Centre for Internet and Society

Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project

nitika — 2013-11-30T10:49:15Z

Goa University in collaboration with the Centre for Internet & Society’s Access to Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) is digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh. In this project CIS-A2K will work with group of individuals who will help digitize the encyclopedia in a time bound manner. All 3632 pages of Konkani Vishwakosh will be digitized.

On September 18, 2013, CIS-A2K opened the registrations for Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project. As a part of the registration process interested candidates were required to fill out a form detailing their name, motivation to be a part of the program, comfort level with Devanagari typing, etc. The form can be viewed here. CIS-A2K also prepared a brochure, for the program which was used as an invitation to call out for registrations. The invite was sent through various channels; such as:

Konkani Wikipedia Facebook page
Konkani Facebook page
Konkani Rocks Facebook page
Konkani mailing lists
Goa University mailing list
Goa University bulletin board
Prints of the registration form were circulated
Word of mouth

Registrations
By 5th October (in about 2.5 weeks) CIS-A2K received:

Total Registrations = 40
No. of people who already knew typing = 33
No. of people who didn't know typing = 5
No. of people who knew a bit of typing but were not comfortable = 2
No. of people from Goa University = 18 students
No. of people who are Goa University alum = 4

Scheduling initial orientation workshop
CIS-A2K wanted to organise the initial orientation workshop on October 12 and 13. However, due to Dussehra festivities the date had to be postponed and finally the workshops were organised the following weekend on October 19 and 20. Forty participants were broken down into 2 different groups of 20 each; while the first group attended the workshop on October 19, the second group attended on October 20 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on both the days. Details of the participants can be found on meta-wiki.

Scanning of Vishwakosh
CIS-A2K got the Vishwakosh book scanned in a PDF document. It is an 861 MB file constituting of all 4 volumes.

Organising initial orientation workshop
Out of 40; 37 participants attended the workshop over 2 days. Several aspects were covered during the workshop including introduction to Wikipedia, Konkani Vishwakosh, digitization process, typing in Devanagari for those who were not comfortable; allocation of pages from Vishwakosh to the participants etc. Each participant has been allocated approx 100 pages to be digitized over a period of next 2 months. List of participants usernames and pages allotted for them to digitize can be found on program page.

Plans ahead (for Nov)
CIS-A2K will organise open house Skype/Google hangout to help resolve any problems that the participants might face during digitization. One month after; on 20th November CIS-A2K will organise a follow up session to clarify any doubts that the participants may have. This will also serve an opportunity for CIS-A2K to schedule a mid-program review of all the work done by participants. CIS-A2K will produce a mid-program report in Nov that can be shared with all.

Challenges

Quality check: Participants are currently digitizing Vishwakosh but there are ought to be spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. CIS-A2K wants to make sure that the digitized product is of best quality and would want involve few resource persons to proof-read the final product. Finding resource people has been a challenge so far.
Compiling work: Vishwakosh is a huge book with about 3600 pages. All 37 participants are doing their bit to digitize 100 pages each. Compiling all these efforts to finally produce 1 book seems to be a challenge. However details of this could be spelt only once the process starts.
Adding tables and equations: Participants have been facing trouble to add tables and equations. They have been asked to park these issues and make a note so that we could discuss it in the follow up session in Nov.

Successes

CIS-A2K received high number of registrations (40) in just about two and a half weeks.
Out of 40 registrations; 37 of them attended the orientation workshop; with only a 7.5% drop out.
The orientation workshops were organised successfully.
Scanning of Vishwakosh was done efficiently and in high quality.
Division of work amongst the participants was done methodologically and fairly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/konkani-vishwakosh-digitization

Darshana Mandrekar speaks on Konkani Wikipedia

nitika — 2013-12-31T10:38:07Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) in collaboration with the Goa University is working to build Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this program it organised the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Program recently.

Darshana Mandrekar a participant at the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Program speaks about her inspiration to edit Konkani Wikipedia.

