The Centre for Internet and Society
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These are the search results for the query, showing results 311 to 316.
Open source effort gives indigenous language an official typeface
https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-july-8-2016-open-source-effort-gives-indigenous-language-an-official-typeface
<b>Santali, an aboriginal South Asian language, has a brand new freely licensed font and set of cross-platform open source input tools on the way.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://opensource.com/life/16/7/indigenous-language-official-typeface">The article was published by Opensource.com on July 8, 2016</a>.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">More than 6.2 million people in four South Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan) speak Santali. In India, it is one of the 22 major languages as mentioned in the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution. However, Santali is not the official language in regions where it is largely spoken, nor is it widely taught in schools. A large segment of the native speakers are socially and economically disadvantaged, which doesn't help either.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When it comes to mainstream media and the Internet, use of the native Santali alphabet, Ol Chiki, is limited. Right now there exists no single, fully Unicode-compliant website with Santali content. The Indian government's Ministry of Tribal Affairs, which is set up for the development of many aboriginal groups in the country, does not have its web portal in Santali or any other indigenous language. However, the government <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Industry/tAMIQv9Etdeg17HirI0n8H/Indian-languages-support-in-mobiles-to-be-made-mandatory.html" target="_blank">announced last year</a> that it would make native Indian language input mandatory in mobile phones.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The need for a typeface, especially in a universal encoding standard like Unicode, became apparent during a <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/14/odia-wikisource-digitizes-classic-books/" target="_blank">three-month digitization project</a> on Odia Wikisource, an Odia-language online library and sister project of Wikipedia. Many of the students who were part of the digitization project were native speakers. The students shared how they couldn't opt for education in their own language, thus affecting their knowledge and understanding of the written language.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The question whether digital activism can help revive indigenous languages was discussed at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7SpUnvFYZI" target="_blank">2015 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit</a> in Cebu City, Philippines. After the event, a pilot project was started within the Center for Internet and Society's <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K" target="_blank">Access to Knowledge program</a> to create a freely licensed font and input methods so that anyone can easily type in their native language.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The typeface family was designed by type designer <a href="http://www.poojasaxena.in/" target="_blank">Pooja Saxena</a> and went through several rounds of review by language experts. However, the <a href="https://github.com/anexasajoop/olchiki-fontfamily" target="_blank">typeface</a> is still one step away from reality. Because of this, <a href="https://github.com/GuruGomke/ol-chiki" target="_blank">two input methods</a> will be made available along with the typeface; <a href="https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector/Input_methods/sat-Sarjom_baha" target="_blank">Sarjom Baha</a>, a phonetic input method so that every common user can easily type the they pronounce the words, and <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ol_Chiki_InScript_keyboard_layout.svg" target="_blank">InScript</a>, a keyboard layout standard for Indian scripts. Even though the original plan was to create a editor community to contribute to the <a href="https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/sat/Main_Page" target="_blank">Santali Wikipedia</a> and bring it live from Incubator, outputs will just be distributed for the users to use them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The input method will also be available on <a href="https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.ime/tree/master/rules/sat" target="_blank">Mediawiki</a> so that the input methods will be available on Wikipedia and all its sister projects. Hopefully in the future, a group of contributors will use the tools, contribute, and bring the Santali Wikipedia live!</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-july-8-2016-open-source-effort-gives-indigenous-language-an-official-typeface'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-july-8-2016-open-source-effort-gives-indigenous-language-an-official-typeface</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaCIS-A2KOpen SourceAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipedia2016-08-03T02:00:36ZBlog EntryCommunity celebrates birthday of Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wiktionary
https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-july-7-2016-community-celebrates-birthday-of-odia-wikipedia-and-odia-wiktionary
<b>This June, Odia Wikipedia turned 14 and Odia Wiktionary turned 11. Odia Wikimedia community member Chinmayee Mishra, CIS-A2K Programme Associate Sailesh Patnaik and I co-authored this blog in the Wikimedia Blog. The blog chronicles several major activities of the community and features quotes from many old and new community members.
