Centre for Internet and Society

Online edit-a-thon on incidents in Telugu

Subhashish Panigrahi and Pavan Santhosh — 2016-07-11T16:23:12Z

A week-long online edit-a-thon was organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community to cover popular social, political and other events on the Telugu Wikipedia.

Long time Telugu Wikipedians Venkata Ramana, Ravi Chandra, Dr. Rajasekhar, Kodihalli Muralikrishna and Pranay Raj organised an online edit-a-thon during May 1-May 7 to chronicle events of all kinds—from social to political and everything old and new—that are notable. I (Pavan Santosh) also joined them all in organising this event. 25 articles were created during the event and over the campaign week. The articles were enhanced with more citations and information.

We reached out to two of the organisers to learn about this project and below are what they had to say.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Can you please share how you came up with the idea of organising this event? What are the future plans to take this project to the larger Telugu Wikimedia community?
Ravi Chandra (RC): The idea of organizing an edit-a-thon for events on Telugu wikipedia came up when I was chatting with Pavan Santhosh about the progress of Telugu Wikipedia. He had also heard similar comments from other Wikipedians. We knew that we were concentrating more on people, places and movies in general. We wanted to pick up a topic which we have not focused much in the past. That's how it was born.

SP: Did you see anything in particular lacking in Telugu Wikipedia that helped start this project?
RC: I think the biggest challenge in our community is the lack of editors. The kind of articles we created during this event could have been written better by history scholars from different universities of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana. I feel that we should reach out to more people from diverse background so that we get more contributors.

Pavan Santhosh (PS): Why did you participate in this edit-a-thon?
Venkata Ramana (VR): I joined in this event to improve articles in Telugu WIkipedia especially related to incidents.

PS: Where do you see one such initiative adding value to Telugu Wikipedia?
VR: There are several articles related to incidents in English Wikipedia, that too related to India. But there is a gap in Telugu Wikipedia. For example, Karamchedu massacre is one of the very important incidents in the Dalit history and there was no article in Telugu Wikipedia until this edit-a-thon happened. Similarly, this event kickstarted chronicling of several such important incidents in Telugu Wikipedia.Within a short span of one week we have covered some of the very significant incidents.

PS: What was your collective learning? Can you please share some of your future plans?
VR: Edit-a-thons like this help community recognise some major gaps in content. And community members feel encouraged to work together to fill the gaps. I have seen the impact of edit-a-thons based on incidents, movies and now Punjab. Going forward, we are planning to conduct a few thematic edit-a-thons as this edit-a-thon and a few ones in the past have proved to be very effective on community building.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/online-edit-a-thon-on-incidents-in-telugu

Ongoing Proof-reading Effort by ALC Student Wikimedians in Telugu Wikisource

Pavan Santosh & Ting-Yi Chang — 2016-12-30T11:00:09Z

Student Wikimedians at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada formatted and proof-read more than 1,900 folios in Telugu Wikisource during the last few weeks of November (2016). Each day, a group of twenty students uses the lab facility provided by the college after regular classes to make necessary formatting changes and fix spelling mistakes in the folios of books available in Telugu Wikisource. Till date, the student Wikipedians have proofread eight books.

The work was initiated and supported by CIS-A2K members who organized a proofreading workshop of the Bible Bhashya Samputavali Volume 06 on Telugu Wikisource in Andhra Loyola College during 18 to 20 November 2016. During the workshop, Telugu Wikimedian Gullapalli Nageswara Rao (User:Nrgullapalli), along with CIS-A2K community advocate Pavan Santhosh helped students to learn about the process of digitizing book in Telugu Wikisource and other formatting aspects involved. In this event, nearly twenty students picked up the skills required to proof-read a book as well as the formatting techniques in Telugu Wikisource. Some students had also started to proof-read three other books that are currently available in Telugu Wikisource.

This event also marked great effort and accomplishment of promoting gender balance and diversity in local community events — as the organizers and institution successfully assured a minimum 50% female participation rate throughout the three days. CIS-A2K member Ting-Yi Chang also gave a short introduction to the participants about the issue in Wikipedia (media) Gender Gap. Students who had previous Wikipedia editing experience at the ALC were also invited to the session, rendering around thirty female audience. The presentation included small brainstorm activities for students to discuss reasons behind the gender asymmetry online and on Wikipedia/media projects, as well as how we as community members can make a difference to help women feel more welcomed.

