Centre for Internet and Society

Fifty-fourth Bangalore Wikimedia Meet-up at IIM, Bangalore

noopur — 2013-03-06T09:09:03Z

The 54th Wikimedia meet-up in Bangalore was held at the Indian Institute of Management on February 25, 2013. The event was planned and organized by Radhakrishna Arvapally, SIG (Special Interest Group) Chair, Bangalore (a part of the Wikimedia India Chapter) with support from Solutions IQ, Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS.

The proposed agenda was as follows: an introduction to Wikimedia projects by Sudhanwa Jogalekar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, a talk on accessibility and knowledge by T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, followed by a session on WikiSpeed – extreme manufacturing of high speed cars by Joe Justice and Vibhu Srinivasan from Solutions IQ. Mr K S Viswanathan, Vice President (NASSCOM) was the chief guest. He spoke to the participants about the importance of developing a digital hub of free knowledge.

Sudhanwa gave a brief introduction to the world of Wikimedia including projects like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Incubator, MediaWiki and more. He also explained how one could contribute to each of these projects. He mentioned two upcoming projects – Wikivoyage and Wikidata. He answered a few questions after his session and encouraged participants to become members of the Wikimedia India Chapter and get involved in Wikimedia activities in India. Here are the details to become a member.

Vishnu’s talk was about understanding why Wikipedia and what is the importance of enabling access to knowledge resources. He took the example of older technologies and what propelled their invention. In the interactive session, we explored our relationship with knowledge resources, how happy we are with the knowledge we get and how we can make the access better and wider. The discussion also touched upon knowledge resources in Indian languages in the digital domain and the problems associated with them. Participants noted some challenges like affordability, awareness, fonts, low visibility in search etc. They also agreed that given the multilingualism, machine translations are not the solution to knowledge gaps in Indian languages in the digital domain. Another question was about awareness versus access to existing knowledge.

We also discussed how audio technologies could help the cause of Indian languages in education. Radhakrishna coordinated the sessions and answered questions related to content on Wikipedia, authenticity of knowledge on Wikipedia.


Participants seen in the classroom during the Wiki meetup at IIM, Bangalore

In the next session, Joe Justice and Vibhu Srinivasan spoke about WikiSpeed cars, a DIY project to make high-speed cars by harnessing work methods from the Open Source movement. Joe spoke of Kanban and agile engineering. He also explained how the car uses Arduino circuit boards and this project is being scaled so that people across the world can make functional cars collaboratively. He also invited the participants to WikiSpeed event in Bangalore.

Mr Viswanathan then spoke about TEQIP (Technical education and Skill Development Cycle), a program devised to ensure industry exposure and experience to students in technical fields. He also mentioned how the curriculum would be freely available online for all to use. Radhakrishna made the concluding remarks and thanked all the participants and guests for attending.

The meetup ended with questions and more interaction. Details of upcoming Wikimedia meetups in Bangalore can be found here.

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

Wikipedia Indian Languages Workshop at IIT, Bombay

noopur — 2013-03-28T11:44:04Z

This is a brief report on the Wikipedia Indian languages workshop held on March 9, 2013 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in partnership with Vaani, the Hindi bloggers' club at IIT, Bombay.

Vaani is a group of students at the institute who maintain personal blogs in Hindi language. They upload stories, poems and other original material in Hindi and hold regular meetings as a part of Vaani. Their motive is to conserve and promote the love for native languages, especially that of Hindi.

The A2K team had proposed a meeting and workshop to Vaani students earlier in February but it was eventually scheduled in March. The date also coincided with Women's day celebrations which gave us an opportunity to discuss questions of gender, access, knowledge bias on Wikipedia and more. It was attended by 17 participants and was coordinated by Apoorv Maheshwari from Vaani.

The participant group was diverse – it consisted of doctoral students from humanities as well as sciences and a few graduate students from different departments. Before talking about how to contribute to Wikipedia, we had a round of introductions and questions from participants about what they wanted to know. Most of the participants had seen the 'edit' button and had clicked on it but were clueless beyond that. They also wanted to know about the style guide to writing articles on Wikipedia. After initial discussions and a few edits on English Wikipedia, we moved to exploring Indian language Wikipedias. Surprisingly, only a few of them knew that Wikipedia exists in Indian languages. This led to questions of font support, readership and contribution – who contributes to Indian Wikipedias, why one should contribute and more.

