Centre for Internet and Society

ଆମ ହାତେ ଆମ କୋଡ୍ ଲେଖିବା

subha — 2016-09-17T16:04:12Z

I authored a column on writing our code in our own hands for the editorial of Odia-language daily the "Samaja". The piece is about the philosophy of software freedom and how free and open source software is making a significant difference in our lives. I have also shared a little bit about how anyone can celebrate the Software Freedom Day today by contributing to and sharing about to FOSS.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/samaja-september-17-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-let-us-write-our-code-in-our-own-hands

Making Telugu Suitable for Internet

rahim — 2016-09-06T14:21:49Z

In brief, the article speaks of steps in making a language other than English suitable for Internet and computers, what input methods, fonts and content are available in Telugu as on date and what challenges are ahead in making language fully available on Internet and in computers.

Click to download the file here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ammanudi-september-6-2016-making-telugu-suitable-for-internet

Wikiwomen’s Meetup at St. Agnes College Explores Potentials and Plans of Women Editors in Mangalore, Karnataka

ting — 2016-09-01T14:39:53Z

Karnataka is known for its diverse linguistic cultures. Aside from Kannada, many are native speakers of Konkani, Tulu, and other languages. A small Wikiwomen's meetup was held on Saturday, August 27th at St. Agnes College, Mangalore, to invite female Wikipedians from the region. Many of them were new to the online encyclopedia but demonstrated strong interest in learning and contributing more Indic language content online.

A Wikiwomen’s meetup was held at St. Agnes College on August 27^th in the hope to strengthen the bonding and communication between female Wikipedians in Mangalore. Attendees of the meetup on Saturday included five Kannada Wikipedian, one Konkani Wikipedian, one from the recently gone live Tulu Wikipedia, and Ting-Yi Chang from the CIS A2K team. Two of the Kannada Wikipedians are staff and faculty members of the College’s library and Department of Kannada respectively. Both were brought into Wikipedia by edit-a-thons held on the college campus in the last few months

The meetup started off with a round of brief self-introduction and an inspiring introductory presentation by Dhanalakshimi K T, a St. Agnes commerce student who had successfully organized the last two women’s edit-a-thons on her campus.

“Wikipedia is a great tool for knowledge sharing. When we edit in our own languages, people from outside of the city who don’t speak English can learn things more easily online.... It is the respect and passion I have for my language."

The presentation also touched upon some feasible benefits that editors gains through participating in Wikipedia/media projects: improvement in writing and research skills, nurturing a critical thinking habit when reading texts and doing research, learnings from collaborative work experience, improvement in language and communication skills, etc. One of the participants later mentioned that with the hobby of editing Wikipedia, she began actively researching in her interested topics. Even in occasions when she had no time to actually update the content onto Wikipedia, the knowledge she gained throughout the research process has already enriched her and broadened her horizon of the subject.

The second half of the presentation consists of an introduction to the 5 pillars rules and some other advice of Wikipedia editing. Participants who were newcomers showed great interest and actively raised questions surrounding the use of different editing tools including the infobox templates, translation tools, useful markups, and personal sandboxes.

When being asked about the barriers they have faced so far in editing Wikipedia, most agreed that time issues do prevent them sometimes as their offline commitments (work, family, school) can take priority over it. However, most participants also concluded that “those who are truly interested will eventually find the time.” On the other hand, access to internet and facilities has not been reported as a barrier in their cases, but all agreed that it can be for many other women. Awareness was emphasized as a crucial factor when trying to bring in more women to Wikipedia. One of the student participants shared her experience,

“Some people may have never heard of Wikipedia before; some misunderstood its use and potential… when I talked about Kannada Wikipedia with my peers, first they thought it was some website for Kannada stories writing…. But when I explained to them what it is and how we can edit, they were all very excited and very much wanted to try."

In the latter discussion of the meetup, participants talked about the tentative event plans for the next few months. Two sessions were suggested to be held by November, 2016. One as a workshop for the newcomers and the other as an editing event for more experienced female Wikipedians. All participants, old and new, are really excited to strengthen the bonding between Wikiwomens in Mangalore. Some suggested there should be more casual meetups every few weeks to help them communicate more and plan upcoming community events, including an ongoing event that can be held in March, 2017 for the International Women’s Day and Wikiwomen’s History Month.

The meetup continued with more discussion on various language Wikipedias’ development. As an experienced Wikipedian and an actively outreaching community member, participant Harriet Vidyasagar explained the complexity in Konkani Wikipedia, which contains five scripts, and the importance of those scripts in Konkani language’s history and culture. All participants agreed that seeing their mother tongues’ scripts online and creating more content to make their culture and language visible are a great source of happiness and a motivation for them to continue editing. The session ended with exchange of contacts and group pictures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiwomen2019s-meetup-at-st-agnes-college-explores-potentials-and-plans-of-women-editors-in-mangalore-karnataka

A workshop to improve Telugu Wikipedia articles on Nobel laureates

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-09-12T15:01:15Z

Many articles about Nobel laureates are missing in the Telugu Wikipedia. Recently undergraduate students from four different disciplines of the Andhra Loyola College (ALC), Vijayawada gathered to create and improve articles related to Nobel laureates.

Spanned for three days—from August 16 through 18—54 students from the department of Telugu, Botany, Statistics and Physics edited articles related to Nobel laureates, improved the content quality and inserted images that were already there in Wikimedia Commons. There was a great balance of equal participation in the number of female and male students. During this sprint 124 existing articles on Telugu Wikipedia were improved and 118 of them saw images being added. Though it was challenging for me to manage so many participants, I was partly successful in mentoring some of the students who in turn helped their friends with basic editing.

Apart from educating the students about editing Wikipedia, I demonstrated about digitising “Kavitvatattva Vicharam”, a book authored by by Kattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy in 1913 and is considered as the first modern literary criticism in Telugu literature, on Telugu Wikisource. Some of the students tried to proof-read the book for the first time.

