Centre for Internet and Society

Van Bodh Workshop for content development on Forest Resources at Gadchiroli

Admin — 2018-11-06T01:36:39Z

CIS-A2K has collaborated with Tribal Research and Training Institute (TRTI) to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation. These contents will become a part of "Van Bodh Knowledge repository".

Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy, Bombay University has formulated and going to start a "Diploma course in Community Resource Management " with the support of TRTI, Pune from 2nd of oct 2018. This is a historic attempt to impart education of the level of a diploma to rural, especially tribal youth without any condition of academic qualification. The course was conducted at Mendha(Lekha) an hamlet in Dhanora taluk of Gadchiroli District. CIS-A2K has collaborated with TRTI to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/van-bodh-workshop-for-content-development-on-forest-resources-at-gadchiroli

Odia Wikipedia workshop in Puri, Odisha sparks creation of informal Wikipedia group WikiTungi

Sailesh Patnaik — 2016-01-12T05:28:14Z

The first ever Odia Wikipedia workshop in Odisha's historic town of Puri finally shaped in on this December 20. With 25 participants contributing to Odia Wikipedia this day, more Wikipedia outreach in the city were planned.

Organised at the Premier Institute of Computer Studies (PICS), this workshop saw many students from technical background including four female participants. The Google Local Guides group of Bhubaneswar collaborated with us in organising this workshop. Thanks to long time Odia Wikimedian Dr Subas Chandra Rout to spare time and taking pain in coming all the way from Bhubaneswar to mentor the new editors. Only 10-12 participants could sign up on the spot because of IP address throttle that we could not fix beforehand. Otherwise the event went well and after a week, many of the participants have turned out to be active on Odia Wikipedia which is pretty exciting.

We planned to organise a meetup once in two month at Puri with the focus on improving at least 20-25 articles related to to the city and district during the meetup. There was a three-minute coverage of the workshop on Odisha Television (OTV) and a brief report of the workshop was published on Odisha Reporter.

As part our effort in chronicling the voice of the Wikipedia community in the WikipediansSpeak series, we reached out to Wikimedians Dr. Subas Chandra Rout and Snehasish Nayak after the workshop. Dr Rout shares his interactions and future plans to expand the Odia Wikimedia community:

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Thank you so much for mentoring these new Wikimedians! How was your overall experience working with them?
Subas Chandra Rout (SRR): The participants were, indeed, very enthusiastic. They not just were good listeners when we were presenting but contributed well after we demonstrated.

SP: How often do you think we should come back here and work with the same set of participants?
SRR: I think one more visit to ensure that they feel more integrated with the larger Odia Wikimedia community and help them contribute more. Face-to-face interaction will also help them feel more comfortable to share the kind of problems they might have been facing.

SP: What kind of problems did they face during the workshop? How did you help them with those problems?
There were certain technical/logistics problems which kind of made us keep the workshop limited to more demonstration by us and less practice by them. Sailesh seems be following up with them as some of them have already started editing Wikipedia actively.

Snehasish Nayak, organiser of the event and a new active Wikimedian of the Odia community—it is worth mentioning that Snehasish has 360 edits on Odia Wikipedia already—shares more about himself, his interests and ideas for future projects:

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): How and when you got introduced to Odia Wikipedia? Did you know about it before or heard from someone before you formally got an orientation?
Snehasish Nayak (SN): The first time I got to know about Odia Wikipedia was during the Google I/O 2015 event. It was Sailesh Pattnaik who introduced me to Odia Wikipedia. My Wikipedia journey started in December 2015, when Sailesh asked me for some help to conduct a Odia Wikipedia in my hometown Puri.

SP: You graduated as an engineer. Many engineers in India do not even contribute much to language related work, especially the ones that are not paid for. What drives you to contribute so much that you have crossed 360 edits in just three weeks?
SN: From my school days, Wikipedia has been good friend to me. I don’t remember in how many projects Wikipedia has come to my rescue. And in return Wikipedia never asked for anything. I felt it would be the best platform to share free knowledge across the globe.Odia being my native language and it being a very old language needs contribution from the youth like me. In the era of digital revolution Odia Wikipedia has the potential of empowering every single Odia with the sum of the world's knowledge any time of in any place. If anyone asks me about what I am getting in return because of my contribution, my first answer would be "knowledge". I have learnt quite a lot after I started contributing to Odia Wikipedia. And after each contribution, it gives me a great feeling that I have done something useful for the world”. It inspires me to contribute more and more...

