Centre for Internet and Society

Open Movement in India (2013-23): The Idea and Its Expressions

soni — 2024-02-13T02:57:29Z

This report identifies some broad patterns that have materialized in the Open Movement in the country in the last decade. The report is based on a reading of the available literature on selected projects and conversations with academicians and advocates of the Open. The rough outline of the Open initiatives is accompanied by reflections on the nature of the Open here and the need to envision it differently from what it currently is.

The report was prepared by Soni Wadhwa, and the visual elements of this study have been sourced by Joseph Francis. CIS’s Access to Knowledge team is grateful to Soni for embarking on the study and making the recommendations. The full report can be read here.

Open, as an idea, has not received systematic attention in India. Openness as a philosophy is rooted in the belief that sharing ideas and resources is healthy for the knowledge economy, especially in contemporary times. This sharing does not take anything away from any entity; rather, it enables collaboration and innovation for the larger social good. With the Internet and digital technology, one can see the faster spread of such innovation across the globe while also allowing for plenty of room for its adaptation to regional contexts. Anchored in the thought and efforts of individuals such as Richard Stallman (1992; 2002; 2006; 2009) and Tim Berners-Lee (Berners Lee, 2004; Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila, 2001; Berners-Lee et al 1992; Berners-Lee and Tim, 2010; Berners-Lee, Tim and Hendler, 2001; Berners-Lee, Tim and Shadbollt, 2011; Bizer, Heath and Berners-Lee 2011) who take a view contrary to that of keeping public funded research and innovation locked away under copyright and patent laws, the Open Movement originated in the Global North.

In the West, specifically in the USA, with the support from the institutions such as the Hewlett Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the manifestation of the Open Movement through the push for OER (Open Educational Resources) translated into a greater uptake from educational institutions such as Rice University and the MIT (through MIT OCW – Open CourseWare)(Bliss and Smith, 2017). With prestigious universities offering MOOCs (massive open online courses) through platforms such as edX and Coursera, educational resources have come to be seen as a social good: keeping them available for mass access has been an intentional move towards equal access to quality educational materials. In addition to OER, Open Access (the idea that research funded by public funds need to be made available publicly rather than behind a paywall erected by commercial publishers), as an expression of the Open Movement, has also been present in institutional funding mechanisms in the West, again, especially in the USA. A lot of research emerging out of grants extended to individuals and institutions have space for allocation of funds towards the cost of Open Access publishing for dissemination of results. Several other initiatives such as the Creative Commons, and the Wikimedia Foundation have been working towards making Openness a reality by charting out various projects, pathways, and initiatives to keep knowledge accessible to all for learning as well as collaboration.

In India, the state of the Open Movement is thrown into stark relief by the much longer and much more engaged Western imagination and practice of Openness. Indeed, studying its contours here is equivalent to studying its absences and is therefore very challenging. Here, Open, as an idea, has come via the West and still seems to be struggling to be defined and accepted as an ideal to strive towards. It is an alien concept, deeply misunderstood by the stakeholders who control sharing of knowledge resources: policy makers, legislators, leaders of research and institutions, and researchers and academicians in general.

To suggest another example, a pilot survey of Indian faculty members’ attitudes towards use of Open Knowledge sources such as Wikipedia in Indian classrooms reveals that faculty members are very suspicious and skeptical of such sources. They see it as a source of misinformation and therefore, as unreliable.What gets missed is the idea that the content on these sources is not merely for consumption of information and knowledge but are also platforms for knowledge creation and collaboration. In contrast to the two scenarios of OER and Open Access mentioned above, India does not show a long history of organized effort towards making information and knowledge accessible to all, not just through earmarking funds or mechanisms for making publicly funded research available in the public domain via Open Access, but through nurturing a culture of the Open as the default mode of dissemination.

What, then, are we to make of the direction in which the Open Movement is headed in India? Is it possible to shape its trajectory in India? Is it possible to ascertain the ways in which the ideas or benefits of the Open can be made to resonate with the Indian educational and research scenario? Can Indian educators and researchers afford to stay out of the Open ecosystem? What alternative modes of innovation do they champion? These are the questions that this study of the Open Movement in India in the last decade (2013-2023) seeks to explore.

The study is not an exhaustive one: it looks at only some examples that engage with the idea of the Open. The selective nature of the study is informed by two rationales. One, an all-encompassing review would be impossible given the constraints on time and resources: indeed, such a review would be the task of a full-fledged tracking project (which is one of the futures that this report suggests at the end). Two, given that Open does not have a clear pathway or a central, strategic vision to drive it as a movement, the selection of projects themselves is a symptom of the disjointed ways in which the idea of Open struggles to take shape or survive in India.

The year 2013 has been chosen as a starting point for this exploration because it was the year the Wikimedia Foundation extended a grant to the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, to work with various Wikipedia communities in India towards the growth of the Open ecosystem in India. This last decade then is of grave importance to the CIS because it helps the organization reflect on their own work vis-a-vis that of other Open advocates CIS’s work, since then, is available on its website through details of its initiatives via its Access to Knowledge and Openness Programmes (see, for instance, their work on bridging gender gap on Indian Wikimedia communities, apart from a host of other training and advocacy initiatives here). This study is an aid to survey the idea and expressions of the Open as a broader movement and thus help CIS reflect on new directions and strategies to be pursued in the near future, to begin with.

