Centre for Internet and Society

Konkani in Wikipedia Incubator — Taking it to the Next Level

nitika — 2013-01-25T07:34:34Z

An introductory session on Konkani in Wikipedia was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, Delhi in the Konkani Department at Goa University on December 12, 2012. About 30 participants took part in the event.

The Konkani staff and students were exhilarated to learn about Konkani in the Wikipedia incubation. They showed a keen interest to kick-start the project and get the translations done from all the following scripts: Devanagari, Roman, Kannada, Malayalam and Perso-Arabic for Konkani Wikipedia.

We are in touch with Ms. Madhavi Sardesai, Director of Konkani Department and are also examining the possibility of organising a follow up meeting sometime in January or February, 2013.

Frederick Noronha, one of the Wikimedia incubator members contributing to Konkani Wikipedia, has been helpful in introducing us with more Konkani writers and in organizing a common meeting sometime in early 2013 to take this project to the next level.

Also see:

Konkani in Wikipedia incubator (http://bit.ly/14bTwAi)
Some pages contributed already - much work needs to be done to improve quality (http://bit.ly/Tv5iUh)
List of tasks as viewed by volunteers (http://bit.ly/10Vxwus)
An example of a well-translated article, on the "Pinto's Revolt" by Isidore Dantas (http://bit.ly/XAmliz)


Above is a picture of the faculty and students at the inaugural talk in Goa University.

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

Promoting GLAM in Goa

nitika — 2013-07-26T11:27:22Z

We organised an introductory Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (GLAM) session at Goa State Central Library on December 13, 2012. It was well attended by about 45 interested people coming from over 10 different GLAM institutes in Goa.

Nitika Tandon from CIS and Debanjan from Pune community led the session about Wikipedia and GLAM activities that have been undertaken by our global community since 2010. The talk instilled a lot of enthusiasm in librarians and curators in Goa to start similar programs in their associated institutes.

Some of the institutes attending the session were: Museum of Christian Art, Goa Chitra, Bookworm Library, K.S. Goa State Library, GTL Bicholini, and DFLG District Library. Participants had a lot of interesting questions about starting GLAM projects in English, Marathi and Konkani, starting point of the project, logistical/financial support required to run a GLAM project, etc.

To begin with we'll be meeting Victor Hugos Gomes from Goa Chitra who has shown keen interest to start a GLAM project. Goa Chitra showcases the rich tradition of implements, tools, arts and crafts. Goa Chitra has archived Goa's cultural heritage through documents, books, photographs, handicrafts, electronic recordings, costumes, musical instruments, and artifacts. In the coming weeks we'll be following up with Goa Chitra and more institutions to figure out the possibility of starting new projects in 2013.

Audio

Here's an audio recording of the entire event: http://bit.ly/XEmylE


A GLAM lecture at Goa Central Library

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/promoting-glam-in-goa

Wikipedia in St. Xavier's College, Mapusa, Goa

nitika — 2013-07-26T11:33:29Z

A three hour Wikipedia workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet & Society, Delhi, in the morning of December 14, 2012 at St. Xavier's College in Mapusa, Goa. Over 30 participants attended the session.

The workshop started with a short introductory presentation followed by a learning session on how to edit the Wikipedia. Since there were lesser number of computers, participants were divided in groups of 2 or 3 at the maximum. Each group made at least 3 edits with the help of volunteers present in the room.

A follow up session will be organised in January or February of 2013 to organise an edit-a-thon for all the interested and enthusiastic participants.

A special thanks to everyone who helped organising this event, especially to Harriet Vidyasagar, Frederick, Debanjan - all from the Wikipedia family and Nitin Volvoikar, the Head of Journalism Department from St. Xavier's.


Above is a picture of the whole group of participants at the St.Xavier's College at Mapusa, Goa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-in-st-xaviers-college-goa

Bringing Konkani Encyclopedia in Public Domain

nitika — 2013-07-26T11:35:29Z

On December 14, 2012, a meeting was scheduled with the Vice Chancellor Dr. Satish R Shetye to discuss the possibility of bringing Konkani Encyclopedia in public domain. Nitika Tandon shares the development in this blog post.