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">This was published on <a class="external-link" href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/06/23/odia-wikipedia-wiktionary-birthdays/">Wikimedia Blog</a> on June 23, 2016.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:%E0%AC%AA%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%B0%E0%AC%A7%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%A8_%E0%AC%AA%E0%AD%83%E0%AC%B7%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%A0%E0%AC%BE">Odia Wikipedia</a> and its sister projects, a handful of dedicated volunteer editors are taking the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odia_language">Odia language</a> to the world outside. The editor community that has recently celebrated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:%E0%AC%89%E0%AC%87%E0%AC%95%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%AA%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%A1%E0%AC%BC%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%86:%E0%AC%9C%E0%AC%A8%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%AE%E0%AC%A4%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%A5%E0%AC%BF/%E0%AD%A7%E0%AD%AA">Odia Wikipedia’s 14th anniversary</a> in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India is collectively growing two more projects; <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/or:%E0%AC%AA%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%B0%E0%AC%A7%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%A8_%E0%AC%AA%E0%AD%83%E0%AC%B7%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%A0%E0%AC%BE">Odia Wikisource</a>, an online library that already has over 300 volumes of text, and <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/or:%E0%AC%AA%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%B0%E0%AC%A7%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%A8_%E0%AC%AA%E0%AD%83%E0%AC%B7%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%A0%E0%AC%BE">Odia Wiktionary</a>, an online dictionary that has over 100,000 entries. With these live projects and more projects in the pipeline, this community is bringing a digital revolution in Odia by sharing valuable content online and creating many language tools inside and outside the Wikimedia projects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Odia Wikipedia community had gathered in the city for a two-day long event to celebrate the anniversary. These two days were spent in intensive capacity building activities as the community is quite dispersed in many places in Odisha and outside, and are all volunteers. Odia Wikipedia, the flagship project was started as one of the first four Indian language Wikipedias along with Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedia in 2002, a year after the English Wikipedia was made live. The project was quite dormant for more than nine years and got revived by a group of editors in Bangalore during 2011. Then the project became much of a household name when more Odia speakers living in Odisha and outside joined contributed in writing and editing articles of several different subject areas. Odia Wikipedia is part of the 292 language Wikipedia family and a larger global family of hundreds of other free knowledge projects that are collectively known as Wikimedia projects. “Odia Wikipedia is officially available online at <a href="https://or.wikipedia.org/">https://or.wikipedia.org</a> and is free for anyone to create articles on notable topics, and edit and enhance those articles”, says Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the administrators of the project. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:User:Aliva_Sahoo">Aliva Sahoo</a>, one of the active editors, shares, “being a student of Odia-language I was seeking information on musical instruments and could not find much. So I started translating from English and now it is one of the longest articles on Odia Wikipedia.” As part of the <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikipediansSpeak">WikipediansSpeak</a> project, we have tried to capture the voice of the community of Aliva and a few other contributors.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify; "><b>Subhashish Panigrahi (SP)</b>: How did the two-day long capacity building activity go? What was the outcome of the different sessions?<br /> <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:Jnanaranjan_sahu">Jnanaranjan Sahu</a></b>: This event was useful in bringing most of the active contributors under one roof as we are working online. This event helped us learn from each other and impart knowledge so that everyone can go back and use them.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify; "><b>SP</b>: What are the problems you faced before coming to this event and how these sessions are going to help you in future?<br /> <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or::Abha_S_Pradhan">Abha Pradhan</a></b>: I was not sure of the copyright part while uploading images on Wikimedia Commons. A lot many pictures got deleted because of my own ignorance. Similarly, I got to learn a lot about linking multiple language entries using Wikidata. These two are my biggest lessons of all that I learned from the sessions taken by other experienced Wikipedians.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify; "><b>SP</b>: What did you learn from these sessions?