SP: You have recently started working and promoting about WikiTungi Puri. Can you share little more about it? What it will do? How it will benefit the Odia language?
SN: With the coming of our group, WikiTungi Puri, we are going to organize more workshops, meetups and other outreach programs in and around Puri. But the work will never be limited only to the city. We are always ready to collaborate with the global community. At Puri, We have plans to design thematic outreach activities in some of the educational institutions of Puri and we would like to invite them to be part of WikiTungi Puri. We have plans to bring the "Odia Wikiquote" live out of the Incubator wiki. We have started working on designing of training materials for the new editors. I have a great feeling that we are going to have more and more active contributors joining us in the near future.

From the place where see it from, Odia Wikipedia is becoming a pioneer of bringing digital technology for taking our language to a whole new level!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/odia-wikipedia-takes-puri

Will domain dot भारत spur the growth of Indian languages on the internet?

praskrishna — 2014-09-08T05:50:11Z

Modi's effort to promote the use of Hindi and e-governance has given hope to those who want to see more vernacular content online, but many challenges have to be overcome.

Rohan Venkataramakrishnan's blog post was published in Scroll.in on August 29, 2014. Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

For most of its short history, the internet has been the English speaker’s playground. Though English is the world’s third-most spoken language (after Mandarin and Spanish), it is by far the most commonly used language on the internet. If you wanted to make sense of most of what’s on the World Wide Web, you had to be able to read and write English.

This is slowly changing. The launch of Devanagari script web addresses on Sunday, allowing people to use .भारत domain names, was another step in the slow effort to bring about a multilingual Web. Already, Indian languages like Hindi – one of the most commonly-spoken languages on Earth – lag far behind. The move gels well with the new government’s effort to promote the use of Hindi, and its push to increase digital services available to all citizens. The next few years could well see a spurt in vernacular content online.

But first many challenges have to be overcome. “At present, not a single Indian language figures in the top 10 languages prevalent on the Internet, though Chinese, Arabic and Russian feature in the list,” said a McKinsey report on the internet's impact on India. “The next wave of internet adoption in India will be dominated by local language speakers, which underscores the need for much more content and applications to be offered in local languages.”

Vernacular internet
Early studies of the internet attempted to quantify how much of the web was in English. A 1997 estimate put the number at 80% of all websites, while the Online Computer Library’s study in 2003 concluded that 72% of all online content was in English. Today that number is much lower.

W3Techs, which conducts surveys of the internet, now estimates that about 55% of content on the Internet is in English, followed by German, Russian and Japanese. Indian languages don’t crack the top 35.

The analysis is by its nature imprecise. The internet is vast and mostly uncharted. Estimates suggest search engines have indexed only 40% of Web content, leaving much off the mainstream radar. Measuring language becomes even harder because, in the early years, when fonts were harder to render, most non-English content on the internet was spelt out in Roman letters.

Indian Wiki
The rise of multilingual scripts has changed that, and made it easier to evaluate the diversity of the internet. Yet even the best approach relies more on sampling than measurement. There is one section of the Web, however, that does allow for comparisons of absolute numbers.

Relative to other tongues, Indian language-articles still comprise a minuscule portion of Wikipedia. English, Spanish and French are perhaps expected, but even languages like Vietnamese have nearly 10 times the number of pages that Hindi does. Waray-Waray, the fifth-most commonly spoken language in the Philippines, appears to be an outlier because of an automated translation method that creates pages in that language.

Hindi content has been growing on the internet encyclopedia, from no pages in 2003 to more than one lakh in 2011, but it still falls far behind the languages that are spoken as commonly as it, like Spanish and Arabic, let alone those with much smaller reach. Of course in many countries English is not spoken at all, so Internet users need web pages in their own language. In India, because of the language-class association, the majority of Internet users are at least conversant in English.

