Centre for Internet and Society

Wikimedia Bangalore Meetup @ Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

praskrishna — 2013-02-14T06:01:28Z

The Access to Knowledge team of the Centre for Internet & Society in partnership with Wikispeed and NASSCOM is organizing meetup at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore on February 25, 2013 at 2.00 p.m. Vishnu Vardhan will speak on the Access to Knowledge program.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikimedia-bangalore-meetup-at-iimb

Wikimedia Asia Meeting

praskrishna — 2013-08-29T10:14:36Z

T.Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi from the Access to Knowledge team at CIS participated in the Wikimedia Asia meeting in Hong Kong on August 10, 2013.

Note: An unedited transcript of the entire conversation can be downloaded below.

Click to see the file (Plain Text, 7Kb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikimedia-asia-meeting

Wikimania 2013: Wikipedians represent Indian Languages in Hong Kong

subha — 2013-09-13T06:03:03Z

The 7th, 8th and 9th of August 2013 saw over 600 Wikipedians across the world participating Wikimania at Hong Kong. The three day annual international conference for users and contributors of Wikipedia brought many debates about open educational research, open source technologies, gender gap, documenting the history of mankind in a free and open platform like Wikipedia and its sister sites in collaboration with Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums and all of these in 286 world languages. More and more volunteers are joining this movement and it is expanding the media of accessing and disseminating knowledge.

Here is a school teacher who lives in Salem, a small industrial town in Tamil Nadu. There lives a school teacher who was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Hong Kong long back. They have never met in real life but have been helping in correcting each others mistakes in Wikipedia articles. These two school teachers have taken their knowledge from the four walls of the classrooms to a larger audience of Tamil Wikipedia. I then realized how language brings people together. This is what I heard from my inner voice when I met S.Parvathi from Salem and H.K.Arun from Sri Lanka during Hong Kong Wikimania 2013, an annual gathering of Wikipedia contributors.

Many still are not aware the existence of Wikipedias in Indian languages. There are 20 South Asian language Wikipedias with more than 2 lakh articles contributed totally by about 1500 voluntary contributors in all these languages. There are hundred more contributors like Arun and Parvathi who create new articles in Tamil Wikipedia, and rectify mistakes by new contributors.

Wikipedians are all volunteers who devote their time for building the greatest repository of knowledge on the internet. Wikipedia articles are free from any copyright infringement so anyone can freely access, share, make modifications and redistribute them. Wikipedians have been able to create this ecosystem of nurturing new editors by teaching them the process of encyclopaedic content generation which not only polishes their writing abilities, but strengthens their communication skills.

Wikimania is fun, it brings wikipedians across the globe speaking diverse languages under one roof where they meet each other and share their ideas and collaborate.

Over 600 wikipedians from various countries participated in this year’s Wikimania including 16 from India. In the open world of Wikipedia collaboration always happen beyond borders; one Nepali and four Bangla Wikipedians from Bangladesh also joined the Indian Wikipedians to rejoice the triumph of the effort of all the volunteers from the subcontinent.

The fun was not just limited in creating a wall of their dreams, ambitions and action plans to take their own language Wikipedia to more people or discuss how they could write articles that are important to each others languages. It went upto helping each other to fix problems in typing Indian languages and discussing success stories of successful workshops that resulted bring more student contributors. Ganesh Paudel, a Wikipedian from Nepal says, "My hometown is very close to India and we share the same script with Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit and Konkani. India and Nepal both have sizable population speaking Nepali, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Sanskrit, Bangla and Hindi. I’m personally interested to collaborate with Indians speaking these languages." I could see the glow in his eyes when he wrote and explained the beautiful curvature of Ranjana script to me. Tinu Cherian, another long term Wikipedian who was attending Wikimania for the third time was excitedly live-tweeting the happening at Hong Kong. When I asked how he is feeling after a short break he unfolded his hands and proudly said, "Wikipedia is like religion to me, once a Wikipedian, you are always a Wikipedian!". Netha, a medical college student from Kerala spoke about bringing more women to contribute to Wikipedia. She calls Kavya, a college lecturer and Malayalam wikipedian who spoke about Women and non-conventional education as one of the gems she has discovered in her personal journey.

