international practice and standard". In my limited understanding of how standardization does happen, this is not the case.

by Ragib Hasan
That's a nice plan. One thing I'd recommend is to get media involved (perhaps you already have that in the plan, sorry if I'm just repeating it). In particular, you need to get the local Bengali language media (newspaper, TV) involved so that they publish news reports on Wikipedia.

In Bangladesh, it was not easy at the start to get people interested. It took a good media campaign in Bengali language newspapers to get people interested. Also, you should get in touch with the Bengali language blogging community in India (if there is one) and try to get them involved.

By the way, the number of native speakers cited at the start of the article is vastly underestimated .... Bangladesh alone has 160 million native speakers, plus at least half of that in West Bengal.

by Dwaipayan Chakraborti
As Ragib mentioned, local media is important. Do we have any plan on this already? Anyone in touch with media? Or knows anybody? Jayanta nath may be of help.

by Jayanta Nath
English news media had already reported about Bengali Wikipedia few times. But Local Bengali news media (Anandabazar, Bartaman, Eisomy, Pratidin, Ajkaal,) no response at all and no interest about Bengali Wikipedia. I had tried with my personal level of contact. All Bengali news print media want business from Wikipedia, then only they can report about Bengali Wikipedia. Anyone in this mailing list in touch with Bengali media for fresh contact?

Overall Languages

by Abhinavgarule
Concept of Wikipedia Student Partners:- Wiki Student Partners are students from colleges who will help students in solving their queries and keeping follow ups of “How to edit on Wikipedia?” Can we start this wiki student partner concept?? In this pilot project??

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/access-to-knowledge-work-plan-synopsis-of-feedback-by-wikipedians