Obstacle Course
The impediments to further growth are all too apparent. For one, internet infrastructure still leaves much to be desired. Though India has the third-largest internet user-base in the world, only 10% of the country is actually online. Even by 2015, when internet access is expected to reach 28% of the population, the equivalent rural figure is likely to be just 9%, according to estimates.

“A lot of the core infrastructure that is necessary for language computing is missing,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet & Society. “There’s no mandate by the government that these languages must be supported, no comprehensive dictionaries, no thesauri, no machine translation capabilities, no optical character recognition capabilities. Because our market is so insignificant for proprietary software makers, they haven’t done enough to develop these. Meanwhile, the free software community is too small and mostly English-speaking.”

The government has launched some initiatives in this regard, like a National Translation Mission aimed at machine translating text from English into Indic languages, as well as banks of fonts that are free to use. But Abraham said that while the government is clear this should be a priority area, it underestimates the scale of the problem.

“We need large scale investment by the government into each language,” he said. “We’re looking at maybe even Rs 100 crore per language, to bring each of our traditional languages into the internet age.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/scroll-in-rohan-venkataramakrishnan-will-domain-dot-bharat-spur-the-growth-of-Indian-languages-on-the-internet

CIS-A2K Signs MoU with Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada: Coverage in Eenadu

praskrishna — 2014-09-09T09:22:23Z

This article was published in Enadu on August 15, 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/cis-mou-with-alc-coverage-in-eenadu

Marathi Language Day events by CIS-A2K in February 2018

subodh — 2018-03-17T08:58:44Z

Marathi Language day is celebrated all over world on 27th February. Dnyanpeeth award winning writer V.V.Shirwadkar alias Kusumagraj was born on this date. Various events and activities were conducted in collaboration with community, institutions and government departments.

Online Workshops

These were conducted at Jeevan Jyoti Women empowerment centre,Velhe ; Garware College of Commerce, Pune and Dayanand college in Solapur. Proof reading of marathi book on Wikisource was completed by the students of Garware college on this day.

Media

Guest editorial in leading newspaper Sakal was published on 10th Feb. The gist is - Everyone speaks, discusses about status of marathi on the occasion of language day on 27th feb and Yearly Litfest. If we want to make marathi, a global language for knowledge sharing and connecting to world lang' communities, it is necessary to adopt unicode and open source softwares in writing, publishing,printing etc. The collaborative works also need unicode as it is a universal bridge. The Wikipedias in 288 lang's is a great success story because it is based on Unicode & open source. The editorial also gives future action plan to achieve this, viz. upgradation of academic courses related to language business, writers/publishers workshops, Indic lang computing centre, digitisation/OCR and content donation in Wikisource, Wiktionary etc., Copyright free/relicense movement among writers or copyright holders, Appeal to social and educational magazines to upload their old issues on Wikisource as reference material.

Radio Interview on Tomato FM 94.3 Kolhapur on 27th Feb. The promotion was made through Facebook post and ads on Radio. The interview received good response from 2 districts.

Event in Sangli

A special event was arranged by 'Janswasthya organisation on 28th Feb. Nearly 80 prominent personalities from Sangli district gathered together to discuss about growth of marathi language. Alongwith Subodh Kulkarni, writer Ramdas Phutane also participated.

Media Coverage

News in Pudhari
News in Lokmat
News in Samana

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-language-day-events-by-cis-a2k-in-february-2018

Chromebook for the Project Tiger- How it is helping me to contribute actively on Wikimedia projects!

Sangram Keshari Senapati — 2018-04-20T06:21:10Z

Project Tiger is a collaboration project of Wikimedia Foundation with Centre for Internet and Society, Wikimedia India and other affiliates of India to improve and create high-quality content in Indic languages like Odia, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi etc.This project helps the active and experienced Wikipedia editors by supporting them with Internet charges for 6 months and Laptops to 50 volunteers to address existing Wikipedia content gaps.

