Centre for Internet and Society

Classical Odia Language in the Digital Age

subha — 2014-07-28T07:41:51Z

The essay was published in the June edition of Odisha Review, a magazine published by Government of Odisha's Department of Information and Public Relations.

Click to read the original article published in Odisha Review here.

Odisha’s documentation and archival history dates back to the pre-Kalinga civilization that existed more than 5,000 years back in which today’s Odisha was a major part of it. It, later was more vibrant when Kalinga kingdom and was widespread from Ganga to Godavari, geographically consisting of modern day Odisha entirely and partly Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chattishgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana and part of Tamilnadu and Kerala. The epigraphs of cave painting in Gudahandi and stone inscriptions of Hatigumpha in Udayagiri complex are a few examples of the early documentations that the ancestral Kalingan tribes had made. Furthermore, the early Buddhist poets of Kalinga (popularly known as 64 Sidhapada) wrote “ doha ” (spiritual verses) in Pali language. Pali is the language of all of the Buddhist literature and predecessor of modern Odia, Maithili, Bangla and Assamese language and has deep impact on many other Indic languages. Odia has travelled through a long journey of “Tambapata ” (bronze plate inscription), “Talapatra” (palm leaf manuscripts), printed books since early 18th century and e-books in the modern days. Years of history that have perished during invasions by foreign invaders could have told more about this civilization. Modern Odisha state, so far has been able to uphold the pride of having the largest number of palm leaf manuscripts (over 20,000 manuscripts) in the world. Odia printing and publication industry is spread across all the 30 administrative districts of Odisha and other Indian cities like Kolkata and New Delhi and to some extent in some parts of Surat. A few million books would have been printed starting from the first book “New Testament ” that got printed in 1809.[1]

In this chronology there comes the new age reading tools “e-books” or electronic books less formally initiated in the eighties by students of Regional Engineering College, Rourkela (Now National Institute of Rourkela) and now crossed a decade.[2]

Odia got classical status on 20 February this year after 5 other Indian languages on the basis of its literary heritage of over three millennia. Interestingly, it is older than most of the most spoken languages in the world. Like many other mighty civilizations, traders of this region conquered places and took their language and culture to their occupied colonies. Early traders of Kalingan Sadhabas were trading silk and spices with South Asian countries. With them travelled Kalinga’s language and culture. When all of the other language’s have been able to have a strong presence on the Internet, online content available in Odia is way limited compared to even other Indic languages. It has been almost a decade since Odia support is available in most computers across operating systems. But, the digital desktop publishing (DTP) published resources are still not available in a searchable manner – not on internet or in a computer locally. Currently, the Odia publication industry uses proprietary standard fonts for Odia typing. Akruti, LEAP office, Shreelipi are name to few. All of these were the only means for printing books using desktop publishing at one point of time. But, these encoding systems are out-of-date. The major drawback of these fonts is, they have regular Latin characters replaced by Odia characters. If a document is typed using one such fonts is sent to someone it is difficult to even read or reuse if the person in the receiving end does not have the exact font used for typing. As already mentioned the fonts are commercial and proprietary and it is mandatory to buy them to use. In reality most of the users do not buy and use pirated versions of the software for work.

The printed documents typed in one standard is not compatible with the other one. To avoid this problems, an advanced universal standard called “Unicode” was released in early 2000. Unicode has both Odia and Latin characters in a font that allows both the scripts to be displayed correctly at the same time. It is universally compatible and all the operating systems have Unicode fonts installed in the computers. This takes the pain of installing multiple fonts to access any typed text. Searching any text typed in Unicode is as simple as googling something in English. Moreover, documents typed using one Unicode font could be read using another Unicode font. Unfortunately, none of the Odia newspapers have their publications in Unicode at this moment.

This, practically does not allow any reader to search, access, reuse and quote any content. Same is the case for all other published resources like books and magazines. More than 80 per cent of the published content are not even released online and also not archived.

Many publishers, intimidated of online content plagiarism have been protecting their publications. Unfortunately, copyright laws in India are not stringently practiced unlike the west. This has given rise to a parallel piracy market for the movies and music over the years. Interestingly, books are not of that much demand as music and movies are. As a result of the lingua-cultural shift to English from native languages regional language publications are not widely sold in the post-colonial Indian book market as compared to the English publications. The case of the use of Odia language as a language of governance is still not put in place. Odia is still to be used as a medium for official communication in all of the government offices. English medium educational Boards have been domineering over the Odisha state Board. Despite of these challenges, number of Odia dailies is slowly growing. There are around 100 newspapers published daily from various regions of Odisha. It is essential to note that news archives, unlike literary writings have much of any kind of high commercial value. So is in the case of scholarly and research publications. If all of these publications could be made available online in digital form that will take Odia literature to the global audience. This triggers the need of A) making sure the forthcoming publications are not just typed in Unicode but made available online, B) digitization of published books and making them available free on internet.

It is essential to take measures to ascertain the forthcoming publications use Unicode standard and digitizing published matter and publishing them online. Online content could be made available in Unicode and has trillion times reach than printed matter. As a vast number of the users use Microsoft’s Windows XP they could either upgrade their operating system or move to completely free and open source and Linux based operating systems like Ubuntu. At this moment, Odia has far less content on internet.

Odia Wikipedia tops the list of Odia Unicode content websites and is the largest Odia online encyclopaedia with over 8,000 articles. Available for free on or.wikipedia.org, Odia Wikipedia is a community project where any user could create, edit and modify content. The articles being encyclopaedic and referenced from other reliable sources has some level of authenticity. As this is a small project and is developing it needs more voluntary contribution to grow to a larger project that could serve the purpose of an Open Educational Resources (OER) for students. There are a handful of web and news portals maintained by individuals and organizations that have Odia content in Unicode. The other upcoming project is Odia Wikisource which is an online library. Odia books that are useful for the Odia speaking community like classical literature, religious scriptures, dictionaries and lexicons, journals and research papers and manuscripts could go online on this platform. The most important thing about these two projects is that they both have only volunteers as contributors and anyone and everyone could contribute. Any individual or organization who is interested could add a lot of value to Odia language by contributing the process of digitizing content and making them available for free. These projects, additionally are released under Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses that allows free reuse, modification and commercial reproduction of content. Many valuable books could also be part of Odia Wikisource.

Srujanika, a Bhubaneswar based organization in collaboration with National Institute of Technology, Rourkela and Pragati Utkal Sangh, Rourkela has scanned over 760 Odia books. Out of these, over 200 books are hosted in a non-profit project “Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB)” and hosted at: oaob.nitrkl.ac.in. Organizations like Manik-Smrutinyas and Institute of Odia Studies and Research have re-licensed books of noted author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty and Dr. Debi Prasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty respectively to Creative Commons licenses for free, commercial distribution. Majority of the resourceful magazines like The Utkal Prasanga could be also made available in Unicode standard by changing its copyright terms to Creative Commons licenses. Larger debates are also needed to convince authors and knowledge and information producing organizations/departments like universities and government’s departments (e.g.Information and Public Relations, Department of Mass Education and Department of Statistics.) to migrate from proprietary copyright restrictions to reusable licenses like Creative Commons licenses. This will not only will help for more public-private collaboration and knowledge production but also taking language resources to masses which is discontinued because of lack of updated technological advancement like use of Unicode font and digitizing valuable content. Government portals need Odia localization in Unicode standard so public get access to information in Odia language and this could make e-governance much more easier. Government notifications that often are released publicly are found to be released in image formats. Many such public and private information could just be released in plain text that will increase the searchability, accessibility and reusability million times.

Footnotes:

[1].Pattnaik, Pushpashree. Presentation on digitization of Odia books in Utkal University (21 February 2014).

[2].Mohanty, Jagadish, eSabada. eOdissa.com (2009 - 2010).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odisha-review-june-2014-classical-odia-language-in-digital-age

Doctors and Translators Are Working Together to Bridge Wikipedia's Medical Language Gap

subha — 2014-08-04T03:29:44Z

I interviewed Wikimedian User:CFCF who is managing the entire project to understand how it is going to work and wrote on Global Voices' Rising Voices about it.

The article was published in GlobalVoices on July 27, 2014. It can be accessed here. It was republished in the Wikimedia Blog on July 30, 2014.

