Centre for Internet and Society

A Report of the Odia Wikipedia Workshop held in KMBB College of Engineering, Bhubaneswar

praskrishna — 2012-12-07T22:37:59Z

(By Debapriya Priyadashi Chakra) Sambad, Odisha's most widely read and largest circulated daily, on November 19, 2012, published an article about the Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in KMBB College of Engineering, Bhubaneswar, Odisha.

Read a detailed report about this workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/report-of-odia-wikipedia-workshop-in-sambad

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar

subha — 2012-12-07T22:40:32Z

The Centre for Internet and Society along with Odia Wikipedians in Bhubaneswar organized an Odia Wikipedia workshop on November 18, 2012. It was held in KMBB College of Engineering. Odia Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia in Odia language which everyone can edit.

Odia Wikipedians gathered in the temple city of Bhubaneswar on November 18, 2012 to organize the third Odia Wikipedia workshop in KMBB College of Engineering. KMBB College of Engineering is a BPUT affiliated engineering college supported by Ama Odisha, an organization working for media, communication and development of Odia language. Dr. Dhanada Mishra, Director-Academics, KMBB and a veteran educationalist and open source source enthusiast supported this event. Forty-five students from KMBB attended this workshop. The agenda for the two-and-a-half hour session was to educate students about open source movement, journey of Wikipedia and how to contribute to Odia Wikipedia and how it would help them. Nine active Odia Wikipedians joined to support this event.

Dr. Mishra began the session by introducing Odia Wikipedians to the students. He spoke about Open source movement, how the community supports various open source projects, how Wikipedia was started and how it is essential for students to take part in such activities. Subhashish Panigrahi briefly spoke about the history of Odia wikipedia, how it grew up in the recent years to its present state. Odia Wikipedian Manoranjan Behera discussed about how everyone can contribute to the Wikipedia.

To explain the easiness of typing in Odia, some of the students were invited to write text on a board and test the typing tool on Odia Wikipedia. A new article about the college was created and one of the students wrote few sentences. Wikipedians explained the importance of creating user accounts and demonstrated how to search an article, how to create an article and the basics of editing an article. A Question and Answer session was held for students to put their queries. At the end of the session, contact details were shared with the students and the Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki) of Odia Wikipedia was shown so that students could continue editing and remain in touch with fellow wikipedians.

Odia daily “The Sambad” covered this event.

Presentation: Copy of Introduction to Wikipedia! on Prezi
Video:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-workshop-organized-in-kmbb-college-bhubaneswar

Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session at Bharati Vidyapeeth — More Interested and More Involved Participants

nitika — 2013-10-30T09:17:31Z

A Wikipedia introductory session was organised at Bharati Vidyapeeth Engineering College in Delhi early this year and a follow up session was organised by CIS on November 19, 2012. About 12 to 15 participants attended the follow up session. Although most of the participants had attended the introductory session there were a few who were coming over for the first time.

Many participants had already tried some wiki editing (such as correcting grammar, spellings, punctuations, etc.) after the introductory session but had several queries with respect to advance editing such as wiki markup, adding references, adding wiki interlinks and so on.

The main aim to conduct a follow up session was to clear these editing doubts, provide editing support and more importantly make these new editors feel a part of the wider Wikipedia community. This session gave us a brilliant opportunity to inform and encourage the participants to be part of Wikipedia mailing lists, talk page discussions, Facebook pages, current Wikipedia projects and Wiki meet ups. Participants were taught difference between article and user talk pages, leaving messages on various talk pages, how to add wiki markups, add references, add inter wiki links, send private mails to other users, page view stats, etc. The good part of organizing a session with second time participants was that they were already familiar with the workings of Wikipedia from the introductory session. They had more intelligent queries especially around editing. In addition, another big advantage was the surety that only those participants will return who are genuinely interested in wiki editing and are not just attracted towards Wikipedia brand or swags.

Albeit being a short two-hour session, the workshop provided a good platform for getting in touch with participants, helping them to gain confidence and edit Wikipedia articles, informing them of different ways in which they could be more involved.

Hopefully, next year we could revisit each of the institutions where we'd organised an introductory Wikipedia session in 2012. Though the number of participants for a follow up session might be small but it definitely guarantees more interested and more involved participants.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/follow-up-to-wikipedia-introductory-session-at-bharati-vidyapeeth

‘Some Indian laws could be challenging’

praskrishna — 2012-11-19T04:40:46Z

Wikipedia’s founder member Erik Möller says their principle is not to decide the map of India, but to explain that there is a controversy.

This article was published in Bangalore Mirror on November 15, 2012.

Erik Möller, vice-president engineering and product development, Wikimedia Foundation, is one of the founder members of Wikipedia, along with Jimmy Wales, since it started in 2001. Möller was in Bangalore over the weekend to speak at a technical seminar at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a local chapter of Wikimedia. He spoke about India’s role in the growth of Wikipedia not just in the sub-continent, but globally.

