Centre for Internet and Society

Community Digest—Estonians working on a new feedback system for Wikipedia articles

subha — 2016-02-27T06:30:41Z

Community digest is a weekly publication on Wikimedia Blog. This week, I have authored a section on the Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary that is being celebrated today. It includes a small section from a longer interview with Kannada Wikipedian Vasanth S.N. The two blogs on creating Odia-language character encoding converters I had written before in the Huffington Post and the DNA are also featured in the digest.

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog here.

Sites that rely on the cooperation of people need to be able to easily exchange information. When there are some problems with an article, you could always add some templates to specific places or point to them on talk page—but that can sometimes be painful and time consuming.

The problem can grow even greater when articles are written inside a Wikipedia Education Program. You may need to follow up with hundreds of students and provide them feedback so that they can easily understand what should they fix. This can be a rather tricky job when dealing with people who have never before written to Wikipedia.

For example, in Estonia we have a course called “Estonian Composition and Conversation” in the University of Tartu, where there are on average more than 200 students per year writing articles on Wikipedia. We are keenly interested in providing good quality feedback, but with that number of students and with the use of the usual wikisystem, that is hard to achieve.

So we needed a solution.

When using the usual method (the talk page), you need to point out where are all of the mistakes located and then express your concerns about them. With a lot of comments, that does get rather messy and it’s hard to understand where are those comments directed to; it’s not an ideal medium for feedback in massive scale and not that useful for neither the students nor the person giving feedback. So the goal was simple: to ease the process of giving feedback to students who write wikiarticles as their coursework.

What we did was to create a system called WikiComment.

What does it do? Well, at first it allows to add comments to exact letters/sentences/paragraphs to speed up the commenting process and make it easier to locate the issues. In addition to adding comments, it also provides various highlighting options and a possibility to strike through text. Secondly, it allows for better monitoring of the articles of interest. That means the wikiComment user has information about which pages have been modified and he or she can easily check if the changes have solved the marked questions.

We hope that this will make it easier to focus on text and to the quality of writing.

Obviously WikiComment could be used outside the education initiative and in many other ways as well, but that is just how it all started. For example we’ll soon add support for sites like Meta-Wiki, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wikinews, and Wikiquote, among others. Having a discussion about some details in grant request or talking about local tourist sites may have just become easier. But to really optimize the system and to make it as good as possible we’ll need your feedback, so please go on and test that site—if you have any suggestions, just let us know.

Ivo Kruusamägi, Estonian Wikipedian

In brief

Kannada Wikipedia anniversary: The Kannada Wikipedia is all set to celebrate its 13th anniversary. 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—there were about 700,000 pageviews in December 2015. 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. Since its inception, the project 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 16 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. To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians are gathering at Saint Aloysius College Mangalore, Karnataka this 14th. The larger community, including long time Wikipedians and new members like the students faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs, will gather and participate in a day-long edit-a-thon and chalk out plans for the future.

Innovation and revolution in the Odia language: Wikimedian Subhashish Panigrahi has written two pieces recently. In dnaindia.com, he described a Unicode converter that in revolutionizing Internet access in the Odia language; in the Huffington Post, he wrote about why contributing and adding to Wikipedias in Indian language is so important.

Coming together across the divide: Saanjh (ਸਾਂਝ سانجھ), a Punjabi word which means collaboration, was an online edit-a-thon between the Gurmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia and Shahmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia in January 2016. The plan came together after two editors, one from each side, met at Wikimania 2015. Organized by the Punjabi Wikimedians User Group, 23 editors participated; you can read more about their story on Meta.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate, Wikimedia Foundation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-community-digest-estonians-working-on-new-feedback-system-for-wikipedia-articles

Looking ahead to the future of the Kannada Wikipedia: Vasanth S.N.

subha — 2016-02-29T14:15:41Z

Vasanth S.N. has edited the Kannada-langauge Wikipedia since 2006. As part of the WikipediansSpeak series, I caught up with Vasanth to learn about his contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia, which just celebrated its 13th anniversary. In the discussion Vasanth shares his long time involvement in the Wikimedia movement, and what drives him every day to edit Wikipedia and helping other fellow Wikimedians.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Hi Vasanth, thanks for agreeing to share about yourself. Can you tell me little about yourself and how you started contributing to Kannada Wikipedia?