Internet users from around the world often turn to Wikipedia to answer questions of all kinds. The information offered there includes medical subjects, especially important in parts of the world where access to medical professionals may be limited.

However, much of this information can be unreliable and is available only in the most oft-spoken languages.

A group of experienced Wikipedia editors and medical professionals is trying to change that with the Medicine Translation Project, an effort to improve health care-related topics in English Wikipedia and translate them into other languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Persian, Tagalog, Indonesian and Macedonian.

Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grant (IEG), a microgrant supporting work on Wikipedia-related activities, granted 10,000 US dollars to the Medicine Translation Project Community Organizing project, which aims to enhance communication and coordination among the team.

Medical student and Wikipedian User:CFCF along with two advisors, Dr. James Heilman (User:Doc James) and Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi) lead the group. We spoke to founder CFCF over email.

Rising Voices (RV): How did the project get started? What inspired it and how did you identify the needs it would fulfill?

CFCF: [...] The project itself started off in 2011 when Dr. James Heilman and a number of translators from Translators Without Borders: Enrique Cavalitto and Ildiko Santana teamed up in an effort to translate medical articles. Since then, the project has exploded into a larger translation forum with hundreds of translators translating articles into almost a hundred different languages. [...]

For Wikimedia projects with a large pool of editors, we have been taking help from editors to assess what is needed, and what should be translated. On smaller projects we have simply set the goal to get anything on World Health Organization (WHO)’s list of essential medicines, as well as anything about neglected tropical diseases, also from a list by the WHO. As for these articles the project is still in an early phase, but we want to cover basically anything that might be relevant to readers, from cancer to emergency medicine.

RV: How is the process of translation going?

CFCF: [...] The problem is that there are so many layers of complications in the translation process. After an article has been written and been subject to review to ensure its quality, the article needs to be prepared and proofed for translation, after which translators need to be found. [...] Many of our translators are medical professionals and have in-depth knowledge in their native languages. On the top of it, they dedicate plenty of time on the content creation and translation. This helps to get good quality translations. What this also means is they they seldom have any knowledge of Wiki markup or Wikipedia. Someone else who knows the language in question has to go through links, templates etc. and fix them, proofread the translated content so it is up to scratch and readable.

CFCF: [...] The problem is that there are so many layers of complications in the translation process. After an article has been written and been subject to review to ensure its quality, the article needs to be prepared and proofed for translation, after which translators need to be found. [...] Many of our translators are medical professionals and have in-depth knowledge in their native languages. On the top of it, they dedicate plenty of time on the content creation and translation. This helps to get good quality translations. What this also means is they they seldom have any knowledge of Wiki markup or Wikipedia. Someone else who knows the language in question has to go through links, templates etc. and fix them, proofread the translated content so it is up to scratch and readable.

RV: How do you address this?

CFCF: To fix all this, it is best to have a local Wikipedian who can integrate the text. Most of the work has already been done. But, getting these things right is very crucial, especially on Wikipedias with vast content, where there already is a lot of content to link in.

I think the resistance we met early in the project's life was not against translation of content. But, because we did not spend enough time getting the translated articles up to shape before sending them live on the target Wikipedia.

What we saw on the Polish Wikipedia was that much of the issues were down to how they used different templates, and after I commissioned a bot to fix this, the articles started going live very quickly. After this, more and more editors became interested in helping out [...]

RV: Are you in conversation with the Wikipedia Zero team — a mobile data project focused on Wikipedia access in the developing world — about popularising this with their partners in the developing nations?

CFCF: Currently we are not in touch with the Wikipedia Zero team specifically, even though our works target the same communities. The difference between us and them is that we target developed countries as well as countries where there barely is any mobile connectivity at all, such as Burma where I do not know if we will be seeing Wikipedia Zero in the foreseeable future [...]

RV: What are your plans to engage with the larger Wikimedia communities that are multilingual and totally diverse?

CFCF: We aim to get high quality content in as many languages as we can. It is difficult to translate such deeply technical content, so we are really looking for professional translators, or individuals with some form of medical background so that information loss and corruption of content in translation is minimal.We recruit translators either off-wiki, or on the medical WikiProjects. We are still looking for translators who feel they are comfortable with such topics, and we especially need them in smaller languages. We are also searching them at Babylon on Meta Wiki.

WikiProject Med Foundation was the first attempt to get a truly global organization of medical Wikipedia editors. Most medical professionals are fluent in English, and we really try to engage in discussion in other languages when we can, so I think there is a real benefit in creating a global community for medical editors.

We are not large enough yet that we have all the relevant people on English Wikipedia, and we will probably never be because there are always specialists in other countries with very specific knowledge that we can leverage. That makes international collaboration really great.

As for the local language integrators, the idea is to have editors who are willing help out and be an intermediary between that community and our translator community. We have a page where all our finished translations are added. An integrator would patrol that page on a regular basis, inform the respective language Wikipedia that the new translation is ready. The language Wikipedia’s reader community share feedback on the translation quality and suggest for improvement. For us, it is really easy to just add articles without going through them thoroughly. But, that would not work at all. For things to work, we need someone who both knows Wiki markup and the target language so that the integration can go smoothly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/global-voices-subhashish-panigrahi-july-27-2014-doctors-and-translators-are-working-together-to-bridge-wikipedias-medical-language-gap

Andhra Loyola College and the Centre for Internet & Society sign MoU for Better Net Access

rahim — 2015-01-20T18:47:13Z

Andhra Loyola College (ALC) and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to steward the growth of Telugu Wikipedia and to make available free knowledge in Telugu to all Telugus across the globe.

Highlights

Ten theosophical books authored by Rev. Fr. P. Jojaiah, SJ released under free license (CC-BY-SA-4.0)
For the first time an educational institution in the state of Andhra Pradesh is signing an MoU with CIS-A2K to work collaboratively to qualitatively improve Telugu Wikipedia.
ALC faculty and students to create free e-content in Telugu on Telugu Wikipedia.
Digital content from the fields of Botany, Physics, Chemistry, Telugu, Statistics, Ethics and Religion, Music and Dance to be produced on Telugu Wikipedia

This is a big leap for the college in opening up itself to the internet world. The college is planning to train its faculty and students to create free econtent in Telugu. These resources will in turn be dedicated to the society.

The signing of the MoU took place in the college premises on August 14, 2014 at 2.00 p.m.

Ten theosophical books authored by Rev. Fr. P. Jojaiah, SJ was released under free license (CC-BY-SA-4.0) on the same stage.

The event was organized by ALC and CIS.

CIS-A2K has been closely working with ALC. They have organised 4 workshops for students and faculty. CIS-A2K also helped in QR coding of the institute.

Now, this MoU would further enable CISA2K and ALC to collaboratively work on creating free and open knowledge in Telugu across various disciplines on Telugu Wikipedia. This collaboration is set to benefit millions of Telugus to freely access knowledge in Telugu on the internet.

Media Coverage

ALC signs MoU for better net access (The Hindu, August 15, 2014)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/alc-cis-sign-mou-better-net-access

NIE Steps in to Grow Konkani Wikipedia

vishnu — 2014-10-10T11:26:26Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) signed a memorandum of agreement (MoU) with Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa to enhance digital literacy in Konkani in the education sector across Goa.

The Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of CIS, in its sustained efforts to enhance the content and reach of Kokani Wikepedia (which is in incubation), has signed an MoU for a period of five years with Nirmala Insitute of Education (NIE), a Secondary Teacher Education College established in 1963 by the Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in response to the then urgent need for trained teachers in post liberation Goa. The key objectives of this partnership are: a) to design, develop and execute a certificate course titled "Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia", which is aimed at middle and high school teacher-trainees and teachers; and b) to introduce Wikimedia projects into the pedagogic curriculum of NIE.

Both CIS and NIE share a mutual interest in conserving, developing and disseminating knowledge free of cost in Konkani, which incidentally is Goa’s official language. Konkani as a language faces several challenges — it has no official script. The population who speak it are dispersed across the world and have little motivation to further the cause of Konkani, and there are few educational venues that offer a formal course to study Konkani or offer Konkani based curriculum. NIE Principal Dr. Denzil Martins welcomed this MoU and said that "it will guide our teacher-trainees to upload relevant information in Konkani that can be freely accessed by the local population" and "provide the volunteer-trainees with skills that they will be able to use to contribute and enhance the free knowledge in Konkani". The MoU was signed by Dr. Denzil Martins from NIE and T. Vishnu Vardhan (Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, CIS) in the presence of staff and students of NIE and volunteers Harriet Vidyasagar and Gayathri Rao Konkar. Dr. Rita Paes, ex-Principal of NIE who worked to forge this MoU sent her best wishes.