However, there is more to the year 2013 than the happenstance of the grant to CIS per se: indeed, one can spot other organized efforts emerging in the Indian ecosystem since then. NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning), which was established in 2003, began to offer MOOCs on its platform in 2014. Coincidentally, 2013 was also the year the Bichitra Project (an online variorum of the work of the Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore), funded by the Ministry of Culture, went live. Together, the international foray into the Indian Open Movement and the governmental gravitas to strive towards making education and the literature of a great Indian author) accessible provide the rationale for this study’s focus on the examination of the nature of championing for the cause of the Open, its successes, failures, and potential for its growth in the next decade.

The approach or methodology to explore answers to these questions involved: analysis of primary as well as secondary research available on the different initiatives in India; interactions with experts working in the Open domain in India including some Indian academicians, especially on the discussion of Open Access which impacts their publishing record, and in turn, impacts their career advancement. The reading and the conversations supplemented each other in the process of investigation: the existing literature provided facts through texts (blogs, papers, documentation on websites and so on) while the interactions opened up more nuances of intersections through perspectives that do not always make it to the static texts.

Any study on the Open Movement in India owes a huge debt to Arul George Scaria’s gargantuan Open Science India Report (2019). At over 350 pages, it is a detailed study of Open Access projects and also includes a survey conducted among academic fraternity. It also offers concrete suggestions to strengthen access in research. It is remarkable for the larger view it takes of access to include access for persons with disabilities and access in terms of language, suggesting that research should also be accessible in Indian languages, and also in jargon-free English for wider audiences. Apart from Scaria’s study, there are journalistic pieces about Open Data in India, given the relevance it has for governance.

This current study does not aspire to be monumental like Scaria’s. However, it is hoped that its relevance to the ongoing conversations about openness would be noted at at least two levels. One, between 2019 (when Scaria’s report was published) and 2023 (the end point of this study), socioeconomic changes such as COVID-19 and the resulting remote work, one expects, have highlighted the significance of openness. For instance, given the serious constraints it posed for travel, a lot of commercial publishers kept their resources open so that further research, within medicine and outside, could keep happening. Thus, it becomes imperative to understand if the Indian ecosystem displayed any stronger endeavor towards openness. To anticipate a couple of suggestions discussed in the report below, certain things such as Indian researchers’ apathy or disdain for Open Access has not quite changed in the span of these four years. However, Government of India’s open initiatives such as Anuvadini and Bhashini around tools for navigating and producing content in Indian languages have started to appear.

Two, Scaria’s study subsumed all knowledge under “science”: in other words, science, in his report, is a metonym for knowledge. This current study, in being inclusive of humanities and the arts, especially as relevant to Open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), engages with knowledge or movement in general irrespective of its disciplinary boundaries.

With that statement on where this report is situated, some notes about its structure are in order. This study begins with an overview of the legal and policy environment in India. It then moves on to explore the nature of Open projects in India. There are many ways to organize the narrative around Openness, with the domain wise bifurcation of the different aspects of the Open (The OPEN Movements, 2023). In contrast, this goes on to organize the projects around positionalities, rather than the domains. That is, the different projects and initiatives are narrativised as:

Public funded projects: These are endeavors emerging from funds provided by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Culture and distributed via grants to Higher Education Institutes in India, especially the IITs. They stand out as one category in that they are characterized by:

The vision to provide basic infrastructure of education and archival material in the public domain
The capacity to think and execute in terms of massive impact and scale
A wide scope for aiming higher in terms of innovation, approach, and access

Volunteer undertakings: These are projects undertaken by non governmental organizations such as the Sanchaya Foundation, SFLC (Software Freedom Law Centre) and FOSSUnited characterized by:

A niche focus on a language or a domain or an audience
A preoccupation with developing a community rather than delivering an output
A qualitative aspect to engagement and documentation, as opposed to impact in terms of numbers

Within volunteer undertakings, the role of philanthropic foundations is very briefly touched upon. There are entities such as the SRTT (Sir Ratan Tata Trust) and SDTT (Sir Dorabji Tata Trust) that supported the cause of the Open in the initial stages via their investment in the larger educational and cultural cause. These foundations also seem to have discontinued their efforts in the long term perhaps given the scope of work involved. In addition to philanthropic foundations, mention is also made of international projects. The international Open Knowledge projects in India involve the Wikimedia Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation that have funded various initiatives in India and have continued to stay invested in the larger vision as well as execution of Openness through their grants.

The discussion of the above mentioned types of projects is followed by an examination of the attitudes of academicians teaching at Higher Education Institutes towards Open Access as a specific niche within the Open Movement. Conversation with faculty members in different institutions reveals that Open as an idea is not quite clear to the academia, or at least occupies a space of dissonance: while it is desired as an ideal, it is very strongly constrained by the judgments of fellow peers and employing institutions. In contrast, conversations with experts in Open Access reveals that Open Access deserves a much stronger effort: not just to push for policy changes but also to decolonize Indian academia.