A diverse list of articles related to art, health, culture, and others are provided for Project Tiger Edit-a-thon to bridge the content gap on Odia Wikipedia, and within these 3 months (March, April & May), volunteers who write the most number of articles in their language Wikipedias with the proper guidelines will be awarded prizes worth 3000 INR, 2000 INR and 1000 INR according to their contribution for the month.

I applied for a laptop under this program so that I could contribute more than as usual. I must thank Sailesh Patnaik for guiding me to apply for the laptop. After verifying all the applied list, the final result was out and my username "ssgapu22" was on the 33rd number with other 4 Odia Wikipedia friends.

On 16th March, I received an e-mail from Tito to submit my address to get the laptop. So, I submitted the address of my PG, where I'm staying right now in Bangalore. After 30 minutes, he pinged me on Facebook and called me to the office. So that, I could receive the laptop directly.

I reached there at the CIS-A2K office to receive the laptop. There were Tanveer, Gopala, and Tito and later Ananth joined us. I met them at Mysore for TTT 2018. It was like a reunion with them. After a short conversation with Ravi, I did a live unboxing the Chromebook on Facebook, where I was asked about my experience in the Wikimedia movement and about some features of this laptop.

In that box, there was an Acer Chromebook. I have experience with the Windows OS and Linux OS, but this was little different. Since this has the Chrome browser only and all are available online. So, Tito described some of the features of Chromebook to me.

Now, I must say something about this laptop. It doesn't have any hard disk drive to store movies. So, all the time we hold it must work and all those works could be done in online. So we could focus more on Wikipedia works. The power backup is outstanding, around 10 to 12 hours. So, the power failure doesn't affect the work. And yes, with a short update of Chrome OS, the Google Playsote activated so we could download the play store apps directly.

By getting this laptop, I started working on this and all those online works are done easily. Previously, when I was using other laptops, the works took longer than as usual since the slow processing, but here that problem avoided. Finally, this laptop would definitely help me with the Wikipedia works. Since I'm working on the #1WikiYear project on Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource on a particular subject after contributing to my #1WikiYear project, I also write an article for the Project Tiger from the list.

Link to Sangram Keshari Senapati blogpost

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/chromebook-for-the-project-tiger-in-a-collaboration-with-google-by-wikipedia

ಬೆಳ್ತಂಗಡಿ:ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕಾಲಕ್ಕೂ ಲಭ್ಯ ಇರುವ ಸ್ವತಂತ್ರ ಹಾಗೂ ಮುಕ್ತ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾ-ಪವನಜ

pavanaja — 2015-09-06T12:09:51Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS-A2K) has ongoing partnership with SDM College, Ujire. Students of Masters in Communication and Journalism will be writing articles in Kannada Wikipedia. This academic year’s programme was inaugurated on August 12. It was followed by hands-on workshop. SahilOnline has reported this on August 14, 2015.

Read the online entry published by SahilOnline on August 14, 2015.

ಬೆಳ್ತಂಗಡಿ: ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾ ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕಾಲಕ್ಕೂ ಲಭ್ಯ ಇರುವ ಸ್ವತಂತ್ರ ಹಾಗೂ ಮುಕ್ತ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶವಾಗಿದೆ. ಉಪಯುಕ್ತ ಬರವಣಿಗೆಗಳ ಕೋಶವನ್ನು ಹೊಂದಿದ ಇದನ್ನು ಯಾರು ಬೇಕಾದರೂ ಮುಕ್ತವಾಗಿ ಬಳಸಬಹುದು ಎಂದು ಪತ್ರಿಕಾ ಅಂಕಣಕಾರ ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಡಾ. ಯು. ಬಿ. ಪವನಜ ಹೇಳಿದರು.
ಅವರು ಗುರುವಾರ ಉಜಿರೆ ಎಸ್.ಡಿ.ಎಮ್. ಸ್ವಾಯತ್ತ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಪತ್ರಿಕೋದ್ಯಮ ವಿಭಾಗದ ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿಗಳಿಗೆ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾ ಬರವಣಿಗೆ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ನೀಡಿ ಮಾತನಾಡಿದರು.