Video


Above: Darshana Mandrekar speaks about Konkani Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/darshana-mandrekar-on-konkani-wikipedia

Darshan Kandolkar on Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Process

nitika — 2013-12-31T10:47:46Z

Darshan Kandolkar, talks about his experience with Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Process and Konkani translation sprint.

Video


Above: Darshan Kandolkar's interview on Konkani Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/darshan-kandolkar-konkani-vishwakosh-digitization-process

Varsha Kavlekar on Konkani Wikipedia Incubator

nitika — 2013-12-31T10:56:22Z

Konkani Wikipedia Editor, Varsha Kavlekar, talks about her experience with Konkani Wikipedia Incubator.

Video


Above: Varsha speaks about Konkani Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/varsha-kavlekar-konkani-wikipedia-incubator

Pooja Tople on Wikimedia Projects

nitika — 2013-12-31T11:04:59Z

Video


Above: Participant of Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project, Pooja Tople, talks about her experiences with Wikimedia Projects

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/pooja-tople-wikipedia-projects

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia

nitika — 2013-12-31T11:48:02Z

The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K team) is pleased to share with you the key accomplishments about the work it accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013 in this report. In accordance with the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge Program’s (CIS-A2K) Konkani Work Plan 2013-14 the program has invested time and effort to build Konkani Wikimedia community and projects.

Highlights

Increased editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia

CIS-A2K has been organising different programs and workshops. The idea is to bring in as many volunteers as possible who can contribute to Konkani Wikipedia for years to come. We have organised these outreach sessions mainly in Devanagari, Romi and Kannada scripts. As a result of these programs we have been able to significantly increase no. of editors, consistently have minimum of 5-6 active editors per month and build a community of volunteers. You can also view level of editing activity on Konkani Wikipedia for the past few months in the chart below:


Above: Edits Per Month on Konkani Wikipedia (Mar-13 to Dec-13) (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Increased number of articles on Konkani Wikipedia

Total number of articles increased from 150 in Sep 2013 to 315 in Nov 2013. The number of articles have doubled over a period of 3 months. We should keep in mind that out of those who edited in Devanagari; 95% of them were completely new to the input method and had to spend considerable time learning and practicing it.


Above: No. of articles on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Translated Media Wiki messages

CIS-A2K organised translation sprint to help translate Media Wiki interface messages. We achieved translating 79% of these messages in Konkani Devanagari while all 100% messages have already been translated in Romi script

Re-release of Konkani Vishwaksh under Creative Commons License

Upon CIS-A2K‘s explicit request, Goa University has approved the re-release of Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-SA 3.0) to make it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done. This is a huge step to help preserve Konkani language and culture in the digital era. Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume hard copy encyclopedia (3632 pages) published by Goa University; a work that took over 14 years to develop. It encompasses the world’s information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography etc. To know more about click here and here

Initiated & Completed 30% of Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project

Goa University in collaboration with the CIS-A2K is digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh. 37 participants are enrolled in this project who are working to digitize the encyclopedia in a time bound manner. All 3632 pages of Konkani Vishwakosh will be digitized. The program started on 19th October and in just about 2 months 30% of the encyclopedia had already been digitized. You can monitor the progress of this project on Wikisource. Here are the links for Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3 and Volume 4. Please note that some of the participants firstly digitize the encylopedia either in their Sandbox or offline and then move it to Wikisource. To know more about the project click here.

Signed an MoU with Goa University

Goa University entered into a three year MoU with CIS for building Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this partnership, Goa University and CIS-A2K will work together to help build Konkani Wikipedia and community.

White paper by a Linguist

Fr. Pratap Naik, S.J. B.Sc., B.Ed. M.A. (Linguistics), M.Phil. (Linguistics), Ph.D. (Linguistics) has written a white paper discussing issues faced by Konkani language and his views on how it should be dealt on Wikimedia projects. We'll soon upload the white paper on Wikimedia Commons and make the link available.

14 Outreach session, over 450 participants, in 3 months

CIS-A2K organised about 14 outreach sessions and reached out to over 450 people to create awareness about Konkani Wikipedia and the community between Sep-Dec 2013. Details of these sessions can be found here.