A follow-up Wikisource session was conducted on 25 and 26 November 2016 for students to learn about the remaining steps in digitization and the OCR tool. Thanks to encouragement and motivation given by Principal Rev. Fr., Dr. Peter Kishore, staff members Prof. Siva Kumari, and Dr. K. Sekhar, the student Wikipedians had started to contribute to Wikisource after class for at least a couple of hours every day. These events and accomplishments show remarkable efforts and dedication from both student Wikimedians and the institutional partner.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ongoing-proof-reading-effort-by-alc-student-wikimedians-in-telugu-wikisource

One Thousand Books Online

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:16:39Z

The article was published in the Maharashtra Times on October 30, 2015. Download the file here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/one-thousand-books-online

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

Odia Wikisource to Hold 1st Anniversary

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:09:54Z

Odia Wikisource, a sister project of Odia Wikipedia and a free online Odia-language library will celebrate its first anniversary at the Indian Institute of Management of Agricultural Extension (IMAGE), Siripur here on Monday.

Available online at or.wikisource.org, it not just provides readers to free and open access to text that are out of copyright or available under free license, but also allows them to contribute in either digitizing copyright-free text or correcting mistakes made by others.

"Last year the Wikimedia community in Odisha did a remarkable job in bringing as many as 141 books by multiple authors relicensed under free licenses like CC-BY/CC-SA", said Centre for Internet and Society's Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi.

Odia Wikisource administrator Mrutyunjaya Kar has invited everyone to join the event.

This was published by Pioneer on October 26, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/pioneer-october-26-2015-odia-wikisource-to-hold-1st-anniversary

Odia Wikisource to Celebrate its First Anniversary Tomorrow!

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:14:16Z

Odia Wikisource, a sister project of Odia Wikipedia and a free online Odia language library, will celebrate its first anniversary in Odisha capital tomorrow.

The article was published in Odisha Sun Times on October 25, 2015.

Scheduled to be held at the Institute on Management of Agricultural Extension (IMAGE) in Siripura at 5 PM, the open to all event would welcome everyone taking interest in Odia library movement in particular and Odia language in general, as per a press release issued by Odia Wikisource.

It may be noted that the project, available online at or.wikisource.org, went live on October 20, 2014 after being incubated for over two years. It not only provides free and open access to readers to text that are out of copyright or available under free license, but also allows them to contribute in either digitizing copyright-free text or correcting mistakes made by others.

“Wikisource is different than Wikipedia as the former is published writing republished online where on Wikipedia it is more of aggregating information published elsewhere in an encyclopaedic manner,” explained Subas Chandra Rout, a long time Wikimedian.

All the contributors to the project are volunteers and are fondly called ‘uikiali’ in Odia. These volunteers follow certain guidelines to check through the content digitized by others to make sure there is no copyrighted text posing copyright violation, correct typing and other grammatical mistakes and incorrect attributions.

Authors and copyright holders are also encouraged to provide permission in re-licensing their work under free licenses like CC-BY/CC-by-SA licenses so that some of their content becomes available online and fill the large gap in online availability of Odia books to some extent.

“Last year, the Wikimedia community in Odisha did a remarkable job in bringing in as many as 141 books from multiple authors relicensed under the above mentioned licenses. We, as an institution, played a role in reaching out to many authors and convincing them for a small contribution to the society,” said the Centre for Internet and Society’s Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi.

“There is a great dearth of Odia books online. I try to buy some time from personal and office time to continue my contribution. I started from an all time Odia classic ‘Chhamana Athaguntha’ by Fakir Mohan Senapati,” said Pankajmala Sarangi, the most active contributor to the project.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/odisha-sun-times-october-25-2015-odisha-wikisource-to-celebrate-its-first-anniversary-tommorrow

Odia Wikisource to Celebrate Its First Anniversary in Bhubaneswar

subha — 2015-12-15T08:19:56Z

Odia Wikisource, a sister project of Odia Wikipedia and a free online Odia-language library is celebrating its first anniversary in Bhubaneswar tomorrow i.e., 25th October, 2015.