CIS-A2K since 2013, has worked to develop partnerships with key educational institutions to promote and grow Konkani Wikipedia. It has previously worked with NIE to design and implement a program to enroll 100 B.Ed. students to increase the amount of information available in Goan villages and towns on Konkani Wikipedia. A2K has also been instrumental in convincing Goa University to re-release Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopedia) under CC-BY-SA 3.0 , making it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done.

The course ‘Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia’ will enable the teacher participant to have a) a comprehensive understanding of changes due to digital technology to the knowledge domain; b) an introduction to various openness movements that inform the discourse on Open Educational Resources; c) exposure and training to participate on open knowledge platforms like Wikipedia; and d) practical examples and best practices of using Wikipedia and sister projects within the classroom context. The parties will also co-design and jointly implement programmes to introduce Wikipedia in the NIE curriculum. The curriculum for this workshop is positioned within the context of indian languages (particularly Konkani) and school education to ensure that any learning is practical and can be applied within the teachers immediate pedagogic environment. Speaking about the relevance of this course Gayathri and Harriet (who have been associated with NIE as volunteers) mentioned that "the Goa government has handed out tablets to all school going children in Goa. In order to use them effectively in the classroom will require teachers to rethink their role and teaching methodologies and this course is an important step towards that". Agreeing with this Denzil Martins feels that this course "will provide the teacher-trainees with ideas and inputs for using Wikipedia in creative ways in the classroom".

This partnership could bring huge momentum and scale for the growth of Konkani as participants who graduate from this course will as teachers act as anchors and mentors to teach and assign Wikipedia editing assignments in their respective schools and classrooms.

As Gayathri feels "such courses once fine tuned should be made available to teachers from all over the country and should be part of the package for introducing the digital technology in the school system. Today it ends with setting up computer labls in schools or distribution of hardware to students - they may have a 'computer teacher' but the class and subject teachers never become part of these new initiatives. Only when this happens can we move away from 'teaching computers' to using computers as tools to learn and teach, which is the primary objective of digital technology in schools".

CIS will develop this open course and welcomes anyone to partner in this effort, which will be made available for anyone to use it within their context. The efforts to build free and open knowledge platforms like Konkani Wikipedia will continue and partnerships like NIE will play a crucial role in building a robust knowledge society in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/nie-steps-in-to-grow-konkani-wikipedia

We are Wikipedia

subha — 2014-09-06T03:19:29Z

Wikimedia Deutchland has included a paragraph about WeAreWikipedia on their blog.

@WeAreWikipedia auf Global Voices

Subhashish Panigrahi hat einen Beitrag über das Twitter-Projekt „We Are Wikipedia“ auf der Bloggerplattform GlobalVoices veröffentlicht. Subhashish erklärt unter anderem wo die Idee für das Projekt herkommt und greift einiger der unterschiedlichste Beiträge auf, die über den Twitter-Account in den letzten Wochen liefen. Inzwischen gibt es auch schon eine deutschsprachige Version des Beitrags

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

OpenGLAM at Wikimania 2014

subha — 2014-10-06T05:09:19Z

GLAM activities in the last two months have been quite happening!

Subhashish Panigrahi's blog post was published on OpenGLAM website on August 27, 2014.

After Open Knowledge Festival in Berlin, OpenGLAM members and other GLAM contributors met again during Wikimania London, the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement focused on what people are making with wikis and open content. There were GLAM talks, workshops, discussions and brown bag talks: in this blog I’ll go into some of the highlights, but you can find an overview of all GLAM & Free culture submissions here.

Best practices for the evaluation of GLAM-Wiki cooperation

A GLAM-Wiki evaluation workshop was organized by Beat Estermann, Maarten Brinkerink and Wikimedia Foundation’s Program Evaluation specialist Jaime Anstee to assess the impact of the past GLAM projects and to create a road map by placing evaluation parameters in place for institutional collaboration. From the GLAM wiki residency project at Wikimedia UK, Jonathan Cardy presented the evaluation process needed in place for Wikipedia-in-Residence programs. Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE)’s Lilli Iliev shared information about the evaluation practices WMDE has put in place in order to implement small to large scale GLAM projects in Germany. While working with various cultural institutions in Germany, they focused on qualitative aspects of the content acquired, on goal oriented programs like “GLAM on Tour”, and on mass outreach by popular media and post campaign impact measuring. Four groups were then formed to work on particular GLAM projects, how they plan to evaluate tangible output and measure return on investments.

Have you heard?

In the scope of the Wikipedia Voice Intro Project that he founded, Andy Marbett (http://pigsonthewing.org.uk) spoke about the beauty of having recordings of notable people where they not just pronounce their names in their native languages, but introduce themselves with their dates and places of birth. With BBC’s collaboration, this project has grew to an avenue on Wikipedia to enrich biography-articles. This is indeed a project that has run absolutely in zero cost and aims at making Wikimedians meet their stars and document their voices for ever on the Internet. The full video of the talk is available below.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-glam-august-27-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-open-glam-at-wikimania-2014

Expanding the World of Telugu Wikipedia – CIS-A2K and ALC join hands

T Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik — 2014-09-30T05:11:29Z

Students and faculty of Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada aim to enhance Telugu Wikipedia through increased contributions to Wikipedia and make it available under free license.

The Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in its quest to catalyze the growth of open knowledge movement in Indic languages recently added another feather to its cap by signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Andhra Loyola College (ALC) in Vijayawada on August 14, 2014 to work collaboratively to improve Telugu Wikipedia and Telugu Wikisource. College Principal Fr. G.A.P. Kishore, Vice-Principals Fr. P. Anil Kumar and Fr. Rex Angelo, correspondent Fr. Raju signed the agreement with CIS-A2K programme director T. Vishnu Vardhan.

The MoU signed with ALC is for a period of five years and encompasses four activities: Open knowledge creation in Telugu across various disciplines on Telugu Wikipedia: ALC faculty and students will be trained by CIS-A2K staff and interested Telugu Wikimedians to understand the principles that govern Wikipedia in order to generate quality entries. Faculty from Botany, Physics, Statistics, Ethics, Religion, Telugu Literature, and Music will work with CIS-A2K. Each of the faculty in the coming months will come up with a plan to generate open knowledge in Telugu in their respective disciplines. Content donation and digitization on Telugu Wikisource: ALC through its networks will help CIS-A2K to bring Telugu content under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. The Telugu department of the college expressed keen interest to work with CIS-A2K in digitizing historical Telugu content and to make it available on Telugu Wikisource. Various competitions will be planned in the future. Creating a free software environment at Andhra Loyola College: 400 machines within various labs on the campus will be converted into FOSS systems with free and open source software including support for Telugu and other Indic languages. It should be noted that all the existing computers of ALC are run on proprietary software. As a pilot initiative CIS-A2K has already converted 30 systems in a lab and named it as Loyola FOSS Lab. CIS-A2K to revise the FIT (Fundamentals in Information Technology): A mandatory course for all undergraduate students which will introduce students to FOSS, Openness and Wikipedia. This is an outcome of the FOSS orientation done by T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahimanuddin Shaik during the two workshops that were held at ALC.

CIS-A2K will put every effort to involve Telugu Wikimedians and FOSS community in taking this collaboration with ALC forward. CIS-A2K will also create a project page on Telugu Wikipedia to actively document and publicly share the detailed plans and progress. More updates will also be shared on this website.


Above: Representatives from ALC and CIS-A2K seen during the signing ceremony.

The signing of the MoU was done at a public event in the presence of students, faculty and management of ALC and various representatives from media. The media covered this event enthusiastically. The Hindu coverage can be found here and Eenadu article coverage is here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/expanding-the-world-of-telugu-wikipedia-cis-and-alc-join-hands

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages

Tejaswini Niranjana and Tanveer Hasan — 2014-10-12T03:52:20Z

A two-day workshop for students was organized by Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune (KSPWSC), Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Access to Knowledge Programme, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore (CIS-A2K) on September 11 and 12, 2014 in Pune. Tejaswini Niranjana and Tanveer Hasan summarize the developments from the workshop in this report.