There is a plan laid out to work with a small subset of these participating students again for different kind of academic-centric projects like the QRpedia project. To keep the activity more regular, the students are are creating the missing Botany-related articles. We are hoping to work with remaining students at least once in every quarter. A few recommendations for bettering the students’ understanding of Wikipedia and the community that Telugu Wikipedian User:Chaduvari had shared earlier came quite useful during this event. Based on his inputs I did my best elaborating the [Wikipedia] project structure and community dynamics to the new editors. Another long time Wikimedian Rajasekhar followed up on the Wikisource activity remotely. B. Manikantha, a students from the Arts department shares, “Until now I always had a notion that Wikipedia might be some sort of entertainment website where we can listen to music and play games. But after attending this workshop I could understand how great it is as a learning platform. Also I learnt about one of our professors Dr. Gumma Sambashivarao who is a noted author, and how the articles about more such authors could be made available online in our language.” “It was fun translating articles in my favourite subject—war. I’m hoping to continue my contributions further”, he adds.

More details in the event page on Telugu Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/a-workshop-to-improve-telugu-wikipedia-articles-on-nobel-laureates

Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses

Pavan Santhosh S. & Subhashish Panigrahi — 2016-09-20T12:43:29Z

This campaign was started on June 19 and copyright migration process is complete for 17 books so far. Once the copyright migration is over the books—ranging from historical figures and popular personalities to regional history—are going to be digitised on Wikisource.

List of books and their authors

Author: Gadam Gopala Swamy
Book: Paschima Godavari Jillalo Mahatmuni Sancharam, a historical account on Gandhi's travels and the way he spread his ideology in and around this area.
Significance: This can be used in improving articles related to the history of villages of the West Godavari district. Swamy is going to publish his magnum opus on the national movement in West Godavari along with another biographical work about the notable people of the district.

"I dedicate these works to all the people of the West Godavari district. All my efforts will be useful even if one person [from West Godavari] reads these works, learns what their ancestors lived for and died for [in the national independence movement] and tries to be responsibly contribute to the society. I find this could only be possible through placing it in digital platform like Wikisource."
- Dr. Gadam Gopala Swamy, historian, former professor

Author: Kanuri Badarinadh (Historian, Novelist and Journalist)
Books: Biographies, short biographies like Tanuku Talukulu, Yarra Narayana Swamy Jeevitha Charitra, Local Histories like Panara Vishayamu, Maa doothikapuramu, collection of articles on historical, cultural, social and art like Kasyapa Vyasalu, Antharvani, Badareenadheeyam, Lochoopu, Annavi anukonnavi, Vyasa Badarikam, historical fiction like Kavi garu, Koutilyuni Nireekshanam.
Priority: These Books can be used as resources to create articles about notable personalities of West Godavari district, several important persons and events in Andhra pradesh politics and history. Can improve articles related to West Godavari district, especially about the history sections in the village articles.

“I don't want these works to be in bookshelf and get wasted by termites. My wish as an author and researcher is to make these works available to future historians who can make use of it, so that our people get to know the local history”
- Kanuri Badarinadh, historian, novelist and journalist. Badarinadh has donated some of his books.

Author: Katta Srinivasa Rao, historian, Wikipedian and poet
Book: Ganapeswaralayam, a historical account of temples of historical importance that were built in Kusumanchi of Khammam district in Telangana. These temples flourished under the Kakatiya dynasty’s reign.
Priority: Katta Sriniavasa Rao is one of the first line Telangana historians who are working to rebuild Telangana’s History. This work is result of his research. It contains valuable content about Ganapeswara Temple and gives a glimpse of the sculpture, history and society under Kakatiya dynasty in Khammam.

Author: Vemuri Venkateswara Rao
Book: Ramanujan Nundi atu itu, a book about mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his works in mathematics
Priority: Like many other Indian languages, Telugu also has a lower number of books related to science and mathematics especially in the contemporary context. This book is about Ramanujan Numbers, formulas and a few more works. It also has description about contemporary mathematics built upon Ramanujan's work. This can be used to improve mathematics related articles in Telugu Wikipedia.

Author: Yasaswi Sateesh Kumar
Books: Okkamata, contains brief poetic pen portraits that explains about contemporary Telugu poets, Tellakagitam is anthology of Telugu poet Yasaswi’s poetry.
Priority: Photos of many contemporary Telugu poets and brief descriptions about them are now under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. These can be used in Wikipedia articles about notable poets.

Author: Emma Rauschenbusch Clough
Translator: Vivina Murthy
Book: Cheppulu Kuduthu Kuduthu is a translation of Emma Rauschenbusch Clough’s English book “While sewing sandals”. The English book was released in 1899 and is in Public Domain. The Telugu book was translated by Vivina Murthy and was published in 2007 by Manasu Foundation. As the translator had rights on his translated work, he released it under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license to make it freely available to all on our request.
Priority: Historical record especially about Christianity in coastal Andhra Pradesh, dalits in 19th century.

Author: Gurajada Apparao
Book: Gurujadalu is a compilation of all the works Gurajada Apparao -- he is considered as one of the greatest literary figures of modern Telugu literature. The book was edited and published by the efforts of Manasu Foundation and its associates. Apparao’s works are under Public Domain already as per the Indian Copyright Law,. But the critical introduction and some of the translations included in the book were copyrighted by Manasu foundation which they released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. This move will help digitize them on Wikisource and make them freely available to Telugu people.
Priority: Even Though some of the works of Apparao got digitized on Wikisource, this can showcase his complete literary journey with bringing a vast set of reading for the Telugu readers.

All of these books were released or agreed to be released under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license in June and July 2016. Some of these books were digitized on Wikisource, and the proofreading is going on currently. Some of the the remaining books being scanned and some are uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. The ones that have been uploaded on Commons are being indexed and digitized on Wikisource.

The news about all of these license migrated books was shared with the [Telugu Wikimedia] community, and also personally with some of the community members like Rajasekhar, Sri Ramamurthy, Gullapalli Nageswara Rao, Bhaskara Naidu, and a few others who supported in various stages of digitization like indexing, proofreading, etc.

"I wish this contribution will go forward in the same way and help making Telugu Wikisource number one in entire Indic Wikisources. I will support this work wherever you need and please ask my help whenever necessary. Definitely we can collaborate."
- User:Rajasekhar1961, Telugu Wikimedian

The list of the books can also be located on the Telugu Wikisource.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/campaign-for-relicensing-copyrighted-books-under-creative-commons-licenses

Data Xgen launches paid Hindi email service

praskrishna — 2016-08-30T02:35:03Z

Jaipur based Enterprise email provider Data Xgen Technologies has launched a paid email service in Hindi Devnagari script. This is especially for .bharat domain names, but can also be used for other domains. As of now, the company offers email packages starting at Rs 99, Rs 499, Rs 999 and Rs 1,499, which look like monthly plans.