Got consensus from field experts

Over the past few months CIS-A2K has spoken with Konkani Wikipedians (such as Frederick Noronha, Deepak D'Souza, Seby Fernandes) Konkani linguists (such as Fr. Pratap), professors from Konkani Department at Goa University (Dr. Madhavi Sardesai and Dr. Priyadarshini Tadkodkar), cultural experts (such as Prof. Alito Siqueira and Harriet Vidyasagar) and other experts to propose a solution for Konkani Wikipedia that faces a problem of usage of multiple scripts. To a great extent we have got consensus from different field experts that we should strive to create separate Wikis for each script, at least those which prove to be active.

Wikipedians Speak

One of the ongoing projects of CIS-A2K is 'Wikipedians Speak' which are small videos of Wikipedians that captures their expereinces, learnings and challenges. As a part of this project CIS-A2K published several videos of Konkani Wikipedians.

Link to the post published on Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/work-accomplished-konkani-wikipedia

First ever Train-the-Trainer Program in India

nitika — 2013-12-31T12:18:48Z

Access to Knowledge Programme at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS-A2K) organized the first ever Train the Trainer Program in India. 20 Wikimedians from 8 different language communities and 10 different cities across India attended CIS-A2K’s Train the Trainer (TTT).

Read the post originally published on Wikipedia here.

The residency program was spread over four days. The event was represented by Wikimedia communities including Bengali, Gujarati, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Odia. The event was organized to help build capacity amongst Wikimedia volunteers to conduct effective and efficient outreach programs in their respective regions in an effort to expand the Wikimedia movement to reach the nooks and crannies of a large nation like India. CIS-A2K realizes that with a small team of five it cannot cover all communities. This program would create leadership, which in turn will hopefully take the movement forward.

Hari Prasad Nadig, one of TTT’s resource persons and sysop on both Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedia, said, “I think the training program was in the right direction. In fact I thought it was a very good idea.

It falls in-line with what is needed to be done with utmost importance for the Indian Wikipedia community – creating more trainers/mentors who can bring in editors to Wikipedia or guide the existing ones.”

Post-Event Survey & Report

CIS-A2K conducted a post-event survey to evaluate TTT program and also review individual training and development activities organized during the four-day workshop. The main aim of the survey was to understand how the attendees perceived the event and help CIS-A2K plan a more successful and well-attended event in the future.

Including a variety of questions ranging from likert scale questions, drag and drop list, paragraph text, multiple choices, provided an interactive and systematic way to gather participant’s feedback. The survey questions were also designed to cover different aspects of the event including attendee’s opinions of the sessions, as well as what they learned. Results and findings will be used to refine and improve the next TTT program.

CIS-A2K’s Findings I

Overall Rating – The event scored an average of 8.3 when participants were asked to rank the overall effectiveness of TTT on a scale of 1 to 10. Survey respondents found value in the program and felt the event met their expectations. A vast majority (83 percent) said they would recommend TTT to fellow Wikipedians. “The overall experience of the TTT program was quite satisfactory. What I liked about it was the timely flow of the entire planned schedule and the preparedness of CIS – A2K team,” said Rangilo Gujarati, a Gujarati Wikipedian.

Inspirational Factor – One of the questions: “After the workshop, how inspired do you feel to strengthen your Wikipedia community and project?” received an anonymous reply: “It was really a nice time with you all. I got to learn many new things. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to attend this workshop. I’m inspired and looking forward to using my skills and conduct an edit-a-thon in my language community soon.”

“The overall experience of TTT program was quite uniquely satisfactory.” said Rangilo Gujarati.

Participants gave an above average rating of 8.25 on a scale of 10. We believe this high number indicates that CIS-A2K’s was able to inspire more volunteers to conduct online and offline outreach activities to grow their Wikimedia communities.

New Learnings – “It was a good experience for me. I learned a lot of things by interacting with so many TTT participants from different communities. The sessions were extremely useful and informative”, said Pranayraj1985, an active Telugu Wikipedian. Most participants got to learn new things during the course of four day workshop. The question ‘Do you feel you got to learn new things from TTT workshops?’ got an average rating 8.58.