Day 1

The workshop began with Tejaswini Niranjana speaking about the monolingual nature of the present day higher education system. She explained why monolingual students were disadvantaged in their pursuit of knowledge, since they could not grasp the concepts coming from the societies they lived in. The mandate of CILHE was briefly explained, and the commitment of the centre to generate accurate and relevant multi-lingual terminology for the social sciences and humanities stressed upon. She lauded the role of the KSPWSC, Pune University, in using bilingual pedagogic material and promoting an engagement with Indian language materials in their courses. The importance of using digital resources was also discussed. The collaborative nature of creating entries on the Wikipedia platform was stressed. The organizers added that students from various other institutions across the country would be participating in the larger exercise.

Next, T. Vishnu Vardhan of CIS-A2K spoke about the changing nature of knowledge repositories and the pattern of access to those repositories. He described at length the genesis of Wikipedia and the influence it has today on the way we access and understand knowledge. Different types of digital resources available to us and the nature in which they generate the knowledge and make it available was explained. Participants were also introduced to the difference between born digital material and digitized material along with the many sister projects of the Wikimedia foundation. Vishnu explained how anyone registering as an editor on Wikipedia could begin contributing to the development of this knowledge base. This was followed by a session in which the basics of Wikipedia editing were explained.

Following lunch, there was a group exercise that required the participants to pick any three concepts that were provided to them in a handout and try to explain the same without using the concept itself. This exercise was important as the participants would try to understand the concept more closely without assuming its meaning. This was self-evident. Better understanding of the concept would in turn help them to write about it or use it meaningfully in an Indian language entry on Wikipedia. Many participants found this exercise difficult in the initial stages as they fell back upon their classroom understanding of the term. They were asked to focus on explaining the concept without using the word itself but by understanding its effects and its multiple meanings.

In the second exercise, the participants made use of the material generated through the first exercise and tried to explain the denotative and connotative meanings of their chosen concept. The third exercise involved coming up with a cluster of concepts in which their chosen concept was embedded. The idea was to show how concepts derived meaning from a larger context, and could not be understood outside of their conceptual universe. The first day of the workshop ended with all the participants successfully registering themselves as Wikipedia editors, learning the basics of editing, and having taken part in an exercise that made them think about the concepts they used with greater clarity.


						Above: A participant explains the denotative and connotative meaning of her chosen concept.

Day 2

Participants were asked to search for an article in the English Wikipedia for a person, a book and a concept connected to women’s studies. They were asked to identify the challenges involved if they had to translate the article into an Indian language they were familiar with. The exercise was intended to alert the participants to the kind of problems they were likely to face during the act of translation. They were also asked to come up with solutions as to how these problems could be overcome. A key problem voiced by many participants was that of the non-availability of the right phrase/term/word in Indian languages. Tejaswini Niranjana advised the participants not to reinvent the wheel but use the terms that had been coined earlier but were now out of circulation in Indian languages. She also pointed out that translation from English to Indian languages is a different process than from Indian languages to English. In the former, one has to break sentence structure to make the meaning more clear, and in the latter one has to combine the sentences. She also said that the process of translation must happen at the level of sentences and ideas and not simply at the level of terms and words.

Answering another question about the lack of social context while translating a concept, Prof. Niranjana asked the participants to use the existing historical and social writings already available in their languages to overcome this problem. These writings could be updated and edited, and current references added.

Vishnu continued the discussion of using digital platforms to create and disseminate knowledge by explaining various tools available. He stressed the importance of sharing our efforts in creating knowledge and making it widely available, and pointed out various features of Wikipedia and Google translator. Participants were shown ways by which the existing knowledge base on Google and such other digital knowledge platforms could be improved.

Everyone then started working on his/her individual entries that would be the quantitative output of this workshop. They were asked to select one topic (a book, a person, a concept) from their previous exercise and develop an article based on that in any Indian language that they preferred. Most of the entries were in Marathi, with a few participants opting for Hindi. There was an entry in Bangla as well.

At the end of the workshop, more than half of our 26 participants had fully developed entries in Indian languages. These entries contained a table of contents and references, inter-wiki references, and external links, and in some cases included images too. Many participants wrote about personalities such as the writer Mukta Salve, the feminist theorist Mary John, and the contemporary Marathi writer Narayan Bhosle. Some wrote about concepts such as feminism, nationalism and domestic violence.

This two-day workshop proved to be immensely successful as the participants were motivated to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms regularly, and began to appreciate the importance of Indian language initiatives such as these.

We are very thankful to the entire faculty at KSPWSC, Pune University, Dr. Anagha Tambe, Dr. Swati Dyahadroy, Sneha Gole, Sanjay Kumar Kamble, and Deepa Tak who facilitated the discussions and were of immense help in conducting the workshop.


					Above: Tejaswini Niranjana with participants at the Pune workshop.

Click to download all the photographs from the workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/report-on-developing-digital-open-knowledge-resources-in-indian-languages

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ବିକାଶରେ ପ୍ରତିବନ୍ଧକ ଓ ସମ୍ଭାବନା

subha — 2014-10-13T05:19:44Z

I authored an editorial in today's Samaja (Odia daily). It talks about the hurdles Odia language has been facing and potential aspects of the language including it being used massively on the Internet in Wikipedia and other platforms.

Click to read the article published in the Samaja on October 13, 2014 here. Click to download the file (PDF).