Wikimania also has Sengai Podhuvan, one of the oldest Indian Wikipedians. His appeal for Wikipedia fundraising brought a lot of donations to Wikimedia Foundation. Dr. Podhuvan shared his story of learning using computer, Tamil typing and writing articles about Wikimania this year brought many academicians, education researchers, policy change makers and open source and open knowledge activists across the world to share their ideas, activities going across the world even while enjoying dinner in the 100th floor.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikimania2013

Wikimania 2013: The International Wikimedia Conference

praskrishna — 2013-08-29T06:30:54Z

Wikimania is the annual international conference of the Wikimedia movement. It's organized by a different local team each year. In 2013 the conference took place in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Wikimania allows the community and the general public to learn about and share their experiences with free knowledge initiatives all over the world. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.

Click to read the details published on the Wikimania website.

The previous conferences were held in Frankfurt, Germany (2005), Boston, USA (2006), Taipei, Taiwan (2007), Alexandria, Egypt (2008), Buenos Aires, Argentina (2009), Gdańsk, Poland (2010), Haifa, Israel (2011), and Washington, D.C., USA (2012).

Picture: Wikimania 2013. Official site, CC-BY-SA 3.0

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikimania-2013

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: We, Men, Women: Collective Learning in Bridging Indic Wikipedia Gender Gaps

Elisachang — 2016-08-17T02:37:01Z

There is no denying that non-English Wikipedias are disproportionally underrepresented in scholarly focus despite the significant role of an open knowledge society can play in smaller linguistic groups – local collaboration and communication, knowledge dissemination, as well as preservation of local language resources.

A presentation was made at the WikiIndia Conference 2016.

Likewise, for the issue of the Wikipedia gender gap, missing the discourse and context of the Indian language Wikipedias’ gender imbalance will be a great loss considering the potential it possesses in gender empowerment and the recognition of female’s accomplishment in the local communities.

In this action research, we approach the issue with localized lens to investigate the gender gaps in five Indian language Wikipedias (Kannada, Konkani, Telugu, Odia, and Marathi) and to recode female participants' experiences in editing, negotiating, and communicating. However, this is not an ordinary gender gap bridging plan, we are not only promoting the idea of female-inclusive open knowledge society, but also actively searching for effective incentives, tangible outcomes, and sustainable strategies to cope with the challenges in respective contexts. Most importantly, we hope to create an example for the establishment of “community feedback loops” for reflective learning. Combining practical approach with theories in Feminism and Social Network, we ask.

How do female and women’s organizations perceive Wikipedia and its use on knowledge production?
How do we incentivize females and various female organization and make them feel empowered through online contribution?
What type(s) of network are ideal for female newcomers? How can we improve cross-community/gender communication?
How can we build a more welcoming platform for collaboration?

Indian language Wikipedias may be small, but they are in the phase of much flexibility and opportunities to shape and reshape the cultures and dynamics. Through the cyclical process of an action reaction, narrowing gender gaps in our local Wikipedias is no longer discrete events of individual efforts – but a collective action, a mutual learning, as what Wikipedias were built for.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-we-men-women-collective-learning-in-bridging-indic-wikipedia-gender-gaps

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: How to better tell your Wikimedia Community Story using Media as a Tool

subha — 2016-08-17T02:24:19Z

The Wikimedia community has constantly struggled to a) reach out to masses and tell them about their contribution, and motivate people to contribute to the Wikimedia projects. Media plays a very important role in spreading the word about Wikimedia projects and the contributor community, and at times, encouraging the audience to contribute.

A presentation was made at the WikiConference India 2016. This was one of the submissions which was accepted.

This has not been a very successful trend in the movement so far that a large number of people have engaged on Wikimedia projects because of a media shoutout. But there is no doubt about media being a great tool to engage with a large number of people. Apart from the mainstream media, social media has also been a gamechanger in mobilizing masses. The audience in both these kinds of media demand a certain kind of content and storytelling. And it is not easy to create relevant content for an audience that is hungry for new stories. Also, dealing with mainstream media has a lot to do with interpersonal skills.