BM: How significant is India in the Wikipedia movement?
EM: Very significant and growing. I don’t have the data on exact number of editors based in India. However currently, 2.4 per cent of all Wikipedia edits globally are made from India. As a comparison, the UK’s is 6.5 per cent. India has overtaken Australia and (narrowly) Brazil since last year. In the 2011 fundraiser, India reached the top 10 of countries giving to the Wikimedia Foundation, with 39,000 donors from India giving the equivalent of $360,468. The 2012 fundraiser will be launched in a few days. (Interestingly, India is the only developing nation in the Top 10 contributing nations).

Does the financial support from India surprise you?
Of course not. You are a country of a billion people (laughs). I think Wikipedia appeals to a lot of cultural sensibilities, sharing of knowledge and culture. I think people here want to share.

Where does India stand in the future of Wikipedia’s roadmap?
India was identified as one of three global priority areas in our 2010-15 strategic plan (alongside Brazil and Arabic language countries). While there are active Wikipedia communities in many Asian countries, India continues to be the Foundation’s main focus area in (non-Arabic) Asia through the “Access To Knowledge (A2K)” programme conducted by CIS as our local partner, funded via a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.

From the standpoint of freedom to internet access, what do you think of Indian laws?

Depending on your interpretation, specific laws in India could be challenging, particularly in areas of mapping (geographically). We are concerned about those things, but have to run with it. We consider ourselves specifically (governed by) US laws from where we are legally published. But then, Wiki is not an advocacy organisation that goes around telling people which politician to vote for. As Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said, it’s very important all people become educated on the issues. It’s not up to us to decide what’s the correct map of India, of course, but it is up to us to explain there is a controversy.

Are you constantly bombarded with litigation world over?

Surprisingly not.

What are the big developments happening in Wikipedia?

We are currently running two pilot projects – Wikidata and Wikivoyage. For example, today you can find out the GDP of each country on Wikipedia but cannot query and arrange countries by GDP size. Wikidata will allow you to do that. Similarly, Wikivoyage will provide matter-of-fact information on local sites that are of interest to travellers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bangalore-mirror-article-kalyan-subramani-nov-15-2012-some-indian-laws-could-be-challenging

Odia Wikipedia Gets a New Typing Solution!

subha — 2012-12-12T12:28:57Z

Subhashish Panigrahi worked with Yuvi Panda to create a new typing scheme for Odia Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This blog post gives a summary of this development and its outcome.


Odia Lekhani Phonetic Keyboard Layout

A new typing scheme Lekhani (Odia for a stylus which was used for writing on palm leaves) to be used for Odia Wikipedia, other sister Wikimedia projects and for offline and typing using mobile devices was researched upon.

Indian languagFedora's Phonetic Keyboard Layoutes use various typing schemes (key combinations for output in Indic languages) which could be used for writing, printing, publishing and for any other purpose both for offline and online publication as well as printing. Development for Unicode standard in Odia language progressed lately. Revival of Odia Wikipedia after 2011 helped the use of unicode more on internet because of its extensive content (more than 3100 articles on various topics) and online activities on social media. Currently there are over different typing schemes available for Odia including the non-unicode typing schemes used mostly by the DTP operators and many newspapers and publication houses. One of the earliest development was the Inscript keyboard layout which follows a global standard for most Indic languages. Inscript is useful and once someone gets his fingers used to typing it is fun. But, most of the beginners find it difficult to type in Inscript. In those cases phonetic keyboards are quite helpful where someone need to press the English keys which corresponds to the Roman characters, e.g. R-a-d-h-aa for "Radha". Based on these sort of logics a keyboard layout was deployed for all the Indic languages on Narayam including Odia. (See Odia transliteration for details). The primary developer for transliteration was Junaid PV, a Malayalam Wikipedian who helped for the Indic languages and few other Asian languages. As transliteration follows more a common rule there are many ambiguities and bugs reported after it was deployed on Odia Wikipedia. Even though many rounds of changes there are still bugs which doesn't allow many editors to type accurately. This is one of the reasons when there was a need for a purely phonetic typing scheme which has more affinity to the way an Odia user would type the words using a Roman key board.

The idea for deploying a new phonetic typing scheme was started during Mumbai Hackathon in 2011. Subhashish brought the proposal in community village pump for ideas and consensus and the basic layout and testing was done. The whole project went into a slumber for a long time! Recently when YuviPanda was in Delhi and met Subhashish the idea of hacking and testing the tool came again. The whole keyboard layout was revised and deployed on github. Two main keyboard layouts which were used for keeping the major inputs as standard were Fedora Phonetic keyboard and Apple Oriya Qwerty.


Fedora's Phonetic Keyboard Layout


Apple QWERTY Keyboard

Majority of the key combinations have been kept same except for few small changes. The typing scheme is deployed on TranslateWiki.net for Universal Language Selector and gerrit which will be enabled on Odia Wikipedia soon for Narayam. The recent mobile typing tool, "Indic typing tool" which was developed at Delhi office of the Centre for Internet and Society by Yuvi Panda and Subhashish Panigrahi also uses Lekhani as a default typing tool.