As for now the four volume Konkani Encyclopedia is under the copyright of the University of Goa. Dr. Shetye has gifted one whole set of Konkani Encyclopedia to the Centre for Internet and Society and is interested to relinquish the copyright to release it under creative common license and digitize it on Wikipedia. In the coming weeks we'll be working closely with Dr. Shetye and his team to bring this free encyclopedia on Wikipedia.

A Special thanks to Goa State Library, Goa University, Dr. Shetye, Prof. Alito Siqueira, and Prof. Gopakumar for such a wonderful gift. And a big thanks to Harriet Vidyasagar and Debanjan and all those who helped to pull this through.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/bringing-konkani-encyclopedia-in-public-domain

Access to Knowledge Report — September to December 2012

noopur — 2013-01-31T10:14:26Z

This post provides an overview of the activities done by the Access to Knowledge team under the grant provided by the Wikimedia Foundation from September 2012 to December 2012.

The information provided in this post can also be viewed in form of a presentation here.

The activities done by the Access to Knowledge team have been listed under events, meetups and programs. Here, events indicate workshops conducted and outreach activities supported for people outside the existing community while meetups indicate the meetings with existing community members and programs refer to education programs and competitions across different language Wikipedias. A detailed list of these events and meetups can be found in the presentation.

During this period of four months, a total of 22 events were conducted in 7 languages across 14 cities reaching out to a total of 2,250 participants between the ages of 15 and 52. There were 27 meetups where approximately 150 community members participated. To list briefly, these were in the cities of Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, Anugul, Dhenkanal, Hyderabad, Panjim, Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Karkala and Delhi.

The focus of the Access to Knowledge team has significantly shifted in terms of concentrating on Indian language projects as well as limiting the scale of initiatives to ensure more engagement. We conducted and supported 5 programs including the Malayalam education program, Gujarati Wikipedia article competition, Assamese education program, Odia education program, supporting Konkani Wikipedia incubator project and Wikipedia takes Pune. In line with the Wikimedia Foundation’s narrowed focus which includes promoting technical volunteer initiatives, the Access to Knowledge team has been helping with filing bugs for Punjabi, Assamese, Odiya, Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi communities. We conducted two hackathons at BITS-Pilani Hyderabad and in Delhi and have been helping connect interested volunteers across the country including initiatives like MediaWiki groups.

Including all the activities listed above, we reached out to a total of approximately 2,050 people and have connected with about 49 per cent of them who continue to receive updates on Wikipedia activities in India through our newsletters, mails, etc. Of these, approximately 387 participants (37.9 per cent) created usernames and made edits. The total number of female participants were 288 approximately which is about 28.2 per cent of the total people engaged. However, we are yet to generate a list of articles edited and the list of current active users. One useful way of tracking active editors on different Wikipedia projects is being developed by WMF Labs. Here is an example of the increase/decrease in editor count on Gujarati Wikipedia. We feel that more work needs to be done around studying editor retention.

From the team’s experience with outreach in these months, I want to share a few qualitative insights. For instance, we do think that there is great enthusiasm and potential among engineering students to contribute to MediaWiki and more initiatives need to be planned in order to welcome them and utilize their potential to the benefit of Indian language Wikipedias. Similarly, in terms of gender gap, while the initial barrier of participation can be overcome with outreach, a systematic strategy needs to be developed in order to make female editors feel a part of the existing community and ensure they continue contributing to topics that interest them. Also, right now the team conducts outreach sessions and workshops in all institutions that invite us with no specific approach based on subjects, gender or other parameters. Currently, the Access to Knowledge team has been sharing reports and blog posts with the community via mail, newsletters, tweets and social media fora. We hope to start monthly IRC meets with the community to improve communication and brainstorm together on what challenges each community faces.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/access-2-knowledge-report-2012

Celebrating Odia Wikipedia's Ninth Anniversary

subha — 2013-02-28T04:32:29Z

Odia Wikipedia saw its first edit on January 29, 2004. After a dormancy of many years it got revived in 2011. To commemorate the effort of many volunteer wikipedians, a celebratory event was organized on January 29, 2013 in Bhubaneswar. Subhashish Panigrahi participated in this event.