2001ರಲ್ಲಿ ಅಮೇರಿಕಾದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭಗೊಂಡ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾ ಪ್ರಪಂಚದ 290 ಭಾಷೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಲಭ್ಯ ಇದೆ. ದೇಶದ 20 ಭಾಷೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಒಳಗೊಂಡಿದೆ. 2003ರಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿಯೂ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾ ಬರವಣಿಗೆ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭವಾಗಿದೆ. ಕೇವಲ 20 ಸಾವಿರ ಲೇಖನಗಳು ಇದೆ. ಬೇರೆ ಭಾಷೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಹೋಲಿಸಿದರೆ ಕಡಿಮೆ ಅನ್ನಿಸುತ್ತದೆ. ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಬುದ್ಧತೆಯ ಬರವಣಿಗೆ ಶೈಲಿಯನ್ನು ಸುಧಾರಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ಇದೊಂದು ಸುಲಭದ ಮಾಧ್ಯಮ. ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿಗಳು ಸಂಶೋಧನಾ ಪ್ರವೃತ್ತಿ ಮತ್ತು ಕೌಶಲ ಬೆಳೆಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬೇಕು ಎಂದರು.

ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾ ಬಳಕೆಯಿಂದ ನಮ್ಮ ಭಾಷೆ ಮತ್ತು ಶೈಲಿ ಸುಧಾರಣೆಯಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಸಂಗ್ರಹದೊಂದಿಗೆ ಕ್ರೋಢೀಕರಣ ಮತ್ತು ಉಲ್ಲೇಖವೂ ಅಗತ್ಯ. ಗೂಗಲ್‍ನಲ್ಲಿ ಯಾವುದೇ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಇರುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಎಲ್ಲಿ ಸಿಗುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂದು ಮಾತ್ರ ಅದು ಸೂಚಿಸುತ್ತದೆ. ಯಾವುದೇ ಪ್ರಕರಣ ಘಟಿಸಿದ ತಕ್ಷಣ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾದಲ್ಲಿ ಅದು ನವೀಕರಣ ಆಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಪತ್ರಕರ್ತರು ನಿರಂತರ ಅಧ್ಯಯನಶೀಲರಾಗಿ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಸಂಗ್ರಹಿಸಬೇಕು. ಭಾಷೆ ಬಳಸಿದಾಗ ಅದು ಬೆಳೆಯುತ್ತದೆ ಹಾಗೂ ನಮ್ಮ ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿ ಉಳಿಯುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂದರು.

ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಪತ್ರಿಕೋದ್ಯಮ ವಿಭಾಗದ ಮುಖ್ಯಸ್ಥ ಪ್ರೊ. ಭಾಸ್ಕರ ಹೆಗ್ಡೆ ಉಪಸ್ಥಿತರಿದ್ದರು. ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿಗಳಾದ ಅರಹಂತ ಸ್ವಾಗತಿಸಿ, ಚೇತನ್ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ನಿರ್ವಹಿಸಿದರು.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/sahil-online-august-14-2015

Wikipedia Workshop in the Theme of "Sau Dhuni Teen" in Pune University

garule — 2016-06-18T18:10:43Z

A Wikipedia workshop is being planned to be organised in the Srimati Savitribai Phule Pune University on the 20th August 2015. Under the scope of “Sau Dhuni Teen” project, the workshop is focused on building resources in Indian languages for women's studies on Wikipedia and equip its participants with the rudiments of contributing to Wikipedia, and to introduce it as a concept to them.

The goal of Wikipedia Workshop is to build resources in Indian languages for women's studies on Wikipedia and equip its participants with the rudiments of contributing to Wikipedia, and to introduce it as a concept to them.

Primary goals

To introduce Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia for research and a concept to new editors.
To Promote Marathi Wikipedia Community & promote the use of regional languages in Wikipedia.
To have an open interaction within the editors, existing as well as new.
To spread the awareness of Wikipedia as a powerful tool.