The blog post by Sneha Johari was published in Medianama on August 29, 2016.

Ajay Data, the company’s founder and CEO told MediaNama that it plans to launch an app for sending free email in Indic language, starting with Hindi. Data said that he was hopeful about Hindi email adoption given the vast majority of the population in India was rural and did not understand English. “People get left out of communication streams because they do not understand English. But they can still get onto the internet and communicate with all of us. Mobile companies are also selling phones in Indian languages, marketing as Hindi phones.. And this is the right time (for Indic email) since the segment is being created,” he added.

Earlier this month, the Indian government told email service providers to provide users with addresses in Indian languages, starting with Hindi. It also wanted ‘sufficient local language content and tools to access it’ in order to increase internet penetration and push higher rural adoption. This was needed because English speakers and readers in the country were low (10.35%), according to Rajiv Bansal, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT.

Wikipedia Indic efforts

About 3 weeks ago, Wikipedia launched in Tulu, the 23rd Indian language Wiki. In September 2013, the Goa University had entered into a 3 year MoU with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani Wikipedia, which was launched 6 months later. In August 2014, former Bihar CM Nitish Kumar launched the ‘Bihar on Wikipedia’ campaign inviting people of the state to write about their villages, towns, culture, history, development over the years, etc. Note that in 2012, Wikipedia editors were digitizing Indian language, out-of-copyright texts online, trying to address the comparative paucity of Indic language texts online.

As of June 2016, Wikipedia had 16 million page views per month on the Hindi wiki, with overall 106,844 articles. This is not a significant increase. According to this August 2011 report, there were 0.1 million Hindi articles on the platform, and 9 million overall views.

Indian mobile handsets need to support Hindi: BIS

In June, the Bureau of Indian Standards reportedly said that mobile handsets in India would need to support typing in Hindi and English, and reading in all 22 official Indian languages. We’d pointed out at the time that this was essential for growth of access to the internet for handsets in order to access content in users’ local languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/data-xgen-launches-paid-hindi-email-service

Meet the Newly Born Tulu Wikipedia, the 23rd in a South Asian Language!

subha — 2016-08-30T02:14:13Z

The Tulu language Wikipedia became the latest entrant in the family of 294 world-language Wikipedia projects after the project went live from Wikimedia Incubator earlier this month.

The post was published in Global Voices on August 28, 2016.

The project waited as long as eight years in the Incubator before becoming the 23rd South Asian language Wikipedia. Available at https://tcy.wikipedia.org, the Tulu Wiki space has a total of 1,285 articles contributed by 198 editors, about 5-10 of which are active with over five edits every month.

The announcement about the project going live was made by Katherine Maher, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation during the WikiConference India.

Wikimedia Incubator is a sister project of Wikipedia and before any new language Wikipedia is created, an Incubator project is created and grown by volunteer editors. Once the project gains momentum with more editors developing more content more often, the project goes live as a new Wikipedia project.

The Tulu language is spoken by about three to five million people in the Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala, and there is a sizeable diaspora living in US and the Gulf countries.

Eight years back in 2008, Tulu Wikipedia was created in Incubator with just a handful of editors. But apart from a few sporadic edits every so often, there was little impetus to take the project forward.

A community in a real sense is one that engages in discussion, consensus and collaboration. This never existed for Tulu Wikipedia as individual editors were working in isolation from each other.

There was therefore a need for them to meet and form a strategic plan to grow the community and the Incubator by brining in more active contributors.

In 2014, the need to connect the Tulu Wikipedia editors and foster an interactive editorial group was discussed and a meetup was organized in Mangalore by the Centre for Internet and Society—Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) program, a catalytic program funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and grow Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects in the Indian subcontinent.

As an offshoot of that meeting, more community meetups started to happen. A few workshops were organized in Mangalore to provide hands-on training to participants and the city's St. Aloysius College opened its door to include Wikipedia editing as part of its syllabus.

A Wikipedia Education Program was promptly organized for the undergraduate students in this college where students started editing Wikipedia as a classroom assignment and the faculty was involved both in providing training and evaluating the articles.

Vishwanatha Badikana, assistant professor of the Kannada language department at St. Aloysius College, became an active Tulu Wikipedia editor himself and led outreach activities at the institution. His students have enriched the Tulu Wikipedia with articles across a broad range of topics.

However, what has been achieved so far is still only the tip of the iceberg. The community is still fairly small and has to grow beyond one supporting institution. The larger Tulu language community also has to take ownership and become stewards in growing Tulu Wikipedia.

Despite its long, rich linguistic heritage, Tulu is still struggling in terms of achieving wider usage in written form, especially in its native script. The lack of promotion is also quite evident as the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy, an official body set up by the Karnataka government uses Kannada and English for its official portal.

The biggest challenge of all is the lack of Unicode support. Unicode is a global standard for scripts, and the Tigalari script that is used to write in Tulu is not encoded in Unicode. At the moment, all the articles in the Tulu Wikipedia are written in the Kannada script as most of the speakers are based in the state of Karnataka, and speak Kannada as a second language.

The only possibility of using Tigaliri script is tied to standardizing the script on Unicode, releasing a freely licensed typeface so that it can be bundled as a web font to display the script in the case of any mobile or desktop user not having the font installed on their device.Finally the script for existing content must be converted from Kannada to Tigaliri.

There is a series of eight how-to video tutorials that have been created to help new and existing editors to learn more about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, style and the editing process.

“Many students have contributed by creating these tutorials,” says Dr. Badikana.

The current set of editors are doing their best to spread the word about the project while safeguarding the core values of Wikipedia.

In an interview to the media portal Daijiworld, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu, an active editor based in Oman said, “Anyone can write or edit articles on Wikipedia Tulu, but it should not be plagiarised [..] Photos should be one's own or uploaded with valid permission from the owner. This will help the future generation to know more about the language and act as a source of information on Tulu language and culture.”

