Centre for Internet and Society

Pushing women scientists

praskrishna — 2014-10-21T15:44:09Z

Wikipedia edit-a-thon attempts to raise awareness of the contribution of Indian women to science.

The article by Renuka Phadnis was published in the Hindu on October 19, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

Ask anyone to name an Indian scientist and the answer is likely to be a man, and not a woman scientist. To let more people know about the unsung heroines of science in India, a workshop called the Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014 was held here recently. At least 15 participants added content about women scientists over two days to Wikipedia as the first step in bringing public awareness about them.

The edit-a-thon (a large number of people adding or modifying content on Wikipedia at once) concluded on October 14, which was Ada Lovelace Day, an international day to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology and maths. The event was organised by BioScienceIndia Programme, a non-profit science outreach initiative, and Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

Participants added information about at least 40 women scientists. Information on 80 more would be added in a year’s time, said Nandini Rajamani, Co-director, BioScienceIndia Programme.

The aim, however, is to go beyond edit-a-thons, to examine issues that have not received the attention they deserve. Women scientists in India are not on par with men for several reasons (see info box) and the “leaky pipeline” theory is used to describe their decreasing visibility. Vishnu Vardhan, Director, Access to Knowledge team, CIS, said the aim is to motivate a new and younger generation of women scientists.

Karthik Ramaswamy, visiting scientist at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and a participant in the edit-a-thon, said science in India has a ‘diversity problem’ with Indian women and minorities represented inadequately. “There are very few women scientists among faculty of science institutions because they have no role models. Hopefully, this (presence on Wikipedia) will provide them with role models,” he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-renuka-phadnis-october-19-2014-wikipedia-editathon-attempts-to-raise-awareness-of-the-contribution-of-indian-women-to-science

Guerrilla GLAMː An alternate way of doing GLAM in indie-way

subha — 2015-12-16T03:09:47Z

I have been working on a concept called the Guerrilla GLAM. Here is a very quick summary about the concept that was published in the GLAM-wiki newsletter for November.

GLAM stands for cultural institutions like Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. It is a globally acclaimed free knowledge movement for opening up cultural data using various free software platforms as a tool. GLAM activities include collaboration with cultural institutions, data mining, meta data and other documentation of institutional collections, digitization of published works, records and artifacts, and publishing the collected information in both human and machine readable forms with open standards. Building partnership with GLAM institutions is a great way of funneling the cultural content acquisition and bringing open access to such valuable data. But it is not that easy given the complications each country have in terms of formal agreement, organizational framework, and dissemination of information. "Guerrilla GLAM" techniques are based on the learning curve of institutional partnership building for large scale GLAM projects and leveraging personal contacts in small scale GLAM projects. It bring in several frugal strategies for cutting cost implication and operating in flexible modes. Guerrilla GLAM's range of work aims to accommodate people of different core expertise and it targets small to large orgaizations.

Guerrilla GLAM appeared first as a public presentation during Wikimania which I presented this year. It later interested many GLAM practitioners of New Zealand who organized a webinar which provided a great platform to add many interesting ideas to my existing set of ideas. Guerrilla GLAM is still a budding concept that aims for being implemented by many cultural enthusiasts especially those who would like to document much about the artifacts, digitize old text from archives and manuscripts, and create meta data for institutional collections. Guerrilla GLAM operates with zero or with some informal institutional partnership with the institution and carried on the shoulders of the Wikimedians. The Wikimedians seek out for support from local communities, leverage the permissible access to institutional property and to some extent the personal relations with the institutions keeping the legal restrictions in mind, and do their best to acquire as much data as possible. Often times, near to zero cost Guerrilla GLAM projects with detailed planning with right kind of people on-board could yield more or less the same like any conventional GLAM project.

Click to read the original published on Wikimedia Blog on November 25, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guerrilla-glam-an-alternate-way-of-doing-glam-in-indie-way

Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University

Shiju Alex — 2012-10-16T12:35:10Z

Tumkur University, Karnataka hosted a Kannada Wiki Workshop on September 15, 2012. This was the first Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Tumkur.