Odia Wikipedia recently has celebrated its 9 ^th anniversary. January 29 is considered to be that day when someone made a first edit on it. Communities from Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Nalconagar joined hands to celebrate this event with a panel discussion on "Application of Odia language in e-media". The discussion was coordinated by Nilambar Rath, Director of Academy for Media Learning. The event was organized by the Odia Wiki Community with support from The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with Academy for Media Learning. Panelists who took part in the discussion were Prasanna Kumar Mohanty, Director of "Odia Bhasa Pratisthan", Dr. Prafulla Tripathy, Odia linguist and writer, Dr. Dhanada Mishra, Academician and Director-Academics, KMBB College of Engineering, Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society, Jatindra Das, Senior journalist and founder, Odisha.com and Subhransu Panda, Senior journalist, Sambad. Wikipedians, students and journalists took active part in the discussion.

To celebrate the success of Odia Wikipedia, wikipedians joined the guest to cut a “Chhenapoda” and light Deepam as an integral part of the Odia culture.

The discussion began with Nilambar Rath speaking briefly about the agenda of the meeting and about the current scenario of the use of Odia language in media especially in the web. Prasanna Kumar Mohanty spoke about how the true form of the language should be taken to public via media. He also emphasized about the need to sacrifice our conventional way of approach and adopt new technologies like Wikipedia. Many such efforts are not rewarded because of the lack of support from the government even though funding is available for such development. Odia linguist Prafulla Tripathy explained about the lack of public interest to pledge for declaring Odia as a classical language even though Odia holds the 31^st position among 6500 world languages. "The language of our personal lives, social interaction and verbal communication never gets documented. The confusion among various linguists is another obstacle to take Odia to a global level. If the script grammar is kept in focus and script and eventually the fonts are simplified then they would be easier to be used online", he expressed. Dr. Tripathy also shared his experience of his interaction with other Indian language experts at places where he worked such as on OCR (Optical character reading) software which could be a great tool to digitize many precious resources. He offered his support for helping with OCR in Odia. Few other aspects of simpler approaches of scripts discussed were glossary, Odia-English and English-Odia lexicon, spell check feature for typing and interactive e-learning which could boost the effort of the wikipedians.

Prof. Dhanada Mishra took the audience through the free and open source culture and Linux and future role of Odia Wikipedia to tackle the problems of primary education. He thanked the wikipedians for their noble effort and showed his interest in promoting it more in academics. Subhashish Panigrahi discussed about the role of Odia Wikipedia in documenting various resources in Odia Wikipedia. He brought various technical problems that common men face while typing, contributing to Wikipedia and how they could be handled. He also proposed a plan for bringing more language experts and museum curators to the community which would increase the spectrum of resource and capacity for the Odia Wikimedia community.

Jatindra Das, founder of the first online Odia newspaper Odisha.com discussed about the hurdles of using Odia Unicode and acceptance level in the society for it. Senior journalist Subhransu Panda discussed about the usage of various fonts and how adopting Unicode could bring a lot of information to the public.

Nilambar Rath, Director, Academy for Media Learning talked about the future efforts of Odia Wikipedia community. He elaborated how media could be used as an essential tool for taking Wikipedia to more people. Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the very active Wikipedians closed the ceremony with a brief talk about the achievements, education program and impact of Odia Wikipedia in the recent past and community building plans.

There was a press meet in the afternoon. Wikipedians interacted with the media about future prospects of Odia Wikipedia and its current state.