The study concludes with some threads that can be pursued from the projects the Open Movement in India has witnessed in the last decade. These points of engagement could become points of reflection for further initiatives in the next decade or two.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-movement-in-india-idea-and-its-expressions

Continuing community engagement: Communities of interest and Quarrying

Manasa Rao — 2017-05-19T15:23:28Z

In telling the stories of Indian Wikipedians, we bring to you the story of Dr. Diptanshu Das, a doctor and avid Wikipedian, working with WikiProject Medicine who recently approached CIS-A2K with a technical request.

CIS-A2K has always believed in continuing our engagement with the communities and individuals we work with. This year in particular has been special to us thanks to our Train The Trainer alumni steadily achieving the goals they set out to achieve and continuing their Wiki journeys with more vigour. It is especially significant to us when our alumni come back to our resource and idea exchange platform to help develop their pet projects. For the first time, one such alumnus, Dr. Diptanshu Das, a doctor by profession and avid Wikipedian approached us in April 2017 with a request to our technical team. He wanted to know the number of articles that were tagged in both Category:WikiProject Pharmacology and Category:All WikiProject Medicine.

To provide some context, WikiProjects are generally article development projects undertaken by groups of editors on Wikipedia whose aim it is to achieve goals on specific topics and subjects on Wikipedia. For example, WikiProject Medicine manages and helps curate medical articles on Wikipedia. Similarly, WikiProject Pharmacology states that it "coordinates the development of Wikipedia articles and lists relating to the pharmacology and science of medications and other pharmacology-related topics." Working to define clearer guidelines for WikiProject Medicine of which he is a member, Dr. Das intended to find out how many articles were listed under WikiProject Pharmacology that were also tagged under WikiProject Medicine. As these two are closely related topics, the former being a sub-specialty of the latter, he felt it could cause an overlap which would mean that most of the sub-specialty articles would get lost in the "parent" category i.e. WikiProject Medicine.

CIS-A2K ran Dr. Das' request on Quarry, a public querying interface that lets one raise queries regarding databases in addition to managing them as an SQL(Structured Query Language) software would. Dr. Das had begun discussions with fellow Wikipedians to get their thoughts on the matter and wanted to provide data-specific points but was unable to gather consensus on developing a guideline. However, when CIS-A2K reported back to him, he realized that the overlap was not as significant as he had feared. WikiProject Medicine had 34,475 articles, WikiProject Pharmacology had 10,721 articles; only 2002 of these were tagged in both. Dr. Das, while relieved, believes that sub-specialty tagging would go a long way in helping improve articles such as those of WikiProject Pharmacology, many of which are still in Start and Stub classes.

"While collaborating on wiki is always good, it is important that an organization like CIS contributes its expertize," he says. CIS-A2K's presence as an idea exchange platform hopes to generate debate and discussions in addition to the physical resources and support we provide to communities. Dr. Das is also of the opinion that domain knowledge experts could make a real difference to Wikipedia by engaging with or creating WikiProjects that are specific to their interests and collaborate with other free knowledge champions around the world. CIS-A2K has attempted to encourage such communities of interest in the past so as to find an easier way to engage members of the general public and educational institutions as they are more likely to edit Wikipedia articles based on their personal hobbies and interests.

If you have requests for us please post them here or email Tito Dutta at tito@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/continuing-community-engagement-communities-of-interest-and-quarrying

Preliminary research result on Wikipedia gender gap in India

ting — 2017-05-23T11:09:23Z

Since June 2016, Ting-Yi Chang from the University of Toronto has worked with the CIS-A2K team to conduct action research on the Wikipedia gender gap in India. The research aims to improve the understanding of the gender gap (imbalance) issue in the Indian Wikipedia communities while examining local interventions.

This post is an extraction from the Wikipedia Gender Gap Bridging Toolkit - South Asia Edition which will be published on Wiki (Commons and meta) in late May 2017. The toolkit is a derivative of the gender gap research initiative.

Wikipedia has a wide gender gap in participation and content coverage. The editor survey in 2011 showed that among the active editors worldwide only 9% identified themselves as female. While research and initiatives have been proposed and conducted to “bridge the gender gap,” mass majority of these studies are done in the Western context (English/European language Wikipedias and communities). The movement dynamics and situation of other Wikipedian communities are not well explored or documented. Of the few studies that did focus on non-Western contexts, this action research is one of the few to look at the issue in India.

Due to the timeline of the research and the limitation of space in this post, we will only discuss the preliminary findings of the study, specifically for the following questions:

Q1: What are existing female Wikipedians’ (regardless of one’s activeness in editing) experience in the Wikimedian communities?

Q2: What are new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in gender gap bridging events) attitude and preference toward these gender gap bridging activities?

In Q1, we used open coding to find recurring themes in the qualitative data collected through 18 semi-structured interviews with 21 female Wikipedians, and label them to find certain patterns of answers. To answer question 2, discussion and infographics will be presented to summarize the 64 survey responses we have gathered.

Q1: What are existing female Wikipedians’ experience in the Wikimedian communities?