Quick links:

Lekhani typing scheme for Odia
Source file: https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.ime/blob/master/rules/or/or-lekhani.js
Check the github page for other Odia typing tools and here for all other languages
Typing in Lekhani using mobile phone

Credits:

Odia Lekhani Phonetic Keyboard Layout (CC-BY-SA 3.0): Manoranjan Behera
Fedora's Phonetic Keyboard Layout: RedHat
Apple QWERTY Keyboard: Apple Inc.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-gets-new-typing-solution

Typing in Indic Languages from Mobiles made Easy!

subha — 2013-07-17T09:02:46Z

A new app is up for typing in Indic languages from mobile phones. This is is available online at: http://bitly.com/indictyping and supports on iOS. Android version is to be released soon.

"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."
Phil Karlton

Yuvi Panda smiles saying this. Yuvi Panda, a former Wikimedia Foundation contractor and developer was here in our Delhi office and I had an opportunity to spend some time discussing some of the technical problems that we have been facing.

One of the major setback most people have with their phones is the lack of language support and lack of typing support for Indic languages. Fortunately most of the new generation phones support Indic languages. Three of the major operating systems used currently by most phones are Android, Windows, Blackberry and iOS. Android being an open source operating system has extensive community support and developments which is something we were primarily hopeful while starting this project. Windows phones also have a good number of user base in India and support for Indic languages on Windows is really good. Though iOS has good support for Indic display there is no support for typing. IOS, Windows and Blackberry all being proprietary have really less community support and any tool available on these app market would be proprietary. So, our idea was to start a cross platform app which will use the available jQuery ime used for Indic typing for Indic Wikipedias and sister projects.

Currently, most of the Indic language Wikipedias use a typing tool called Narayam ( "Narayam" is a Malayalam word which refers to a metal stylus that was used for writing on palm leaves and papyrus in ancient days). By default the typing scheme for most of the language wikipedias is set to transliteration or phonetic. An Indian mobile user would normally type his own language using Roman letters from a mobile. "और दोस्त सब ठीक है?" in Hindi would be typed as "Aur dost sab thik hai?" when someone pings a friend on facebook or sends a text message. Now with the new typing tool you need to type "aur dosta saba thiika hai?" to get the same text in Devanagari script. This typing scheme is almost same like the phonetic typing most people use for regional languages on mobile which is why typing won’t be much of difference. In terms of usability most people would use the typed text either for web search in regional languages, Facebook posts, tweeting or even sending mails and text messages.

The detailed procedure for typing using this tool is documented at: http://goo.gl/HdVJW. Indic typing tool is available at: http://bitly.com/indictyping

Scan the QR code below using your QR code application to go "Indic typing tool".

Developer speaks:

This is a simple tool that lets you type in your native language on mobile phones. Currently only iOS devices are supported.

The tool is a simple wrapper around Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering's jquery.ime project. It simply adds a much easier to use (on a mobile device) language selector, and makes it available offline (on iOS devices).

Quick links:

Source code: https://github.com/yuvipanda/indic-typing-tool
Test the app and report the bugs directly on GitHub or on Meta.
Credits: YuviPanda, Subhashish Panigrahi, Santhosh Thottingal

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/typing-in-indic-languages-from-mobiles

Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad

Yuvi Panda — 2012-12-03T06:37:11Z

BITS Hyderabad had a tech fest from October 25 to 27, 2012, and wanted to conduct a technical wiki hackathon. We decided to do it on October 26 — all night.

We had a Google form that people filled up with a few simple questions — and picked out 12 from the 70 that signed up. This was important since I was the only one conducting it — and I wanted to keep it to a manageable number. It was an all night event that started at 7 p.m. in the evening and was supposed to go on till 6 a.m. next morning.

Hackathon

The hackathon started as scheduled around 7.00 p.m. As people trickled in I talked to them individually and mentally sorted them into two groups — 'people who are already programmatically competent enough to contribute code' and people who were not. A lot of people who were not selected but applied also showed up — since we had not sent rejection emails. I got them started on learning either Javascript or Python — and helped push them along. However, a good amount of time was spent with people who already had prior coding experience.

Most people worked on Gadgets, and a few on Python — exploring the API. We started off with basics of how to customize your Wikipedia experience with JS and CSS, building a very basic user script that changed colours / added new links. Some of the participants spent the entire night building this and others finished this in a few minutes and were on to the next project. Everyone worked at their own pace — and since there were smaller number of people I was able to (mostly) provide individual attention.

As people started working on stuff past hello world, I introduced them to IRC (#wikipedia-en and #mediawiki) and had them say 'hi' to editors. I also introduced them to a bunch of local hacker channels on IRC — and quite a few of them stayed on.

A fair amount of people left at around midnight — but a 'core' group seemed to have formed that stayed on. We hacked on to the wee hours of the morning, and even took small naps. We wound up at around 6 a.m., and staggered back to the hostels (and then proceeded to have long conversations about Linux, history of programming, and graphical raytracing).