Expected Attendees : 20-30 (only for university research students)

The event is being organised in collaboration with Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-workshop-in-theme-of-sou-dhuni-teen-pune-university

"Sau Dhuni Teen" project: Wikipedia workshop in TISS, Mumbai

Abhinav Garule — 2016-06-18T18:08:13Z

A two-day multilingual Wikipedia workshop was organised at the Women's Studies Department of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai during the 22nd through the 24th August. This was one of the outreach events under the scope of the "Sau Dhuni Teen" project that aims at bringing digital content on 100 notable persons, 100 key books, and 100 key concepts relating to women's studies, gender studies, and more broadly, interdisciplinary social sciences, between January 2015 and March 2016.

This event being a women-only event has participation from both students and faculty. 18 participants signed up for the event where 14 of them turned up for the first day and 10 on the second day. As they were introduced to Wikipedia editing for the first time, none has prior Wikipedia editing or even typing (in their own languages) experience. They were oriented with Wikipedia editing where we showed the “How to edit Hindi Wikipedia” video tutorials. Six new articles were created during the event where three articles were edited and enhanced. Helping out one new editor to type out in Assamese script was slightly tough. The future plans to engage with these participants was discussed and we have planned to meet once or twice in a quarter for an edit-a-thon. The event was organised in collaboration with Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/sau-dhuni-teen-project-wikipedia-workshop-in-tiss-mumbai

Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujire, Karnataka

pavanaja — 2016-06-18T18:12:41Z

A Kannada Wikipedia workshop is being planned to be organised in Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujire on the 13th August 2015. This is going to be part of the several outreach programmes in the institution.

Topics to be discussed:

What, Why & How of Wikipedia
Basics of Wikipedia markup
Kannada Wikipedia
Editing Kannada Wikipedia
What can be added to Kannada Wikipedia and how to add articles

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-at-shree-dharmasthala-manjunatheshwara-sdm-college-ujire-karnataka

Wikipedia workshop in the theme of “Sau Dhuni Teen” in Pune University

Abhinav Garule — 2016-06-18T18:08:36Z

A two-day Wikipedia workshop was organised in the Srimati Savitribai Phule Pune University on the 20th August 2015. The workshop was focused on enriching Wikipedia with 100 articles related to notable Indian women under the scope of the “Sau Dhuni Teen” project.

To begin with, we announced it in the Marathi Wikipedia village pump prior to the workshop inviting Wikipedians to join. The primary goal of the project was to to introduce Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia for research and a concept to new editors, to promote Marathi Wikipedia and promote the use of Indian languages in Wikipedia.This workshop provided a platform to have an open interaction within the editors, existing as well as new. Interestingly, there was a male:female ratio of 1:10 among the new participants out of which five edited Wikipedia before coming there. Six new accounts were created on that day. Each of the participants created at least one new article which resulted creation of 15 new articles where 28 articles in English, Bangla and Hindi Wikipedias were edited totally. As the participants were new, learning typing using Wikipedia’s native Marathi input method “Aksharantaran” was slightly difficult for some where some found the Google’s input easier. Unavailability of sandboxes (user subpages where users work on a draft Wikipedia article until it is fully ready to be published) in Marathi Wikipedia was a concern as many editors were unsure if their article might be changed and/or deleted during the time when they were editing. During the workshop one good quality article was created and the second one was in progress by the end of the second day. We helped the editors to refer to the existing good quality articles for understanding how to write one.

We are planning to to engage with the participating new editors once or twice in a quarter. The event is being organised in collaboration with Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE).

More details of the workshop could be found in the Meta event page.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-workshop-in-the-theme-of-201csou-dhuni-teen201d-in-pune-university

Talamaddale on August 23

praskrishna — 2015-09-20T15:57:16Z

A talamaddale ‘Karna Chedana’ and ‘Shalya Nirgamana’ will be organised at Abhisheka mandira on the premises of Manjunatha temple at Kadri on August 23 at 2.30 p.m. Yakshagana playback singers Balipa Narayana Bhagawatha and Puttige Raghurama Holla will take part.

