Centre for Internet and Society

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

Ahmedabad Wikisource Workshop

Admin — 2019-05-13T01:38:31Z

Report of the Ahmedabad Wikisource workshop published in Vishwavihar.

Above: Report of the Ahmedabad Wikisource workshop published in Vishwavihar, a mouthpiece of Gujarat Vishwakosh Trust

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/vishwavihar-may-13-2019-ahmedabad-wikisource-workshop

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/Programme Plan

praskrishna — 2012-09-30T13:25:14Z

Pursuant to the announcement made on July 30, 2012 and as reflected in the FAQ accompanying the announcement, the India Program will become a project of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) an established non-profit organisation working in India whose own goals and objectives are in close alignment with that of the Wikimedia movement.

Context to the CIS A2K programme plan

Between 80 to 120 million Indians have Internet access, and by 2015 that number is expected to increase to 237 million. Correspondingly, between 400 and 700 million Indians have mobile phones, and the number that have mobile-data access to the Internet is increasing exponentially. India is a country with tremendous knowledge resources to contribute to humankind. While the majority off Indians face income-related technological barriers against accessing and contributing to the global storehouse of knowledge, there are a significant number of people in the country who have both the capacity and ability to do both.

For the Wikimedia movement, India represents a largely untapped opportunity to dramatically expand our impact and move toward our vision of a world where everyone can freely share in – and contribute to - the sum of human knowledge. Although the Indian population makes up about 20% of humanity, Indians account for only 4.7% of global Internet users, and India represents only 2.0% of global pageviews and 1.6% of global page edits on Wikimedia's sites. Despite such a disproportionately small presence on Wikimedia, English Wikipedia, our flagship project, ranks in the top ten of the most visited websites in India. We also have Wikipedia projects in 20 Indic languages, which will become increasingly important as the next 100 million Indians to come onto the Internet, given that they are likely to be increasingly using the Internet in languages other than English. Demographically, Indic languages represent a good growth opportunity since estimates suggest only about 150 million of the total Indian population of 1.2 billion have working fluency in English.

In 2010, the Wikimedia movement developed its first strategic plan and set India as a priority geography for growth and investment. At the conclusion of the strategy process, the Wikimedia Foundation created a Global Development team that immediately started laying the groundwork for the India Program. In 2012, the strategic plan was updated and revised to reflect experiences from the initial phase of the India Program and changed realities on the ground.

Objectives

Support the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects (e.g. donations of encyclopaedias and other useful texts, education partnerships and other institutional partnerships) Support India-focused efforts to improve quality of India-relevant content on Indic language and English Wikimedia projects (e.g. university outreach, institutional partnerships and India-relevant thematic contribution campaigns) Drive and complement access to free knowledge across India through alternative technological means (e.g. mobile-based Wikipedia and offline Wikipedia) Help the Indian community and chapter share experiences and tell their stories to the wider Indian and global communities within the Wikimedia movement Generate and document lessons from activities in India that can inform the work of Indian communities and similar programs in other countries Support the Wikimedia community on an on-going basis as and when needed and possible, and by cross-pollinating ideas, encouraging volunteer initiatives and transferring best practices. Partner with formal and informal groupings within the Wikimedia movement in India, for example, the Wikimedia India chapter, language communities, WikiProject India, etc.

Impact

In measuring impact, it is important to differentiate between outputs and outcomes. Desired outputs of the CIS-A2K programme are described in more detail in the sections that follow, and are likely to be re-callibrated, given the customised, changing and experimental nature of the work. Outcomes, on the other hand, relate to expected/desirable impacts that the work seeks to achieve. Both outputs and outcomes can only be achieved through a cooperative effort involving the CIS-A2K programme team, the Wikimedia India chapter, the Wikimedia community, and the other important community groupings that exist online and offline. In other words, the goals can be met if

Desired outputs:
To expand the Indian editing community to 5,000 active editors by June 2015, with at least 1,000 active editors in the Indic language projects. To enable the building of Wikipedia projects (and sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource) while keeping in mind reasonable quality, and have 5 Indic language Wikipedias reaching 50,000 articles, and 5 more reaching 25,000 articles, while also enabling 5 Indic language communities to have 100 active editors, and 5 more to have 50 active editors. To expand Wikipedia readership to 100 million unique visitors per month by June 2015. To ensure Wikipedia is accessible to all literate Indians through mobile and/or offline platforms. To expand the base of India-related articles on English Wikipedia from 115,000 to 165,000 by June 2015, and to halve India-related stubs in the same period.