Prof. Ashwin Kumar from the Department of English, Tumkur University and Kannada wikipedians, Omshivaprakash, Hareesh, Tejus and Pavithra played vital roles in organising this workshop.

About 30 participants including students and teachers participated in this workshop. Students were mostly from the Department of English and Library Science.

The workshop began at 10.30 a.m. Prof. Ashwin Kumar gave the welcome address and spoke about the importance of Kannada Wikipedia. Thereafter, Om Shiva Prakash made a presentation on "Introduction to Wikipedia and Kannada Wikipedia". This was followed by the "Editing Session". The university had provided 10 computers for the session. Harish and Tejas lead the editing session with the rest of the team supporting the students to do the "wiki editing". The session went upto 2.00 p.m. since the participants showed keen interest. As there were some restrictions associated with the "username creation" only "six" students were able to create their wiki username.

Seen above: Participants from the Kannada Wiki Workshop held in Tumkur University. For more pictures, visit http://bit.ly/UsuqFv

The Kannada Wikipedia community is holding talks with the university officials to begin a Kannada Wikipedia education program. These types of initiatives will attract more Kannada speaking people to Kannada Wiki related activities.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/kannada-wiki-workshop-tumkur-university

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report: January – June 2012

Shiju Alex — 2012-09-28T15:41:31Z

The following is a compilation of the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias from January to June 2012. The author provides perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language Wikipedias during the period.

The period of analysis is editor contributions between January 1, 2012 and June 30, 2012. (Read last year’s report here). The data for this report and analysis are based on the statistical data published at http://stats.wikimedia.org. Thanks to Erik Zachte for compiling all this information.

Some of the important points from this report are:

As always Indic wikipedia communities that are focused on community building had done well. Progress is slow but the results are steady and sustainable.
The communities that have made substantial progress in community building are Urdu, Oriya, Assamese, and Malayalam. (among this, for Urdu Wikipedia most of the activity is from Pakistan). The most recent entry to this club is Punjabi which will show up in the statistics of next few months.
Providing adequate support for newbies is very much required after each outreach. But many communities are failing here. This is affecting the conversion rate even though many outreach activities are happening across the country,
As seen in the past the readership of Indic language wikipedias is still growing up.

This report is presented in the following sequence.

Community
Content
Readership

Community

As community is the backbone of every Indic language Wikipedia, it is important that the respective language wiki communities give adequate importance to community building. Many language communities are still not understanding the importance of building the community. To achieve the goal of building free knowledge database in the respective language we need participation from maximum number of speakers of the respective language. The following table gives information on two important parameters about the community in the respective language Wikipedia:

Number of users who had 100 or more edits in a month (high active Wikipedians)
Number of users who had at least 5 or more edits a month (active Wikipedians)

User growth in Indic language Wikipedias during 2012 January-June

Some of the important information that we can make out from this table are:

The number of high active editors (editors with more than 100 edits per month) are the backbone of each language wikipedia. Apart from doing normal article editing they are the users maintaining the wiki. Tamil and Malayalam continue to be on the top spot with almost 24 active users . Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, and Urdu also showed growth in the number of high active users.
Assamese Wikipedia is showing a reduction in the number of high active users even though its number of active users increased. This means that Assamese Wikipedia requires some more current active users to take up the role of wiki adminship and similar leadership roles.
The number of active users (editors with more than 5 edits per month) give an overview of the overall activity in wikipedia. Here also Malayalam and Tamil continue to be on the top. Some of the languages that showed notable growth in the number of active users are Urdu, Oriya, and Assamese. As we know there are lot of community building activities happening in both Oriya and Assamese. Along with community building activities both the communities are making sure they are providing sufficient support to newbies using various options. And there efforts are showing up in the form of community strength.
The number of active members in Odia has increased to 25 which means community has grown 3 times over the past 6 months.
The number of wiki editors per million for most Indic languages is still below 1. This shows that awareness about Indic language wiki projects is still an issue for most Indic Wikipedias. From this statistics (http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm), we can see that for Sanskrit the number of editors per million speakers has become 280 which is one of the highest in the world. No other Indic language Wikipedia is near Sanskrit in this parameter. Malayalam comes second with 3 editors per million and Assamese and Bishnupriya Manipuri comes third with 2 editors per million. Tamil is in the fourth place with 1 editor. For all other Indic languages the number of editors per million population is below 1. This shows that still the penetration of respective language Wikipedia among the speakers of a language is very low. We need more outreach programs to reach the speakers of the respective language.