Vasanth S.N. (VSN): I grew up in a small town in the Indian state of Karnataka. After completing my PG Diploma in Human Resources studies from Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) I started working at Dharmasthala temple in Karnataka where I have been working over last 35 years. As a student, I was voracious reader of Kannada-language books. Science, art and culture were my favorite subjects back then. I started contributing to Kannada Wikipedia back in 2006. Shushrutha, a scientist based outside India helped me with several technical needs like creating templates in Kannada Wikipedia. With his help, I contributed to articles related chemical elements. He helped a lot in importing templates then. These days another Wikipedia editor Omshivaprakash is helping in importing templates and several other technical needs I have, thanks to Pavanaja who is also helping and encouraging me regularly.

SP: What are you currently working on?

VSN: After the 14 volume Kannada encyclopedia “Kannada Vishwakosha” got relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license by Mysore University, we have started digitizing it on Kannada Wikisource. I am taking the digitized articles from here to Kannada Wikisource. I first check for the English Wikipedia article, use some of the updated content from there with citations, and wikify the Kannada Vishwakosha articles to create articles on Kannada Wikipedia.

SP: What are the kind of challenges you generally face?

VSN: Something that really bothers me is the low participation of Kannadiga s in contributing to Kannada Wikipedia. I wish there could be more discussions in the village pump and collaborations between fellow editors. Many of the long time Wikimedians like Radhatanaya, who is probably over 70 years old, need more support with complex Wikipedia policies, and more appreciation. And so are B.S. Chandra from Sagara, Karnataka and many other editors so that every single editor feels to be an important aspect of the community. We also have to bring back editors like Tejas Jain who were active some time back but have slowed down over time. I feel bad that we are lagging behind our neighboring Wikimedia communities like Tamil and Malayalam. When we cannot scale up too fast, a valuable resource like Kannada Vishwakosha that I mentioned before would be really useful in populating Kannada Wikipedia with good quality article. The Vishwakosha is not just compiled by subject experts but has been updated over time. I am more than happy if more editors are willing to join use this encyclopedia as a resource and I am sure we could create over 14,000 articles that a handful of editors like me will take over years to complete otherwise. However the community is skeptical about just one citation but i think we could always rely on English Wikipedia and search for more resources for additional citations.

SP: What do you suggest we—all the Wikimedians, the Wikimedia India chapter, and us (CIS-A2K)—should work on?

VSN: I feel that we are focusing so much only on cities and there might be potential editors in rural areas. But may be reaching out to people who have access to computer and internet is a low hanging fruit as compared to outreach in rural Karnataka. There are over 46,000 state-run schools and many have computers. Taking Kannada Wikipedia to select schools with the facilities needed might result in bringing in flesh blood to the community. I also think that the veteran professors and educators could help grow Wikipedia by correcting articles and wikifying if not writing articles. There might be collectives of such people that I do not know of but in my opinion, it is worth trying. I tried to request some professors in Ujjire, Karnataka to help with correcting over 60 articles related to plant varieties of Karnataka but could not get much help. But that is just one failure and should not stop reaching out to more professors. And if a collective of professors does not exist we could find a common area of interest and create a group.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society

This post is part of the WikipediansSpeak series, which aims to chronicle the voices of the Wikipedia community. You can find more of these posts on the Wikimedia Commons. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section below.

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-february-28-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-looking-ahead-to-future-of-kannada-wikipedia

Bodh: a new tool for Wikidata lexicographical data

Bodhisattwa Mandal — 2021-06-28T01:19:11Z

We are happy to announce that a new tool, named Bodh, has been developed by Jay Prakash, as a CIS-A2K assignment, to add or modify statements for lexemes, senses and forms.

This tool presents lexicographical data in tabular format generated from SPARQL queries or from manual lists. Users can switch whether to work on lexeme proper, sense or form and add or modify statements there.

The idea of this tool was inspired by the one and only Magnus Manske's Tabernacle which helps editors to add or modify statements, labels, descriptions and aliases for Wikidata's entity data.

The tool is going to be documented here. Users of this tool can request for more features or report for bugs using this phabricator project profile.