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ଶାସ୍ତ୍ରୀୟ ମାନ୍ୟତା ପାଇବା ପରେ ସଭା ସମିତି ମାଧ୍ୟମରେ ଗୋଟିଏ କଥା "ଓଡ଼ିଆ ସଂସ୍କୃତରୁ ଆହରିତ ନୁହେଁ, ବରଂ ନିଜେ ସ୍ୱୟଂସମ୍ପୂର୍ଣ୍ଣ ଏକ ଭାଷା ଯାହାର ପାଖାପାଖି ପାଞ୍ଚହଜାର ବର୍ଷର ଇତିହାସ ରହିଛି'ଜନମାନସରେ ବାରମ୍ବାର ବିମ୍ବିତ ହୋଇଛି । ଏହା ଅନେକ ଓଡ଼ିଆଙ୍କୁ ନିଜ ଭାଷା ବାବଦରେ ଖାଲି ସଚେତନ କରିନାହିଁ, ବରଂ କେଇ ଶହ ବର୍ଷର ବିଦେଶୀ ଶାସନ ଓ ତା' ପରର ଭୁଶୁଡ଼ି ପଡ଼ିଥିବା ଏକ ସାମାଜିକ ଅବସ୍ଥା ଭିତରେ, ଢୋକେ ପିଇ ଦଣ୍ଡେ ଜିଇ ଆଗକୁ ଆଗେଇଥିବା ଏକ ଜାତିକୁ ଆତ୍ମଗୌରବ ଦେଇଛି । ୧୯୩୬ରେ ଭାଷା ଭିତ୍ତିରେ ଓଡ଼ିଶା ପ୍ରଦେଶ ଗଢ଼ାହେବାବେଳେ ଓଡ଼ିଆଙ୍କ ମଞ୍ଜ ଯେଉଁ ଦମ୍ଭିଲା ହୋଇଥିଲା, ଶାସ୍ତ୍ରୀୟ ମାନ୍ୟତା ମିଳିବା ପରେ ତା' ଉପରେ ଏ ଭାଷାକୁ ଆହୁରି କେଇ ହଜାର ବର୍ଷ ଆଗକୁ ବଢ଼ାଇବା ପାଇଁ ସଂକଳ୍ପର ଇନ୍ଧନ ଯୋଗାଇଛି । ତେବେ ଆମର ଏ ଗୌରବ ସାର୍ବଜନୀନ କି କେବଳ ବୁଦ୍ଧିଜୀବୀଙ୍କ ଭିତରେ ସୀମିତ ତାହା ବିଚାରିବାର ବେଳ ଆସିଛି । ଭାଷାଟିଏ କେବେ ହେଁ ଭାଷାଗବେଷାଳିଙ୍କ ଭାଷା ହୋଇ ଜିଏଁ ନାହିଁ, ଜିଏଁ ସାଧାରଣ ଲୋକଙ୍କ ନିତିଦିନର ଜୀବନରେ-ଘରେ, ସାମାଜିକ ମେଳିରେ, ସାହିତ୍ୟରେ ବିଶେଷ କରି ବେପାର-ବଣିଜରେ ଓ ଶାସନରେ । ଆମ ଭାଷା କେତେ କେଉଁଠି ବ୍ୟବହାରରେ ଲାଗୁଛି ଓ କେତେ ଲାଗିବ, ତାହାର ନିର୍ଦ୍ଧାରଣ ନିତାନ୍ତ ଜରୁରୀ । ଏ ଗୁରୁବେଳା ଏବେ ଆସି ଉପନୀତ । ଭାଷାଟିଏ ସବୁବେଳେ ଆରମ୍ଭ ହୋଇଥାଏ ସମାଜ ସମାଜ ଭିତରେ ଭାବ ଦିଆନିଆ ନିମନ୍ତେ । ଇତିହାସ, ସାମାଜିକତା କିମ୍ବା ଧନ ସମ୍ପତ୍ତି ନିଜପର ପିଢ଼ି ପାଇଁ ସାଇତି ରଖିବାପାଇଁ ସମାଜର ପୁରୁଖା ଲୋକେ କଥିତ ଭାଷାକୁ ଲିପି ମାଧ୍ୟମରେ ଲେଖିରଖନ୍ତି । ଏହି ଳେଖିବାର ପ୍ରକ୍ରିୟା କିଛିକାଳ ଚାଲିବା ଭିତରେ ଲିଖନ ପଦ୍ଧତିକୁ ବ୍ୟବସ୍ଥିତ କରିବା ନିମନ୍ତେ ବ୍ୟାକରଣ ତିଆରି ହୁଏ, କେବଳ ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା ମେଣ୍ଟାଇବାପାଇଁ ଲିଖନ ତିଆରି ନହୋଇ ମନୋରଞ୍ଜନ ଓ ଜୀବନଧାରାକୁ ସୁଗମ କରିବାପାଇଁ ସାହିତ୍ୟ ତିଆରି ହୁଏ । ଏମିତି ହୁଏ ଭାଷାର ବିକାଶ । କେବେ ଏକ ଭାଷାଭାଷୀ ସମାଜ ଆଉ ଏକ ଭାଷାଭାସୀ ସମାଜର ଶିକାର ହୁଏ ତ କେବେ ଷଡ଼ଯନ୍ତ୍ରର । ଭାଷା ପ୍ରବାହର ଏ ଆବଡ଼ାଖାବଡ଼ା ପଥରେ ମୂଳ ଭାଷାରୁ କେତେ ନାଶ ହୁଏ କେତେ ଅଲଗା ଭାଷାରୁ ମିଶେ । କେବେକେବେ ଭାଷାଟିଏର ଆଧୁନିକ ରୂପ ମୂଳ ରୂପରୁ ଖୁବ୍‍ ଅଲଗା ହୋଇବସେ । ଓଡ଼ିଆ, ଏକ ଭାଷା ଭାବେ ଏମିତି ଉତ୍‍ଥାନ ପତନ ଭିତର ଦେଇ ନିଶ୍ଚିତ ଆସିଛି । ଆଜି ଆମେ ଯଦି କଳିଙ୍ଗରୁ ଆବିଷ୍କୃତ ଲିଖିତ ପୋଥିପୁରାଣରୁ (ଯାହା ପାଳି ଭାଷା ସହିତ ସାମଞ୍ଜସ୍ୟ ରଖେ)ଆମ ଭାଷା ସହ ମେଳ ଖୋଜିବସିବା, ଅନେକ ମେଳ ପାଇବା ନିଶ୍ଚିତ, ହେଲେ ଅନେକ ବର୍ଷର ବ୍ୟବଧାନ ହେତୁ ତା'ର ଅନେକ ଭାଗ ଆମକୁ ବୁଝିବାକୁ ଦୁରୁହ ମଧ୍ୟ ହେବ । ଆମ ଭାଷାର ମୌଳିକତା ଜାଣିବା ସମୟରେ ଆମେ ସବୁଠାରୁ ମୂଳ ପ୍ରମାଣ ଯାହା କେବଳ ଆମର ଅଧୁନା ବ୍ୟବହୃତ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ସହ ମୋଟାମୋଟି ମିଶୁଥିବା ତଥା ଆମର ସାମାଜିକ ବ୍ୟବସ୍ଥାର ଇତିହାସ ସହ ମିଶୁଥିବ, ତାହା ପରଖି ନିର୍ଦ୍ଧାରିବା । ପ୍ରାମାଣିକ ଓ ଐତିହାସିକ ତଥ୍ୟ, ଲୋକମୁଖରେ ଜୀବନ୍ତ ଇତିହାସ (ଓରାଲ ହିଷ୍ଟି୍ର) ତଥା ପ୍ରତ୍ନତାତ୍ତ୍ୱିକ ଗବେଷଣାର ଆଧାରରେ ଏହା ସାଧିତ ହେବ । ଆମ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ କିଛି ଗବେଷଣା ହୋଇଛି, କିଛି କାମ ବାକି ଅଛି, ଆଉ ଆମ ପାଖେ ମିଳୁଥିବା ଭାଷାଗତ, ଲିପିଗତ, ପ୍ରତ୍ନତାତ୍ତ୍ୱିକ ଓ ସାମାଜିକଗତ ପ୍ରମାଣକୁ ଭିତ୍ତିକରି ହୋଇଥିବା ନାନାଦି ଗବେଷଣାକୁ ପରସ୍ପର ସହ ଯୋଡ଼ିବା ଦେଇ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର କ୍ରମବିକାଶର ଧାରା ଜଣାପଡ଼ିବ । ହେଲେ ଇତିହାସ ଗୋଟେ ଆଡ଼େ, ବାସ୍ତବିକ ଜୀବନରେ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ରତିଛବି ଆଉ ଗୋଟେ ଆଡ଼େ । ଆମେ ଅତୀତରେ ଏକ ଲଢ଼ୁଆ, ପରିଶ୍ରମୀ, ଚତୁର ଜାତି ହୋଇଥିଲେ ହେଁ ଆମ ଏବେକାର ପିଢ଼ିରେ ଯେ ଘୋଡ଼ାମୁହାଁ ପୁଅ ଜନମ ନହେବେ ତା'କିଏ ଦମ୍ଭର ସହ କହିପାରିବ? ଗହଣା ଯେତେ ଝଟକୁ ପଛେ ମାସରେ ଥରେ ତେନ୍ତୁଳିପାଣିରେ ମାଜିବା ଚାହି । ଭାଷାଟିଏ ଯେତେ ପୁରାତନ ଓ ସମୃଦ୍ଧ ହେଉ ପଛକେ, ଛୋଟ ପିଲାଟିଏରୁ ନେଇ ବୁଢ଼ାଯାଏ ସେ ଭାଷାକୁ ନିଜ ଜୀବନଧାରଣର ଭାଷା ଭାବେ ବ୍ୟବହାର ନକଲାଯାଏ ସେ ଭାଷାର ଉତ୍ତରଣ କେବେ ହେବନାହିଁ । ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ଏବେ ଧୀରେଧୀରେ ସାଧାରଣ ବ୍ୟବହାରରୁ ଦୂରେଇ ଯାଉଛି । ଏ କଥା ଯେତେ ବେଦନାଦାୟକ ହେଲେ ବି ସତ । ଆମେ ରକ୍ଷଣଶୀଳ ଭାବେ ଇଂରାଜୀ ବା ହିନ୍ଦୀଭାଷାକୁ ଦୋଷ ହେଉଛୁ ସିନା, କିନ୍ତୁ ସେହି ପରିମାଣରେ ଆମେ ନିଜ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଜନପ୍ରିୟ ମାଧ୍ୟମରେ ସାଧନ ଉପଲବ୍ଧ କରାଇପାରିନାହୁଁ । ମୋବାଇଲ କଷ୍ଟମର କେଆରରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆଟିଏ ସେପଟରୁ କଲ ଉଠାଇ ହିନ୍ଦୀରେ ସିଧା କଥା ହେବା ଆରମ୍ଭ କରିବା ଦେଖି ଲାଗିବ ଆପଣ ବୋଧେ ଦିଲ୍ଲୀ କି ପାଟଣାରେ ଅଛନ୍ତି । ଗଣମାଧ୍ୟମରେ ବହୁବିଧ ଖେଚୁଡ଼ି ଭାଷାରେ ସମ୍ବାଦ ପରିବେଷଣ, ବିଲବୋର୍ଡ଼ଠାରୁ ଆରମ୍ଭ କରି ଟିଭି ବିଜ୍ଞାପନ ଯାଏ ଅବିକଳ ହିନ୍ଦୀ ବା ଇଂରାଜୀ ଢ଼ାଞ୍ଚାରୁ ଓଡ଼ିଆକୁ ବଦଳାଇବା, ଇଂରାଜୀମାଧ୍ୟମ ସ୍କୁଲମାନଙ୍କରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆକୁ ବାଧ୍ୟତାମୂଳକ ନକରାଇବା, ବିଭିନ୍ନ ଶିକ୍ଷାନୁଷ୍ଠାନଗୁଡ଼ିକରେ, ଦୋକାନ ବଜାରରେ, ରାଜଧାନୀର କ୍ୟାଫେଠାରୁ ଆରମ୍ଭ କରି ଛୋଟଛୋଟ ଦୋକାନରେ ହିନ୍ଦୀରେ କଥାବାର୍ତ୍ତା ଶୁଣି ଲାଗୁଛି ଆମ ସମାଜ ପାଇଁ ଆଉ ଏକ ଭାଷା ଆନ୍ଦୋଳନ ଲୋଡ଼ା ।