Outcomes

We had some students who contributed substantially including Thomas Matthew, Vishwajit Kolathur, Aravind Peddapudi and Varun Chappidi. Most of them have been introduced to the local hacker community via IRC, and I see reports of continuing participation — after accounting for their ongoing exams. They all are technically very competent and have expressed interest in doing Google Summer of Code this year. Among the projects did at the hackathon are:

'Reading mode' gadget
'Reading mode' Chrome Extension that is wikipedia specific
Major work on a '3 hours later' type extension (a tool to produce graphs like (http://xkcd.com/214)

The fact that these people went from having no experience with Wiki related programming to being able to build code for it in a few hours time makes me very happy.

Learnings

Make sure people know that 'Hack'athon has nothing to do with cracking wifi passwords or breaking into Facebook accounts. We had a 'lot' of people apply thinking that was this despite a clear description. I was told that some of the people evangelizing the event also thought the same — so clearer messaging around this was needed.
Send rejection emails. We missed this, and sent only acceptance emails. A lot of people who weren't accepted turned up and we had to figure a way to engage them.
More organized followups. Currently all I can do is introduce them to the local hacker community and hope they 'stick'. GSoC is a good spot, but is too infrequent — and too high stakes.
Find more things for them to do. We had to actually stretch a bit to find them things to do — they were all raring to go, but we found it hard to find 'easy' bugs for them to fix that were actually useful to editors. Clearly editors have a lot of things in their mind that would make their lives better — but they are not listed anywhere public. Having a publicly available list of such things would be helpful. (There is a Gadget requests page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Requests), but it hasn't been updated in ages).

Finally, I would like to thank the Centre for Internet & Society for supporting my travel for the event, Thomas from BITS for organizing most of the logistics and Ravi Chandra from the Tor community for helping provide technical mentorship.

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

A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi

Yuvraj Pandian — 2012-12-04T07:31:21Z

Wikipedian Yuvaraj Pandian visited the CIS office in Delhi and helped the Access to Knowledge team conduct a super-ad-hoc mini-hackathon with two other volunteers, Sheel from Delhi and Harsh from Ahmedabad. The aim was to get them a kickstart in developing userscripts/gadgets, and get them to a point where the prior existing documentation makes sense to them.

The ad-hoc plan had three parts:

The execution environment (Concept of userscripts vs gadgets, ResourceLoader)
The API concepts (Special:ApiSandbox, concept of 'actions' in the API)
Accessing the API from JS (mediawiki.api module, concept of AJAX)

Here is the account of what they did, written by Yuvi:

"We covered all parts of them slowly, with both Harsh and Sheel working at things until they fully understood what they were doing and why whatever they were doing was working.

I introduced them to the environment first by having them execute code in Chrome's JS Console, and then in their own common.js. Once they understood the context in which the code was getting executed, the 'ResourceLoader default modules'[1]documentation started making sense to them, and they could pick up other modules from there.

We then explored the API via the API Sandbox[2], which is a relatively new (and not very well known) way of letting people play around with the API. It is a massive improvement over the older, non-interactive docs[3], and both Harsh and Sheel were very excited about being able to discover all the things they could do with the API. A fair amount of time was spent messing around with it on different wikipedias (en, hi and gu) and reading bits of the API Documentation[4] to understand the concepts behind the actions - and for filling in the gaps.

Finally we had them use the API from a userscript to make calls. I went through the entire process line by line, explaining how AJAX works and how asynchronous programming works. We traced the flow of code together to understand how the seamingly nonlinear asynchronous programming model works. Then we dug into a bit of how to use the mw.loader module to make dependencies work, and why the same code that was working in the chrome js console was not working in their common.js.

It ended with them trying to port HotCat to their native language wikipedias. Harsh started to explore more about getting started with MediaWiki dev itself (rather than just gadgets), but the clone took a looooong time and we had run out of time by then. I directed him to a WMF tech open chat happening today, and hopefully that could help!

[1].https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Default_modules
[2].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox
[3].https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
[4].https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/mini-hackathon-delhi

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

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller

praskrishna — 2012-12-18T06:51:46Z

The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore is hosting a talk by Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation at its office in Bangalore on November 12, 2012, from 11.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m., followed by a lunch discussion.

Talk Summary

Wikipedia's technology platform is rapidly changing, with improvements being deployed every day. Unlike other top websites, Wikipedia is run by a non-profit (Wikimedia Foundation) and all its technology is open source, ready to be improved and extended by you.

Learn about the recent and coming technology changes to Wikipedia and Wikimedia's other projects: the new Visual Editor, improvements to mobile sites and apps, Wikidata, and projects with mysterious codenames like "Echo", "Milkshake", "Agora" and "Flow". Learn how to get involved and ask anything you'd like to know about Wikipedia.