Happy editing!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/bodh-a-new-tool-for-wikidata-lexicographical-data

She Leads Bootcamp 2025

Soni Wadhwa — 2025-02-19T14:30:11Z

CIS-A2K is committed to bridging the gender gap within Indian Wikimedia communities, and to further this goal, last year we launched the impactful She Leads program. This initiative is designed to empower female Wikimedians to take on leadership roles within their language communities, promoting diversity and inclusivity.

She Leads offers vital support and resources, helping women bring their ideas and initiatives to life, while fostering an inclusive, supportive environment that encourages growth and collaboration.

The response and feedback from the first iteration of She Leads illustrated a larger need to nurture female leadership in the open knowledge movement. Subsequently, we had several conversations with remarkable women in the open knowledge space to explore avenues to foster female leadership. We are grateful to Rosie Stephenson Goodknight, Masana Mulaudzi, Netha Hussain, Sneha PP, Amrita Sengupta, Manavpreet Kaur, and Medhavi Gandhi for their support and guidance in conceptualizing She Leads Bootcamp 2025. A special shout out to Satdeep Gill for being an ally and contributing to the program design.

The She Leads Bootcamp 2025, which was held in Bangalore from January 31st to February 3rd, 2025, aimed to further these efforts by gathering budding women leaders from Indic Wikimedia communities. This immersive, in-person event provided participants with the tools, resources, and connections necessary to thrive as leaders. The She Leads Bootcamp 2025 helped create a robust network of women leaders who were able to collaborate and support each other’s initiatives. The training sessions focused on leadership skills, feminist methodologies, project management, and advocacy strategies. Organizers fostered a sense of belonging among participants, encouraging them to share experiences and learn from one another.

Click to download the event report authored by Soni Wadhwa and edited by Chris and Nitesh Gill.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/she-leads-bootcamp

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship

Manasa Rao and Ananth Subray — 2017-07-05T09:33:19Z

CIS-A2K’s Wikipedia Education Program with Christ University, Bangalore is coming to an end after another year of intense classes, certificate courses and an internship at The Centre for Internet and Society. The internship activity in particular has successfully managed to engage students beyond classroom hours. The selection of 12 students for the internship program was based on their penchant for the language as well as their interest in the wiki world.

The internship was structured into three stages. Firstly, the students were asked to develop stub articles. The aim of this activity was for students to learn searching skills. As a result, over 1500 articles were developed with qualitative work.

Secondly, the students were asked to create new articles from scratch. They searched for the topic on the Wikipedia, ascertained whether the article exists or not and later researched further on the content of the articles. As a result, the students were able to create 1400+ articles

Finally, the students were asked to draft policy pages for their respective language Wikipedia. They went through the policy pages in different languages including English and were asked to create similar policy pages for Kannada Wikipedia.

Unlike previous years, the activities during the internship program were tailored to suit the individual capabilities of the students, taking into consideration the suggestions from community members. The students were of the opinion that in addition to rekindling their love for the language, the internship program also enabled them to develop their overall knowledge of various subjects. The students felt that their vocabulary and typing skills also improved. However, the students were of the opinion that they could have been taken a level or two higher from article writing and introduced to other Wikimedia projects and topics related to the overall movement. The CIS-A2K WEP Program hopes to incorporate these suggestions for the upcoming year while also trying to increase the number of days of the internship in order not to tax the students.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/christ-university-wikipedia-education-program-internship

Asian Athletics Championships 2017 Edit-a-thon

Sailesh Patnaik & Jnanaranjan Sahu — 2017-08-01T05:23:47Z

Odia Wikipedians, in conjunction with Indian Athletics Federation and Sports and Youth Services collaborated to document the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships. Hundreds of photos were uploaded and new Wikipedia content added to inform the event’s fans.

The Asian Athletics Championships is an intra-continental sports event organized bi-annually since 1973. The 22nd championship was held in July at the Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar, India, where 655 athletes from 41 countries participated in 21 games. The Odia Wikipedia community worked with the event organizers in different ways, to document the event on Wikipedia, by holding edit-a-thons (editing workshops), to improve Wikipedia’s content about the championships and releasing official photos of the event under free Creative Commons licenses.