ଏକଥା କହିବାର ଉଦ୍ଦେଶ୍ୟ ହେଉଛି ଯେଉଁ ତୋଷାଳିକୁ ଆମ ସଂସ୍କୃତିର ପ୍ରାଣକେନ୍ଦ୍ର କହି ମନ୍ଦିରମାଳିନୀ ଉପାଧି ଦେଇ ଆମେ ମୁଣ୍ଡରେ ବସାଇଛୁ, ସେଇ ସହରରେ ଅନ୍ୟ ରାଜ୍ୟରୁ ଆଗତ ବିଭିନ୍ନ ଭାଷାଭାଷୀ ଇଞ୍ଜିନିଅରିଂ ବା ଅନ୍ୟାନ୍ୟ ଛାତ୍ର ଓ ଚାକିରିଆ କେତେ ଅଧିକ ହୋଇଗଲେ ଯେ, ଆମର ଦୋକାନବଜାରର ବ୍ୟାବହାରିକ ଭାଷା ହିନ୍ଦୀ ହୋଇଗଲା? ଯେଉଁଠି ଆମ ରାଜ୍ୟର ଭାଷା ଓ ଚଳଣିର ବାନା ସୁଦୂର ଜାପାନ, ଥାଇଲାଣ୍ଡ, କୋରିଆ, ମାଲେସିଆ, ସିଙ୍ଗାପୁରଠୁ ଆରମ୍ଭ କରି ଦକ୍ଷିଣ ଆମେରିକାଯାଏ ଉଡ଼ୁଛି ସେଠି ଆମେ ଆମ ପଡ଼ିଶା ରାଜ୍ୟର କେତୋଟି ପିଲାଙ୍କ ପାଇଁ ନିଜର ପରିଚୟ ହରାଇଦେବା? ନିଜ ଭାଷାକୁ ଉଜାଡ଼ି ଦେବା? ବିଶ୍ୱାସ କରିବାକୁ ବାଧ୍ୟ ହେବେ ଯେ ଧୀରେଧୀରେ ଓଡ଼ିଶାର ଶିକ୍ଷାନୁଷ୍ଠାନମାନଙ୍କରେ ବ୍ୟାବହାରିକ ଭାଷା ଉପରେ ବର୍ଣ୍ଣିତ ଖେଚୁଡ଼ି ଭାଷା ହେଲାଣି । ଏଥିରେ ହିନ୍ଦୀ ଛୁଆଁ ଥିବାରୁ କେହି ହିନ୍ଦୀ ଭାଷା ବିଶାରଦ ଯେ ଆନନ୍ଦ ଅନୁଭବ କରିବେ ତାହା ମୋର ଧାରଣା ବାହାରେ । ଏମିତି ବେମୁରବା ଭାଷାର ଏନ୍ତୁଡ଼ିଶାଳ ହିନ୍ଦୀ ଭାଷାର ଅନେକ ଟିଭି ଚ୍ୟାନେଲ ଓ ବଲିଉଡ଼ । ଯାହା ଜଣାଶୁଣା ମିଡ଼ିଆରେ ପ୍ରସାରିତ ହୁଏ ତାକୁ ଯୁବଗୋଷ୍ଠୀ ଶୁଣନ୍ତି । ସେଥିରେ ଯୁବାମନକୁ ସୁହାଇବାକୁ ଏତେ ଯେ ଉପାଦାନ ଭରି ରଖାଯାଇଛି, ଆମ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ମିଡ଼ିଆ ଏଯାଏ ପହଞ୍ଚି ପାରୁନାହିଁ; ବରଂ ସେମାନେ ହିନ୍ଦୀ ଭାଷାରେ ପ୍ରସାରିତ ଅନେକ କାର୍ଯ୍ୟକ୍ରମର ନକଲ କରିବାକୁ ଯାଇ ଆହୁରି ବେଙ୍ଗା ଭାଷାଟିଏ ତିଆରି କରୁଛନ୍ତି । ଆଉ ଏ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ରସାର କେଉଁ ଗୋଟିଏ ଭାଷାର ଲାଭ ଯେ ହେଉନାହିଁ ଏକଥା କହିବା ବାହୁଲ୍ୟ । ଏ ଭାଷା ଏବେ ରିଆଲିଟି ଶୋ କିମ୍ବା ଗୀତନାଚ ଭଳି ଅନେକ ମନୋରଞ୍ଜନଧର୍ମୀ ଓଡ଼ିଆ କାର୍ଯ୍ୟକ୍ରମରେ ଦେଖିବାକୁ ମିଳିବ । ଭାବନ୍ତୁ, ଆଜିକାଲିର ଶିଶୁମାନେ ବହିଠାରୁ ଯେତେ ଦୂରେଇଗଲେଣି ଆଉ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ଶିକ୍ଷାକୁ ସ୍କୁଲରେ ଯେଉଁଭଳି ଅବହେଳା କରାଯାଉଛି ସେଥିରେ ପିଲାଟିଏ କେମିତି ଅବା ଶିଖିବ ଓଡ଼ିଆ? ଯଦି ଏ ରାଜ୍ୟର ଆଗାମୀ ପିଢ଼ି ଏ ଭାଷା ଶିଖୁନାହାନ୍ତି, ଯୁବାଏ ୪୦ ଭାଗରୁ ଅଧିକ ଶବ୍ଦ ହିନ୍ଦୀ, ଇଂରାଜୀରୁ ଆହୁରି ଓଡ଼ିଆରେ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରୁଛନ୍ତି ତା'ହେଲେ ଆଉ ଦଶଟି ବର୍ଷରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ କେଉଁଠି ଥିବ? ଭାଷାଟି କେବଳ କ'ଣ କିଛି ଜେଜେ ବୟସର ଲୋକଙ୍କ ପାଇଁ, ଆଉ ସାହିତ୍ୟ ଚଷୁଥିବା କିଛି ତରୁଣ ଓ ପ୍ରବୀଣଙ୍କ ପାଇଁ?