Odia wikipedians being felicitated by the guests

Few glimpses of the event Audio Podcast

Press coverage:

ଓଡ଼ିଶାନ୍: ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ନବମ ଜନ୍ମତିଥି ଅବସରରେ କର୍ମଶାଳା : ଇମିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ର‌ୟୋଗ.
ସମ୍ବାଦ: ଲିପି ବ୍ୟାକରଣ ଓ ମାନକ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ରୟୋଗ ଜରୁରୀ.
eindiadiary.com:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Fullorissa.com: Odia Wikipedia’s 9th anniversary. Fullorissa.com
orissadiary.com:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Indiaeducationdiary.in:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Odishaviews.com:Odia language workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia Wikipedia: Application of Odia language in e-media. Subhashish Panigrahi is quoted.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-odia-wikipedias-ninth-anniversary

Wikimedia Bangalore Meetup @ Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

praskrishna — 2013-02-14T06:01:28Z

The Access to Knowledge team of the Centre for Internet & Society in partnership with Wikispeed and NASSCOM is organizing meetup at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore on February 25, 2013 at 2.00 p.m. Vishnu Vardhan will speak on the Access to Knowledge program.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikimedia-bangalore-meetup-at-iimb

Odia Wikipedia Community Brings Wikipedia Education Program to IIMC, Dhenkanal

subha — 2013-08-23T14:01:17Z

The Odia Wikipedia community collaborated with the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal and hosted a pilot Odia Wikipedia Education Program. The program began in November 2012 and got over by January 2013. Sixteen student wikipedians signed up and took part in editing more than a dozen articles on Odia Wikipedia.

Odia Wikimedia community is primarily active in three major cities: Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Nalconagar. There was a sustained growth in the community during August-October 2012 which inspired the comunity to initiate a long term program like Wikipedia Education Program. Mrutyunjaya Kar from Nalconagar community reached out to several schools in Nalconagar and Phulbani to find a potential institute for such a program. Subhashish from Access To Knowledge team of CIS supported the community for setting up a meeting with Prof. Mrinal Chatterjee and few other faculty members of Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal followed by a workshop for the students.

More than 45 students from both Odia and English department took part for the first introductory workshop. A program page was created on Odia Wikipedia for the detailed plan and discussion. 16 out of 45 students showed their interest to take part in the program and signed up on the project page. Teaching assistants Bhagaban and Sucharita supported the students in assessing and suggesting articles. A follow up session was organized in December by the Nalconagar Wiki-Community to teach the students about the typing and basic Wikipedia editing. Students continued to edit their chosen articles. Though initially the program was planned to be run for 3-4 months because of the course structure and exam announcement students requested for the closure of it.

The articles were assessed and wiki-fied by the wikipedians. On January, 26 a celebratory event was organized for the student-wikipedians. Prof. Chatterjee addressed the students about the benefits of contributing to Wikipedia in their mother tongue Odia. Subhashish along with fellow Wikipedians Dr. Subas Rout, Mrutyunjaya Kar, Srikant Kedia and Manoranjan Behera took part in a discussion about “What students can gain by contributing to Odia Wikipedia”.

Contribution details:

Number of student participants for introductory session: 45

Number of students took part in the Wikipedia workshop: 16
Number of students contributed: 12

Number of mentor wikipedians: 4

Number of articles edited: 12

Other details:

More details on Project page.

Photos, meeting podcasts and videos: http://bit.ly/YymQkn

Podcast of discussion among Odia Wikipedians with Prof. Mrinal Chatterjee and Subhashish Panigrahi

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-education-program-iimc-dhenkanal

Digital Literacy Workshop at Department of Arts, Delhi University

nitika — 2013-03-05T01:03:05Z

A digital literacy workshop was organised at the Department of Arts, Delhi University for students pursuing their masters in Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies on February 5, 2013. Nitika Tandon shares the developments.

About 30 students and 4 faculty members attended the three hour long workshop. Surprisingly most participants had a clear understanding of how Wikipedia works, who writes the content, who are the Wikipedia editors, where do these editors come from, availability of Wikipedia in different Indian languages and many other aspects that participants are usually not aware of before most wikipedia outreach sessions. I was stunned and pleasantly surprised at the same time. I was then told that many of their fellow colleagues from Hindi department had already attended a session sometime last year and had briefed them about workings with Wikipedia. The main reason to organise this particular session was the curiosity to understand how does one actually 'edit' Wikipedia.

Mid way into the session we moved to the computer lab where all participants had access to computers, laptops and internet. A computer was shared by 2-3 participants because there were'nt enough machines. To begin with students were taught how to do basic and minor editing such as correcting spelling, grammar, punctuations, the importance of show preview button and writing an edit summary. Participants were then taught wiki mark up, adding references, adding inter-wiki links.