Western-based research and survey has shown that a plausible reason behind the gender gap on Wikipedia is the discriminatory and unwelcoming environment within the editor communities. Research was much needed to explore the reasons in the Indian context as we cannot simply apply the same results or rule out the possibility of the same situation. Among the 9 reasons that Sue Gardner, the former Executive Director of WMF, had pointed out in her 2011 blog post, we deem the “misogynist atmosphere” as the most problematic - it signals an unhealthy environment and structure for diversity and long term growth.

Thus, 18 private interviews were held to understand the positive and negative experience that existing female (Indian) Wikipedians have faced in the communities. In this question we are specifically looking at the interaction and interpersonal relationship between community members (editors), hence it does not include experiences like discouragement from speedy deletion or technical difficulty in editing.

In each of the two categories (positive and negative), we use three labels to cover the recurring themes mentioned. In “positive experience,” these are (a) emotional support and respect, (b) bonding and friendship, and (c) other support. In “negative experience,” the three labels are (a) neglected or belittled, (b) sexist comments, and (c) safety concern.

It is interesting to note that although in most (Western-based) research, the positive and negative experiences were in the online context, our interviewees (Indian female Wikipedians) had mostly pointed out experiences that were either offline or in non-specified context. Comments on the online interaction dynamics were fairly rare and neutral, while negative experiences mostly occurred in the offline settings.

This can indicate that the communities’ offline interaction dynamics leaves a much more significant impression (sadly, especially when it is negative) to female Wikipedians on their overall community experience. Additionally, it seems that compared to the Western/English context, Indian Wikipedian communities are more close-knit and active offline, that is, the editors are more likely to know each other personally. This dynamic is a great plus to create positive experience such as strong bonding and emotional support. However, it may also be more toxic when the experience is negative as compared to if the experience was online and anonymous. In other words, sexist comments, deliberate neglect, and safety concerns can have an aggravated effect when faced personally.

In numbers, more positive experiences were mentioned than negative ones when a neutral question was asked (such as “How do you think about the community?” / ”what is your experience in the editor community so far?”). Most negative experience were only revealed when a negative-oriented question was asked (such as “Have you had any negative or uncomfortable experience so far?”). This may be interpreted that the interviewees’ overall experiences are positive with only occasional negative encounters. However, this interpretation can still be biased if we consider the possibility that:

There is a lack of trust between the researcher and the interviewees (i.e. Interviewees may have the intention to provide a more pleasing/non-controversial answer), or
the selection of our interviewees was already biased since “existing” female Wikipedians can be those that have not experienced much negative experience (i.e. the female editors who were upset by more negative experiences and had already quit editing were not reachable when the interviews were conducted, or they might simply be uninterested in participating in the research).

Q2: What are new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in gender gap bridging events) attitude and preference toward these gender gap bridging activities?

As indicated in our last question, the offline interaction and activities seem to be very crucial in determining a female Wikipedian’s overall experience in the community. In other questions throughout the semi-structured interview, we had asked existing female Wikipedians - who had been active in gender gap bridging event conduct - to discuss what can make an event more welcoming to women. Below are some of the answers given:

A women-only event (although some also criticized that this approach often made the gender gap a “women-only” discussion)
Female tutor’s presence
Offline events where women can meet others face to face (although some had mention that they prefer to participate online - which makes them feel safer and more comfortable)
The chance for participants to socialize and make friends
Write about women-related topics (although some had argued that a gender gap bridging event should not promote the tokenizing logic that (only) women should (only) edit on women-related topics)

As you may notice, there are divergence of ideas regarding the points A, C, and E. In order to cross-check all these ideas, a survey of 11 scale-rating questions was developed to understand the new female Wikipedians’ (who participated in a gender gap bridging event) attitude and preferences. Three clusters of questions were formed - general experience, cross-checking questions, and attitude.

Below is an infographics on the 64 responses we had collected: (You may click on the image at the top of this page (under the blog title) to zoom in)

From the infographics above we can see that event participants’ overall experience are positive. However, it may still be far from perfect as there were 2 respondents who “fully disagreed” with the statement “I find the event environment safe, friendly, and welcoming.” There are still more than 40% of the respondents who thought editing is difficult (or somewhat difficult), which means improvement is needed in our event tutorship or a re-estimation participants’ skill levels is needed. Participants’ attitude towards the events was also mostly positive as indicated in the last two questions.

Cross-checking (A): Do women prefer a women-only event?

During the events, the presenters and resource persons usually encouraged male participation in the initiatives and stressed that the gender gap bridging efforts cannot be a further segregation between men and women editors. Hence, we do expect this to influence the answers given to the statement “I still prefer a women-only event.” Still, more than one-third of the participants indicated their preference in women-only events; we expect the actual rate to be even higher if the said factor was not present.

Cross-checking (B): Is the presence of female tutor(s) important? (Does a tutor’s gender matter?)

Question 5 and 6 show very interesting results. In the offline (in real life) event context, there seem to be more disagreement on the statement “I would prefer a woman to be my tutor.” These responses can be affected by the fact that majority of the tutors in Wikipedia events were still men, and if a participant had generally positive experience throughout the event, they might not be against the idea of having a male tutor again. Nonetheless, interestingly, the answer turned the other way around when the scenario changed to an “online” setting. More respondents then agreed that they would prefer a women as their tutor. This may be a sign that women are more alert and defensive when it comes to online interaction with people in the opposite sex.