Dr. Badikana moreover shared in an interview with this author that he is hopeful of seeing more Tulu speakers contributing to Tulu Wikipedia, as he feels that growing language content online, combined with work in conventional classrooms, is the best approach to preserving the language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/global-voices-august-28-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-meet-the-newly-born-tulu-wikipedia-the-23-in-south-asian-language

Community Digest: Tulu Wikipedia Goes Live after Eight Years in Incubator; News in Brief

Subhashish Panigrahi and Ting-Yi Chang — 2016-08-26T15:21:58Z

Eight years after being created in the Wikimedia Incubator, the Tulu-language Wikipedia is now live as the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia.

The blog post was published in the Wikimedia blog on August 24, 2016.

Available at https://tcy.wikipedia.org, the project has a total of 1285 articles contributed by 198 editors.

Tulu is spoken by between three and five million people principally concentrated in the states of Karnataka and Kerala in south-west and south India (respectively), with more in the US and in Gulf countries. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director Katherine Maher announced that the project would go live in her keynote at WikiConference India 2016.

Tulu Wikipedia was started in the Wikimedia Incubator back in 2008 with a one or two editors, but neither the project nor the community remained active except sporadic edits. Without any meetups and outreach, it was difficult for those editors to work as a community to bring the project live from Incubator. The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program, a catalytic program funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and grow Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects in the Indian subcontinent, started building a Tulu-language community in 2014. They and the community conducted Wikipedia editing training workshops at St. Aloysius College in Mangaluru, who opened their doors to introduce the Wikipedia Education Program (WEP). As part of the WEP, students started editing Wikipedia as part of their syllabus with the leadership and guidance of Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, assistant professor of the Kannada-language department at St. Aloysius, who himself became an active Tulu Wikipedia editor. Similarly, many students from both the institutions also contributed articles of diverse subject areas.

However, the community is fairly small and needs a way to grow outside the institution. “A series of eight how-to video tutorials have been created to help editors to learn about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, manual of style and overall editing. Many students have contributed in creating these tutorials”, Badikana says, and the existing set of editors are doing their best to spread the word about the project. In an interview with the media portal Daijiworld, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu, an active editor based in Oman, said, “anyone can write or edit articles on the Tulu Wikipedia but it should not be plagiarised. The photos should be one’s own or uploaded with valid permission from the owner. This will help the future generation to know more about the language and act as a source of information on Tulu language and culture.”

One of the biggest challenges in growing the project—apart the community’s limitations within institutional frameworks and having just a handful of editors outside—is the lack of codification of the project as per Unicode compliance. Unicode is a global standard for scripts, and the modern Tulu script (derived from the original Tigalari script) is not yet encoded in Unicode. As a result, all the articles in the Tulu Wikipedia are written in the Kannada script, as the speakers are mostly based in the state of Karnataka and speak Kannada as a second language.

Despite a long linguistic heritage, Tulu is still struggling to be widely used, especially in its native script. Badikana says that he is really hopeful that he will see more Tulu speakers start contributing to the language’s Wikipedia, as he feels that growing language content online would be the best thing to do while working in a conventional classroom.

In brief

Ongoing India At Rio Olympics 2016 Edit-a-thon promises to plant one tree for every 20 new articles created

India this year has a great participation in the Rio Olympics; some of the participating athletes have brought medals and glory for the country and some lost in the tight competition. But for Wikipedia, every single athlete matters! An edit-a-thon is being organized by Wikimedia India in collaboration with not-for-profit “Sankalp Taru”, publication house Niyogi books. Several Indian-language Wikipedia communities are participating in creating Wikipedia articles related to the Rio Olympics and India’s participation in it. A unique goal is set for this edit-a-thon where a tree will be planted for every 20 new articles created and it could also be monitored online. The edit-a-thon started officially at 0:00 UTC on 29 July 2016 and will go on 23:59 UTC on 18 September 2016. Apart from several other rules for participation, the rule also discourages pure machine translation of the articles as historically there has been disastrous impact of Google Translate for many Indian language Wikipedias.

Wiki Loves Monuments returns to India after three years

Wiki Loves Monuments, the global photo competition that is organized by the Wikimedia communities in September with the focus of getting good quality photographs of monuments of historical interest, will be organized in India. “The aim of the contest is to ask the general public—readers and users of Wikipedia, photographers, hobbyists, etc.—to take pictures of cultural heritage monuments and upload them to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and its other sister projects.”, shared Abhinav Srivastava, Executive Committee member of Wikimedia India which is the official organizer of the event. More details about participating in this event could be found in the event page.

WikiConference India 2016, the largest Wikimedia community gathering of the year in South Asia comes to an end

Organized by the Wikimedia communities in India, the WikiConference India 2016 was the largest Wikimedia gathering in the subcontinent of this year. After a long break of five years, the event has about 250 participants including over 100 scholarship recipients from four countries representing Wikimedia projects in 20 Indic languages. As reported in the Signpost, nearly 25% of scholarship recipients were women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. There were 89 accepted submissions including workshops, presentations, The event also included an edit-a-thon to improve the content related to Punjab, Punjabi language and culture as a gesture of respect to the place where the event was organized. Over 2000 articles have been created by more than 150 editors in 12 different language Wikipedias.

A gender gap-focused panel, led by formed Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees member Bishakha Datta, was held on the second day of the conference to share the research and outreach experiences in different communities (featuring Kannada, Tamil, and Marathi communities). Researchers proposed new strategies and practices in tackling the systematic and social barriers for Indian women joining Wikimedia projects. Other presenters shared tips and event-organizing experience on various outreach activities—from edit-a-thons and photo-thons in the International Women’s Month to student-led events in college institutions—demonstrating respective communities’ efforts on the local, national, and global scales. The panel was followed by a Wikiwomen’s Lunch meetup attended by most female Wikipedians at the conference along with Bishakha, Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees member Nataliia Tymkivand WMF staff members.