This workshop would cover a few best practices from lessons learned from several media-related exercises in the recent years. Some of these exercises come with success and some with failures with some specific learning. And these important takeaways will hopefully lead a path in creating some kind open education resources (OER) for the Wikimedia community. However, none of the methodologies that are going to be discussed here are going to be ready solutions to change the awareness about the Wikimedia movement overnight. But these will certainly help the participants map their own community stories. The interactive workshop will help the participants to make some roadmap for a regular and sustained engagement on media.

Those who are keen on learning about using different media tools and take their Wikimedia stories to a wider world should consider participating this. It would be beneficial if they come prepared with a list of challenges that they are facing in media outreach.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-how-to-better-tell-your-wikimedia-community-story-using-media-as-a-tool

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: Gender Gap in Indian Language Wikipedias – Projects, Outreach and Outcome

pavanaja — 2016-08-17T02:43:54Z

India is not much different from the global statistics when it comes to gender gap issues in Wikipedia. Indian language Wikipedias are known to have similar ratio of male to female editors.

The submission was included as part of a panel related to the gender gap at the WikiConference India 2016.

Many activities are being made to bridge the gender gap in Indian language Wikipedias. These are aimed both at improving the ratio of female to male editors and increasing women related content in Indian language Wikipedias. Some of the notable projects are Art+ Feminism editathon, Lilavati’s daughters editathon, International Women’s day or month editathon, editathon to add articles about woman writers of coastal Karnataka. Sizeable number of students who are part of the Wikipedia in Education Program which are being run at many educational institutes of India are female. Some of these students continue editing and contribute to Wikipedia. Some female students worked as interns and have contributed by improving the quality of articles written by their peers. Outreach is one of the regular activities of taking Wikipedia to people. Outcome of the projects and the data on retention of the participants of outreach activities as regular contributing Wikipedians, survival of the newly created editors for short and long periods are documented and will be presented at the conference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-gender-gap-in-indian-language-wikipedias-2013-projects-outreach-and-outcome

WikiConference India 2016 Starts Friday in Chandigarh

praskrishna — 2016-08-05T01:48:32Z

India, a key growth area for Wikipedia, is gearing up for a national conference "for Wikimedians in India to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other information".

First published by Indo Asian News Service was mirrored on NDTV website on August 4, 2016. Sunil Abraham will be participating.

While the conference is open to "Wikipedians" from across the globe, organisers announced here that it would have a "very distinct Indian flavour and will deal primarily with issues relating to India on Wikipedia and its sister projects".

Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is the world's sixth-most popular website in terms of overall visitor traffic. Its worldwide monthly readership totals almost 500 million.

Since 2011, the Wikipedia has been working to expand its growth in India, and it held its first Indian conference in Mumbai in November that year, which was attended by 700 persons and addressed by website founder Jimmy Wales.

This year, the meet takes place from August 5-8 in Chandigarh, the city and a Union territory of a million population that serves as the capital of the states of Punjab and Haryana.

"The main objective is to reduce the gap between different communities and get help from other community members on technical issues and other things like best practices in decision making and how we resolve the disputes in the community," the organisers said.

Those attending including Wikimedia Foundation executive director Katherine Maher, board member Nataliia Tymkiv, senior programme officer for emerging Wikimedia communities Asaf Bartov, language engineering team international manager Runa Bhattacharjee, Punjabi poet Dr Surjit Patar, and Wikipedia education programme senior manager Tighe Flanagan.

From India, participants will include The Centre for Internet and Society executive director Sunil Abraham, and Wikimedia India president Yohann Varun Thomas.

This event includes "hackathons" and "edit-a-thons" - collective workings towards improving the content available online. It will also see sessions on the Wikimedia movement in India, examples of its use in education, innovative tech solutions from India, content translation, a "gentle introduction" to Wikidata, gender gaps, and case studies from various Indian languages.

Participants are coming from the Wikipedias in languages including Punjabi, Kannada, Odia, Tamil, English, Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Sindhi, Hindi and Chinese.