The original plan was for the Indian city of Ranchi, Jharkhand to host the 2017 athletics, but plans changed 90 days before the event when Bhubaneswar was selected as a venue instead. Preparing the Kalinga Stadium and getting ready for the championships in that short period was a challenge for the organizers. However, the state government of Odisha stepped in to assist, and as part of that freely shared the event website content under Creative Commons licenses.

The local Wikipedia community, along with the WikiTungi project in Bhubaneswar, were invited by R. Vineel Krishna, the State Department’s Director of Sports and Youth Services, to organize an edit-a-thon for the Championships. The scope was to improve Wikipedia’s content about the participating Asian athletes.

Before the event, existing Wikipedia articles provided little information on the biographies and accomplishments of some of the participating athletes. Odia Wikipedians collaborated with the Sports and Youth Services Department of Odisha to bridge the dearth of information.

Edit-a-thon participants gathered at the office of CSM Technologies, an event partner for the championships. Fifteen Wikimedians from Bhubaneswar and Puri WikiTungi, with some CSM staff members and new editors participated in the edit-a-thon.

Kalinga Stadium,, Bhubaneswar/ CC-BY-SA 4.0/ Sailesh Patnaik

The collection includes images of the athletes during their Heats, Semi Finals, Final, and Medal ceremonies of all four days. 127 images are used in 269 pages on Wikipedia in 27 languages, and many articles added their first image from this collection. WikiProject Women in Red used the images in many female athlete articles. The Odia Wikipedia community and the Centre for Internet and Society are also planning to work with the Wikipedia Asian Month competition to use these images to illustrate Wikipedia articles they work on, in their next edition. Victuallers, one of the volunteers of Women in Red project, identified athlete photos from the games website collection and used them to illustrate their articles. He has also created new articles of other participating female athletes.

Arpitha M. of India in action at the 400m hurdles event/ CC-BY-SA 4.0

The event started with a basic Wikipedia orientation session for new participants. There was no Wikipedia article for the championships in Odia language, so participants created it in addition to improving the English Wikipedia article. Along with that, 10 new articles were improved and created on both Odia and English Wikipedia. The 2017 Championships page on the English Wikipedia received over 100,000 views during the championships week.

“Wikipedia has been the one-stop source of knowledge for me,” says Alankar Devta, an edit-a-thon participant. “It has helped me learn a lot and prepare for competitions. This is the first time, I got a chance to take part in any Wikipedia edit-a-thon. Apart from that, the articles about the athletes taking part in this year’s Championships are of great help for the readers who may want to search for the athletes with expectations to find useful information about them.”

Wikimedia community members were offered passes to attend the opening ceremony and take photos. We spent four hours taking photos of the 41 participating teams, athletes and cultural events. All were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Nearly 19% of the photos taken at the opening ceremony are used on Wikipedia articles.

A major outcome of the edit-a-thon was releasing the content and images of the championship’s official website under a Creative Commons license. 286 images from the websites were added to Wikimedia Commons, of which 47.2% are used on Wikipedia in several languages.

“I have worked with the Women in Red project since it started,” says Victuallers. “Over the past two years, we have helped raise the percentage [of female biographies on the English Wikipedia] from 15.5 to 17%. One of the things that hold us back, though, is that women are less likely to have images available. It’s, therefore, amazing to find that a major athletic event has released hundreds of images with a CC BY-SA license. Participating athletes are all notable and women are fairly well represented. I have downloaded over 100 pictures and cropped group photos to create portraits. We’ve been tweeting the new articles and pictures on @WikiWomenInRed and trying to encourage all to “one up” the Odisha people. It’s a great success and we need more people to follow suit.”

With such collaborative spirit from the Government institutes, the Odia community is planning to get more content from Odisha under a free license. The community has also partnered with the Bhubaneswar Development Authority, to run a global edit-a-thon named Bhubaneswar Heritage Editathon, for documenting the culture and heritage monuments of the city.

A version of this blog post appears on the Wikimedia Blog, co-authored by Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/asian-athletics-championships-2017

Unable to read Odia on your android device? Don’t fret!

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:04:39Z

If you get only boxes in place of Odia fonts in your Android device then it does not support the language. So you need to install Odia font in your smart phone; one way is to root it, but it’s not without cons.