Ashutosh Sarangi, the youngest Wikimedian from the oldest Indian-language Wikipedia community

At the closing ceremony WikiConference India 2016, Ashutosh Sarangi was awarded as the youngest Wikimedian at the conference by , two days after Katherine congratulated the Odia Wikipedia for celebrating its 14th birthday, where the project happens to be the oldest of all Indian-language Wikipedias. Ashutosh, a 6th grade student, is the son of Pankajmala Sarangi, the most active Odia Wikisourcer, and is active in Odia Wikisource with 226 edits for digitization of two books so far. “Living and studying in New Delhi where Hindi is predominantly the primary language, having a conversation in our native language Odia itself is so difficult. I am proud to be a mother who not only teaches Odia language to her kids but also helps them contribute to the open Internet. At some point of time, these valuable books Ashutosh has contributed in digitizing on Odia Wikisource will be of great read for others”, she shares. Long time Hindi-language Wikipedian Raju Suthar has mentioned in a news article in Hindi newspaper the Sanjivani saying, “Ashutosh has won everyone’s heart as the youngest Wikimedian in this conference. Asaf Bartov and Nataliia Tymkov have awarded him for his contribution”. Ashutosh started contributing to Odia Wikisource in February this year on the day of the second workshop in New Delhi.

MediaWiki hackathon at WikiConference India 2016 has seven important outputs

The MediaWiki hackathon that was running at the WikiConference India in the leadership of Santosh Shingare was productive to engage with several participants and bring as many as seven most important outcomes:

WikiSpeak, an easy-to-use Android (source code) and web app (source code) that read the the Wikipedia articles in native languages.
Edit Tamil Wiktionary, android app that helps create entries in Tamil-language Wiktionary from a spreadsheet created with a .tsv extension. The app checks for existing entries and creates only entries that are not existent. (source code)
Commons audio uploader, Android app that helps a user to log in using Mediawiki credentials, create audio recordings using their phone microphone, and upload them on Commons. (source code)
Wikipedia articles on Google map, web application that can show Wikipedia articles with geo-cordinates in Google Maps when the phone’s location is enabled for Google Maps. The application is responsive enough to adjust the portion of the Wikipedia article it displays on the screen, and works for all the Indian languages. (source code)
OCR (Native Application) : Convert scanned book copy to Indian language text with google doc (Tested for Hindi and Malayalam).
Communication platform[WebRTC] (Web Application) : Community used this to talk or conference (Audio/video web conferencing application)
Notification (Event based) : showing popup on event eg (If recent changes happen, It will show popup which article was updated)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-digest-tulu-wikipedia-goes-live-after-eight-years-in-incubator-news-in-brief

Preserving Languages and Cultures in India: The Birth of the Tulu Wikipedia

subha — 2016-09-07T15:35:43Z

After eight years of effort and outreach, the Tulu language Wikipedia has gone live. Wikimedia contributors play a key role in preserving languages and cultures, and tools like the Wikimedia Incubator help new projects like the Tulu Wikipedia get started.

The blog post was published by Opensource.com on August 26, 2016. This got mentioned in Wikipedia's newsletter "The Signpost".

Tulu is a language spoken by three to five million people in the states of Karnataka and Kerala in the southwest and south India respectively, and by some people in the US and in Gulf countries. Tulu Wikipedia is the 294th Wikipedia and the 23rd South Asian language Wikipedia.

The Tulu Wikipedia grew in the Wikimedia Incubator for about eight years before going online. So far, 198 editors have contributed 1285 articles, and the active editors that have more than 5 edits in the project number between 5-10.

Tulu Wikipedia started back in 2008 with just one or two editors. But neither the project nor the community remained active except for sporadic edits. Without any meetups or outreach it was difficult for those editors to work as a community to bring the project live. The Centre for Internet and Society—Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) program, a catalytic program funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and grow the Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects in the Indian subcontinent, started work on building a community for Tulu in 2014. It all started with an informal meetup, and then more community meetups started happening. The community also conducted Wikipedia editing training workshops, and two major educational institutions came forward to help grow the community and the project.

These institutions, St. Aloysius College and St. Agnes College in Mangaluru in the state of Karnataka, introduced the Wikipedia Education Program where students started editing Wikipedia as part of their syllabus. Vishwanatha Badikana, assistant professor of the Kannada language department at St. Aloysius, became an active Tulu Wikipedia editor himself and led the outreach activities in the institution. Similarly, many students from both the institutions also contributed articles of diverse subject areas.

However, the community is still fairly small and has to grow outside of the institutions. "A series of eight how-to video tutorials have been created to help editors to learn about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, manual of style and overall editing. Many students have contributed in creating these tutorials", says Dr. Badikana. The current set of editors are doing their best in spreading the word about the project while safeguarding the core values of Wikipedia. In an interview to media portal Daijiworld, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu, an active editor based in Oman said, "Anyone can write or edit articles on Wikipedia Tulu, but it should not be plagiarised. The photos should be one's own or uploaded with valid permission from the owner. This will help the future generation to know more about the language and act as a source of information on Tulu language and culture."

One of the biggest challenges, apart from the limitations in attracting new contributors, is the lack of Unicode support. Unicode is a global standard for scripts, and the Tigalari script that is used to write in Tulu is not encoded in Unicode. At the moment, all the articles in the Tulu Wikipedia are written in the Kannada script as the speakers are mostly based in the state of Karnataka, and speak Kannada as a second language.

With its great and long linguistic heritage, Tulu is still struggling to be widely used, especially in its native script. The lack of promotion is also evident as the official body, the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy, that is set up by the Karnataka government uses Kannada and English in the official portal. However, Dr. Badikana shared in an interview to the author that he is hopeful to see more Tulu speakers contributing to Tulu Wikipedia, as he feels that growing language content online would be the best thing to do along with working in a conventional classroom.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/preserving-languages-and-cultures-in-india-the-birth-of-the-tulu-wikipedia

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଇଁ ଓସିଆର: ଛପା ଲେଖାର ଛବିରୁ ଡିଇଟାଲ ଲେଖା

subha — 2016-08-23T15:16:00Z

Though not an open source solution, Google's OCR works really well for Odia and other Indian languages. My column in the Odia daily the Samaja that was published last Saturday briefs about how the OCR works and has a step-by-step process to use it. There is also a little bit of background of Tesseract-based OCR that Debayan Banerjee worked in the past and Nasim Ali from the Odia Wikimedia community is currently working.