Because of its widespread popularity - and contrary to fears that a website "anyone" can edit will not have quality - the Wikipedia notches often among the highest results when information is searched for on the world wide web.

It is a project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of "openly editable content". As the site explains: "The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning quick) and encyclopedia."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/indo-asian-news-service-ndtv-august-4-2016-wiki-conference-india-2016-starts-friday-in-chandigarh

WikiConference India 2016

praskrishna — 2016-08-07T01:35:50Z

WikiConference India 2016 is an event to provide a common platform for all Wikimedians in India to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other information. The Conference is open for participation of Wikimedians from all nations, and will be taking place on the 5th, 6th, and 7th of August 2016 at Chandigarh.

The Conference has a very distinct Indian flavor and deals primarily with issues relating to India on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The main objective is to reduce the gap between different communities and get help from other community members on technical issues and other things like best practices in decision making and how we resolve the disputes in the community.

Guests

Katherine Maher, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Nataliia Tymkiv, Board Member, Wikimedia Foundation
Asaf Bartov, Senior Program Officer, Emerging Wikimedia Communities, Wikimedia Foundation
Runa Bhattacharjee, Manager, Language Engineering Team (International), Wikimedia Foundation
Dr. Surjit Patar, Punjabi poet and writer
Tighe Flanagan, Senior Manager, Wikipedia Education Program, Wikimedia Foundation
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society
Yohann Varun Thomas, President, Wikimedia India
María Kreuz, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Social Media Campaign

Facebook event page - https://www.facebook.com/events/146258892472025/ (More suited for conference participants only)
Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/WikiConferenceIndia2016
Facebook group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikiConferenceIndia2016/
Official Twitter Handler - https://twitter.com/WikiConIndia
IRC Channel - #wikiconferenceindia

More Info, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/wikiconference-india-2016

Wiki Women's Workshop

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T10:37:57Z

As part of the commemoration of the International Women's Day, International Centre Goa (ICG) in association with the Centre for Internet & Society’s Access to Knowledge team is organising a Wiki Women’s Workshop on Sunday, March 9, 2014 from 3.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m. at ICG – Dona Paula.

8th March is International Women's Day and to celebrate, women in India are organizing edit-a-thons and meetups to create and expand articles of importance to women in Wikipedia in English and various Indian languages. The goal of the month-long event is to encourage more women to contribute to Wikipedia and increase representation of articles related to women in Wikipedia. The event aims at creating new articles, expanding the existing stubs and translating English articles to various Indic languages.

The main aim of the event is to get more women aware about Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. Participants would be guided on "How to contribute to Wikipedia?" by a hands-on session and make the knowledge available for free.

Click here to view the poster and registration details.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/international-womens-day-2014

Wiki Women's Day in Goa

nitika — 2013-03-19T06:32:25Z

International Women's Day (IWD), also called International Working Women's Day, is celebrated on March 8, every year. There were a series of Wikipedia events organised this year with the aim of increasing participation of women contributing to Wikipedia. One such event was organised by the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society and the Wikimedia India Chapter at the Nirmala Institute of Education (NIE), a Secondary Teacher Education College in Panaji, Goa on March 8, 2013.

NIE is a respected institution providing pre- and in-service teacher education to thousands of teachers and about a 100 of them (99 per cent of the participants being women) joined in to learn Wikipedia editing and increase women related content on Wikipedia.

Rohini Lakshane from the Wikimedia India Chapter and Nitika Tandon from Access to Knowledge, CIS lead the session jointly. The session began with the introduction of Wikipedia, Wikipedia volunteers, the five pillars, motivation of volunteers to contribute to Wikipedia tirelessly and a brief of different activities that are being organised to strengthen the Wikimedia movement in India. Most of the students and faculty members were curious about two main things:

How to integrate the new community of editors in Goa with the larger Indian and global community?
How can teachers and students use Wikipedia to advance students' knowledge and add useful content to Wikipedia?