Erik Moeller

Erik Moeller is the Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation, overseeing a department of about 70 people. Erik has been involved in Wikipedia since 2001 and joined the staff of Wikimedia in 2008. He previously worked as a journalist and project manager.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-state-of-tech-talk-by-erik-moeller

Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia

noopur — 2012-11-04T02:12:56Z

This was a competition to raise Wikipedia awareness and help students discover the joy of writing articles in their native language and an attempt to connect producers having knowledge in Gujarati to a wide audience of more than four lakh readers.

The Gujarati Wikipedia article writing competition was held among 10 Gujarati medium schools of Ahmedabad city in Gujarat with the support and cooperation of The Open Page publication and Gujarati Lexicon in two phases over a period of two months.

Initial discussions about doing something to promote Gujarati language on the internet started when Shiju Alex, Indian language Wikipedia consultant met Yatrik Patel from Inflibnet. With Mr Yatrik Patel's intervention we were able to meet Mr Archit Bhatt, the director of Tripada Education Trust in Ahmedabad.

After a round of presentations from Wikipedians, Gujarati Lexicon and interested schools in August, we charted out a rough sketch of the article competition. Then, this plan was proposed to Gujarati editors online. Again, without the cooperation and encouragement of long term members like Mr Dhaval S Vyas, Mr Ashok Modhvadia, Mr Sushant Savla and Mr Maharshi Mehta, these students would not have had the freedom to make mistakes and learn as they progressed. Apart from these online members, constant guidance and support was provided by Mr Ashok Vaishnav, Mr Harsh Kothari and Mr Konarak Ratnakar. They coordinated with Ms Hemangini Kanth from The Open Page and Ms Shruti from Gujarati Lexicon to materialize the competion.

Structure

Phase I: Over 200 students from the ten schools were invited to write articles with references on Gujarati literary personalities (poets and writers) on paper. These entries were then collected and checked by Mr Yogendra Vyas, a consultant to GSEB (Gujarat Education Board) and Mr Ashok Vaishnav.

The above picture shows a student learning Gujarati typing

Phase II: 20 students were selected from these entries and invited for a workshop on Gujarati typing, introduction to GU WP and were briefed on how to write articles. Once the deadline was over, these on-wiki articles were checked by Mr Dhaval Vyas and Mr Ashok Modhvadia and two winner entries were selected. They were subsequently awarded trophies and certificates in a small ceremony on 21^st October.

Here is a list of articles written by the students.

Learnings

Given that this was a pilot program and I have read about only one such prior attempt in Javanese Wikipedia, we had much to learn:

It was a wise decision to take primary speakers of Gujarati because their proficiency in spelling, punctuation and vocabulary was good. This may not be possible for students with Indian languages as secondary language.
While we had estimated a maximum of one month's time, it took us nearly two months to accomplish it because of the huge number of entries. Perhaps, the work should be distributed amongst more people.
The biggest challenge that lies ahead is retaining these editors – we are working to get feedback from students to see how this could have been better and what attracted them about Wikipedia.

This competition has given the community a batch of new editors along with valuable content and we hope to retain the momentum by engaging more Gujarati students further.

Click below to download the posters

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/gujarati-wikipedia-article-competition

Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot

noopur — 2012-10-31T08:17:56Z

This report analyses a series of meetings and workshops held in Rajkot, a city in Gujarat, India during the month of October 2012.

I visited Gujarat for a few Wikipedia activities – including Wikipedia meets in the cities of Ahmedabad and Rajkot, interacted with students and teachers from various colleges as well as to successfully conclude the Gujarati Wikipedia article writing competition.

I visited Rajkot on October 17, 2012 with two Wikipedians – Harsh Kothari and Konarak Ratnakar, both from Ahmedabad. We were scheduled to take up a small introductory lecture on contributing to Wikipedia at Christ College, Rajkot in the afternoon and meet up with other Gujarati Wikipedians from Rajkot and Junagadh later in the day. Fortunately, I was able to connect with Rashmikant Makwana, a teacher at TGS (The Galaxy School) in Rajkot. I had first met up with him during the photo walk – Wiki takes Ahmedabad in January 2012. He had shown a great deal of interest in doing something for his school students. Thanks to Mr. Makwana's prompt response and support, we visited three branches of TGES (The Galaxy Education System) and had the opportunity of interacting with over 100 students from secondary and higher secondary divisions.

Interactions with TGES students

I got to read Mr. Makwana's email only after I reached Rajkot. He wrote that he spoke to a couple of teachers about our visit and their students were very eager to meet us as they had many questions about Wikipedia! I was pleasantly surprised because once we met these students (mostly 11^th standard, English medium students) we realized they had already tried their hand at editing and even creating articles! So, they had far more advanced queries like how to verify information on Wikipedia, what is the authenticity of information there, questions on notability and so on. Next, we were taken to the vadi branch of the education group. These were children from fifth and sixth standards and who also had questions and better ones about stories of vandalism they had committed on Wikipedia! We told them how Wikipedia was one of the best ways of telling people about their culture, identities, city and language. Besides students, we also met teachers who taught Gujarati, History and Geography.

Interactions with Christ College students

Wikipedians giving lecture.