ତେବେ ଏଥିପାଇଁ ଆମ ଗଣମାଧ୍ୟମ ଏକ ଗୁରୁଭୂମିକା ନିଭାଇ ପାରନ୍ତା । ଏବେ ଯେଉଁ ଓଡ଼ିଆକୁ ଆମେ ମାନକ ବୋଲି ମାନୁଛେ ସେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଆମ ଭାଷାର ପୁରାକାଳର ଭାଷା ସହ କିଛି ତ ସାମଞ୍ଜସ୍ୟ ରଖେ । ତା'ର ବାକ୍ୟ ଗଢ଼ଣ ଓ ଶବ୍ଦସମ୍ଭାର ଏବଂ ଦେଶୀୟ କହି ଏକ ସମୟରେ ଫିଙ୍ଗାଯାଇଥିବା ଅନେକ ଶବ୍ଦର ପୁନଃବ୍ୟବହାର କରି ଆଜିର ଖବରକାଗଜ, ରେଡ଼ିଓ-ଟେଲିଭିଜନ ଏବଂ ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟ୍‍ରେ ଫେସବୁକ୍‍, ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ, ଅନ୍ୟାନ୍ୟ ପୋର୍ଟାଲ ଆଦିରେ ଅଧିକରୁ ଅଧିକ ବ୍ୟବହାର କଲେ ତା'ର ପ୍ରଭାବ ସିଧାସଳଖ ସମାଜ ଉପରେ ପଡ଼ନ୍ତା । ହିନ୍ଦୀ କି ବାକି ଭାଷାରୁ କପି ନକରି ଆମର ଅନେକ ସୁଖପାଠ୍ୟ ସାହିତ୍ୟରୁ କାହାଣୀମାନ ଓ ଆମର ନିଆରା ପରିବେଷଣ ଶୈଳୀଟିଏ ତିଆରି କରାଗଲେ ଆଗାମୀ କେଇ ପିଢ଼ିର ମନ ଭିତରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଯେ ବ୍ୟାବହାରିକ ଭାଷାଭାବେ ଏକ ସମୃଦ୍ଧ ଭାଷା, ଏ ଭାବନା ତିଆରି ହୋଇଯାଆନ୍ତା ।

ଅନେକେ ଆଳ ଦେଖାନ୍ତି ଯେ କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟରରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ବ୍ୟବହାର ଦୁରୂହ । ଅନ୍ତତଃ ୮ବର୍ଷ ଧରି ଓଡ଼ିଆ ବ୍ୟବହାରର ଅନୁଭୂତିରୁ କହିବି ଯେ କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟରରେ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରିବାପାଇଁ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଜଗତର ବାକି ଭାଷା ତୁଳନାରେ କୌଣସି ଗୁଣରେ କମ୍‍ ନୁହେଁ । ତେବେ କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟର ଓ ମୋବାଇଲରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପଢ଼ିବା ଓ ଲେଖିବା ସହିତ ଅଧିକରୁ ଅଧିକ ୱେବସାଇଟ୍‍ରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରିବା ଅଧିକ ବଢ଼ିନାହିଁ । ପାଖାପାଖି ୧୦-୨୦ଜଣ ସ୍ୱେଚ୍ଛାସେବୀଙ୍କ ଅବଦାନରେ ୮୦୦୦ରୁ ଅଧିକ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ପ୍ରସଙ୍ଗ ତିଆରି ହୋଇପାରିଲା ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆରେ, ଆମର ଏତେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଇଞ୍ଜିନିଅର କ'ଣ ଓଡ଼ିଶାର ପାରମ୍ପରିକ ଖେଳକୁ ନେଇ ମୋବାଇଲ କି କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟର ଗେମ୍‍, ପିଲାଙ୍କୁ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଶିଖାଇବା ପାଇଁ ଇଣ୍ଟରାକ୍ଟିଭ ଗେମ ତିଆରନ୍ତେ ନାହିଁ? ଆଜିକାଲି ପିଲାଏ ବହି ପଢ଼ାରୁ ଯେଉଁ ଦୂରେଇ ଯାଉଛନ୍ତି, ଇ-ବୁକ୍‍ ବା ଡିଜିଟାଲ ବହି ତିଆରିଲେ ସେସବୁ ପିଲାଏ ଭଲ ଭାବେ ପଢ଼ିପାରନ୍ତେ ।

ଭାଷା ସାହିତ୍ୟର ଚଉହଦିରୁ ମୁକୁଳି ବେପାର ବଣିଜର ଭାଷା, ଶାସନର ଭାଷା ହେଉ । ଭାଷା ଶିକ୍ଷାଦୀକ୍ଷାର କେବଳ ଭାଷା ନୁହେଁ ବରଂ ବ୍ୟାବହାରିକ ଭାଷା ହେଲେ ଯାଇ ଲୋକେ ତାକୁ ଅଧିକ କହିବା ଆରମ୍ଭ କରିବେ । ଭାଷାକୁ ନେଇ ହୀନମନ୍ୟତା ସେତେବେଳେ ଦୂର ହେବ ଯେତେବେଳେ ଆମେ ଆମ ଭାଷାକୁ ଅର୍ଥ ରୋଜଗାରର ଭାଷା କରିପାରିବୁ । ଭାଷା ଯେତେବେଳେ ବିତ୍ତଶାଳୀଙ୍କ ଭାଷା ହୁଏ ସେଥିରେ ଗବେଷଣା ହେବାର ଅଧିକ । ଭାଷା ଯେଉଁଠି ଯେତେବେଶି ସାମାଜିକ, ସେଠି ସେତେ ବ୍ୟାପକ । କେରଳୀମାନେ ମନ୍ଦିରର ପୂଜାରେ ଖାଲି ନୁହେଁ, ଚର୍ଚ୍ଚର ଉପାସନାରେ ଆଉ ମସଜିଦର ଫାଟକରେ ମଧ୍ୟ ମାଲାୟାଲାମର ବହୁଳ ବ୍ୟବହାର କରନ୍ତି । ସେମାନଙ୍କର ଧର୍ମଗତ ବିଭେଦ ବାହ୍ୟ ରୂପରେ ଏତେ କମ ଯେ ବେଳେବେଳେ ଜଣାପଡ଼େ ନାହିଁ କିଏ କେଉଁ ଧର୍ମର । ଆମର ଭାଷାର ବ୍ୟବହାର ବେଳେବେଳେ ସାମାଜିକ ବ୍ୟବହାରରୁ ସଂକୀର୍ଣ୍ଣ ହୋଇ ଧର୍ମଗତ ହୋଇଛି । କଳିଙ୍ଗର ଇତିହାସ କହେ ଏ ଚତୁର ଜାତି ସାଗର ବେଳାର ଲମ୍ବା ବେଳାଭୂଇଁ ଉପକୂଳରେ ବସତି ସ୍ଥାପନ କରି କେତେ ଦଶନ୍ଧି ରାଜୁତି କରିଥିଲା, ତା'ର ବଣିକ-ସାଧବ ପୁଅ ମାଛମରାଠାରୁ ପାଟଲୁଗା ବୁଣା ବହୁବିଧ କାମରେ ନିପୁଣ ହୋଇ ନିଜର ଭାଷା, ଚଳଣି ଓ ଜୀବନର ଅନେକ ରଙ୍ଗ ଦକ୍ଷିଣ ଏସିଆର ଦେଶମାନଙ୍କରେ ମାଖିଥିଲେ । ସେ ଭାଷା ବଳବାନ, ଯାହା ବେପାର ଆଉ ଶାସନର ଭାଷା । ସରକାରୀ କାମ ସବୁ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାରେ ହେବା ଆରମ୍ଭ ହେଉ । ଆଗରୁ ଦୁଇଥର ହୋଇ ବନ୍ଦ ହୋଇଯାଇଥିବା ଏ ବ୍ୟବସ୍ଥାର ପୁନରାରମ୍ଭ କରାଗଲେ ଅନେକ ସମ୍ଭାବନା ଠିଆ ହୁଅନ୍ତା ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ଭବିଷ୍ୟତ ପାଇଁ । ଏଥି ସହିତ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାକୁ ନେଇ ଚାକିରି କରିବାପାଇଁ ବି ବାଟ ମିଳିଯାଆନ୍ତା ଯୁବପିଢ଼ିକୁ ।

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/subhashish-panigrahi-october-13-2014-editorial-in-samaja

Samskrita Vaibhavam (Sanskrit Wiki Outreach Program)

Shubha and Sayant Mahato — 2014-10-31T14:02:51Z

To celebrate the revival of Sanskrit language, the Bangalore chapter of Samskrita Bharati organised a two-day mega event "Samskrita Vaibhavam" at VSR Kalyan Mantapa in Bangalore on August 9 and 10, 2014.

Competition, Conference & Exhibition

The theme of the event was promotion of Sanskrit. It offered an encapsulation of the culture and heritage woven into Sanskrit. No wonder, the event attracted more than thousand samskrita premis or Sanskrit enthusiasts, who actively participated in the proceedings.

As is well known, Samskrita Bharati with a missionary zeal, is engaged in popularising Sanskrit language and demonstrating to the world that Sanskrit cannot only be easily learnt by anyone but also by those who can easily speak in Sanskrit and transact daily activities too. Samskrita Bharati organises Samskrita Shibirams through which these concepts are popularised.