Content

The number of articles is an important parameter which has misguided some wiki communities. However, it is a very important parameter if communities are increasing the number of articles in a way helpful to the readers of the wiki.

Hindi continues to be on the top spot with 1,02,902. During the past 6 months almost 2000 articles got added to Hindi Wikipedia.
Telugu Wikipedia crossed the 50,000 article milestone is one of the major accomplishments during this period. I remember reading the news about Telugu Wikipedia crossing the 30,000 article milestone in June 2007 which shows that it took almost 5 years to reach 50,000 article milestone. As pointed out by User:Veeven in his blog post (about Telugu Wikipedia crossing the 50,000 articles), Telugu Wikipedia needs more support from Telugu speaking population to build the free knowledge project in Telugu. The current number of active users in Telugu Wikipedia is not showing justice to the huge speaker base (more than 8 crores) of Telugu.
Another major milestone was Assamese Wikipedia crossing the 1,000 article milestone.
Tamil and Malayalam are the two language wikipedias that added most number of articles during this time period. Both the language wikipedias added close to 3000 articles.
Sindhi, Newari (Nepal Bhasha) and Bishnupriya language wikipedias showed reduction in the number of articles. There are 2 reasons for this:

There is no active community to add new articles (see the first table for the number of active users)
Spam/vandalism pages were deleted by stewards/global sysops.

Readers (Pageview)

Number of people visiting the website continue to increase for all Indic language wikipedias and the total visits for all Indic language wikipedias combined is close to 4 crore now.

Please note that the information available in the below table is the total visits (page views) for a language wikipedia for a month from all the platforms combined. It includes visits by readers and editors. This is NOT the list of Number of Unique Visitors to the website.

(The number of readers shown in the below table is in lakhs)

(The Number of Readers shown in the above table is in lakhs)

For most of the Indic languages readership has gone up. For Assamese and Odia it almost doubled.
Among big languages unlike the number of active users when it comes to readers most Indic languages are doing justice to its speaking population volume. So even though many of our speakers are not editing the respective language wikipedia they are reading it. Bengali and Telugu are two languages that behaves different here which shows that awareness is very low for both the languages.
As the Indic language support in smart phones and different OSs is in better position now, I am sure the readership is going to increase further in future.

Still a major percentage of our speakers (I mean speakers who has access to internet) doesn’t know that there is a Wikipedia exists in their own mother language and they not using it is a big issue. If our reader base is not increasing it will affect the community growth also. Hope things will improve as at least few language communities are involved in various awareness and outreach programs.

Originally posted at http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/indic-language-wikipedias-statistical-report-2012-january-2012-june/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/indic-language-wikipedias-statistical-report-jan-june-2012

Odia Wikipedia Turning 13 this June 3

subha — 2016-06-18T18:19:22Z

The Odia Wikipedia is turning 13 this June 3. To celebrate this long time of the editor community's tireless effort to make it to the largest Odia-language online encyclopedia an event is being organised in Odisha' capital Bhubaneswar. Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) is proudly sponsoring for this event. Subhashish Panigrahi and Rahmanuddin Shaik are representing CIS at this event.

Over 20 Wikipedians from various corners of India are participating for a public gathering that is planned on June 3 at the Institute of Physics at 5 pm. A day-long internal meetup for the community in the presence of Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K has been planned that focuses on raising consensus for policy and guidelines for Odia Wikipedia, and planning for the activities ahead in the light of successes and learning from failures from the past.