Feedback on various sessions – One of the participants said “All workshops were excellent. The event managed to cover different aspects such as crowdsourcing, copyright, social media, digitization, media wiki etc. There was bit of everything to match everyone’s taste. Each one of the sessions gave a lot of energy to Wikipedians. These types of programs should be conducted often. Thanks for giving us the opportunity.”

Presenting with Impact I & II was the most liked session according to feedback. DIY digitization led by Malayalam Wikipedian Vishwa Prabha and Odia Wikipedian Subhashish Panagrahi also received a high ranking. This was followed by Copyright CC and Wikimedia led by Achal Prabhala.

Sessions such as Spectogram, Accessing Media Wiki Data, Wikimedia India Chapter – History & Present were found to be less useful. This could be due to the fact that some of the participants already had sufficient knowledge about the topic or were simply not interested in the topic.

“It was a good experience for me. The sessions were extremely useful and informative”, said Pranayraj1985

Follow up Session – 92 percent of the participants recommend CIS-A2K organize a follow-up session for them in the coming months. Eight percent of them did not think it’s required. One of the resource persons from Malayalam community, Vishwa Prabha, offered to organize the follow-up meet in Kerala. He said, “December would be a good time for a follow-up meet, I would like to suggest Alappuzha (Kerala) as a venue. This could be scheduled just before or just after the WikiSangamotsavam, which is being planned by the ML community. This could also be a great opportunity for TTT members to interact with the ML community, one of the most vibrant wiki communities in Asia.”
Recommendation to other Wikimedians – 83 percent of the participants said that if another TTT program was t be organized they will recommend it to their fellow Wikimedian volunteers; while 17 percent of them won’t.

CIS-A2K’s Findings II

All participants unanimously suggested that CIS-A2K continue this program in the future and offered suggestions to improve it next time:

Organize more ice-breaking activities – Even after a four day workshop a lot of participants thought they didn’t get enough time to get to know volunteers from other language communities. This was owing to the fact that participants had relatively little free time. Communication in a multilingual environment was also rather difficult for some.

Provide longer breaks – Some participants complained that the length of breaks were too short. “While trying to stuff in so many topics (all of them being quite essential and worthy) within such a short time, the breaks seemed too short,” said one participant.

Organize parallel and optional sessions – There were some participants who were not interested in technical aspects of Wikimedia projects such as Python or MediaWiki and would have liked the option of attending a parallel non-technical session. One of the participants said “Let us say for example, not everyone is interested in knowing how to access media wiki data using XML, so why force the participants to attend, even if they don’t want to. What could have been done is, some other kind of session/talk or extension of any previous session in parallel so folks uninterested in XML can attend that.” If scale permits, CIS-A2K will aim to organize parallel sessions so that the participants can choose the session they’d like to attend.

Wikipedians during at the CIS-A2K Train-the-Trainer Program Digitization workshop (by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Provide ideas and action points – Providing a report and case study on how TTT participants can infuse the lessons learned into their outreach and community activities would have been helpful. CIS-A2K was informed that the participants were highly encouraged and motivated to strengthen their language communities but didn’t know where to start or whom to reach out for help.

Create Wiki Projects for TTT participants – One of the attendees suggested that we should initiate some intra-community collaboration projects (like railway network, Bibliography database, taxonomy database, reusable standard templates among Indic communities etc) and ask participants to volunteer on these projects with a common goal. This will help break barriers as well as help volunteers get to know each other better. Another attendee said, “Another way could be to ask them to work towards creating a repository of outreach material (coursebooks, presentation modules, standards/workflows, PR, media, publicity and courses) for each Indian language community.”
Organize advanced technical sessions – A few participants would have liked more technical sessions such as bat running, edit tools, web linkups etc. CIS-A2K got requests to invite experts and organize more advanced technical sessions.

Participants during Information literacy and Internet research techniques for Wikipedia editors (by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Conclusion

Overall, the participants and resource persons were satisfied with India’s first ever Wikimedia Train the Trainer Program. A special thanks to all the participants and the resource persons who gave their time and energy to make this program a success. A list of all participants and resource persons can be found on program meta page.