Desired outcomes:
Foster a strong relationship with and within the Indian Wikimedia community through transparency and communication, and by providing support for community-led activities and facilitating community participation and ownership Expand the Indic language editing community and build interest in Indic language Wikimedia projects Grow high-quality Wikipedia projects (and sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource) Expand Wikipedia readership in India including on mobile and offline platforms Grow India-focused articles across Wikimedia projects.

Program goals

Catalyst Project Approach

The India Program started out as a partnership with the Indian Wikimedia community, which includes the Wikimedia India chapter. The initiative was intended as a means through which the Wikimedia Foundation can help the community grow, improve and expand the projects. This was an experimental effort, as the Wikimedia movement does not have a set of proven programs that can guarantee the growth of a community or project and the India Program was the first catalyst project being undertaken by the movement (further efforts have since got underway in the Middle-East and Brazil). Subsequent to the India Program becoming a project of CIS' A2K program, the aim is to identify pilots that work in achieving impact goals. This will be useful for sustaining the long-term success of the projects and will provide guidance for the development of other languages.

Catalyst Project Approach

Specifically, the A2K Team will focus on testing pilots that tackle the following challenges:

Building editor communities of sufficient critical size to accelerate and sustain growth in Indic languages
Connecting the Wikimedia community to new networks, building awareness of the Wikimedia projects and how they work
Building partnerships with educational and other groups to encourage new users to join the community as editors and content contributors
Encouraging editors of English Wikipedia in India, and strengthening coverage of India-relevant topics therein
Reaching communities with limited Internet connectivity to create access to Wikipedia's educational content

The A2K team will answer the following general questions in its pilot work that will help inform program design in India and in other geographies where the Wikimedia movement is active:

Editing growth: Are there certain types of proactive programming that work well in garnishing editorship in India? Indic languages and English: Is there a difference in strategies/opportunities for growth between Indic language communities and the EN:WP community in India? Program evaluation: Why are the programs in India successes or failures? Pilot testing and learning: Why do some program pilots succeed and others struggle? Community partnership: What is the best way to partner with the community in the individual pilots and the overall program? Ability to replicate in India: What are the features/programs that have succeeded and can succeed elsewhere in India? Ability to replicate internationally: What is replicable from the India experience? What are the cultural factors that should be accounted for before expanding? Capacity: Is it possible to maintain the program's activities within the volunteer community or is staff capacity needed? Return on Investment: Is the financial investment justified by the results of the program? Scale: Are pilots that are being tested scalable within a particular community, and adoptable by other language communities?

Current year plan - July 2012-June 2013

General community support and communications

The A2K team will provide support to the Indian Wikimedia community, which includes the Wikimedia India chapter, on various community-led activities, including outreach events across the country, meetups, contests, conferences, and connections to GLAMs and other institutions. This support will extend to all formal and informal groupings within the Wikimedia movement. Henceforth, requests of support from the community and the chapter will be managed transparently and publicly so that the A2K team can meet expectations, keeping in mind that not all community events will seek A2K program support, and that the A2K program will not always be able to support all requests made. In general, community support is intended to solve a problem or help or add to an existing community or chapter initiative; the A2K team will provide any level of reasonable help as needed.

The A2K team will also provide services to the community with regard to intra- and inter-community communications--most visibly through the quarterly Indian community newsletter, Wikipatrika, and also through direct efforts to cross-pollinate ideas and make connects between projects. The team will support the community to tell its story on the global Wikimedia blog, Wikimedia.in, Wikipedia Village pumps and use all available channels to reach out to the community. The team also will build a formal public relations plan that will advocate the values of the movement and encourage new editors. In all cases, the communication efforts will be such that they stay in facilitation/support mode, allowing full ownership and participation by the community.