Participants watching Netha's video	To answer the first part, participants were informed about regular Wiki meet ups in different cities, several city based and language based Wikipedia mailing lists where one can find volunteer friends, active use of user talk pages and village pumps, Wikimedia India Facebook page amongst many others. To address the second part there was also a brief discussion about wiki project classroom coordination with specific examples from universities around the world. The teachers and faculty members will be sent a detailed outline of the program, list of universities with on-going projects, list of teachers who have used Wikipedia as a teaching tool and are willing to serve as a contact to help others set up a similar teaching courses.

The session was planned to go on until late evening with hands on editing in the computer lab. But unfortunately, we (Rohini and Nitika) were informed that the session will have to close before the scheduled closing time as participants had to leave. Except for two or three participants coming on stage and making their user accounts and another 3-4 article edits, we couldn't include more editing as a part of the outreach session, primarily due to time constraint. We're hoping that at a small percentage of participants would try actual editing at home and contribute to women related articles and some of them will be successful in using Wikipedia as a teacher's tool. We have their contact details and we'll try and monitor their on Wiki activities and provide them support whenever needed.


A picture of participants doing Wiki editing at the NIE workshop in Goa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-womens-day-in-goa

Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion on Suvarna News

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T16:36:11Z

Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in a panel discussion around Wikipedia in general and about Kannada Wikipedia in specific. This was telecast by Suvarna News 24x7 (Kannada) TV channel on June 13, 2013.

Videos

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/suvarna-news-june-13-2013-wiki-rahasya-panel-discussion

Wiki Meet-up in Bangalore: Talk by Vishnu Vardhan

praskrishna — 2013-02-11T06:22:56Z

Vishnu Vardhan, Director of Access to Knowledge team at CIS has been invited by the Bangalore SIG Chair. Vishnu will speak on the Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) project. The talk is scheduled for February 25, 2013 at 2.00 p.m. in Bangalore.

Agenda

Wikimedia Projects
Access to Knowledge by Mr.Vishnu Vardhan, Director A2K, CIS
Guest Talk by Mr.Joe Justice, Founder WikiSpeed & Mr.Vibhu Srinivasan, MD, Solutions IQ
Audience address by Chief Guest, Mr.KS Viswanath, Vice President, Industry Initiatives, NASSCOM
Networking

KS Viswanath

Mr. K.S. Viswanathan, Vice President, Industry Initiatives, NASSCOM, has around 32 years of general management and leadership experience in the Indian business context, building key executive relationships and a strong customer capital in diverse business environment. His extensive work experience in the IT industry and social sector comprises of developing and executing operational strategies, managing customer engagement programs, and establishing models for customer acquisition and retention. Over the span of his career, Mr. Viswanathan has held strategic & leadership positions at Wipro, Dell, Azim Premji Foundation and Hilleman Laboratories. As the Head for India geography at Wipro Infotech (2003-2008), he led the positive transformation of and business landscape for Wipro in India. He was the first country manager for Dell in India in 2000 and was instrumental in establishing Dell’s direct business model in India. Mr. Viswanathan is a graduate from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (1979 batch). He holds a MBA in marketing from PSG College of Technology (1981 batch).

Vishnu Vardhan

Vishnu Vardhan is the Programme Director-Access to Knowledge at CIS since February 2013. His experience spans across academics, industry (media) and not-for-profit sectors. Over the last 11 years he has worked in various capacities as researcher, grant manager, teacher, project consultant, information architect and translator. Prior to joining CIS, Vishnu managed the Art, Crafts and Culture portfolio of the Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT); where had spent 5 years in project conceptualization, management and assessment of quality and impact in the not-for-profit sector. Vishnu managed more than 30 projects and funds to the tune of Rs. 160 million. He also anchored SRTT’s automation and knowledge management activities. Vishnu worked as Research Coordinator at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore where he a) coordinated the online M.A. in Cultural Studies; b) managed the Library Fellowship programme; c) conceptualized and coordinated national and international workshops and short-term courses in Media and Cultural Studies; and d) helped in building academic institutional partnerships. Vishnu is a superannuated doctoral candidate at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster and CSCS, Bangalore.