Christ College offers a variety of graduate courses. We were connected with their faculty, Mr. Rushabh, by Umesh Joshi from the Open Page publication in Rajkot.

I am thankful to both of them for their support in gathering their MBA students! Harsh Kothari, a Gujarati Wikipedian presented on how one can contribute to Gujarati Wikipedia while Konarak helped them in a live editing session. One question that everyone asked us was – WHY do people edit Wikipedia?

So, we called upon Jitendrasinh Chauhan, a long-term Gujarati Wikipedian. He came up and spoke to them on how he discovered Gujarati Wikipedia and has not only gained in terms of knowledge but also friendships that he has made with fellow editors across the state and overseas! We also explained the importance of learning correct ways of editing to these students who might pursue public relations as their professions.

Meeting Wikipedians

The trip to Rajkot, apart from meeting a whole bunch of new people, was also about connecting offline with Gujarati Wikipedians. Their warmth and day long support in terms of logistics, context and guidance kept us enthused. I extend my gratitude to Jitendrasinh Chauhan and his friend Harsh, both Wikipedians for their help. They have also helped us establish a dialog with Saurashtra University where we hope to plan a two-day conference centered around Gujarati language and digitization.

Given here is a network visualization infographic highlighting the key points.

Videos

Gujarati Wikipedia workshop at Christ college - 1

Gujarati Wikipedia workshop at Christ College - 2

Write about your city on Gujarati Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/gujarati-wikipedia-education-program-rajkot

First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized!

subha — 2012-11-30T12:44:44Z

The first Pune Odia Wikipedia workshop was organized in Pune on October 27, 2012. Subhashish Panigrahi recollects his experience about the events through this report.

Recently Odia Wikipedia (http://or.wikipedia.org) crossed 3000 articles. After being dormant for 8 long years, Odia Wikipedia emerged as one of the active South Asian wikipedias. I visited Pune on October 27, 2012 to participate in an Odia Wikipedia workshop celebrating this success with the wikipedians and also attend the WikiWomenDay 2012.

Over the last few months Odia Wikipedia has seen many active faces. One of them is Suratha Parhi, a very active Odia wikipedian. Suratha reached out to his friends, colleagues and existing wikipedians staying in Pune to celebrate the success with an Odia Wikipedia workshop. As it was after Durga Puja only a few Odia people in the city were there to attend. We saw a gathering of 10 people at PAI International Learning Center for this workshop. Abhishek Suryavanshi from Wikipedia Club Pune extended his support for organizing the venue for us.

Prior to the workshop I interacted with the participants to understand their interests and efficiency with Odia typing. To my surprise two of the participants were good in typing in phonetic and Inscript. Suratha took the audience through a presentation about Odia Wikipedia explaining the history of Odia language, importance of Wikipedia, how to contribute to Wikipedia, manual of style for writing articles, dos and do nots, rules and regulations and validating articles by adding sources. After the preliminary sessions participants started asking questions about numbers of readers, how to type in Odia, use of Odia Wikipedia and various such questions. Suratha answered their questions with examples and illustrations.

To demonstrate editing on Odia Wikipedia we invited one of the participants. We helped her to create her user account and others also created their user accounts on Odia Wikipedia. Then we invited Sudhir Patel, a type designer and technologist working with CDAC, Pune to introduce Odia typing and how to type easily in Odia. After a small hands-on training for typing, all of the participants were able to start searching for articles they wanted to edit. Some of them created new articles and some edited existing articles. At the end of the session we shared our contacts to stay in touch. We also showed them Chatasabha, a friendly desk on Odia Wikipedia and demonstrated how they can ask questions and see the answered questions. New wikipedians will be also connected to the facebook group to be updated about events and activities. New Wikipedians have decided to meet once again in November for a Odia Wikipedia meetup. Sudhir and Suratha are also planning to organize a introductory session on Odia Wikipedia during the cultural gathering organized by Odia communities.

Above is a picture of participants from the Orissa Wikipedia workshop held on October 27, 2012

More pictures on WikiCommons.

Press Coverage:
OdishaDiary.com, Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language (October 31, 2012)

Videos

Suratha Parhi explaining about Odia Wikipedia

Sudhir Patel explaining about Odia Typing

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-pune-odia-wikipedia-organized

Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates

shiju — 2012-11-09T18:18:20Z

Three months back, I wrote a blog post (http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/07/06/wikipedia-education-a-model-from-malayalam-wikipedia/) about the inauguration of the Wikipedia education program in Malayalam Wikipedia. This program is the first of its kind in an Indic language, and Malayalam community is doing the program in collaboration with the IT@School, a project of the Department of General Education, Government of Kerala, setup in 2001, to foster the IT education in schools.

Three months have passed since the last report in English (regular updates in Malayalam) about the program have been shared with the Malayalam wiki community during this period. Here is a brief update about this ongoing program. The July report was mainly about the inauguration of the project in the Government Higher Secondary School, Anchal West, Kollam, and a few details about the plans of the community regarding this project.