Cross-checking (C) : Do women prefer offline (in-real-life) events over online ones?

Over 50% of the respondents chose “fully agree” to the statement while only 5 respondents chose either fully or partially disagree. We can conclude that women who had experience in an offline (in-real-life) event would still prefer the same setting in the future. However, of course, we cannot be sure how many women may have turned down this first event experience because it was offline. In other words, we do not know if the preference of women who had never attended any events. However, what we know is that mass majority of those who had one offline event experience would prefer the offline setting over an online participation.

Cross-checking (D): Does socializing matter to women?

Majority of the respondents fully agreed with the statement “I would like to socialize with and know more Wikipedians.” This is one of the very few questions where no one disagreed to. Although we cannot calculate the personal utility of socializing or conclude that socializing is “necessary” to make women feel more comfortable, we can assume that it will be a positive addition to the events if women can make new friends in the communities.

Cross-checking (E): Are women interested in women-related topics? Or would they have preferred to write about their expertise areas?

From the survey, we found that more women actually showed interest in writing on women-related topics than on their domain knowledge subjects. Over 80% of the respondents agreed that they were interested in writing more about women (and related topics) while slightly fewer women said the same about their expertise knowledge. Only 8 out of 64 respondents expressed a preference for writing on their domain knowledge topics over women-related topics. Hence, it seems that women-related topics are a good place to start (for one’s first Wikipedia event experience) as most women enjoyed it. One thing we are not able to estimate is how long can this interest be sustained.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/preliminary-research-result-on-wikipedia-gender-gap-in-india

Mini TTT and MWT held in Kolkata

tito — 2017-06-28T09:53:55Z

A regional version of Train The Trainer and MediaWiki Training was recently conducted in Kolkata.

CIS-A2K’s widely well-regarded flagship skill building program was conducted in Kolkata between 7- 8 January 2017, in partnership with the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group. The two-day event was held at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. There were 20 participants at the event, of which 18 were male and only two female.

There were three thematic sessions, each broadly dealing with: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. The participants were taught article enrichment and how to upgrade articles into good category articles on Wikipedia. The participants learnt reference resources in detail in addition to discussing the different types of syntax required to apply the references meaningfully. The participants were also exposed to advanced search techniques on Google in order to gather relevant references.

During the Commons session, the participants were taught the basics of creating categories and subcategories in order to help narrow down searches and hence, image utility on Commons. Facilitating easy identification of an image helps enrich articles in need of descriptive photos. Additionally, participants were encouraged to give specific file names to their images along with a detailed description of the same. This was followed by a technical session on the following popular tools and gadgets that help frequent uploaders on Commons:

Cat-a-lot is a JavaScript gadget that helps with moving images (or subcategories) between categories or adding categories to search results
Google Images tab: On File pages, adds a new tab to easily search for similar images on the Internet using Google Images
OTRS is a tool used by the Wikimedia projects, including Commons, to manage and archive email conversations. The main use of OTRS in relation to Commons is to verify and archive licensing permissions.
Flickr2Commons - Tool to easily upload single and multiple files from Flickr to Commons. This tool uses OAuth to upload files to Commons.

In addition to these on-wiki discussions, a broader discussion took place on photography tips such as the rule of thirds which helps enhance the effect and purpose of the image.

The final thematic session was on Wikisource. Participants had a hands on lesson in proofreading methodology in addition to learning about image formatting, formatting table of contents, table access page break, text divider, and tools and script of Wikisource.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mini-ttt-and-mwt-held-in-kolkata

MediaWiki Training 2017

Tito Dutta and Ananth Subray — 2017-06-07T08:43:57Z

MediaWiki Training 2017 conducted in Bangalore

The third iteration of the MediaWiki Training was conducted on 24-26 February at Bangalore, India (the first and second iterations of MWT was conducted in 2015 and 2016). 16 participants from 9 Indic Wikimedia communities attended the workshop. The following graph shows the participation from different Indic Wikimedia communities.

Malayalam Wikimedian User:Viswaprabha attended the workshop as a resource person. On behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society, User:Titodutta and User:Ananth_subray were the resource persons.

== Sessions ==

On the first day, the following topics were discussed

=== First day: technical audit ===

Introduction to MediaWiki Training: The first session of the day started with introducing the aims of objectives of MediaWiki Training 2017.

Introduction to MediaWiki software and platform: Following this User:Titodutta and User:Viswaprabha discused the MediaWiki software, different extensions, LocalSettings.php and some other important configurations related to MediaWiki.

Wikipedia technical audit: Wikipedia technical audit was the central theme of the day, and the phrase “Wikipedia technical audit” was coined by Rahul Desmukh of IIT Bombay. He suggested that once in a year a Wikimedia community should do its technical audit, when the community would solve issues like deadend pages, orphan pages, uncategorized pages, script errors, infobox errors, reference errors, and other errors and issues related to a Wikimedia project.

On the first day of the MWT workshop we discussed these issues and errors and how to solve these.