The article by Ruby Nanda was published in Odisha Sun Times on September 28, 2015. Subhashish Panigrahi was quoted.

Rooting means breaking and getting full rights into the entire operating system of your Android. If done right it can turn you into a super user and open a wealth of opportunities with your handheld device. But, rooting is a complex process and definitely not for a newbie, as rooting leads to loss of warranty, security issues and a wrong move can turn it into a paperweight.

“Rooting is not advisable as it is bit complicated and turns your phone warranty void”, says Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, an NGO. By far the easiest way to read Odia is by installing Firefox Browser for your android mobile, he added.

Nihar Kumar Dalai, IT professional, has found an easy hack and with Panigrahi, he has designed a free licensed tutorial by which one can easily read Odia language in their smart phones.

“Odia fonts are supported only in the latest android 5.1.1 update, but people using android devices with older version may not have Odia fonts and can see only the boxes. We see many people seeking help to resolve this problem on Twitter and Facebook. With missing Odia fonts, people may end up writing Odia in Roman script, said Dalai.

“There has been very positive response from people who have tried this method. I’m happy to play a very small part for this cause, the IT professional added.

So if you are unable to read or write Odia in your android handheld then no sweat, just try out these simple steps and enjoy the fun of reading and writing Odia in your mobile.

Install Mozilla Firefox browser for Android on your phone from Google Play.
Launch Firefox and go to the Oriya fonts package Add-Ons page and select “Add to Firefox”
Click on Install
Eureka! Now Odia fonts appear on your android device instead of unrecognizable boxes.

Click here to watch the tutorial:

https://or.wikipedia.org/s/ucf

Once you’re able to read and write Odia, you can use any online Odia transliteration service e.g. TypeOdia (on Firefox browser), iBUS on Linux, Microsoft’s Indic language Input Tool, Google Input Tool.

P.S: This method only works on Firefox Browser for Android and not on any other Apps. Android jellybean 4.3 version also supports Odia but there might be issues which are fixed by 5.1.1.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/odisha-sun-times-september-28-2015-ruby-nanda-unable-to-read-odia-on-your-android-device

WikipediansSpeak: Telugu Language Library Catalog Project Helps Wikipedia Grow

subha — 2015-12-15T08:06:52Z

In 2013, the interview project “WikipediansSpeak” was launched in response to observations that many noteworthy Wikimedians were being underrepresented both locally and globally. Not just them personally—their work, and the communities they represent, were also unknown to the Wikimedia community and the outside world.

This was published on Wikimedia blog in two languages English and Ukranian.

Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising campaigns were the biggest inspiration for the project. From video-only interviews, this is an attempt at different ways of interviews, and is the first interview showcasing a Telugu Wikimedian: Viswanadh B.K., who was an Individual Engagement (IEG) Grantee last year and has continued to be active in outreach.

Recently, you attended a Telugu Wikipedia workshop for the Botany-major undergraduate students at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. Would you like to talk a little bit about your participation, how the program was designed, the activities there and the output? How are you planning to mentor the students in the future?

The staff and students are quite enthusiastic, and the students are dedicating considerable time to learning, and reflecting their learning, while editing the Telugu Wikipedia. However, they need more training on basics of Wikipedia, as well as on policies and guidelines. Without that, they might end up creating low quality articles that the community will face problems cleaning up. Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), that has been organizing these sessions in the college, should seek out more support from the Telugu Wikimedia community so that the experienced editors could mentor these students. I feel it would be a good idea to award the students and faculty with certificates. These small little things often motivate many.

What part should the community and CIS-A2K be playing in the Wikimedia movement? What could and should we do for the Telugu community?

Many in our community do not know how programs like CIS-A2K work. Maybe there is a need to provide some kind of orientation for them which will help them to understand how they could approach CIS asking for support. This process could also help the community understand CIS’s activities and its programmatic implementation. More collaboration, and understanding of the program among the community, will improve involvement in CIS’s activities as well as CIS’s understanding of the community.

You were the second Telugu Wikipedian to be awarded with an Individual Engagement Grant (IEG). How did it go, and what did you achieve? Based on your own experience, how are you planning to groom this year’s applicants from Telugu and other Indian language Wikimedia communities?