The Wikipedia education program was inaugurated by the IT@School director, Abdul Nasar Kaipanchery on July 14, 2012. After two weeks, we conducted a Malayalam Wikipedia introduction workshop for the students and teachers of Anchal West School. Almost 150 participants including students and teachers attended this workshop. After the workshop students were asked to write an article (on paper in Malayalam) about any topic related to Anchal and submit it to the education program coordinator, Sateesh R. Veliyam, a teacher in that school. Satheesh is also a Malayalam wikipedian. Students were given three weeks to submit the article on paper. Nearly 100 students submitted the articles and the project coordinator (with inputs from other Malayalam Wikipedia community members) shortlisted 34 students for the Wikipedia education program. The selection of the students for this program was based on their writing skills in Malayalam, the interest in this voluntary project, and other skills needed for this time bound Wikipedia education project.

A meeting was conducted with the selected students on August 9 in the school computer lab. As Malayalam Wikipedians knew that the major roadblock for students to start wiki editing in Malayalam would be Malayalam typing (in fact this is the case with all Indic languages) we decided to teach Malayalam typing to students on a priority basis. A printout of the Malayalam Inscript layout was given to the students. The Inscript layout was selected because that is part of the syllabus in Kerala. Students were asked to practice Malayalam typing and learn it within the next two months. From that day onwards students were practising Malayalam typing at school and making a steady progress.

Some recent developments are listed below:

September 8

Students are back to school after the Onam vacation. The progress on their Malayalam typing is evaluated. Malayalam Wikipedians, Kannan Shanmugham and Sugeesh visited students and addressed them. They discussed the potential articles that could be created as part of this project. They also helped few students to create their user names in Malayalam Wikipedia. After addressing the students they also visited some famous people in Anchal, other places, and some organizations to collect reference books and other information related to this project. The collection of reference materials from library, personal collections, and from panchayat office is vital for this project as these are the only places from where we can get any reliable information regarding the different topics that students plan to write.

October 1

As Malayalam typing and the collection of information and reference materials were in progress we received an important book authored by Dr. P. Vinayachandran which had a lot of information about Anchal. Students who achieved a minimum level of expertise in Malayalam typing and those who had created user accounts started editing in Wikipedia. On October 1, four new articles were created by the students who had learned Malayalam typing.

October 12

Shiju Alex visited the school students to see the progress of the project, interacted with them, and welcomed them to Malayalam Wikipedia. Since all of them had acquired a minimum level of expertise in Malayalam typing, we decided to create usernames for all of them. So on that day we created accounts and user pages for all the 34 students who were included in the project.

October 13

All the students who were part of the project reached Kollam to participate in a one-day Malayalam Wikipedia editing workshop. The program started at 10 a.m. Malayalam wikipedians Binu, Sugeesh, Kannan Shanmugham, Ajay Balachandran, Akhil, and Shiju Alex participated in this workshop. It was organized to assist students in getting started with Malayalam Wikipedia, introduce them to basic wiki editing and other related stuff. Apart from providing support for all basic needs, students were also introduced to "talk pages" and the basic policies of Wikipedia which would help them to get started with the project. We finished this one-day workshop at 3.30 p.m. by taking a group photo. A detailed report (in Malayalam) regarding this one day workshop can be read from here.

Students doing Malayalam wiki editing

October 14

Malayalam Wikipedians Sateesh, Sugeesh, Shiju, and our new wikipedian Anathu P. Sankar visited the Rehabilitation Plantation Limited [RPL] which is an important institution near Anchal and is one of the article being developed as part of this project. We met a few key people who provided some references about RPL. It was decided that students who were working on the articles related to RPL will visit again to collect more information about the project.

As of today some of the important progress the main progress made on the project are is listed below:

All students have created their accounts.
All students have created their user pages.
Most students created or edited articles that they were planning to contribute.
Students with the help of their teacher, Satheesh continue collecting reference materials on topics they plan to write.
Students continue editing in Malayalam whenever they get access to computer and internet.

Some of the things that need to be kept in mind regarding this project are:

The project is done entirely on a voluntary basis. No separate time is allocated for students to participate in this project.
Thirty-four students are part of this and most of them are from ninth standard.
Out of the 34 students, 7 are girl students.
Out of 34 students only 10 students have got computers at home.

Kerala schools are using free software for computers. They use a customized version of Ubuntu in computer labs. It is easy to configure Malayalam typing in that. Technically all 34 students need to depend on the five computers available (computers with internet facility) in the school computer lab to practice Malayalam typing, wiki editing, and do the other tasks related to the project. And the lack of regular access to computer and internet is affecting the smooth progress of the project.

As separate time is not allocated for this project, students who are part of this project are working on it either during intervals, lunch time, during early hours before the start of the school, or by staying late after the school working hours. Since we have only around five computers with internet in the school lab, students need to divide and share the timing among themselves. Many of them come to the school on Saturdays and Sundays to participate in the project.

Few important links related to this project:

The master project page of this program is available here.