== Second day ==

On the second day of third iteration of MWT, we began with problems faced in different languages with respect to Templates and Imfoboxes. And continued with teaching how to create the basic info boxes. Each participant were thought how to add two digits in a single template and creation of LUA templates. Later we had thought them how to create a basic template by adding a label and data, and even localizing of some templates were also done.

After this use of Wikidata was thought and INfoboxes using wikidata.

Post lunch some of the tools and their uses and applications were thought Copyvio, Duplication detector, Google books citation, Citation generator and Hay's tool directory

== Third day ==

On the third day of MWT 2017, the first session started with a session where User:Viswaprabha discussed Wikimedia Labs Quarry (https://quarry.wmflabs.org/)

The major points of the session were:

Introduction to Quarry.
Importance of Quarry
Coding simple quarry.

User:Viswaprabha also showed how to integrate Google spreadsheet with Quarry. He showed a couple of examples where he had the most of it using the tricks.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mediawiki-training-2017

Wiki Loves Mayabazaar

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-06-07T09:24:35Z

On the 60th anniversary of the movie Mayabazar, Telugu Wikimedians celebrated Wiki Loves Mayabazar, an event to commemorate the cult Telugu film Mayabazar. As part of the celebrations, an edit-a-thon of the same name was held at Ravindra Bharathi in Hyderabad. Interestingly, the Cultural Department of Telangana Government sponsored the entire event.

In the Telugu speaking regions, there is a well-known appreciation of the cinematic arts. Mayabazar, released in 1957 captured the imagination of fans like no other film had before. Telugu Wikipedians decided to pay tribute to the movie by improving articles and content related to it on Telugu Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

The edit-a-thon was held on 30 April, 2017 at the monthly Wikimitra Vedika meetup of Telugu Wikipedians. A screening of the film took place followed by discussions on references, citations, film studies and articles related to the film. From 1 May 2017, the edit-a-thon took place online.

There were 15 participants of which only one member was female. Telugu Wikipedian, Kasyap hoped for more participation as this "is an interesting event."

However, the event was made popular by the wide ranging media coverage in print and electronic media.

Media pieces on the event:

1. ‘మాయాబజార్‌’కు వినూత్న షష్టిపూర్తి

(Eenadu Newspaper; 1 May, 2017)

2.‘మాయాబజార్’కు 60 ఏళ్లు.. వినూత్న షష్టిపూర్తి వేడుకకు సిద్ధమవుతున్న వికీపీడియన్లు! (Ap7am.com; 1 May 2017)Wiki Loves Mayabazaar

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wiki-loves-mayabazaar

Odia Wikisource Turns 3

manasarao — 2017-10-23T05:40:20Z

Odia Wikisource, the Odia language version of Wikisource, an online digital library of free content textual sources run by the Wikimedia Foundation, celebrates three years of contributing to the free knowledge movement this October. Odia Wikisource is a sister project of Odia Wikipedia, the oldest Indian language Wikipedia. The Odia Wikimedia community, a group of active contributors to Odia Wikimedia projects in India, has been working towards digitizing rare books that are no longer under copyright as well as encouraging authors and publishers to free-license their work under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License 4.0. This license allows anyone free use of the work with due attribution. The books are usually digitized into Unicode text by scanning them using Optical Character Recognition technique. This ensures their easy accessibility on the Internet so that people may easily copy, share and use these works for citations and references. If the books are damaged to a degree that they cannot be scanned, volunteers take the painstaking effort to manually type out whole books and manuscripts.

Odia Wikisource contributors/ CCBYSA4.0 User:Psubhashish

The Odia Wikisource project was realized on 20 October, 2014 after a two-year incubation period. Says Pankajmala Sarangi, long time Odia Wikimedian active on Wikisource, "since [2014] more than 300 old and rare books have been digitised and made available online. Before that, searching [for] a book in Odia was not possible even if it existed in pdf or some other format. Now it has become easy and all the books available on Wikisouce are easily searchable." In addition to digitization, the Odia Wikimedia community members conduct regular quality checks of the content from time to time by ensuring proper licensing, attributions and other errors that may be avoided by thorough proof-reading. While these quality checks follow global guidelines that have been localised to help volunteers prevent vandalism of any form, it has not been without its challenges. Ms. Pankajmala explains that the lack of Odia text on operating systems is problematic for access and availability.

Despite the challenges, Odia Wikisource counts amongst its accomplishments the digitization of a twelve volume 14th century Odia classic as well as 16th century palm leaf manuscripts from the Dadhibaman Temple in Bargarh, Odisha. Taking the movement to classrooms, Odia Wikisource was introduced to students of the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences to pique the interest of young minds in the preservation of Odia language texts online. The many advantages of Odia Wikisource has also been illustrated to institutions with the Utkal University library encouraging the digitization of their rare books and manuscripts by Odia Wikimedians.

Sangram Keshari Senapati, another active Odia Wikimedian explains that Odia Wikisource is important for the preservation of those books which run a high risk of being lost in the coming years. He says, "our future generation must get a chance to read them." Adding to this, Ms. Pankajmala says, "Sky is the limit for Odia wikisource. We will try to digitise more books, most probably triple the number of existing books. We'll even try to reach more libraries and authors and get more books and further digitize them. The number of wikimedians may also flourish till that time."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikisource-turns-3

Wikimedia Workshop at Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College, Satara

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-10-24T11:52:19Z

A Wikimedia Workshop was on 4 August 2017 at the Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College in Satara to introduce the Wikipedia and its sister projects to the students.