Indic language community building

The India Program began work on Indic language community building in October 2011. This area is a top priority of the A2K team, as Wikimedia's reach in India will always be limited by language barriers. The Indic language projects remain small, with the most successful having fewer than 50,000 articles and fewer than 100 active editors on a monthly basis. The primary challenge is to strengthen communities to build and sustain each Indic language project. To date, community building has focused on working closely with some really small but promising project communities (some with fewer than five editors) to help them take the initial steps to expand their communities. This will entail supporting the organization and design of outreach events, projects and pilots to aid the community in catalyzing activity. See Indic Language projects for more info on recent and current activities.

Over the next year, Indic community building will continue to focus on deep engagement with 7-10 Indic project communities, with the addition of systematic digital outreach pilots focused on encouraging new editor engagement. Digital outreach represents a powerful channel to invite and encourage new editors, especially given the increasing readership of various projects in India. The current reader base is the most logical place to foster new editors. A combination of geo-targeted banners, linking to online tutorials and other training material, supported by online help points such as the Teahouse, will be piloted in an Indic language and then rolled out to other languages as well as the English Wikipedia community in India. Digital outreach will be conducted in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation's newly established Editor Growth and Contribution Program.

Community building will be done by:

Encouraging communication between editors through establishing connections between editors, facilitating meet-ups and encouraging on-wiki discussions on talk pages or forums such as village pumps
Organising collaboration amongst editors through Wikiprojects that are either subject-specific or task-specific (an example of this process can be seen in the Wikiproject to create and improve articles of the 80 most-read medical topics on English Wikipedia that is now active in 5 different Indic languages--Assamese, Bangla, Odia, Telugu and Marathi)
Cross-pollinating ideas across communities by sharing experiences and success (or otherwise) stories in relevant forums such as the various village pumps, as illustrated in this example for Hindi
Supporting Indic language community events such as the Malayalam conference, Sangamothsavam, held at Kollam in May 2012. The A2K team will also offer support to larger events such as Wikiconference, the national conference of Wikimedians in India, but this will be a secondary focus as priority will be placed on Indic-specific activities.

Content addition/donation in Indic languages

Though the A2K team will work with Indian content in all languages, particular emphasis will be placed on generating and improving content in Indic languages. The team will work to find content that is relevant and useful to the Wikimedia movement that is (a) already in the public domain and (b) contributed to the movement under an acceptable copyright license. Such content will include, but not be limited to, dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias and any other encyclopedia-like compilations. The rationale for making content addition/donation a key part of the A2K program work (with the full consent and engagement of the relevant Wikimedia communities involved) is that many smaller Wikipedias need a 'shot in the arm' of content to create sufficient momentum in the projects. In English and other European-language Wikipedias, bot-created content (an integral part of the growth of these Wikipedias in their early years) was possible because sufficient electronic/digital resources existed at the time outside of Wikipedia. For many Indic languages (and indeed, India-related topics in any language), the same is not necessarily true, and content addition/donation may be seen as a necessary intervention--it can be likened to performing the work of a bot in the physical world, with physical texts.

A precedent for content addition/donation exists in the gift of an encyclopedia that the government of the state of Kerala contributed to the Wikimedia movement in December 2008. The gift was received by Jimmy Wales on behalf of the movement and is in the process of being integrated to Malayalam Wikipedia.

New editor cultivation with campaigns on Indian topic areas on English Wikipedia

English Wikipedia is a global resource of nearly 4 million articles. However, only around 115,000 articles (or less than 2.9%) of all articles directly cover topics of relevance in India, and 60,000 of those articles are stubs or articles of poor quality. There is a tremendous opportunity to deepen contributions on India-related topics including areas such as Indian history, geography, law, public policy, politics, art, culture, contributions to the sciences, popular culture, etc.