This IEG was my dream come true! Back in 2009, I blogged about the potential of opening up library catalogs on the Internet for people to search for books. It took shape with my grant project: “Digitization of Important Libraries Book Catalog in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana”. I worked on an extensive project, digitizing the catalogs of five libraries—a total of 300,000 books—in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. I learned a lot, and documented part of my learning, which talks about the ways one should go about partnering with Indian institutions. I believe, my interaction with fellow Wikimedians must have helped them to better their grants applications this year. And I am hoping that I will continue to support more friend from my community and country in the future.

What drove you, over the years, to work on a project like this digitizing library catalogs? Were there any additional learning and benefits from this project?

In this digital age, people searching for books on the Internet might have developed the notion that if a book is not available online, it doesn’t exist. I have been experiencing this very issue while looking for evidence notability and citations on the Telugu Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia editors argue for citing at least the name of the book when the book is not available online. This pushed me to create a central catalog that will benefit Wikipedians, researchers, and readers. In the process of creating the catalog, I also managed to develop strong relations with several cultural organizations. These include Kathanilayam, a dedicated organization collecting every Telugu story; the Annamayya Library, which developed into a great cultural center in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh; and the Suryaraya Vidyananda Library, whose collection is enriched with rare manuscripts and important books. I touch based with them then, and they are slowly becoming household names for other Wikimedians for their library-related needs. We can see the potential of strong partnerships and synergy with these libraries.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-october-9-2015-subhashish-panigrahi-telugu-library-catalog-project-wikipedians-speak

Odia gets more space in e-world

praskrishna — 2016-04-24T14:57:56Z

A survey conducted by the Odia Wikipedia community and the Centre for Internet and Society reveals that the online presence of Odia language is gradually increasing.

The article by Anwesha Ambaly was published in the Telegraph on April 7, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi was quoted.

The survey, conducted last month, found nearly 61 per cent online users active on social media to be using the universal web-compatible Unicode font for Odia. Using the Unicode ensures it is searchable, sharable and reusable on the Internet, thus making its presence bigger.

"The survey results show that more people are typing in the native script. And the use is increasing at a fast pace," said Subhashish Panigrahi, the programme officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, adding that there had been a 20 per cent rise in the number of Unicode users for Odia over the past two years.

Most people share quotes, personal opinions and news on social media in Unicode. In the first phase, the survey was conducted among 500 active social media users. More such surveys will be conducted within six months. The survey was conducted on Facebook, Twitter and some other popular social networking sites.

The survey results are particularly significant since the two other fonts used for writing Odia in the computer - Akruti and Sreelipi - are not compatible for use on the Internet.

"Based on these survey responses, we will customise several projects so that more people join in this free and collaborative knowledge sharing movement," said Mrutyunjaya Kar, an administrator of the Odia Wikipedia Community.

The Unicode font for Odia was introduced in 1991. Earlier, many people were not even aware of its existence in their personal and office computers. Unicode-compliant fonts now come preloaded in all computers across Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems. And many mobile companies also have Unicode fonts installed, especially in systems such as Android 5.0 and later versions."

Medical student Nasim Ali said: "Apple iOS devices have Odia support to the display level where one needs to download apps to type in Odia."

The survey also mentions that around 30.4 per cent use the Latin script to write Odia.

However, while explaining why there was not much Odia content on the Internet, Kar said: "There is no government initiative to promote Unicode in Odia. There is a need for more initiative to implement Unicode at all levels, such as government websites, web versions of school textbooks, government circulars and other publications."

"We have written several letters to the state government requesting them to start using Unicode while uploading documents in government websites. But, there has been no response or action from the government's side," Kar added.

Culture secretary Manoranjan Panigrahi, however, said: "We are taking a lot of initiatives to promote Odia language at the international level. We are trying to make use of technology to make sure that its presence increase on the web platform."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-telegraph-april-7-2016-anwesha-ambaly-odia-gets-more-space-in-e-world

Eight Challenges Indian-Language Wikipedias Need to Overcome

subha — 2016-06-18T17:09:38Z

Even after a decade of existence, Indian language Wikipedias are not yet known to many Indian language speakers. Wikipedia, the largest available encyclopedia made in the human history, is what it is today because of the hundreds and thousands of volunteer editors.