A Wikimedia Workshop was conducted at the the Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College in Satara. The workshop provided an introduction to students on the various Wikimedia projects. The workshop also aimed to equip them with Wikipedia editing skills. However, owing to time constraints the editing component has been postponed.

The workshop saw at an attendance of 30 participants, with 20 women participants. The Principal of the institution, Ms. Sunita Pawar said, "Wikipedia is good platform for students to do online assignments. We are eager to integrate it in academics." A discussion on integrating academic assignments with Wikimedia Projects was conducted to develop the basic theme and concepts.

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-workshop-at-ismailsaheb-mulla-law-college-satara

Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Aurangabad

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-10-24T13:18:41Z

A Marathi Wikipedia Workshop was recently held at the MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication on 11 August 2017.

A Marathi Wikipedia workshop was recently conducted at the MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication at Aurangabad. The workshop aimed to introduced Marathi Wikipedia to the students of the college and equip them with the process of editing the same. The workshop was attended by 10 female participants and 15 male participants.

"It was happiest moment for me, when I created new article on Pashmi, [a] species of dog. I added [an] image also." says Shivani Joshi a participant at the workshop. While 21 new editors were introduced to Wikipedia, 60 articles were improved and 15 images added. Another participant, Randhir Patil who added content on water-related articles says, "This content can be used as training material by field workers.

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-workshop-at-mgm-trusts-college-of-journalism-and-mass-communication-aurangabad

Orientation Program at Kannada University, Hampi

Gopalakrishna A. — 2017-10-24T13:01:25Z

A Kannada Wikipedia Orientation Program was conducted at Kannada University Hampi on 31 August and 1 September 2017.

A Kannada Wikipedia orientation program was conducted at the Kannada University in Hampi recently wherein the participants where introduced to the various Wikimedia projects in Kannada. The participants were doctoral research students of the Dravida Samskruti Adhyayana Kendra of which 5 were male and 1 female.

Working on Wiktionary, the students added 3300 words to their sandboxes, which will be moved to the main space on Wiktionary.

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/orientation-program-at-kannada-university-hampi

Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Solapur University

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-10-24T14:09:24Z

15 September

A Marathi Wikipedia Workshop was held at the Department of Mass Communications at Solapur University. The workshop aimed to introduce Wikimedia and its sister projects to the students. The workshop comprised 25 participants with 10 female attendees.

Sharing their thoughts after the event, the participants were enthuse. Says Priyanka Lagshetti, "I never imagined that I can contribute to Wikipedia. I worked on various media related articles." Another participant, Ambadas Bhasake added, "This workshop showed us a innovative way to use internet productively and constructively"

While 19 new editors joined Wikipedia, participants worked on 60 articles and made around 90 edits. 15 images were added to Commons and into articles.

The meta page of the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-workshop-at-solapur-university

Discussion on Creation of Social Media Guidelines & Strategy for Telugu Wikimedia

manasarao — 2017-10-24T14:42:24Z

Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online.

An online discussion of guidelines and policies for the various Telugu Wikimedia social media handles was conducted. User:Pavan santhosh.s suggested a set of strategies and guidelines that can be taken into consideration for an official Social Media Policy of Telugu Wikimedia Projects. These suggestions included defining objectives, guidelines (with do's and don'ts) and strategies for the Social Media Policy. User:Ravichandra supported the idea and suggested another objective(showcasing best quality works of Wikipedia). User:Viswanadh added some strategies (such as writing a series of posts about technical aspects that help Wikipedians). User:Pranayraj1985 suggested some don'ts in handling Wikipedia pages as well as handles while User:Rajasekhar1961 expanded the strategy to other sister projects(Telugu Wikisource and Wiktionary). Finally, User:Chaduvari suggested not to name any page as official to avoid possible conflicts. User:Swaralasika announced consensus and User:Pavan santhosh.s created a page based on the discussion in order for the community to reflect.

User:Pranayraj1985 said, "there are pages & groups for Telugu Wikipedia in Facebook for years. We are using them as major social media promotion channels. I(Pranay) am publishing content related to Telugu Wikipedia in those channels. Some of the community members also been admins of page and group. But once or twice, in Facebook page and group, unrelated posts were published and I informed this to Wikimedians active on Facebook and removed those posts. I am glad that this discussion happened and community came up with guidelines and strategy now. This is very much needed.

The guideline page can be found here.

Although the event was successful in creating guidelines, none of the input included women's voices as there were no female participants. Here's hoping there is a diversity of voices in future discussions.

With input from Pavan Santhosh S., Telugu Community Advocate, CIS-A2K.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/discussion-on-creation-of-social-media-guidelines-strategy-for-telugu-wikimedia

Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon

praskrishna — 2016-01-26T15:19:56Z

Between 25 January and 31 January 2016, CIS-A2K is organizing an edit-a-thon to celebrate India's republic day. The goal of this edit-a-thon is to create and improve Geographical Indications articles.