Towards the end of the session students filled in feedback forms with their contact information so that we could keep them updated on upcoming events and meetups that are being organised in the city. Many participants had questions about how to add table of contents, pictures and info box but there wasn't enough time to cover it all.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/digital-literacy-workshop

FOSS, Wikimedia and Mozilla Under One Roof at GNUnify 2013, Pune

subha — 2013-07-17T06:55:43Z

GNUnify 2013 organized in the campus in Pune from February 15 to 17, 2013. The event was organized by Pune Linux/Unix User Group (PLUG) and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research (SICSR). Subhashish Panigrahi reports the outcomes in this blog post.

GNUnify is an annual gathering consisting of Free and Open Source software workshops, talks, seminars and BOFs (Birds of a feather). This was hosted by the Pune Linux User Group and the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research in Pune, India.

Day 1: February 15, 2013
The first day of the event had many parallel tracks including talks on KDE, Firefox OS, FUEL Project, Wikimedia Localization, OpenSSL, Discussions on Creative Commons, OpenStack and few technical workshops.

Day 2: February 16, 2013
Few of the full day events includes several talks and discussions about Mozilla and Firefox, Internationalization, Localization and Indic language input method related talks and workshops by the Wikimedia Foundation Engineering team (More details on mediawiki.org), Drupal and workshop and talks on Python. Wikipedians, translators from various languages, A2K team members Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish had an open conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation Engineering team.

Day 3: February 17, 2013
The final day of GNUnify had 3 major parallel day long events; Mozilla India community meetup, Wikipedia translation sprint and Wikipedia gadget workshop. At the end of all the events participants gathered for a group photo and socialized.

Videos

Podcasts

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/foss-wikimedia-under-one-roof-gnunify

Fifty-fourth Bangalore Wikimedia Meet-up at IIM, Bangalore

noopur — 2013-03-06T09:09:03Z

The 54th Wikimedia meet-up in Bangalore was held at the Indian Institute of Management on February 25, 2013. The event was planned and organized by Radhakrishna Arvapally, SIG (Special Interest Group) Chair, Bangalore (a part of the Wikimedia India Chapter) with support from Solutions IQ, Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS.

The proposed agenda was as follows: an introduction to Wikimedia projects by Sudhanwa Jogalekar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, a talk on accessibility and knowledge by T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, followed by a session on WikiSpeed – extreme manufacturing of high speed cars by Joe Justice and Vibhu Srinivasan from Solutions IQ. Mr K S Viswanathan, Vice President (NASSCOM) was the chief guest. He spoke to the participants about the importance of developing a digital hub of free knowledge.

Sudhanwa gave a brief introduction to the world of Wikimedia including projects like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Incubator, MediaWiki and more. He also explained how one could contribute to each of these projects. He mentioned two upcoming projects – Wikivoyage and Wikidata. He answered a few questions after his session and encouraged participants to become members of the Wikimedia India Chapter and get involved in Wikimedia activities in India. Here are the details to become a member.

Vishnu’s talk was about understanding why Wikipedia and what is the importance of enabling access to knowledge resources. He took the example of older technologies and what propelled their invention. In the interactive session, we explored our relationship with knowledge resources, how happy we are with the knowledge we get and how we can make the access better and wider. The discussion also touched upon knowledge resources in Indian languages in the digital domain and the problems associated with them. Participants noted some challenges like affordability, awareness, fonts, low visibility in search etc. They also agreed that given the multilingualism, machine translations are not the solution to knowledge gaps in Indian languages in the digital domain. Another question was about awareness versus access to existing knowledge.

We also discussed how audio technologies could help the cause of Indian languages in education. Radhakrishna coordinated the sessions and answered questions related to content on Wikipedia, authenticity of knowledge on Wikipedia.


Participants seen in the classroom during the Wiki meetup at IIM, Bangalore

In the next session, Joe Justice and Vibhu Srinivasan spoke about WikiSpeed cars, a DIY project to make high-speed cars by harnessing work methods from the Open Source movement. Joe spoke of Kanban and agile engineering. He also explained how the car uses Arduino circuit boards and this project is being scaled so that people across the world can make functional cars collaboratively. He also invited the participants to WikiSpeed event in Bangalore.