Workshop

A three-day workshop on writing for Tulu Wikipedia began at Ramakrishna Pre-University College and Ramakrishna College here on Friday. Speaking on the occasion U.B. Pavanaja, Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and a Wikipedia representative said that if a language was to sustain it should in use continuously and all information should be available in that language. Tulu also should be kept alive using modern tools of technology.

Read the original coverage published by the Hindu on August 16, 2015 here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-august-23-2015-talamaddale-on-august-23

Seminar on "Empowering Marathi Schools", Pune

garule — 2016-06-18T17:59:29Z

A full day seminar is scheduled to be organised to address the issue of the gradual decline of Marathi schools in Maharashtra. CIS-A2K member Abhinav Garule will be attending the event to share how teachers could encourage students to contribute to Marathi Wikipedia.

This day long seminar is organised by Yashwantrao Chavan Pratishthan, Mumbai

Organiser's Agenda: Day by day number of students in Marathi Schools is decreasing. Yashwantrao Chavan Pratishthan (यशवंतराव चव्हाण प्रतिष्ठान) and Marathi Shala Tikavalya Pahijet (Facebook Group) have planned to organise this seminar to discuss about addressing these issues. Former Director of Education of the Government of Maharashtra has been invited to chair the seminar and share learning that could help solve problems of the Marathi schools. Abhinav is planning to share how the teachers could use Wikipedia as a learning tool and encourage their students to edit and learn about various topics of interest.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/seminar-on-empowering-marathi-schools-pune

Access to Knowledge Bulletin — December 2012

praskrishna — 2013-01-10T13:33:41Z

This is the fourth Access to Knowledge newsletter from the CIS team in Delhi! During the month of December we had organised the Marathi wiki workshop, a workshop at NMAIT in Karnataka and a workshop at SRM University in Chennai.

Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation has awarded CIS a two-year grant of upto INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program has become the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). In this issue we bring you updates from the Marathi wiki community and workshops organised in NMAIT in Karnataka and SRM University in Chennai.

Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programs, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications at http://bit.ly/TOcXId.

CIS Office in Delhi

The A2K team consists of three members: Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval.

Education Program

Marathi Wiki Workshop at TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra, December 8, 2012). Organised as part of the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society’s initiative of focusing on Indian languages. Nitika Tandon participated in the event.

Workshops Organised by CIS:

Wikipedia Workshop at NMAIT (NMAIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka December 21, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.
Wikipedia Workshop at SRM (SRM University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, December 17, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute). Noopur Raval participated in the event.

Media Coverage

A Report of Odia Wikipedia Workshop at IIT, Kharagpur (Samaja, Odia daily, Kolkata edition, December 3, 2012).

# Blog Entries

Non Unicode ISCII Text Can be Converted to Unicode Now! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 19, 2012).
New Avenues: Media Wiki Groups (by Noopur Raval, December 28, 2012).

Video

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller (CIS, Bangalore, November 12, 2012). Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk.

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programs such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom.

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

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Visit us at http://cis-india.org

*Support Us*

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-bulletin-december-2012

Bhuvana Meenakshi elected Mozilla Rep for July 2019

Admin — 2019-09-25T16:33:55Z

Bhuvana Meenakshi was selected as a Rep of the Month (July 2019) by Mozilla for my active contributions.

Reps are community coordinators interested in:

finding and connecting new talent with Mozilla projects they are contributing to
developing communities on a functional or local level
supporting local communities and Mozilla to have an effective and decentralized environment for contribution
creating collaborations with adjacent communities to spread Mozilla’s mission and expand Mozilla’s outreach in the open source ecosystem
collecting local knowledge from Mozilla communities to inform and inspire Mozilla’s strategy, activities and priorities

How is the Rep of the Month nominated?

Every Rep can be nominated by any Reps Mentor to receive this recognition. Therefore it's possible to nominate other Reps, not just the mentor's mentees. This nomination is meant as a recognition for outstanding contributions to Mozilla through the Reps program. Mentors are encouraged to nominate any Reps that have stood out in the past month.

For more see here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/bhuvana-meenakshi-elected-mozilla-rep-for-july-2019-1