The list of students participating in this program is available here
The list of articles that students started or enhancing as past of this project is available here
The progress report of the project in Malayalam is regularly updated here

We will keep you posted about the updates from this project as and when it happens. Malayalam community is planning to complete this project (student editing) by the third or fourth week of November.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/malayalam-wikipedia-education-program-august-october-update

Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success!

subha — 2012-11-10T08:30:09Z

A2K team members Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval participated in the "WikiWomenDay" organized by Wikipedia Club Pune at PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus on October 28, 2012. Subhashish unfolds the happenings of this full day free fun workshop.

Globally participation of women on Wikipedia is less than 10 per cent. Women wikipedians across the world have joined hands to boost women's contribution to Wikipedia. Recently the A2K team was in Pune for the WikiWomenDay 2012. Wikipedia Club Pune, the first Wikipedia club in India, to encourage women's participation on Wikipedia, had organized a full day fun event on October 28, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions.

Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of Wikipedia Club Pune briefed about the agenda of the event. Noopur spoke about the global contribution on Wikipedia in terms of various topics and how male-centered topics were well covered. Few of the male centric articles were taken up for comparison with those of women to make the audience understand the gap of contribution. A good majority of articles which were of interest to men were well written whereas women centric articles were of bad shape due to lack of contribution from women. A visual representation was shown to the participants to explain the statistical information about gender gap on Wikipedia. Apart from article contribution, male editors were found to be more social and discussed more on talk pages which also bring more male editors on Wikipedia.

Participants were introduced to the basics of Wikipedia editing (five pillars, notability, importance of source of references, vandalism) before they were explained about actual editing. Each of the participants were provided with a computer and one of them was invited to create her user account.

Thereafter Abhishek demonstrated searching an article on Wikipedia and how logging in to Wikipedia allows editors to edit articles which are protected from editing by anyone. One of the logged in editors was asked to make a small edit on an article which surprised many of the participants. They realized that even they can make changes to the articles, for the first time in their life. Then there was a buzz about the credibility of the articles as they all saw that anyone can edit the articles. So the Wikipedia article on Pune was vandalized and Pune was made the capital of India for a few minutes! The page was refreshed after a while and reverted. This was clear enough to demonstrate how active the editor community is on Wikipedia.

Abhishek Suryavanshi demonstrates wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012

Most of the errors and typos get corrected quickly as someone or the other notices that there is a mistake and correct it. However, there are many articles, especially articles of Indian context which still have wrong information because the number of Indian editors are less. A series of editing for various favourite articles chosen by new wikipedians opened up the window for them to understand how important their participation could be. Abhishek, Nikita, Noopur and Subhashish helped the editors with editing.

After engaging the editors for quite sometime with editing there was a fun quiz session to brush up what was taught. The participants were asked questions based on the previous session.

Winners of the quiz were awarded with Wikipedia stickers and badges.

A picture of participants learning wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012 in Pune

Some of the participants left after the lunch break. Those who came back then gathered for a Indian language Wikipedia session. Out of the whole audience there were Bengali, Hindi, Marathi and Odia speakers. They all were showed their respective language wikipedias. A demonstration was given to show the typing tool. As the editors were completely new to the Indian language typing, some of them started typing using default Narayam transliteration tool and some took the help of Microsoft ILIT and Google Transliterate as well. During this session new wikipedians edited many articles on Marathi, Hindi and Bengali Wikiepdia. After the whole day session there was still some time left for acclaim and fun. The participants were awarded with participation and contribution certificate by the Wikipedia Club Pune. All the new wikipedians registered on Wikipedia Club Pune.

There was a special announcement for Wikipedia Summit India, Anniversary Celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune. Club members celebrated with cutting a special Wikipedia cake. Rishi Aacharya and Ketaki Pole from PAI International Learning Solutions extended their support for this event.

Meeting with Wikipedia Club Pune members

There was a meeting with some of the Wikipedia Club Pune members on October 27, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions. It was attended by Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval. Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of the club brought a proposal about the Wikipedia India Summit, anniversary celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune which is planned in the first quarter of 2013. Importance of a India level summit, plans and agenda, logistics and partnership and sponsorship options were discussed during this meeting. There will be public announcement regarding this summit.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-women-day-2012-pune

Centre for Internet and Society

A Report of the Odia Wikipedia Workshop held in KMBB College of Engineering, Bhubaneswar

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar

Presentation:

Video:

Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session at Bharati Vidyapeeth — More Interested and More Involved Participants

‘Some Indian laws could be challenging’

Odia Wikipedia Gets a New Typing Solution!

Typing in Indic Languages from Mobiles made Easy!

Developer speaks:

Quick links:

Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad

Hackathon

Outcomes

Learnings

A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at Academy of Media Learning

Meeting with Nilambar Rath and Saumya Parida

Workshop

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller

Talk Summary

Erik Moeller

Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia

Structure

Learnings

Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot

Interactions with TGES students

Interactions with Christ College students

Meeting Wikipedians

Videos

First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized!

Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates

September 8

October 1

October 12

October 13

October 14

Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success!

Meeting with Wikipedia Club Pune members