The blog post was originally published by Mybhubaneswar.com on October 24, 2015.

Available online at or.wikisource.org, the project finally went live in last year on October 20 after being incubated over two years.

In a nutshell, it not just provides free and open access to readers to access text that are out of copyright or available under free license, but also allows them to contribute in either digitizing copyright-free text or correcting mistakes made by others.

All the contributors to the project are volunteers and are fondly called “uikiali” in Odia. These volunteers follow certain guidelines to check through the content digitized by others to make sure there is no copyrighted text posing copyright violation, correct typos and other grammatical mistakes and incorrect attribution.

Last year, the Wikimedia community in Odisha did a remarkable job in bringing as many as 141 books from multiple authors relicensed under the above mentioned licenses where we, the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program, as an institution, could play a role in reaching out to many authors and convincing them for a small contribution to the society.

Pankajmala Sarangi, the most active contributor to the project elaborated saying, there is a great dearth of Odia books online. I try to buy some time from personal and office time to continue my contribution. After all, I started from an all-time Odia classic “Cha’mana Athaguntha” by Fakir Mohan Senapati”.

“The Odia language classics could now be read from phones, tablets and of course from computers”

Many important books that are out of copyright are making their appearance on the Odia Wikisource. “Wikisource is different than Wikipedia as the former is published writing republished online whereas on Wikipedia it is more of aggregating information published elsewhere in an encyclopaedic manner”, says Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, a long time Wikimedian.

Odia Wikisource’s administrator Mrutyunjaya Kar welcomes everyone taking interest in Odia library movement in particular and Odia language in general to join this event that is being held at the Institute on Management of Agricultural Extension (IMAGE), Siripura, Bhubaneswar at 5 pm tomorrow.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mybhubaneswar-october-25-2015-subhashish-panigrahi-odia-wikisource-celebrates-its-first-anniversary-in-bhubaneswar

Odia Wikisource Celebrates 1st Anniversary this 25th October

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:10:22Z

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାର ୧ମ ଜନ୍ମତିିଥି (Odia Wikisource’s 1st anniversary):

ଆଗାମୀ ୨୫ ତାରିଖ ଦିନ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟରେ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପାଠାଗାର “ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାର”କୁ ବର୍ଷେ ପୂରିବାକୁ ଯାଉଛି । ଏଥି ନିମନ୍ତେ ଆମେ ଭୁବନେଶ୍ୱରରେ ପାଳୁଛୁ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାରର ପ୍ରଥମ ଜନ୍ମତିଥି । ଆଉ ଏ ଉତ୍ସବରେ ଯୋଗଦେବା ଲାଗି ଆପଣଙ୍କୁ ରହିଲା ବିନୀତ ମାଗୁଣି, ଆସିବେ ନିଶ୍ଚେ । ଅଧିକ କିଛି ଜାଣିବାକୁ ଚାହିଁଲେ ଆମ ସହ odiawiki@gmail ରେ ମେଲ ଯୋଗେ ଯୋଗାଯୋଗ କରିପାରିବେ । ଧନ୍ୟବାଦ!

This was published by Bhubaneswar (Buzz) on October 24, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/bhubaneswarbuzz-odia-wikisource-celebrates-1st-anniversary-this-25th-october

Odia Wikipedia: Sambalpur University Workshop

Sailesh Patnaik — 2017-04-17T06:44:47Z

An Odia Wikipedia orientation-cum-workshop program was organised for the students of Sambalpur University on 27 November, 2016.

Over the last couple of years, the Odia Wikipedia community has been successful in organising workshops and outreach programs in different parts of coastal and central Odisha. With over 38 active Wikipedians (as of 2016), the Odia community is growing everyday and expanding across different parts of Odisha. The recent increase in the number of Wikipedians in western Odisha inspired the community members to conduct an introductory Wikipedia workshop in Sambalpur University.