Expectations

We expect that if you participate in this edit-a-thon, you'll create or expand at least 3 articles. However you may work on as many as articles you want.

Rules

For an article to be considered as part of this Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon, it must adhere to the following rules

The new article must be created between 0:00 UTC on 25 January 2016 and 23:59 UTC on 31 January 2016.
Creation/Expansion rule: If you are creating a new article the new article must have a size of at least 3,500 bytes and a minimum length of roughly 300 words (the word count excludes templates, infoboxes, references, etc.), If you are expanding an existing article, you need to expand this article by at least 3000 bytes, (the word count excludes templates, infoboxes, references, etc.)
The articles should not copyvio content and should follow verifiability and other important policies of Wikipedia.
The articles should have decent references;
The article must not be purely machine translated.
There should not be any maintenance tags in the articles
The article must have a direct relation to Geographical Indications in India (see Proposed articles).

Participants

Please add your username below. If you can not find your community name, please add a section using level 3 header (eg. === Ukrainian Wikipedia ===). We also encourage you to start an event page on your Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/geographical-indications-in-india-edit-a-thon

This Multilingual Edit-a-thon wants to Improve Indian Content on Wikipedia

subha — 2016-01-28T07:23:09Z

Ever wondered how many articles the Kannada Wikipedia or the Hindi Wikipedia have relating to India, its social history, literary and cultural heritage and the journey of over 1600 languages?

The article was published in DNA on January 26, 2016.

India has over 235 Geographical Indications (GI) spread over the length and breadth of the 29 states and 7 union territories. GI identifies goods or products as originating in a region or locality and indicates the unique characteristic or particular qualities it has as a result of being made in that area. Out of India's 235 GI, as identified by the Geographical Indications Registry of the Government of India, there exist only about 70 English Wikipedia entries. The state of many Indian language Wikipedias is even worse where a vast majority of the identified GIs and other important topics related to art, craft, cuisine, culture, attire and tradition are missing from Wikipedia. Even Karnataka, which has the maximum number of GIs at 30, has only a handful of articles and a few images on Wikipedia.

This Republic Day, 75 Wikipedia editors who are volunteers and represent 18 Indic languages are coming together online to show their patriotism in a unique way. It is not by hoisting the tri-colour and talking about India's glorious past, but by enhancing Wikipedia content related to the GIs of India in their own languages. Those who are multilingual are even going to create Wikipedia articles in two or three different languages. The multilingual edit-a-thon started on January 25 and will go on until January 31. The event is focused on improving existing Wikipedia content related to GIs of India, translating them into Indic languages and also creating new articles. Being an online event, it has also opened up the door to many contributors outside India. A few participants from Nepal and Bangladesh have signed up for the event.

So little of the great journey of our products with unique quality is available in the public domain. The saddest part is that there is literally a bottom level existence for content related to Indian GIs on Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia, which is often the first link a web search throws up. This sort of lack of access to knowledge related to India is not new. Even outside of Wikipedia, there is very less that exists about the many stories worth telling from our country. However, crying over the low access to knowledge would never solve the real problem.

This edit-a-thon is just a digital experiment but can be a great way of doing digital activism for the preservation of languages and taking the uniqueness of India to millions of people in their own languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/this-multilingual-edit-a-thon-wants-to-improve-indian-content-on-wikipedia

GI-tagged products to get Wiki pages

praskrishna — 2016-01-27T16:33:47Z

Ever realised that the famous, red hot Naga Mirchi (a special variety of chilli from Nagaland) doesn’t have a Wikipedia page?

The article by S. Anandan was published in the Hindu on January 26, 2016.

And that Cannanore Home Furnishings — textile home furnishings from Kannur — is a brand with geographical indication (GI) registration? Wiki, which is an open and free repository of knowledge on the Internet, does not have pages, in English and other recognised Indian languages, on most GI-tagged Indian products.

The Centre for Internet and Society-Access to Knowledge — popular as CIS-A2K— which is a not-for-profit movement to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development, launched an India Edit-a-thon for seven days from January 25 to generate Wikimedia pages in English and Indian languages on Indian products recognised by the GI Registry of India.

“Kerala alone boasts 23 products, mostly agricultural, with the GI tag. But Malayalam Wiki doesn’t have information on all of them. Besides the Aranmula Kannadi, none of the other GI-tagged products from Kerala have Wiki pages in English. Nationally, there are about 213 GI-tagged products and we know nothing of most of them. There isn’t a single article on many of them even in English. It’s in this context that the Edit-a-thon becomes extremely relevant. It’s being held to celebrate the Republic Day,” says Wiki activist Manoj Karingamadathil.

13 pages already

The campaign, launched on Monday, has evoked enthusiastic response from Wiki activists who have begun to create pages on most of these products. At the time of going to press, 13 GI-tagged Kerala products have got Wiki pages and editors are at work to generate content for these products in English.

Apart from existing Wiki editors, freshers may also be part of the campaign. “All they have to do is to create a Wiki account before sending in researched content,” points out Mr. Manoj. The campaign will be on till January 31.

Seven-day India Edit-a-thon begins; Wiki activists begin creating pages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-hindu-s-anandan-january-26-2016-gi-tagged-products-to-get-wiki-pages