This was published in the Samaja on August 21, 2016:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/samaja-subhashish-panigrahi-august-21-2016-ocr-works-and-using-it

Tulu gets official Wikipedia page, but Mumbai linguists say more is needed

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T02:43:08Z

Sitting in his Sunkadakatte home in Bengaluru, Dr UB Pavanaja still recalls the moment when he was at the WikiConference India 2016 in Chandigarh earlier this month. Academicians from all over India had gathered at the event, to share their views about issues related to India on Wikipedia. While the talks were still in progress, Katherine Maher, executive director, Wikimedia Foun-dation, USA, paused to make an announcement.

The article by Anju Maskeri was published in Mid-day on August 21, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

“The Tulu Wikipedia page has just gone live,” she boomed into the microphone. “It was a moment of great joy because we were working on this project for the last eight years,” says Pavanaja, programme manager (Indian languages) at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and one of the mentors of Tulu Wikipedia.

UNESCO has listed Tulu as one of the endangered languages, which is at the risk of falling out of use, because it has a few surviving speakers. Pavanaja says the Wikipedia page is a medium for people to access material on Tulu. “Today, it’s the first page that appears on Google, so the accessibility of the language will hopefully increase manifold,” Pavanaja says.

The Mumbai connect

Sukesh Shetty, owner of Hindmata Hotel in Tardeo, who is continuing the tradition of running a restaurant business started by his grandfather, feels his connection with the language is restricted to his interaction at home. “I ensure I speak in Tulu with my children. But, my four-year-old speaks Marathi better than Tulu because we have a Mah-arashtrian maid,” he laughs.

The 46-year-old is part of the Bunta Sangha, an organisation devoted towards rallying the Tulu-speaking Bunt community.

Shetty feels the lack of availability of Tulu literature and movies in Mumbai are responsible for the declining interest in the language. “You don’t get to watch any Tulu films because they are never screened here. We don’t even have a channel that telecasts Tulu movies. But, the Wikipedia page is a step ahead,” he says.

The Tulu Wikipedia page (tcy.wikipedia.org) went live this month. Currently, there are around 200 registered users of the page

Accessing Tulu

Wikipedia is currently available in 22 Indian languages, including, Assamese, Bish-nupriya, Kashmiri, Konkani, Newari, Odia, Pali and Urdu among others. With the inclusion of Tulu, the count has gone up to 23. “There are about 200 registered users (editors) of Tulu Wikipedia. On an average, we have around eight to 10 active editors. Dr Vishwanatha Badikana, a Kannada professor, and engineer Bharatesha Alasandemaj-alu are the highest contributors,” says Dr Pavanaja.

Tulu Wikipedia was in “incubation” since 2008. This term is used to describe similar online encyclopedias, which are still waiting to go “live”. “Tulu is written in the Kannada script, but the language is believed to be 2,000 years old. But, to create a Wiki page, we needed to prove that it’s a classical language and deserves recognition. We had to submit sizeable amount of literature, ancient manuscripts and literary work for the language to qualify,” he says.

Dr Badikana, who works as a History professor at St Alosious College, Mangalore University, says they had to generate awareness about the language through workshops. “Tulu is predominantly an oral language, and hence, people don’t take interest in documenting it. With Kannada being state-recognised, it’s more popular. We had to hold writing workshops in Tulu to motivate people,” he says.

A languishing script

Of late, Tulu — believed to be one of the oldest Dravidian languages — has been generating great interest amongst linguists and academicians alike. The excavation of an ancient manuscript, Tulu Devimahatme, a prose work like the Mahabharata, from the 15th century and two epic poems written in 17th century, namely Sri Bhagavata and Kaveri by language experts in the last few years have revived interest in the language.

However, a major grouse in the community has been its non-inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which lists the official languages of the country. Presently, it recognises 22 languages with Tulu being the only Dravidian language to have been left out.

Professor Tukaram Poojary, who was instrumental in setting up the Rani Abbakka Tulu Research Centre in Bantwal, Karnataka in 1995, has sent a memorandum to Pranab Mukherjee, President of India for the inclusion of the language in the Eight Schedule.

“Scholars like the nineteenth missionary-linguist Bishop Robert Caldwell have called this language ‘peculiar and very interesting’,” says Poojary. According to him, Tulu is one of the most highly developed languages in the Dravidian family. “But it never received any royal patronisation as was seen with other Dravidian languages such as Telugu, Tamil or Malayalam,” he says.

Shimantur Chandrahas Suvarna, a popular Tulu writer based in Borivli has been diligently writing short stories, poems and novels in the language for the last 40 years. “Although, I write in both Kannada and Tulu, I have been focusing more on the latter, because if we don’t speak and document the language, it will die,” says the 61-year-old, who moved to Mumbai in 1979 after his father set up an Udipi hotel called Hotel Sadanand in Mazgaon.

Suvarna feels the lack of serious literature before the 15th century has hampered Tulu’s claim as one of the legitimate South Indian languages. “In the first half of the 19th century, the German missionaries popularised the language. They produced the Tulu lexicon and a Tulu-English dictionary. But, after the Christian missionaries started printing the Bible and related literature in Kannada, the old script was discarded and the Kannada script was adopted to write Tulu,” he said.

Today, there are no books or literature in the Tulu script and there are only a handful of tuluvas, who can read the script, says Suvarna.

According to him, during the last three years, there has been a surge in literary interest with more than 100 writers contributing articles, poems to a quarterly journal published by the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy Research.

Last year, the University of Mumbai, in collaboration with the Kannada department, and the Rani Abbakka Tulu Research Centre, held a series of lectures on the inclusion of Tulu in the Eighth Schedule. Professor GN Upadhya, head of the department of Kannada at MU, who was part of the series, feels the issue has now become political. “There’s no political willingness on part of the MPs and MLAs to lobby for this language, because it doesn’t constitute a vote bank,” he says.

A language in restoration

Around two million people in the southwest part of Karnataka and the Kasaragod district of Kerala speak Tulu. In Mumbai, about 10 lakh people speak the language. At the beginning of the 20th century, the practice of writing the language in the Tulu script witnessed a decline and was gradually abandoned in favour of the Kannada script. It was only in 2010 that Tulu began to be taught as a subject at the higher primary level schools of coastal Karnataka.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/mid-day-anju-maskeri-august-21-2016-tulu-gets-official-wikipedia-page-but-mumbai-linguists-say-more-is-needed

Tulu takes a major Wiki leap, all thanks to a dedicated team

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T16:38:47Z

Tulu is one of the five Dravidian languages but it has the least number of speakers. Though it has a script, lack of usage has made it almost obsolete, forcing Tulu writers to write in Kannada. This has, however, benefited Tulu today, allowing it to boast of its own Wikipedia

The article by Akram Mohammed was published in the Indian Express on August 21, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted. Also mirrored in Nyooz on August 22, 2016.