CIS-A2K will definitely try to incorporate these ideas and suggestions a the second annual TTT program. Please stay tuned to learn more about when and where it will take place!

A group photo on the last day (by Pranayraj, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Copyright notes: "HPN" by HPNadig, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons, "Photograph of Rangilo Gujarati" by Rangilo Gujarati, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons, "My Photo", "CIS A2K - Train the Trainer Programme.jpg" by Pranayraj1985, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons, "CIS-A2K Train-the-Trainer Program11.jpg", "CIS-A2K Train-the-Trainer Program2.jpg" by Subhashish Panigrahi, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/train-the-trainer-program-in-india

Konkani Vishwakosh Encyclopedia released under Free License

nitika — 2013-12-31T12:42:35Z

Upon Centre for Internet & Society’s Access to Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K)‘s explicit request, Goa University has approved the re-release of Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-SA 3.0) to make it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done. This is a huge step to help preserve Konkani language and culture in the digital era.

Read the blog post originally published on the Wikipedia page.

Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume hard copy encyclopedia (3632 pages) published by Goa University; a work that took over 14 years to develop. It encompasses the world’s information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography etc. The encyclopedia is written in Konkani, a language spoken primarily by people living in Goa and in the neighboring states on the western coast of India (also known as the Konkan belt) – some pockets in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. The Vishwakosh serves as a primary source of information and one of the most important documented texts for a community of nearly 2.5 million Konkani speakers spread across India and worldwide.

Goa University is the first ever Indian University to relicense its copyrighted content under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that the knowledge that they have painstakingly put together is made available freely to all Konkani speakers across the world through Wikipedia and other digital platforms. By doing this Goa University has set a precedent for other public sector institutions in India — such as universities and government departments — to follow. Citing this instance, the Tamil Wikipedia community has begun a negotiation with the Tamil Nadu government to release the Tamil Encyclopedias under CC license. It should be noted that majority of the knowledge production through the 20th century in Indian languages was mostly funded by the State. This victory with Goa University can bring out much more knowledge in the Indian languages into the open and could significantly benefit the Indic Wikimedia projects. CIS-A2K is also leveraging this instance in getting other public institutions in India to re-release the content under appropriate CC licenses.

To celebrate and further the movement of open knowledge and open access Goa University (GU) in collaboration with CIS-A2K organized an event on 26th September 2013 at 10am at the Goa University Conference Hall. The event had significant attendance, including Dr. Satish Shetye (Vice Chancellor of GU), Mr. V.P. Kamat (Registrar of GU), Mr. T. Vishnu Vardhan (Programme Director CIS-A2K), close kin of Late. Manoharrai Sardesai (writer of the encyclopedia), Tanaji Halarnkar (editor of the encyclopedia and a long time associate of Konkani Literary movement), Goa University’s staff, faculty and students, members of Konkani speaking community and press. About 250 people attended this event, which received major media attention.

During the event GU Vice-Chancellor Satish Shetye said, “the Konkani Vishwakosh covers all realms of knowledge like any other encyclopedia. The Konkani Wikipedia will act as a digitized repository of knowledge for future generations and Konkani speakers across the world. I look forward to the pleasure of going to the internet and clicking away to access a Konkani Wikipedia.”

Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director CIS-A2K, Satish Shetye, Goa University Vice Chancellor, V.P. Kamat, Registrar of Goa University during press conference of re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC license (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The event was covered by several local and national newspapers. Here are some links:

“Goa University to make available online Konkani Wikipedia, within 6 months“. Jagran Josh. 30 September 2013.
Chaudhary, Apurva. “Goa University Partners CIS India To Build Konkani Wikipedia” Medianama. 30th September 2013
Lobo,Joanna. “For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa’s official language“. DNA. 29 September 2013.
Prakash, Kamat.”Konkani Wikipedia in the making“. The Hindu. 29 September 2013.
“Konkani Wikipedia from Goa University in 6 months“. Times of India. 27 September 2013.
“Goa University announces plan to upload Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia“. Navhind Times. 27 September 2013.
“Konkani Vishwakosh relaunch tomorrow“. The Hindu. 25 September 2013.
Desouza, Vijay. “Goa university re-releasing Konkani encyclopaedia on Sept 26“. Times of India. 24 September 2013.

Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

More details about the event can be found on the Meta Program Page

CIS-A2K’s Accomplishments

MoU between Goa University and Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)

Goa University has entered into a three year MoU with CIS for building Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this partnership, Goa University has re-launched four volumes of Konkani encyclopedia under CC licence and CIS will help scanning and digitizing Vishwakosh and using it as a foundation for creating articles on Konkani Wikipedia.

MoU between Goa University and Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)

Konkani Vishwakosh available on Wikimedia Commons

The 4 volumes of encyclopedia have already been scanned and made available by CIS on Wikimedia Commons. It can be found here:

Project Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project (KVDP)

CIS-A2K is currently working with 37 volunteers to digitize Konkani Vishwakosh. Thick heaps of the four volumes of Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopedia), till now available only in hard copy, will now be available for free on the Internet. All 3632 pages of Konkani Vishwakosh will be digitized.

“Professors, students and anyone with expertise or love for Konkani can come forward to help the project for which training will be provided. Information in the Konkani Vishwakosh will also be updated as per the current developments,” said T. Vishnu Vardhan, Program Director of CIS-A2K. Orientation, training and follow-up workshops will also be organised by CIS-A2K.

More about the project can be found on the Meta Program Page

Konkani Wikipedia editors digitizing Konkani Vishwakosh (by Nitika Tandon, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Boost to Konkani Wikipedia

CIS-A2K is encouraging Konkani editors to use Vishwakosh as a ready-made source of reference for articles on Konkani Wikipedia, thereby growing Konkani articles not only in numbers but also in quality.

The incubation for Konkani Wikipedia was initiated in 2006 (it could be one of the few projects in incubation for the longest period). During the past 7 years, little progress can be seen on this incubator project.

By way of initiating KVDP, CIS-A2K is hoping to revive the Konkani Wikipedia editing community and give birth to Konkani Wikipedia as a live Wikimedia project in the next couple of months. CIS-A2K has charted out a methodological work plan to achieve this and more.

Copyright notes: "Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC license", "Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0", "Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project 08" by Nitika Tandon, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/konkani-vishwakosh-encyclopedia-released-under-free-license

Community led Konkani Wikipedia Outreach

nitika — 2014-06-10T08:44:22Z

Goa University students organised the first ever community led Konkani Wikipedia outreach on May 14, 2014. Fifteen first year M.A. students from Konkani Department participated in the six hour long workshop.

The primary focus of this workshop was to educate the MA first year students about contributing to Konkani Wikipedia which is currently in incubation.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) took this up as an assignment to build capacity of interested community members to conduct effective outreach sessions in Konkani. By way of supporting and mentoring such workshops CIS wants to make sure that we do not reach a situation where Konkani Wikipedia community is entirely dependent on CIS-A2K for its growth. The community should be able to sustain even if CIS-A2K pulls out of its Konkani work.

The workshop was organised by, User: Darshan kandolkar , User: Konknni mogi 24, User: Supriya kankumbikar and User: John Noronha. The presenters were trained, mentored and supported by CIS-A2K to organise this workshop. This included:

Helping the trainers get physical space to organise this workshop at Goa Central State Library.

Training the presenters on how to best organise the workshop and divide it into different sections such as a) Introduction to Wikipedia b) Introduction to Basic Editing c) Hands on workshop on basic editing d) Advance Editing e) Hands on workshop on advance editing

Providing all the training documents such as presentation and presenters note.

Providing registration and feedback forms.

Helping in getting the IP released from '7 accounts creation per IP rule'.

Helping the trainers to design customised energisers, Wikipedia quiz and Wikipedia games to keep the participant's enthusiasm high.


Above: Participants take part in Wiki editing at the workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/konkani-wikipedia-outreach