Promotional Banner

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/odia-wikipedia-turning-thirteen

Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Annamacharya library to preserve rare Telugu literature text

rahim — 2016-06-18T18:12:24Z

Telugu Wikipedia Community and the Centre for Internet & Society are conducting the Annamaya Library edit-a-thon on August 6, 2015 at Andhra Loyola College, Vijaywada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/rare-telugu-religious-and-historical-work-preserved-at-annamacharya-library-to-come-on-wikisource

Celebrating the 13th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia

subha — 2016-05-23T09:08:23Z

The Kannada-language Wikipedia, arguably the largest online encyclopedia in Kannada language, celebrated its 13th anniversary on February 14, 2016 in Mangalore.

To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians gathered at St. Aloysius College Mangalore, Karnataka. The larger Kannada Wikimedia community including long time Wikipedians and new members like the students, faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs gathered, participated in a day long edit-a-thon and chalked out plans for the future. The event is organised by the Kannada Wikimedia community and Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, Wikipedian and Assistant Professor of Kannada department at St. Aloysius College coordinated the event locally.

117 people gathered in the event out of which 96 were active editors of the Kannada Wikipedia community. Noted Kannada-computing researcher Kinnikambla Padmanabha Rao (widely known as KP Rao) addressed the public event and engaged with the audience about defining Kannada Wikipedia’s role a large role in widening Kannada’s presence on the Internet. The local organisers also took the event participants through a heritage walk in the heritage village of Pilikula Nisarga Dhama, an open library of the rich cultural heritage of Karnataka. The heritage walk resulted in over 300 image uploads on Wikimedia Commons ranging from the life and culture of coastal Karnataka to select rich heritage of the state. 20 new editors also participated in the event and they were oriented on basics of Wikipedia editing and Creative Commons licenses.

Triveni.K, one of the participants who is now pursuing her MSc. at Christ University, explains this event as a great learning platform for even core Wikipedia policies in details apart from many other Wikipedia policies she learnt here. “I’m little occupied for my exams but when it is over, I will be back on Wikipedia”, shares Triveni.

Prior to the event, four edit-a-thons were organised in four different cities of Karnataka. Themes chosen for the cities were Kannada literature in Mysore, Mechanical Engineering in Sagara, Science-related articles in Bangalore and article on notable female of the coastal Karnataka region in Mangalore. Follow up edit-a-thons were organised after the anniversary celebration with the same themes that were there in the previous session for the first three places where the follow up edit-a-thons in St. Aloysius College and St. Agnes College were both on medicinal plants.

The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on 12 June 2003 with a message “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning “Welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia” in Kannada). However it took over a year -- on July 12, 2004 the first article about a city Shimoga was created. Over the last decade Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for the Kannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name -- needless to say that 705,199 unique visitors read the articles every month as per the December 2015 statistics. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (February) being the highest and 22 (May) the lowest and 80 being the count in last December. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. The project since its inception has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles. The biggest hurdle, as explained by Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig, has been cleaning up the articles created by paid translations of Google when Kannada Wikipedia along with many other Indian language Wikipedias were used as testing grounds for improving Google Translate, a multilingual machine translation tool. Vasanth S.N., a Kannada Wikipedian who has cleaned up over 60 such articles prefers to use an existing good quality encyclopedia like the 14 volume Kannada Vishwakosha, published by Mysore University and relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the university, as a resource to create and improve articles.

The 14th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia was another milestone in the long journey of Kannada language and there are many more to come. More about the event could be read on the event page on Kannada Wikipedia.

Ananth Subray, Programme Associate, CIS-A2K contributed to this blog.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kannada-wikipedias-13-year-old-journey-of-knowledge-sharing

Digital native: Control A, Backspace

nishant — 2016-06-05T02:25:45Z

The rewriting of textbooks should not be compared to the collaborations on Wikipedia, which only goes by evidence.

The article was published in Indian Express on June 5, 2016.