<br /> <b>Rajalaxmi Mishra</b>: I got to learn about basics of Wikipedia editing, rules and guidelines, several technical aspects like using templates, uploading and adding images to articles and dealing with copyright issues on Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Subas_Chandra_Rout">Subas Chandra Rout</a>, one of the long time active Wikimedians has been the single most contributor to grow the medical science-related articles on Odia Wikipedia. Subas is the only Wikimedian who has translated all the medical science-related article from <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cb80jUe-tObwbTo-o4hh2IpcQHSv1TAJh-8vuniNsCs/edit?pref=2&pli=1#gid=406141641">Wikimedia Medical Project</a> run by the <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med">Wiki Project Med</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“We have several subject areas covered on Odia Wikipedia – from the elaborate rituals of Jagannatha temple to medical science. Interestingly, almost all the articles on medical science are written by a retired assistant professor Dr. Subas Chandra Rout and needless to say those articles are of really high quality”, explains <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:Hellohappy">Pritiranjan Tripathy</a>, an editor who is based in the Indian city of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkata">Kolkata</a>.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify; ">It was like a “Catch me if you can” challenge when I started to translate medical topics into the Odia language as part of Wiki Project Med on March 5, 2015 with my first article on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:African_trypanosomiasis">African trypanosomiasis</a>. There were more than 150 articles in the project. Gradually the number of topics in the project increased and so did my translated article on Odia Wikipedia. After completion of the 345th article (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:Marfan_syndrome">Marfan syndrome</a>, on May 6, 2016), I looked at the Wikipedia project dashboard, and I saw that I was the only person to complete all the articles in the project among all the world’s contributors.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The next big goal is to enhance the quality of the existing articles by adding more images, references from external sources and expanding small articles by adding more information”, said long-time contributor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:%E0%AC%B6%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%A4%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%95%E0%AC%A3%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%A0_%E0%AC%A6%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%B6">Shitikantha Dash</a>. Shitikantha, who is also an administrator of Odia Wiktionary, says, “it is important that more people contribute to the Odia Wiktionary so that words of all times and all genres, especially the technical and loan words make their way to this free multilingual dictionary. A 10 day-long campaign is going to be organised to celebrate the 11th anniversary of Odia Wiktionary so that every Wikipedia editor adds at least one word. And we are also using these words to create a spell check that will be freely available for anyone to use”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The contributor community that is collaboratively building these projects has been also creating many tools and technical resources like <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odia_Wikipedia_handbook_%28web%29.pdf">editor manuals</a>. The <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/03/odia-wikipedia/">script encoding converters</a> that the community has built is helping a lot of online users to be able to share their writings on blogs and social media. “Before the onset of these converters, a vast majority of the people working in press and media were stuck with outdated encoding systems like Shreelipi and Akruti. <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MKar">Mrutyunjaya Kar</a>, a long time contributor and administrator of two projects; Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource explains, “Odia Wikipedia is available at <a href="https://or.wikipedia.org/">https://or.wikipedia.org</a> and we encourage more people to join us in this movement.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“This is a way to bring digital freedom for everyone and share the world’s knowledge in our own language.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/or:User:Chinmayee_Mishra">Chinmayee Mishra</a>, Odia Wikimedian</i><br /> <i><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Psubhashish">Subhashish Panigrahi</a>, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society</i><br /> <i><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Saileshpat">Sailesh Patnaik</a>, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Associate, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society</i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-july-7-2016-community-celebrates-birthday-of-odia-wikipedia-and-odia-wiktionary'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-july-7-2016-community-celebrates-birthday-of-odia-wikipedia-and-odia-wiktionary</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaWikimediaCIS-A2KWikipediaAccess to Knowledge2016-07-09T03:25:02ZBlog Entry୧୧ ବର୍ଷରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିଅଭିଧାନ, ଯୋଡ଼ିହୋଇଛି ଲକ୍ଷେରୁ ଅଧିକ ଶବ୍ଦ
https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/prameya-june-17-2016-article-on-odia-wikipedia
<b>Odia Wikisource turned 11 on June 16. A news article was published about the project and the contributor community in Odia-language daily Prameya on June 17.</b>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Prameya_June_17.jpg/@@images/53057dbe-af18-4947-9e46-403662be6088.jpeg" alt="Prameya" class="image-inline" title="Prameya" /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/prameya-june-17-2016-article-on-odia-wikipedia'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/prameya-june-17-2016-article-on-odia-wikipedia</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCIS-A2KOdia WikipediaAccess to Knowledge2016-07-09T07:38:46ZNews ItemThe Digital Oxygen for Odia Language
https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/my-city-links-july-4-2016-digital-oxygen-for-odia-language