Over the coming year, in partnership with the Indian Wikipedia community, the Wikimedia India chapter, other groupings (such as WikiProject India) and appropriate national or regional institutions, the CIS A2K team develop campaigns to promote contribution to Wikipedia on specific topic areas. The initial campaigns will involve focused pilots to develop approaches to supporting and cultivating new editors with strong content knowledge. Partnerships will be explored with interest groups outside the existing Wikimedia community to document and celebrate these interests, which could be anything Indian, from efforts that fall under the work of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs), like handicrafts and art, to movies, cricket, history, etc.

Pilot programs

In general, the bulk of the work of the A2K program team will be to run controlled and well-designed pilot programs with the full engagement of the communities involved. These will be developed and carried out in addition to projects focusing on goals A to D. The A2K team will actively design and implement new pilots on the basis of desired impacts and stated goals as outlined through this document. To borrow a phrase from the software development world, the idea behind these pilots will be to continually ensure better design, better engagement and therefore greater chances of success, and to maintain a healthy degree of innovation and experimentation that will allow us, in some cases, to 'fail fast, fail early'.

Built in to the program structure is a speedy evaluation of these pilots that will enable us to document learnings from less successful projects and expand and scale-up more successful attempts. For instance, the India Program, in partnership with the Global Education Program, conducted a pilot project between June-November 2011 with three universities in Pune. The pilot aimed to generate useful content for English Wikipedia and provide lessons for the future growth of education programs within India. The project failed to generate useful content and created significant costs for a variety of reasons, but a thorough evaluation of the pilot was conducted and reported on publicly, and many lessons were learned that will inform future strategies of projects in the same genre. For example, in the coming years, subsequent phases will identify scalable approaches to working with professors and students while taking into account the limitations that were evident in the first attempt; focus will be placed on shifting the design away from English Wikipedia toward Indic languages; work will only be added to Indic language Wikipedias or English Wikipedia if it is of an acceptable quality; students’ training will be made more rigorous; greater and more consistent support from Campus Ambassadors will be provided; and any subsequent project phases will be discussed with the community/ies involved in order to ensure greater community participation in the project right from the outset.

In another instance, the India Program team began two small projects on Facebook in April focused on supporting new editors in English and cultivating community connections and new editors in Odia, as part of a social media pilot. Through these projects, we have learned that social media requires considerable efforts on the part of not just a program team, but instead a whole community. Consequently, in order to succeed, the A2K team will continue to actively engage in the space, and work towards making a cohesive, productive social media space across platforms that is driven and populated by community members, including the chapter, who are already using social media as an extension of their Wikimedia work. One potential pilot project that can work with broad community involvement is an India-focused virtual apprenticeship, building on the Teahouse project.

Approach to measuring results and evaluation

As the work that is being done by the A2K team is of an experimental nature, it is critical that there are clear objectives, robust program design, strong measurement techniques, rigorous documentation, ongoing performance improvement, constant community capacity building and periodic rigorous outside evaluation. Every substantive initiative of the A2K team will have associated pilot designs which will be publicly and regularly developed with and reported to the community. These measures will serve to achieve five objectives:

Increased transparency with the community and chapter so that there is both visibility as well as ownership (and more active involvement of as wide a cross-section of community members as possible)
Discipline of detailed program design to improve the odds of success--especially in the context of the uncharted waters of virtually everything the India Program will be undertaking--with a clear understanding that for any set of experiments, there will be failure and success, though effort will be put towards decreasing failure and increasing success
Facilitation of transfer of capability and best practices within a community, across Indic languages and with communities beyond the India-centric ones
Accountability to community and donors so that a prudent balance is maintained between impact and resources
Fostering of a spirit of learning and continuous improvement, which can only happen if there is detailed and public documentation, communication and training, and an understanding and acceptance that failures will happen with any given set of experiments and that the important thing is to minimise them as well as learn from them.

The A2K team will be supported by a team of five people who will be employees of CIS out of offices in Delhi and Bangalore. The team will be managed by a Programme Director, and consist of individuals working on participation, Indic languages, communication and community and programme support.

Budget

The first year of operations will be supported by a grant from WMF to be administered by CIS for a total of INR 11,000,000. The budget will be spent on team salaries, travel, community events, merchandise for volunteers, and other services as needed.

Read the original published by the Wikimedia Foundation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan

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