Mr Viswanathan then spoke about TEQIP (Technical education and Skill Development Cycle), a program devised to ensure industry exposure and experience to students in technical fields. He also mentioned how the curriculum would be freely available online for all to use. Radhakrishna made the concluding remarks and thanked all the participants and guests for attending.

The meetup ended with questions and more interaction. Details of upcoming Wikimedia meetups in Bangalore can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/fifty-fourth-bangalore-wikimedia-meetup

Creative Commons comes to India

subha — 2013-07-17T06:49:55Z

Creative Commons team visited four Indian cities to spread the word about CC free licenses and CC affiliate program. Wikimedia India chapter was approached to join hands with Creative Commons for research and community building.

Jessica Coates, Global Network Manager and Jane Hornibrook, Regional Coordinator, Asia-Pacific, Creative Commons recently visited India. The Access to Knowledge team from the Centre for Internet and Society got a chance to join them for three of their meetings: one in Pune and two in Bengaluru.

Ceative Commons is a not-for-profit organization and the base for the free licenses. More than 400 million work in the world are in Creative Commons license as of today. The foundation is looking to expand its wing of voluntary affiliates in India who would support for more outreach, community building and research. "We are excited to see the wikipedians in India and their passion to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Commons is the largest Creative Commons license use and we are looking for joining hands with the Indian wikipedians and the Wikimedia India chapter", says Jessica Coats.


Jessica Coates and Jane Hornibrook from Creative Commons at Centre of Internet and Society, Bengaluru

Jane Hornibook, who looks after Creative Common's operation in Asia-Pacific said, "Creative Commons has many users in India. It would be exciting for us to collaborate with more academicians, wikipedians and organizations like Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS for peer research and outreach and grow our affiliate network in India.

Video

Note: This blog post is a combination of events organized in Pune by Pune Linux/Unix User Group and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research, and CIS and the Wikimedia India Chapter in Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons-comes-to-india

Ahmednagar — Marathi Wikipedia Workshop

Tanveer Hasan — 2013-07-26T09:34:47Z

Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications Programme (HEIRA), CSCS Bangalore organize a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in this report.

Ahmednagar College is one of the participant colleges in the ‘Pathways to Higher Education’ programme anchored by HEIRA, and run in collaboration with CIS. This programme works closely with undergraduate students in three states to address the problem of quality of access to higher education. The focus of the programme is on inculcating critical and analytical skills which play a very important role in gaining access to knowledge.

The Wikipedia workshop in Marathi held at the Ahmednagar College intended to introduce the students to the concepts of open and free sources of knowledge, and encourage active Marathi editors to edit and populate the Marathi Wikipedia domain.

Yogesh Khandke was representing the Wikipedia community. He started off by explaining the five pillars of Wikipedia, the copyright issues and the importance of references and citations. As most of the students were new to the concepts of both editing and knowledge production, we faced a few problems in the beginning. Since the IP addresses were already cleared for multiple registrations we did not face that particular problem.

The students were asked to come up with material and information that they would want to add to the Marathi Wikipedia domain. We conducted a group activity where the groups exchanged the information they were planning to use. These groups researched, proof read and added to the information collected by their friends. We had stressed that all the information needed to be cited from a reliable source and must have a clear reference. Hence, a lot of unnecessary and opinionated information was cleared at the first level itself.

The hands-on editing session proved to be challenging as most of the students did not know how to type in Marathi and ended up using phonetic keyboards. The session ended with all the students having been registered as Wikipedia editors and most of the groups were successful in editing. A couple of groups created new pages as well.

Yogesh Khandke was of immense help and he was ably supported by Nagesh Shelake, Dept. of Sociology, New Arts and Science College, Ahmednagar.

A special thanks to Dr. S.B Iyyer, Department of Physics, Ahmednagar College and Coordinator of Pathways Cell, and Raikwad, Department of Commerce and Assistant Coordinator of Pathways Cell.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/ahmednagar-marathi-wikipedia-workshop-report

Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa

nitika — 2013-07-26T11:40:41Z

The Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society was invited by Nikhil Dixit, Public Relations Officer at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani – Goa (BITS Goa) to organise Wikipedia session on March 7, 2013. Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop and shares with us the developments.