Unfortunately, since the institute's IP address has been reported and blocked for vandalism, we could not make user accounts on the spot. However, they tried their hand at editing to understand the process itself. Another challenge while doing workshops with Indian language Wikipedias is font support for individual computers that participants bring. Perhaps there is a need to carry support documentation and tools (keyboard layouts and free fonts). Towards the end, they expressed an interest in a longer Wikipedia program for all the bloggers on campus in different languages.

We thank the members of Vaani for their support and participation and hope to build and sustain this relationship further.

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

Open Education Week: Interview with Subhashish Panigrahi

noopur — 2014-04-04T09:20:49Z

Noopur Raval interviewed Subhashish Panigrahi from the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team about sharing information resources and attribution in academia.

Subhashish Panigrahi works as a Programme Officer for Community and Program Support, Access To Knowledge (A2K) for Centre for Internet and Society. Supported by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Access to Knowledge program promotes participation in Indian language Wikipedia projects. As a part of his role, Subhashish interacts with school and university students from different parts of India regularly. In this interview, he reflects on how students are aware (or not) of attribution.

Read the original published on Commons Machinery website here.

What is the general trend around sharing information resources and attribution among students and teachers?
It is funny to know most students I have spoken to rely on photocopied notes provided by their teachers and try to keep the writing style and sentence structure same as the notes. They don’t know that copying answers or quotes amounts to plagiarism. It is the same for many teachers who teach them to keep the beauty of the author’s writing without modifying it. Also, when I visit universities and interact with professors and students, most consider Google and Wikipedia their best friends, primarily for the quick access to information and imagery. I get a lot of questions about the proper procedure of inserting images that appear in Google search in Wikipedia entries. Many student projects are focused on getting the best pictures available on the internet which means they may download copyrighted images (with watermarks) and modify them. With music and video, it is even worse.

Does the current situation become problematic when you encourage students to contribute to Wikipedia?
It often does. For instance, when we initiated the India Education Program (IEP), as a part of Wikipedia Education Program (WEP), to include editing Wikipedia articles as part of academic curricula. Started in 2011 as a pilot program in the city of Pune, IEP engaged with over 1000 students on English Wikipedia. But the lack of education about copyright violation, and a habit of copying notes from books and other sources affected the program outcome. Many articles were copied from books and internet portals without even paraphrasing, which is completely against Wikipedia policies.

What could be the possible reasons for the lack of basic awareness about how to share information among these students?
Self-taught knowledge about the Internet and the idea of the Internet as a place with few restrictions could be a few of the reasons for these problems. Frequently, social media platforms do not have barriers to downloading and sharing content produced by people in your network. With mobile devices, all incoming content is downloaded and stored on your phone. Often, people crop incoming images or modify them and share them in small networks. Although they do it in good faith, information keeps getting reused very rapidly without any credits or metadata.For a new media educator like me, it is easy to explain why and how to contribute to Open Knowledge projects like Wikipedia…but attribution, and why appropriate attribution is crucial to information sharing, are very difficult things to teach. Most students feel like it is not really important to attribute correctly as long as you are not using it for profit or with bad intentions.

How do you deal with it individually and as a part of the A2K team?

It is crucial for educators, academics and everyone else to include education about Copyright and Copyleft in their syllabus so that students and faculty alike can know how not to violate copyright. At the same time, I think schools and universities are a great place to educate students about Open Access journals and the entire culture of knowledge producing/sharing beyond commercial gains.I often cite the example of one of my pictures that got featured in many international magazines and newspapers including The Conservation magazine and The Huffington post, which would not have happened if I hadn’t let the copyright go. I tell students that the biggest perk of contributing works in Creative Commons licenses is having a wide audience, especially young people. People release published information in free licensing when they hear about the opportunity to get enormously popular.

Similarly, BBC and Al-Jazeera have set great examples of mass donating imagery and video footage under CC. In one of our recent collaborations at the A2K program, the Goa University, on our request, changed terms of their licenses for a Konkani language Encyclopedia to Creative Commons license that has brought many volunteers to digitize and enrich the Konkani Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/commons-machinery-march-14-2014-noopur-raval-open-education-week-interview-with-subhashish-panigrahi

Alternate Visions: Accessing Leisure Through Interfaces

noopur — 2012-02-18T15:18:34Z

Name(s): Noopur Raval
Location: Delhi, India
Age: 23
Profession: Student, researcher

Video Genre: Animation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/alternate-visions-accessing-leisure-through-interfaces

Centre for Internet and Society

Fifty-fourth Bangalore Wikimedia Meet-up at IIM, Bangalore

Wikipedia Indian Languages Workshop at IIT, Bombay

Open Education Week: Interview with Subhashish Panigrahi

Alternate Visions: Accessing Leisure Through Interfaces

Video Proposal