On 27th November 2016, an orientation-cum-workshop program for Odia Wikipedia was organised for the students of Computer Science and Application Department and the Odia Department in Sambalpur University. 57 participants, comprising 30 male and 27 female participants attended the event. 5 faculty members were also present. Dr. Chitta Ranjan Dash, the Vice Chancellor of the University was the Guest of Honour for the workshop. Three Odia Wikipedians- Mrutyunjay Kar, Jnanaranjan Sahu and Nistha Ranjan Dash facilitated the workshop as mentors.

The workshop began with an introduction to Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource digitisation efforts by Dr. Sarada Baboo, a professor from the Computer Science and Application department. The first session introduced the various Wikimedia projects to the participants. The participants were given an introduction on how to contribute to the different Wiki projects. They were also given an orientation on Wikipedia policies and guidelines. After this, the participants were introduced to Odia Wikipedia and its development over the years. The post lunch session trained participants on creating user accounts, articles, and other basic dos and don’ts on Wikipedia. During the training session, over 20 Wikipedians were able to create accounts.

The Wikipedia workshop in Sambalpur University was an important step to raise awareness about the Wikipedia movement in western Odisha, This was the first workshop in Sambalpur University and the second workshop in western Odisha after three years. Over 196 colleges are affiliated to Sambalpur University, in seven different districts in western Odisha. A regular follow up with the University, the faculty and the students will help in furthering the free knowledge movement in western Odisha.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikipedia-sambalpur-university-workshop

Odia Wikipedia Workshop to be organised in Puri

Sailesh Patnaik — 2015-12-29T11:55:12Z

In collaboration with the the Google Local guides group, the first ever Odia Wikipedia workshop in Puri is being organised on this December 20.

This workshop aims at helping the participants learn about creating and improving the Odia Wikipedia articles about the local places, people, and culture of the historical town Puri and the district. Currently there is some presence of the town and the district on Odia Wikipedia but majority of the content are related only to Jagannath temple. The participants will be oriented with Wikipedia's basics, policy and guidelines of Odia Wikipedia, Odia-alphabet input. The event is free and open to everyone.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/odia-wikipedia-workshop-to-be-organised-in-puri

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

Odia Wikipedia Workshop in IIMC, Dhenkanal

Sailesh Patnaik — 2017-04-17T06:31:41Z

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop was conducted at IIMC, Dhenkanal on 31 January, 2017

Since 2013, the Odia Wikipedia community has collaborated with the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal for enabling students of the institution to partake in and contribute to the Wikimedia movement. An Odia Wikipedia workshop was conducted for the students of the institution on 31 January, 2017. The students were given an orientation on the basics of editing Wikipedia on the web and on their smart phones in addition to an explanation of Wikipedia policies, history of Wikipedia and Wiki News.

The 45 English and Odia language students with a male: female ratio of 60: 40, who took part were given a live demonstration of these topics. Along with the help of supportive faculty members, the students were exposed to Commons and Incubator as well. Overall, the event saw the creation of 20 new editors on Odia Wikipedia. A follow-up workshop is also being planned for the students in the coming months.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/odia-wikipedia-workshop-in-iimc-dhenkanal

Odia Wikipedia progress from July to December, 2015

rahim — 2016-02-05T02:45:19Z

Odia Wikipedia, one of the very active Wikipedias in Indian languages has been showing a negative rate of growth for the last 6 months. We will try to analyse, what has been happening and how can that be improved.

Odia language is one of the 22 languages recognized by Indian union in 8th schedule. It has 31 million population as per 2001 census. Odia language has its own Wikipedia created on 3rd June 2002. This blog post will try to put out Odia Wikipedia's growth from a perspective based on Wikimedia stats.

Odia Wikipedia started on 3rd June 2002 and for almost 4 years, it survived with only one page in the project. Until an IP edit created the home page mimicking Sanskrit Wikipedia's homepage. This continued for over a year and then from an IP address, a word to word translation of home page was made into Odia. Around the same time, an entry for an article - (ଭାରତ)India was created. The homepage of Odia Wikipedia and other articles continued to be edited by IP address users until ଓଡ଼ିଆ created his/her account and started modifying the homepage.

Today, Odia Wikipdia has 10,187 articles in article namespace, 47,291 pages in all (including article namespace pages); 10,574 registered users which includes bots. Of these registered users, as of November 2015, 63 users have done at least one edit in November, 13 is the number of users flagged as bots. There are 4 administrators on Odia Wikipedia.