The article was published in Global Voices on April 27, 2016. A version of this post was previously published on The Wire.

But while native-language Wikipedias are becoming game-changers in other corners of the world, the scenario in India is skewed. Here, from my point of view, are some of the challenges that Indian-language Wikipedias are currently facing.

1. Language communities

The language communities of many of the Indian languages are such that many of them do not know how to search for information online, in language typed in their script. Some of these communities even believe that because Google’s home page does not display their script, their language does not exist on the Internet. Google, which starting with five Indian languages as options in its interface, now has has nine Indian languages. But this does not stop a Santali or Manipuri user from searching in Unicode Ol chiki (the script for Santali) or in Unicode Meithei (the script for Manipuri). Google, or any search engine, for that matter, will display anything available in any script on the Internet. But the perceived lack of this very function is keeping many people from connecting to the Internet, and to Wikipedia in particular.

2. Wikipedia’s editor community

Wikipedia is written by people like you and me. And everything, from writing to editing, is done by volunteers. And anybody can correct the mistakes and inaccuracies that exist in many Wikipedia articles. While several Indian languages are spoken by millions of people, the Wikipedia editor communities for these languages are very small, with only a handful editors contributing to editing those language versions of Wikipedia. In January this year, Hindi Wikipedia, for instance, had only 89 editors, while the total number of Hindi speakers is over 550 million.

3. Language input on computers

A vast majority of people in India do not know how to type in their own language. There is also little documentation instructing users about language input. Even though many government-run schools in India are seeing a proliferation in computer use and Internet access, native language input and other essential training of basic computing are not widely taught in schools in all states. This is unfortunate, as there is a wide variety of free software for native-language input, and the challenges of typing in Indian languages that existed a few years back are now almost non-existent.

4. Language input on mobile devices

With over 1 billion mobile phone users, India's 15% internet penetration rate will soon start growing at a faster pace. This in turn—along with the tough competition that will compel TSPs to lower data charges—will help many Indians get access to the Internet. If these people are not educated about native language input they will be victims of the English-centric Internet and fail to enjoy the virtues of the former. Many Indians who have smartphones need full Indian language support, and especially built-in input methods, to be able to contribute to Wikipedia in their own languages.

5. Scarcity of Indian-language content on the Internet

The relative lack of native language content on the Internet is another major factor in the low adoption of Indian language Wikpedias. According to an Internet and Mobile Association of India survey conducted in 2012, over 6% of the population is left behind with regard to joining the online sphere simply because of a scarcity of content in their languages. Take my home state of Odisha, for instance: while the Kerala state government’s official tourism portal is available in Odia and other Indian languages, at the time of writing the Odisha government’s tourism portal had no information in Odia. It is unfortunate that our languages are neglected largely within our own states.

6. Incompatibility between new and traditional media standards

Instead of adopting the Unicode standard, many traditional media outlets continue to use non-standard variants of the ASCII/ISCII script encoding systems Unicode, a global standard, has been available for Indian languages for almost 25 years now, but most of India's vernacular print media has failed to adopt it. As a result, many popular Indian-language newspapers are unavailable in Unicode on the open Internet.

7. Lack of Open Access

The majority of the information published on the Internet, and by the Indian government, in particular, is copyrighted. This paywalled garden of copyright restrictions restricts access of this information and prevents people from sharing and learning more. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is distributed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license that allows anyone to make use of the content, and even distribute it commercially. Opening up information for the masses under free license regime could make it easily accessible to millions of people.

8. Failure to cater for people with disabilities

Many people in India cannot read, speak or write, and the country has over 60 million people with some form of hearing impairment. There is a desperate need for a high-quality text-to-speech and speech-to-text engines for people with physical disabilities. These products also be freely available so that those who cannot afford to buy expensive proprietary software like JAWS can contribute to Wikipedia in their languages. Many of the text-to-speech engines available today for Indian languages sound so mechanical that it is difficult for the average speaker to use them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/global-voices-april-27-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-eight-challenges-indian-language-wikipedias-need-to-overcome

Exercise to Correct articles in Tulu Wikipedia begins

praskrishna — 2016-05-01T10:37:12Z

It will go on till Saturday at the Ramakrishna pre-university college.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/exercise-to-correct-articles-in-tulu-wikipedia-begins

T’puram to host Wikipedia workshop on May 4, 5

praskrishna — 2016-05-01T14:01:24Z

The workshop will be led by Prof. Madav Gadgil and a team of experienced Wikipedia editors.