Joe Justice

Joe Justice (@WIKISPEED) Founder, CEO, WikiSpeed Joe's team tied for 10th place in the mainstream class of the 2010 Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, a $10 million challenge for 100+ MPG automobiles. WIKISPEED now uses agile processes to solve problems for social good. Joe has spoken to audiences at TEDx, Denver University, University of California Berkley, Google, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary International, and others about social web application development, project methodology, and agile best practices. He is CEO of WIKISPEED and works at SolutionsIQ, a leading provider of Agile consulting, certified training, coaching, development, and Agile talent services, where he helps clients leverage Agile project management and team development methods to deliver solutions more reliably.

Vibhu Srinivasan

Vibhu Srinivasan (@vibhu_s) Managing Director, SolutionsIQ India Vibhu Srinivasan is an Entrepreneur, Agile Coach, Technologist and currently heads SolutionsIQ India. Vibhu has an extensive technology, process, and consulting background allowing him to work with a diverse set of clients and teams. Vibhu has been practicing agile practices since 1997 (officially called Agile only in 2001).He brings to his consulting, deep rooted passion and practices gained by working in the trenches with hundreds of developers on real projects. He is very passionate about software development and can code in multiple languages. He has helped many teams in their quest for agility. He is a CTO of a early stage start up in Seattle and has an MBA in strategic management from school of business Madison. He has a very solid understanding of building large scale scalable systems having participated in various roles over the years, most recently chief architect for a game, Lead for virtualization product at Microsoft and CTO of his own start-up. He has worked in financial, gaming, visualization domains to name a few. An entrepreneur by choice he is always busy building a company/product and is currently in India heading Solutions IQ a premier provider of Agile consulting and development services in the US.

Participants

Intended Audience

Anyone interested in Wikipedia (user, contributor or curious about it). Wikipedians from any part of India or the world and anyone who is interested in Wikipedia! Meetup is open to members of all Wikimedia projects and Wikipedians from all languages. All are welcome, and we are especially interested in seeing newcomers to join the experienced Wikipedians/Wikimedians. If you are interested in coming, please add your name below.

The full details can be accessed on the Wikipedia page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wiki-meet-up-bangalore

Wiki Media Foundation keen on developing Urdu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-11-01T13:23:54Z

The Wikipedia India Community Consultation 2014 was organized by the Wiki Media Foundation (WMF) and Wikipedia India Chapter in collaboration with Centre for Internet Society (CIS A2K) Bangalore on The venue was Movenpick Hotel and scheduled for October 4th and 5th here.

The article was published in the Siasat Daily on October 24, 2014.

The objectives of the meet up according to the organizers are “to share views and preferences on the most effective ways to pursue our shared vision of creating and sharing free knowledge in India and in the Indian languages, and to arrive at an agreement on a road map for a future where its resources are better utilized, its volunteers are better served and progress on its mission is more steadily attained. “

I reached Bangalore on 3rd October and invited Urdu speaking people and the Urdu media from Bangalore for a general meet up. Mr. Azeez Belgaumi a renowned Urdu Poet & writer and Mr. Syed Tanveer Ahmed, as senior Journalist heading “Karnataka Muslims” News portal approached me and we had a good conversation to know more about Urdu Wikipedia. They appreciated Wikipedia and promised to extend their support to the Urdu Wikipedia.

Mr. Syed Tanveer Ahmed and Mr. Azeez Belgaumi promised to take up the initiative to conduct some Wiki workshops in collaboration with Salam foundation and CIS A2K. Mr. Vishnu the Project Director CIS has also agreed to extend his best support to organize the outreach programmes in Bengaluru and other parts of India to develop Urdu Wikipedia.

An introductory meeting was held in the evening of 3rd October in which members of WMF and the Wikipedians representing languages viz. English, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Odia, Assamese, Kannada, Konkani, Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, and Gujarati attended.

On 4th October after noon the scheduled meet up was conducted wherein WMF Senior Director Grantmaking Mrs. Anasuya Sengupta from US, Head of Wikimedia Grants & Global South Partnerships Mr. Asaf Bartov from US, Chief Financial Officer Mr. Garfiled Byrd from France and Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees Mr. Petricio Lorente from Argentina Trustee Bishakha Datta participated. Mr. Gagan Sethi from Counterviews Gujarat facilitated the programme.