<b>The article was published in My City Links on July 4, 2016.</b>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/CityLinks.png" alt="City Links" class="image-inline" title="City Links" /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/my-city-links-july-4-2016-digital-oxygen-for-odia-language'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/my-city-links-july-4-2016-digital-oxygen-for-odia-language</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCIS-A2KOdia WikipediaAccess to Knowledge2016-07-09T07:52:18ZNews Itemଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିଅଭିଧାନରେ ଏକ ଲକ୍ଷ ଶବ୍ଦ
https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/sambad-article-on-odia-wiktionary
<b>A news article on Odia Wiktionary's 11th anniversary that got published in Odia-language daily Sambad on June 18.</b>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Sambad_OdiaWiktionary_June16.jpg" alt="Odia Wiktionary" class="image-inline" title="Odia Wiktionary" /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/sambad-article-on-odia-wiktionary'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/sambad-article-on-odia-wiktionary</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaCIS-A2KOdia WikipediaAccess to Knowledge2016-07-09T08:17:07ZNews ItemOnline edit-a-thon on incidents in Telugu
https://cis-india.org/openness/online-edit-a-thon-on-incidents-in-telugu
<b>A week-long online edit-a-thon was organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community to cover popular social, political and other events on the Telugu Wikipedia.</b>
<p id="docs-internal-guid-48b40866-dab2-a573-76cc-57c303b7e69a" dir="ltr">Long time Telugu Wikipedians <a href="https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kvr.lohith">Venkata Ramana</a>, <a href="https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%9A%E0%B0%82%E0%B0%A6%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B0">Ravi Chandra</a>, <a href="https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rajasekhar1961">Dr. Rajasekhar</a>, <a href="https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%B2%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%B8%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95">Kodihalli Muralikrishna</a> and <a href="https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pranayraj1985">Pranay Raj</a> organised an online edit-a-thon during May 1-May 7 to chronicle events of all kinds<span class="st">—</span>from social to political and everything old and new<span class="st">—</span>that are notable. <a href="https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pavan_santhosh.s">I (Pavan Santosh)</a> also joined them all in organising this event. 25 articles were created during the event and over the campaign week. The articles were enhanced with more citations and information.</p>
<p dir="ltr">We reached out to two of the organisers to learn about this project and below are what they had to say.</p>
<p class="callout" dir="ltr"><strong>Subhashish Panigrahi (SP)</strong>: Can you please share how you came up with the idea of organising this event? What are the future plans to take this project to the larger Telugu Wikimedia community?<br /><strong>Ravi Chandra (RC)</strong>: The idea of organizing an edit-a-thon for events on Telugu wikipedia came up when I was chatting with Pavan Santhosh about the progress of Telugu Wikipedia. He had also heard similar comments from other Wikipedians. We knew that we were concentrating more on people, places and movies in general. We wanted to pick up a topic which we have not focused much in the past. That's how it was born.</p>
<p class="callout" dir="ltr"><strong>SP</strong>: Did you see anything in particular lacking in Telugu Wikipedia that helped start this project?<br /><strong>RC</strong>: I think the biggest challenge in our community is the lack of editors. The kind of articles we created during this event could have been written better by history scholars from different universities of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana. I feel that we should reach out to more people from diverse background so that we get more contributors.</p>
<p class="callout" dir="ltr"><strong>Pavan Santhosh (PS)</strong>: Why did you participate in this edit-a-thon?<br /><strong>Venkata Ramana (VR)</strong>: I joined in this event to improve articles in Telugu WIkipedia especially related to incidents.</p>
<p class="callout" dir="ltr"><strong>PS</strong>: Where do you see one such initiative adding value to Telugu Wikipedia?<br /><strong>VR</strong>: There are several articles related to incidents in English Wikipedia, that too related to India. But there is a gap in Telugu Wikipedia. For example, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karamchedu_massacre">Karamchedu massacre</a> is one of the very important incidents in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit">Dalit</a> history and there was no article in Telugu Wikipedia until this edit-a-thon happened. Similarly, this event kickstarted chronicling of several such important incidents in Telugu Wikipedia.Within a short span of one week we have covered some of the very significant incidents.</p>
<p class="callout"><strong>PS</strong>: What was your collective learning? Can you please share some of your future plans?<br /><strong>VR</strong>: Edit-a-thons like this help community recognise some major gaps in content. And community members feel encouraged to work together to fill the gaps. I have seen the impact of edit-a-thons based on incidents, movies and now <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_India/Events/Punjab_Edit-a-thon">Punjab</a>. Going forward, we are planning to conduct a few thematic edit-a-thons as this edit-a-thon and a few ones in the past have proved to be very effective on community building.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/online-edit-a-thon-on-incidents-in-telugu'>https://cis-india.org/openness/online-edit-a-thon-on-incidents-in-telugu</a>
</p>
No publisherSubhashish Panigrahi and Pavan SanthoshCIS-A2KTelugu Wikipedia2016-07-11T16:23:12ZBlog Entry