I remember the first time I made an edit on Wikipedia — it was almost 10 years ago, and it was a heady feeling, to realise that here is a global encyclopaedia being written, and that I could be a part of it. It felt strange, because I was brought up to believe that authors are special people with specialised knowledge, which can only be validated from special institutions, and that authorship required years of practice and perseverance.

However, a historic experiment by Nature magazine showed, that despite the average age of the then Wikipedia editor as somewhere in the late teens, articles in Wikipedia were not any more prone to error than in other established, institutionalised fountains of knowledge like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In fact, not only were the non-specialised editors of Wikipedia spot on with their knowledge outputs, but that because of its iterative nature, errors, once spotted on Wikipedia could be immediately corrected, thus leading to a more robust source of knowledge.

Two key principles helped Wikipedia establish this process of reliable and resilient knowledge systems — neutrality of viewpoint, and evidence-based knowledge. In the largely free and open space of Wikipedia editing, the one thing that remained constant is neutrality. Editors, despite their own biases, locations, contexts, experiences or embodied knowledges, could not introduce their opinions or original research into the Wikipedia articles. This necessarily meant that every truth and knowledge claim made in a Wikipedia article needs to be verified through a source. This source could come from different spaces and different formats, but it serves as objective evidence for the information being provided there. In instances — and there are thousands of them, if not more — where two editors disagreed on how to interpret an event, or how to describe a person or a thing, the edit-war was fuelled not by the I-said-You-said never-ending rhetoric, but by relying on the soundness of research conducted by external sources.

For some years now, Wikipedia has become the de facto global reference system, which still relies on volunteers and non-specialised editors to contribute to complex, complicated and very specialised domains of human knowledge production. Even when the editors are experts or scholars, their contribution has value and merit, only when it is supported by externally verifiable source that supports their view points.

Wikipedia has become one of the foundational models of the information web, that makes it clear that knowledge can be freely produced, consumed and circulated, and more importantly, it can be negotiated and contested, thereby making our scientific research practices relevant and pertinent beyond the hallowed and often closed halls of the university. Wikipedia became a prime example of how information can be revised, changed, mutated, updated, upcycled, and subjected to deep scrutiny as long as it is informed by an alignment towards neutrality and supported by evidence produced through research.

I invoke these principles that have fostered one of the most magnificent pieces of collaborative human effort because it directly puts into contrast the revisionist, biased, authoritative and closed practices by which the Indian educational councils seem to be editing textbooks. The removal of the names of historical figures, the rewriting of history to reflect a biased, narrow and unsubstantiated narrative, the erasure of alternative histories and voices of protest and dissent, and the false planting of information which is grounded in the school of “People say” and the university of “I have heard” is an alarming development. Many people unfortunately think of this political revisionism as mimicking the wisdom of the crowds recounting and contestation of information on spaces like Wikipedia.

It is important to note that these attempts at revising known facts and of producing religious histories of exclusion and violence are not the digital mode of information upcycling. These revisions are firmly rooted in a political agenda that seeks to sanctify the discriminatory violences of our neo-authoritarian governments. They remain challenged by the scholars in the field who have enough evidence — of archives, of tracts, of data, and of information — that show that this information is false. They are entrenched in the politics of power that insist that this is the only true account of things, excluding public discourse, and performing acts of censorship that discourage all access to scientific learning.

The proponents who want to Make in India, cannot limit their rhetoric only to economic production, but have to extend collaborative and connected making to knowledge and information production. And this entails the unmaking of these authoritarian and fascist attempts at justifying rumours as information, hate speech as free speech, and revisions as conversations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/indian-express-june-5-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-control-a-backspace

Beyond Editor Count: Assessing Quality on Wikipedia

teju — 2016-06-12T16:00:13Z

Since Wikipedia is considered as the go-to source for different kinds of knowledge by anyone starting off in a particular field of study, and since Indian languages (IL) are often the default languages of the classroom in India, strengthening the quality of the material available on IL Wikipedias is certain to have widespread tangible and intangible impact.