Thiruvananthapuram: The Swadeshabhimani Media Study Centre jointly with the Centre for Internet and Society and the Wikipedia fraternity of Kerala, is conducting a two-day workshop on Wikipedia from 4 to 5 May at the Vakkom Moulavi Foundation Trust Hall, Thekkinmoodu. The workshop will provide guidance as how to contribute contents on Kerala or to translate pages in English on Kerala in the Wikipedia encyclopaedia. The workshop will be led by Prof. Madhav Gadgil and a team of experienced Wikipedia editors.

This article was published in Mathrubhumi on May 1, 2016. Read the full article here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/mathrubhumi-may-1-2016-thiruvananthapuram-to-host-wikipedia-workshop-on-may-4-5

Tulu Wiki may go live soon as writers work day and night

praskrishna — 2016-05-03T02:17:10Z

An article about Tulu Wikipedia progress was published in the Times of India, Mangaluru edition on April 30, 2016.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/tulu-wiki-may-go-live-soon-as-writers-work-day-and-night

Tulu Wikipedia Editathon to Improve Quality of Articles in Tulu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2016-05-07T15:43:42Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) organized a Wikipedia editathon for improving Tulu Wikipedia. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the sessions.

Dr. Kishore Kumar Rai, Principal of Shri Ramakrishna PU College, who himself is an active Tulu and Kannada Wikipedian provided the lab for this activity. Any Wikipedian (Tulu/Kannada) can walk-in and make use of the lab to edit Wikipedia. He has also procured more than 100 Tulu books from Tulu Sahitya Academy which will be kept there for reference.

Agenda

Improve the quality of articles in Tulu Wikipedia
Increase the length of short articles
Add inter-wiki links
Add references
Add images
Add categories
Improve language

The event will continue in June. More details can be accessed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/tulu-wikipedia-editathon-to-improve-quality-of-articles-in-tulu-wikipedia

Stats for March 2016

rahim — 2016-06-07T04:06:03Z

CIS-A2K team closely works with 5 Indian languages, we call as focus language areas. Here are the stats for the month of March 2016.

We generate stats for each of our focus language area month on month, and it has been used for designing and modifying our strategies from time to time. Though these stats were never published publicly, as we get them at stats.wikimedia.org already and publishing here is just repeating it; it was felt that some more metrics can be added and published month on month here at CIS blog. Also, the data here would be for the last month, while it takes two months for data to get updated at stats.wikimedia.org.

Stub articles created :

Kannada - 3/131

Konkani - 9/38

Marathi - 50/176

Odia - 8/89

Telugu - 59/284

In Kannada Wikipedia, about 131 new articles were created and of these only 3 are stub class articles. This is because Kannada Wikipedia is implementing a strict policy on not allowing a stub class article. There is an abuse filter created by one of the admins, Harish MG, which does not allow an editor to submit a smaller article than 1000 bytes. While Konkani showed a good progress in creation of new articles and only 9 of these 38 articles were stub class articles.

Marathi and Odia had a 28% and 9% share of total articles created as stubs respectively, while Telugu has about 21% of total articles created as stubs.

Active editors count has gone up in Kannada with 133 active editors during March 2016 - this could be accounted to the post 13th anniversary activities. Four focused editathons were organised as part of the 13th anniversary celebrations. The number of active editors increased in Konkani too. While in Marathi, Odia and Telugu the number was consistent with the previous months' numbers.

Now. lets look at the editing activity.

Kannada had 3279 edits adding about 86.57 MB of data. Konkani Wikipedia saw 920 edits in all, adding 8.41 MB of data. Marathi Wikipedia had 2926 edits with 68.42 MB of data; Odia Wikipedia added 1106 edits and 15.28 MB of data and Telugu Wikipedia had 8559 edits with 122.17 MB of data.

Having a provision of local image upload, Telugu Wikipedia added 53 images to the project while Marathi, one image was added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/stats-for-march-2016