The Indic language bureaucrats, sysops and representatives participated actively and focused on the topic how to improve the Wikipedia in Indic languages. This session gone up to 7 p.m. and in the night too, the delegates had the get together to discuss on various issued related to Wikimedia programmes in India.

On the 5th October morning the work shop continued with dignified discussions. Various user groups from different languages took part and presented their views and successes. The discussions focused on wiki tools, various practical problems, do’s and don’ts. It’s a fabulous meet to take part, comprehend, and show the spirit of volunteerism towards Wikipedia.

During discussion on Urdu language, Mr. Asaf appreciated the contributions of Mr. Muhammad Shuaib. Mr. Nisar Ahmed Syed administrator in Telugu Wikipedia represented Urdu Wikipedia too as he is a contributor to Urdu Wikipedia. He discussed issues and stressed the need of outreach and developmental activities for Urdu Wikipedia in India. Mr. Muzammil Ahmed from Hindi and Urdu Wikipedia advocated its importance.

Ms. Anasuya and Mr. Asaf Bartov accepted the need of Urdu Wiki development programmes in India and they said they are ready to prepare a road map for the same.

Finally with the initiations of Mr. Nisar Ahmed Syed and with the kind cooperation of Mr. Asaf Bartov and Mrs. Anasuya Sengupta, an Urdu user group was set and introduced. The user group initially was gathered by backing of Mr. Asaf Bartov. The group has Mr. Syed Nisar Ahmed (Pune), Mr. Muzammil Ahmed (Hyderabad), Mr. Azeez Belgaumi (Bengaluru) and Mr. Satdeep Gil (Punjab).

The contributions of Muzammil Ahmed and Nisar Ahmed to Urdu Wikipedia were appreciated. The WMF team thanked all the Urdu users from India who rendered their best contributions.

Emphasis was laid to improve the Urdu Wikipedia India group.

As WMF intends to focus on the online encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA in the Indian languages Urdu users too expressed willingness to work for the mother tongue Urdu by enriching Urdu Wikipedia.

Mr. Nisar Ahmed said, “It is true that the awareness among the Urdu speaking community about Urdu Wikipedia is very less.” He emphasized the need to take a small step to lead to a large extent to bring awareness by means of outreach programmes, meet ups, seminars. It was accepted and appreciated to initiate outreach work among the Urdu speaking states and clusters in India.

In India about 450 newspapers and magazines are being published in Urdu language. And it is an amazing fact that many of the Urdu newspapers are using the Wikipedia as their source material from English Wikipedia as it has a large and authentic content, but they are not aware about the need to enrich Urdu Wikipedia. It should be known that everyone can edit, resource and enrich it. Hence it is decided to start a user group for Urdu Wikipedia India and to bring the same message to the masses.

“Bring Urdu Wikipedia from budding stage to a blooming stage.”Courtesy:Karnataka Muslims

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/siasat-daily-october-24-2014-wiki-media-foundation-keen-on-developing-urdu-wikipedia

Wiki Media Foundation keen on developing Urdu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-11-01T13:29:32Z

The article by Nisar Ahmed Syed was originally published on the website of Karnataka Muslims on October 22, 2014.

India Community Consultation 2014 held in Bangalore

Ms. Anasuya and Mr. Asaf Bartov accepted the need of Urdu Wiki development programmes in India and they said they are ready to prepare a road map for the same.

The contributions of Muzammil Ahmed and Nisar Ahmed to Urdu Wikipedia were appreciated. The WMF team thanked all the Urdu users from India who rendered their best contributions.

Emphasis was laid to improve the Urdu Wikipedia India group.

As WMF intends to focus on the online encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA in the Indian languages Urdu users too expressed willingness to work for the mother tongue Urdu by enriching Urdu Wikipedia.

“Bring Urdu Wikipedia from budding stage to a blooming stage.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/karnataka-muslims-nisar-ahmed-syed-october-22-2014-wiki-media-foundation-keen-on-developing-urdu-wikipedia