While there is a need to improve the editor count on IL Wikipedias, it cannot substitute for efforts aimed at enhancing the quality of Wikipedia contributions. Here is an account of an initiative geared towards enriching the IL digital domain and in particular Wikipedia through partnerships with universities.

In collaboration with CIS-A2K, the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE) at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, has been conducting workshops with post graduate and undergraduate students in humanities and social sciences on developing digital open knowledge resources using IL Wikipedias.

These workshops, which are conducted by a resource person from CILHE and anchored by faculty members in partner institutions, are aimed at (a) integrating open knowledge resources into classroom teaching, (b) involving students in developing content relevant to their research interests, and (c) developing the skills to produce well-referenced academic writing.

Besides Wikipedia editing, the workshop process involves exercises that allow students to engage closely with major social science concepts and their meanings. The workshops also include collaborative digital annotation exercises.

This effort is the only one of its kind in the country where both students and teachers participate in creating open knowledge resources that are of use to them and the larger academic and non-academic audience.

Achievements thus far

Workshops are conducted bilingually, across several geographies, with English being the common factor. The Indian languages in question are Marathi, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Bangla and Kannada.

Here is a brief account of two such partnerships. The first is with Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre (KSPWSC) at Pune University, Pune, and the second with the Departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) in Hyderabad.

At KSPWSC, around 20 researchers since 2015 have collaboratively annotated 100 key women’s studies texts in Marathi and have written articles on these texts on the Marathi Wikipedia. This is the first part of a larger project called Sau Dhuni Teen (100 x 3), which aims to also cover 100 notable persons and 100 key concepts in women’s studies in addition to the 100 key texts.

This has been a year-long process involving, prior to the workshop,

(a) selection of 100 key texts through a survey of existing women’s studies curricula across the state of Maharashtra in the universities of all 6 major areas of the state;

(b) close reading and analysis of the texts led by faculty.

During the workshop, students learn how to

(a) annotate digitally and for an encyclopedia; how to create concept clusters and clouds of annotation;

(b) overcome translation challenges (English into Marathi, and Marathi into English) through the cultivation of linguistic attentiveness and sensitivity to the cultural contexts involved; and through the use of online and offline dictionaries and other writings on the subjects covered in the 100 key texts. The exposure to the existing literature helps students absorb the necessary vocabulary which is already in use and familiar to readers.

At EFLU, Hyderabad, 25 students speaking a number of Indian languages -Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Hindi - have come together to create articles of relevance to social sciences and humanities teaching and learning. The entries include: the concept of the public sphere, movements for political autonomy, leading Indian scholars, and major contemporary academic and literary works.

Ensuring success and sustainability: Key Factors

Consistent faculty participation coupled with regular meet-ups to develop existing articles and create new ones ensures the success and sustainability of these workshops. Prior to the workshops, the faculty members engage intensively with students in identifying concepts or texts about which writing in Indian languages is limited or inadequate.

Finding a thematic focus has been crucial for retaining interest and participation of the students in different locations, for example - women’s studies in Pune University, rural development at TISS Tuljapur, literary and cultural studies at EFLU.

Measurable outputs for student assessment are important for those faculty seeking to make Wikipedia editing part of internal assessment. These outputs include articles written, information added, references used, and links made, which can be easily computed from the View History pages.

Understanding Quality Enhancement

Participatory knowledge production: The Indian language articles on notable academicians, theorists, phenomena, events, and places written as part of the workshop are accessed, used, and further developed by students as well as Wikipedians other than the original authors.

Changing the pedagogic culture through open access resources: The articles become a strong pedagogic resource in Indian languages which is publicly accessible, generated by users themselves, used to supplement classroom teaching, and open to editing and revision.

Context sensitivity: The success of these workshops may also be assessed in terms of the variety of concept descriptions generated, the relevance of articles to context, and the integration of local experience onto digital knowledge platforms.