Despite the fact that students were busy with their exams and lab tests nearly 30 of them turned up for the event. Many of the students had already tried a bit of IP editing but had not bothered to create accounts. When asked why they hadn't created user accounts many of them said they didn't feel that it is important to create accounts till they are able to correct or add information that they want to share using IPs. The participants were then told about the importance of creating user accounts: using it as an identity with the Wikipedia community, each edit being added to their edit count, helping them build trust, friends and connections with other editors, being able to become Wikipedia administrators or system operators, etc.

As most of the participants had some knowledge of Wikipedia editing, having made sporadic edits in the past, they wanted to know more about advanced editing. About an hour was therefore spent on actual hands on editing where students tried — adding references, wiki markups, info boxes, etc. Students were also taught on how to use user talk pages to interact with other editors. During the course of the workshop we figured that one of the participants had worked on live.wikimedia.in search in 2011 and we invited him to talk a little about his project, experience and involvement. A lot of students were surprised that one amongst their fellow students had worked with the Wikimedia movement in India and achieved so much success. His story really inspired several in the room and many participants made promises to get more involved as editors. Many participants were also curious to know more about Hackathons.

Our next step is to connect participants from all the workshops organised in Goa at BITS Goa, Goa University, Central State Library and Nirmala Institute of Education, since December last year, to enable and support them to organise regular Wiki meet-ups and programs, etc., and strengthen the Wikimedia movement in Goa.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-session-at-bits-goa

Wiki Women's Day in Goa

nitika — 2013-03-19T06:32:25Z

International Women's Day (IWD), also called International Working Women's Day, is celebrated on March 8, every year. There were a series of Wikipedia events organised this year with the aim of increasing participation of women contributing to Wikipedia. One such event was organised by the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society and the Wikimedia India Chapter at the Nirmala Institute of Education (NIE), a Secondary Teacher Education College in Panaji, Goa on March 8, 2013.

NIE is a respected institution providing pre- and in-service teacher education to thousands of teachers and about a 100 of them (99 per cent of the participants being women) joined in to learn Wikipedia editing and increase women related content on Wikipedia.

Rohini Lakshane from the Wikimedia India Chapter and Nitika Tandon from Access to Knowledge, CIS lead the session jointly. The session began with the introduction of Wikipedia, Wikipedia volunteers, the five pillars, motivation of volunteers to contribute to Wikipedia tirelessly and a brief of different activities that are being organised to strengthen the Wikimedia movement in India. Most of the students and faculty members were curious about two main things:

How to integrate the new community of editors in Goa with the larger Indian and global community?
How can teachers and students use Wikipedia to advance students' knowledge and add useful content to Wikipedia?

Participants watching Netha's video	To answer the first part, participants were informed about regular Wiki meet ups in different cities, several city based and language based Wikipedia mailing lists where one can find volunteer friends, active use of user talk pages and village pumps, Wikimedia India Facebook page amongst many others. To address the second part there was also a brief discussion about wiki project classroom coordination with specific examples from universities around the world. The teachers and faculty members will be sent a detailed outline of the program, list of universities with on-going projects, list of teachers who have used Wikipedia as a teaching tool and are willing to serve as a contact to help others set up a similar teaching courses.

The session was planned to go on until late evening with hands on editing in the computer lab. But unfortunately, we (Rohini and Nitika) were informed that the session will have to close before the scheduled closing time as participants had to leave. Except for two or three participants coming on stage and making their user accounts and another 3-4 article edits, we couldn't include more editing as a part of the outreach session, primarily due to time constraint. We're hoping that at a small percentage of participants would try actual editing at home and contribute to women related articles and some of them will be successful in using Wikipedia as a teacher's tool. We have their contact details and we'll try and monitor their on Wiki activities and provide them support whenever needed.


A picture of participants doing Wiki editing at the NIE workshop in Goa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-womens-day-in-goa