Anyone who proposes a Wikipedia in a new language knows the labour between the proposal stage and the period it goes live. The long phase usually erodes the enthusiasm and in many cases, the proposal never passes the incubation period. In the case of Tulu Wikipedia, there were a few determined to ensure it saw the light of the day.

Like Vasanth CN, who had rallied for the Wikipedia page since it was first proposed in 2008. A native of Dharmasthala, the language enthusiast detailed how tcy.wikipedia.org came into being. “When it was first proposed in 2008, there were six people behind it,” he recalled. After a while, the Board of Trustees and Language Committee of Wikipedia accepted the proposal.

Then came the incubation period, stretching over eight years, where enthusiasm ebbed and swelled among the parties working for a Tulu Wikipedia page. “If you see the Wikipedia homepage, you see a lot of system messages. Our task was to translate these system messages first. By 2011-12, we had succeeded in generating about 120 articles related to the Tulu language and the region in which it is spoken,” he said.The tricky part was to get the page active. It needed volunteers and they were hard to come by. “For a Wikipedia page to become live, we required at least 600 articles. Moreover, we also required at least five active volunteers who could contribute content or edit existing pages” he said.

It took several workshops at different venues to get the numbers.

Vasanth told Express that the motivation behind the project was to ensure a recognition for the language and to help it evolve. “It is important to have a knowledge base in the local language,” he said. At present, the page has over 780 articles. “If there is encouragement from government agencies such as the Tulu Academy, we can easily increase the content,” he said. He added that further support was required to upload works of ancient and modern Tulu literature, in online avenues such as wikisource.

U B Pavanaja from Centre for Internet and Society, said that efforts picked up in 2014 to make the page live. Commenting on the significance of the language, he said that Tulu had a rich heritage. Several religious books and works of literature had been translated to Tulu during the late 18th century, which included the Bible. In coastal districts, Tulu can be chosen as an optional subject today, he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/indian-express-august-21-2016-akram-mohammed-tulu-takes-a-major-wiki-leap-all-thanks-to-a-dedicated-team

Focus on India—WikiConference produces new apps; state government adopts free licenses

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T03:15:22Z

WikiConference India and its productive hackathon

The second WikiConference India, held August 5–7 in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, drew hundreds of new and experienced members from 20 language communities of various Wikimedia projects from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. This event was more thematic than the first WikiConference India (held in 2011), with numerous presentations, panel discussions and workshops on the gender gap, Wikipedia in education, Mediawiki, and state of the movement in India. The event was organized by the Community of Wikimedians in India, supported by Wikimedia India and the Centre for Internet and Society, and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. The newly formed user group Punjabi Wikimedians hosted the event. WikiConference India's main goal was to build community and increase participation among Wikimedians in India. Interest in the event was strong: 452 Wikimedians from more than six countries applied for ~100 scholarships. Wikipedia's well known gender gap was evident: only 55 scholarship applicants were women, but a strong focus on diversity resulted in ~25% of scholarship recipients going to women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. In all, about 250 people attended the conference. Several Foundation staff spoke at the event, including executive director Katherine Maher, Asaf Bartov, and Tighe Flanagan.

A highlight of the conference was the hackathon track, which spanned all three days of the conference. It proved highly productive, yielding seven apps that are expected to help Wikimedians in a variety of ways. I spoke with Santosh Shingare (Cherishsantosh), the Bangalore-based Wikimedian who organized the hackathon. Santosh had previously served as an organizer of the 2011 WikiConference, and has run hackathons annually since then. Santosh's primary motivation for holding such events is learning; he spoke of limited opportunities to learn about new areas of technology beyond his core skills in WebRTC and Android. He enjoys collaborating with other Wikimedians and sharing technical skills. This event was his first with an international draw, and he looks forward to opportunities to collaborate beyond India's borders in the future.

As Santosh outlined in a message to the Wikimania email list, the hackathon's 35 participants made substantial progress with the following projects:

WikiSpeak with native language (web and Android): Speaking the text of Wikipedia articles
Edit Tamil Wiktionary (Android)
Audio file upload to Wikidata (Android): Assists users in uploading small files that demonstrate the pronunciation of lexical items
A layer that shows local Wikipedia articles on a Google Map
Optical character recognition for Hindi and Malayalam
Communication platform [WebRTC] (Web Application): Santosh wrote this app himself; hackathon participants used it to communicate
Notifications: browser notifications for Wikipedia functions such as recent changes

Santosh highlights that the projects grew out of advance communication. To identify problems and generate ideas, the hackathon organizing team posted a survey ahead of the event. Requests from various language communities, including Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, and Malayalam, drove several of the projects. The software is all freely licensed, and there are no plans to generate revenue.

Santosh is not a prolific Wikipedia writer or editor, but rather sees value in his ability to communicate among Wikimedians who seek features from various language communities, including his native Marathi and other Indic languages in which he has varying degrees of fluency.

He plans to update the Wikimedia community shortly with further details on each of the seven projects. He is already planning the next of India's annual hackathons. Hackathon organizers worldwide might be interested in learning more about Indian Wikimedians' efforts, and Wikimedians around the world can expect to benefit from their projects.

The conference generated a number of media reports. P

Indian state of Tamil Nadu adopts Creative Commons license

The state of Tamil Nadu on the subcontinent

Last week brought a rare piece of good news in the world's uncertain progress towards the widespread free licensing of information on the Internet. Ravidreams announced on the Wikimedia India mailing list that the government of one of India's largest and most populous states—Tamil Nadu—has issued an instruction to Tamil University and "all other government departments and institutions to release all their publications, archives and collections under Creative Commons by Share-Alike license".

The move comes one year after the collaboration between the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community and the Tamil Virtual Academy, an independent institution set up by the state government in 2001 to provide online resources for Tamil-language communities around the world. TVA and the Tamil-language Wikimedia community collaborated to persuade the government to make the order. Wikimedia India (one of three Creative Commons affiliates in the country) served as an institutional partner, signing the initial agreement on behalf of the Indian Wikimedia community, and funding a Wikimedian in Residence at TVA.