In addition to Wikipedia’s criteria for a good article, which include clarity, coherence, focussed development of the article, comprehensive references, use of inter-links and hyperlinks, the Indian language resources developed through our initiative have the significant additional feature of being contextually and culturally sensitive. We believe this is a crucial criterion for Wikipedia to be able to take root in the Indian knowledge domain.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/beyond-editor-count-assessing-quality-on-wikipedia

Wikipedia edit-a-thon at TEDSummit 2016, Banff, Canada

garule — 2016-06-13T06:44:49Z

The TEDSummit 2016, an annual conference of the TED community, is taking place during June 26-30, 2016 at Banff, Canada. Wikimedians Netha Hussain, Ayyappadas along with Abhinav Garule, Programme Associate, CIS-A2K will be conducting a 90-minute long workshop to educate the participants through Wikipedia's guidelines and help them write their first articles.

A list of articles have been suggested in the event page that participants can create. They can also play with a mock article. Please note, this is an invite-only event and only the conference participants that have registered beforehand can attend this edit-a-thon.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-edit-a-thon-at-tedsummit-2016-banff-canada

Open source effort gives indigenous language an official typeface

subha — 2016-08-03T02:00:36Z

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.

The article was published by Opensource.com on July 8, 2016.

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.

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 announced last year that it would make native Indian language input mandatory in mobile phones.

The need for a typeface, especially in a universal encoding standard like Unicode, became apparent during a three-month digitization project 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.

The question whether digital activism can help revive indigenous languages was discussed at the 2015 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Cebu City, Philippines. After the event, a pilot project was started within the Center for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge program to create a freely licensed font and input methods so that anyone can easily type in their native language.

The typeface family was designed by type designer Pooja Saxena and went through several rounds of review by language experts. However, the typeface is still one step away from reality. Because of this, two input methods will be made available along with the typeface; Sarjom Baha, a phonetic input method so that every common user can easily type the they pronounce the words, and InScript, a keyboard layout standard for Indian scripts. Even though the original plan was to create a editor community to contribute to the Santali Wikipedia and bring it live from Incubator, outputs will just be distributed for the users to use them.

The input method will also be available on Mediawiki 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!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-july-8-2016-open-source-effort-gives-indigenous-language-an-official-typeface

Community celebrates birthday of Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wiktionary

subha — 2016-07-09T03:25:02Z

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.

This was published on Wikimedia Blog on June 23, 2016.

With the Odia Wikipedia and its sister projects, a handful of dedicated volunteer editors are taking the Odia language to the world outside. The editor community that has recently celebrated Odia Wikipedia’s 14th anniversary in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India is collectively growing two more projects; Odia Wikisource, an online library that already has over 300 volumes of text, and Odia Wiktionary, 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.

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 https://or.wikipedia.org 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. Aliva Sahoo, 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 WikipediansSpeak project, we have tried to capture the voice of the community of Aliva and a few other contributors.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): How did the two-day long capacity building activity go? What was the outcome of the different sessions?
Jnanaranjan Sahu: 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.

SP: What are the problems you faced before coming to this event and how these sessions are going to help you in future?
Abha Pradhan: 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.

SP: What did you learn from these sessions?
Rajalaxmi Mishra: 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.

Subas Chandra Rout, 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 Wikimedia Medical Project run by the Wiki Project Med.

“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 Pritiranjan Tripathy, an editor who is based in the Indian city of Kolkata.

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 African trypanosomiasis. 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 (Marfan syndrome, 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.

“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 Shitikantha Dash. 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”.

The contributor community that is collaboratively building these projects has been also creating many tools and technical resources like editor manuals. The script encoding converters 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. Mrutyunjaya Kar, a long time contributor and administrator of two projects; Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource explains, “Odia Wikipedia is available at https://or.wikipedia.org and we encourage more people to join us in this movement.”

“This is a way to bring digital freedom for everyone and share the world’s knowledge in our own language.”

Chinmayee Mishra, Odia Wikimedian
Subhashish Panigrahi, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Sailesh Patnaik, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Associate, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-july-7-2016-community-celebrates-birthday-of-odia-wikipedia-and-odia-wiktionary