When we look at the stats table of Odia Wikipedia taken from stats.wikimedia.org, below,

	Total Editors	New Editors	Active Editors	Very Active Ediors	Articles	New Articles per day
July, 2015	127	2	12	2	8,800	1
August, 2015	129	2	15	6	8,900	3
September, 2015	131	2	15	6	9,100	5
October, 2015	136	5	21	4	10,100	36
November, 2015	136		11	2	10,500	2

Some of the direct observations are : Over a 5 month period, only 9 people joined Odia Wikipedia, average Indian count for this is 9 per month.

The active editors count, which is about 20% of Total editors is at 10% or less for most of the months.

The very active editors count, again 40-50% of active editors is still low.

There have been no new editors who have come to Odia Wikipedia and registered for the month of November.

Though the articles per day count has been at rise, we need to analyze what kind of content it is and what is the size of articles being added.

	Bytes added	Files/ images added
July 2015	6656008	0
August 2015	28507493	0
September 2015	12403456	0
October 2015	25281989	1
November 2015	5442630	0
December	8492735	4

The above table shows the overall bytes added to Odia Wikipedia (both added and removed) and he files uploaded.

The bytes added is generally an indicative of how much content is being added to the project. If an average good article has, say 10kb length on Odia Wikipedia, then what th above table interprets is that a good amount of content is added to Odia Wikipedia for thee months of August, and October, but same thing did not happen in July, September, October and December.

The files/images added to the project is not a direct indicative of any quality change on the wiki. As all file uploads happen on commons. But this is of course and indicative of non-free fair use images being added, and if that is the usability, then Odia Wikipedians do not seem to be utilizing it properly or Odia Wikipedia has content that does not depend on such images.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-sad-state-of-odia-wikipedia

Odia Wikipedia celebrates 13 years of free knowledge contribution at Bhubaneswar

praskrishna — 2016-06-18T18:18:05Z

Odia Wikipedia, one of the first of several Indian language Wikipedia projects is ready to celebrate 13 glorious years of free knowledge contribution on June 3.

This was published in Orissadiary.com on June 2, 2015. Also see http://odishan.com/14971 (In Odia)

Beginning in 2002 — a year after the world's largest online encyclopedia, the English Wikipedia, was launched — Odia Wikipedia has grown to be the largest content repository in the Odia language available in Unicode on the Internet at https://or.wikipedia.org.

With about 17 active editors (also known as “uikiali”) spread across various parts of India and abroad, and over 8,800 articles, the project has become more than just an encyclopedia. The voluntary editor community has put its efforts into acquiring valuable Creative Commons (CC) licensed content by lobbying copyright holders/authors to relicense copyrighted content under CC licenses.

Date and time: 3 June 2015, 5 pm
Venue: Institute of Physics, Near Apollo Hospital, Bhubaneswar, Odisha
Event details: https://or.wikipedia.org/s/sml

It has also engaged with over 2,000 people by organizing various outreach programs including the globally accredited pedagogic program the Wikipedia Education Program (WEP). For its 13th anniversary the community is planning to release a character-encoding converter that promises to unlock massive amounts of content from government portals as well as journals, newspapers and magazines that have their content in non-Unicode character encoding that prevents user searching and reuse of digital-based content.

May you have any further questions about the project or the event, please reach us in the contact details mentioned below:

Mrutyunjaya Kar, Administrator, Odia Wikipedia (9437112371)
Sailesh Patnaik, Editor, Odia Wikipedia (7537097770)
Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K)
subhashish@cis-india.org. 08050515339

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/orissa-dairy-june-2-2015-odia-wikipedia-celebrates-13-years-of-free-knowledge-contribution-at-bhubaneswar

Odia Wikipedia and Orientation Training Programme

praskrishna — 2017-01-23T00:58:38Z

An Odia Wikipedia orientation and training programme is being organized by the Centre for Internet & Society's (CIS-A2K) team on 31 January 2017 at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal in Odisha.

Agenda

Bringing new editors on board.
Orientation programme for students of IIMC.
Finding possible partnership with the institute.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/odia-wikipedia-and-orientation-training-programme