Ravi, who also serves on the TVA committee for outreach, told the Signpost that the TVA is very keen to share its collection of encyclopedic resources with Tamil Wikimedia projects. The community contributed strategic knowledge of free-content licensing, providing precedents for free content release by other governments in India and other countries, and helped in the drafting of the actual order. "But it takes a lot of time, effort, high-profile connections to change how government institutions work", he said.

An example of the distinctive Tamil script

“

Almost 99% of the time it's about the right officer/minister who cares for our mission being in charge of the right department at the right time. It's very hard to bring change through a bottom-up approach. These precedents help when someone at the top gets interested in changing things. So, any community that expects to influence public policy should be prepared to do a lot of groundwork.

”

Tamil-language Wikipedian Thamizhpparithi Maari serves as Assistant Director, TVA and state coordinator of its computing outreach unit, which the government is funding to encourage students in the state to use open-source media and software; this program includes the development of mobile apps and the running of contests to enhance students' computing skills. He described to the Signpost the elaborate process of finally gaining legal and administrative approval for the CC-by-SA release order. Thamizhpparithi has already started a process of digitising books from the universities to share with the Tamil wiki community, involving between 400,000 and 500,000 pages in some 200 books, using Google optical character recognition (OCR).

"This is just the beginning; we expect millions of pages to be uploaded to Tamil Wikisource", Ravi said. Most of the content that will become available for uploading is in Tamil, although some will be in English and other Indian languages; this will present significant opportunities for the Tamil Wikimedia community.

A rare Tamil-language book in an archival exhibition

There are about 70 million native speakers of Tamil, and another eight million second-language speakers. It is an official language in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka (with which the state shares a maritime border), and Singapore, and is also used in Malaysia and the African island of Mauritius. The language, written in a distinctive curvilinear script, has a rich literature of poetry reaching back thousands of years, and of novels over the past few centuries; this is attested by a related category on the English Wikipedia that is already of impressive size.

The Open Policy Network, a project of Creative Commons, published an overview of the value of this kind of work in 2014; the Network advocates for governments around the world to adopt free content licenses. T

In brief

Mobile app provides offline access to 8,000 medical articles in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, and Spanish: The apps, which supplement a popular English language app, were announced by the WikiProject Med Foundation and Wikimedia Switzerland. More language editions are planned.
Wikimedia Foundation appoints five volunteers to its Board Governance Committee: Newly appointed trustee Nataliia Tymkiv announced the selection of the advisory group. Board governance issues have been the subject of much discussion since the tumultuous events at the WMF over the last year. The four members of the BGC are Tymkiv (chair), Kelly Battles, Christophe Henner, and Dariusz Jemielniak.
WikiConference North America will take place October 7–10, 2016 in San Diego. Scholarship applications are open until August 23; conference submissions until August 31.
WikiConvention Francophone will take place in Paris August 19–21.
New help page takes aim at common newbie obstacle: Many articles carry banners, to flag problems with the articles. New contributors often lack an understanding of how to go about removing the banners, if they address the underlying issues. In recent months, Fuhghettaboutit created a help page to explain the process, and advocated for linking to the page from the templates. The help page now gets several thousand views per day, suggesting that it is filling a significant gap.
Machine-assisted translation of Wikipedia articles, which has increased with the introduction of the Wikimedia Foundation's Content Translation Tool (covered by the Signpost in a June 2015 op-ed, in June 2016, and in various other pieces), has sparked a controversy in recent weeks. See here: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT.
Wikidata RfC on defining data quality underway: Alessandro Piscopo, a guest of Wikimedia Germany, asserts that: "to achieve high quality, it is important to define first what data quality is on this knowledge base." Join the discussion: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Data quality framework for Wikidata. P

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-signpost-august-18-2016-pete-forsyth-and-tony-focus-on-india

Tools orientation session for Telugu Wikimedians of Hyderabad

Pavan Santhosh S. — 2016-08-17T14:35:54Z

A tools orientation session is being organised on July 10 at Hyderabad during the regular monthly meetup. Telugu Wikimedians who would be interested to learn about advanced editing tools like citation templates and Twinkle are welcome to join.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/tools-orientation-session-for-telugu-wikimedians-of-hyderabad

Training-the-trainer programme and Mediawiki training at Pune

garule — 2016-08-18T11:14:57Z

A two-day long train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training programme was organised during May 28-29 in Pune to better capacity of Wikimedians both technically, and outreach and community building.

The participants were trained about planning, organising and reporting for outreach programmes, public speaking, advanced editing skills and and the Wikimedia grants structure. Similarly for the Mediawiki training, the major topics covered in the Mediawiki training sessions were Six Wikimedians; bug triage, bots, Mediawiki extensions and scripts, and Wikidata. The sessions were discussed and planned in the Marathi Wikipedia Village Pump in advance. Rahmanuddin Shaik and I facilitated the individual sessions. Thanks to Sanket Oswal, Treasurer, Wikimedia India who shared about the chapter’s ongoing activities, especially the Wiki Loves Earth project. The community members from Nashik shared about their plans for a meetup in the city of Nashik in June.

Santoshi Tiwari, a Wikimedian from the city of Nashik who was attending a programme like this for the first time feels that there is need for more such programmes more often in multiple cities as there are already 16 Wikimedians from her city who are eager to learn more advanced editing skills. “I learnt about many interesting aspects of the Wikimedia world, like the Wikipedia Adventure game, Wikidata and Wikipedia policies and guidelines

. Until this time, I was contributing to Wikipedia on my own but I started contributing to Wikidata after this event. Now I am enjoying playing the Wikipedia Adventure. I also got the opportunity to meet many Wikimedians in person” shares Santoshi. She explains, “this was good as an introductory event but I would like to participate in sessions that are more detail-oriented. Also, having edit-a-thons during such events will be very useful. With a total of about 19-20 people participating in total, 7 female participants is still a good starting point to have a balanced community. However there should be plans for accommodating more people in the upcoming events”.

Going forward, there are plans to have at least one session in four month in cities where there are higher number of Marathi Wikimedians.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/training-the-trainer-programme-and-mediawiki-training-at-pune