Notable during the event was a seminar on "Why Samskrit". Dr. Chamu Krishna Shastry, Samskrita Bharati; Dr. Srinivas Varkhede, Karnataka Samskrit University; Dr. Ramachandra Bhat, Veda Vignyana Gurukulam; Dr. Balachandra Rao, mathematecian and astrophysicist; Dr. VR Anil Kumar, Kalpa Heritage Trust; and Uttara Nerurkar, Vedic scholar, were the expert speakers.

Additionally, an exhibition was also organised. Here, there was a stall on "Samskrita Wikipedia" (Sa.Wikipedia). This was a grand attraction for visitors as Sanskrit Wikipedia showed that (Sanskrit) knowledge can be accessed in a split second with a click on a computer.

The Sanskrit Wikipedia wing of Samskrita Bharati is thankful for the timely support from CIS-A2K, which was used for designing and printing handbills and brochures about Sanskrit Wikipedia. The brochures, which were distributed among participants, were well appreciated as it helped them connect with Sa.Wikipedia, and the myriad possibilities available to them by learning Sanskrit.

The entire event was of great significance in the promotion of Sanskrit language.

Acknowledgement from Samskrita Bharati

This article was written by Shubha and Sayant Mahato.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/samskrita-vaibhavam

Open access platform to save the Odia Indian language

subha — 2014-10-24T15:32:40Z

In February 2014, the Government of India declared the South Asian language Odia as the 6th classical language of India which is one among 22 scheduled languages of India and has a literary heritage of more than 5,000 years. There are documents for more than 3,500 years, and the rest are undocumented oral histories.

The article was published by Opensource.com on October 22, 2014.

The native Odia speakers became hopeful of getting a lot of language related projects implemented to grow the lineage of this long literary heritage and see the language used and spoken globally, not just in literature but in computer and mobile games, interactive computer applications and in other digital media—and to reach the masses as a communicative language.

So far, not many federal initiatives have been put into place, nor a single policy level change has been made, to implement a standard as simple as like Unicode for easy access of information. And, there are very few mobile apps that offer concise and easy to digest content. Overall, there is not much content online that is available in a standard format that is easy to search, access, and reproduce,

Wikisource is here to change that and is working to open up a whole new world of online resources for readers.

With more than 40 million native Odia speakers living in the Indian state of Odisha and its neighboring states and the diaspora in rest of the world—primarily living in countries like the US, UK, UAE, and many of the South and East Asian counties—far less content in the Odia language has been made available on the Internet. The highest is Odia Wikipedia, with 8441 articles created by October 2014. A bigger problem is that though there are a few websites with Unicode content, government portals do not have content in Unicode to make them searchable and reusable. A non-profit Srujanika, with support from two other institutions, has digitized around 740 books under the scope of the project: Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB), most of which were published between 1850 and 1950. This remains the largest digital archive so far for the Odia language, yet all of the books are scanned PDFs, restricting searchability of the content.

Odia Wikisource is a project that aims for the digitization of rare books that are out of copyright. The project is even allowing authors and publishers to donate their copyrighted work by re-licensing under CC0 or CC BY-SA licenses. The goal is to bring about access to large volumes of books and manuscripts and create more Open Educational Resources (OERs). The single biggest advantage of the Wikisource project at-large is that it makes text for books available in Unicode standard, making it searchable on the web and allows readers to copy and use it elsewhere. Most other conventional archival systems lack this important feature.

Wikisource is run by a volunteers and communities who often retype or prepare the books by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a technique that converts scanned images of books into text. Participate and contribute to Odia Wikisource by visiting or.wikisource.org, the project is open to all who want to help!

As a Wikimedia project, Odia Wikisource went through a thorough and long approval process for about 1 year and 9 months, as an active incubator project—first by the Language Committee and then by the Wikimedia Foundation's Board. During this incubation phase, the project has digitized three books completely and one partially—thanks to the individual contributors. An educational institution Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) in collaboration with the Wikimedia funded Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) are in the process of digitizing 9 books by the author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty that were re-licensed to CC BY-SA 3.0 earlier this year.

Four new Wikisource contributors joined the project in response to a tweet and a Facebook post by the author to digitize The Odia Bhagabata, classic literature compiled in 14th century. "Content that has already been typed in fonts of various non-Unicode based encoding, now they can be converted by (this) like it was done for The Odia Bhagabata, that was typed and available on the community hosted website Odia.org. New contributors did not face the problem of retyping,” says Manoj Sahukar, who along with the author designed a converter for reading text and transforming into Unicode for The Odia Bhagabata.

Questions for early contributors to Odia Wikisource

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): You have been with Odia Wikisource since its inception. How you think it will help other Odias?
Mrutyunjaya Kar, a long time Wikimedian who proofreads the books on Odia Wikisource: Odias around the globe will have access to a vast amount of old as well as new books and manuscripts online in the tip of their finger. Knowing more about the long and glorious history of Odisha will become easier.

SP: Do you think any particular section of the society is going to be benefited by this?
Nasim Ali, the oldest active Odia Wikimedian and Wikisource writer: Books contain the gist of all human knowledge. The ease of access and spread of books are the markers of the intellectual status of a society. And in this e-age, Wikisource can be helpful by not just providing easy access to a plethora of books under free licenses but also aiding the spread of basic education in developing economies. Together with Wikisource and cheaper internet this could catalyze a Renaissance of 21st century.

SP: How does it feel to be one of the few contributors to digitize Odia Bhagabata? How do you want to get involved in future?
Nihar Kumar Dalai, a Wikisource writer: This is a proud opportunity for me to be a part of digitization of such old literature. I, at times, think if I could get involved with this full time!

SP: You have digitized almost two books, are the highest contributor to the project and also one of the main reasons for Odia Wikisource getting approved. What are your plans next to grow it and take to masses?
Pankajmala Sarangi, a Wikisource writer: I would be happy to contribute by typing more books on Odia so that they can be stored and available to all. We can take this to masses through social, print and audio & visual media and organizing meetings/discussions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-source-subhashish-panigrahi-october-22-2014-open-access-platform-to-save-the-odia-indian-language

Tulu Wikipedia Workshop cum Editathon at Udupi

pavanaja — 2014-10-31T14:54:07Z

A three-day programme was held at Udupi from October 15 to 17, 2014 with an aim to increase the presence of Tulu in the online world. The first day comprised the inauguration programme and a workshop to understand the Wiki markup. The next two days were devoted to the edit-a-thon where participants added articles to Tulu Wikipedia.

The team comprised 18 girls from the Government PU College, Udupi and some other women. The event was organised by Tulu Sahitya Academy and sponsored by MGM College, Udupi and the Regional Research Centre, Udupi. Janaki Brahmavar, Chairperson of Tulu Sahitya Academy, presided over the function. She spoke about the efforts being made to add Tulu in Unicode. Jayakar Shetty, President Tulu Okkoota, expressed his happiness over the fact that it was a batch of about 20 girls who participated in the workshop cum edit-a-thon. There is a grouse that male editors far outnumber females in editing Wikipedia. This could be one instance where only female editors actively added articles to Tulu Wikipedia over three days. The programme was well covered by the print and television media. The good news is that the girls who participated in the edit-a-thon have continued adding articles. As on October 26, 2014, the total number of articles in Tulu Wikipedia has gone up to 574.

Tulu is one of the Dravidian languages spoken primarily by people from the south coast of Karnataka and north coast of Kerala[1]. As per the Census of 2001, there were 1,722,768 Tulu speakers [2]; figures of 2011 census are still not available. There are a lot of Tulu-speaking people residing outside Karnataka and Kerala in Mumbai, Goa and Gulf countries. It is estimated that the total number of Tulu-speaking people is more than 2.5 million. There has been a long-standing demand to include Tulu in the 8^th Schedule of the Constitution of India[3], [4]. Tulu had its own script long ago, it is not in use. Currently, Tulu is written in the Kannada script. Tulu has a vast vocal tradition, and there is a huge collection of knowledge that is transferred across generations orally. Efforts are being made to document this vocal tradition. The history of Tulu literature has already been documented in Kannada. Recently, the Karnataka government introduced Tulu as an optional language for schools in Mangalore and Udupi districts. However, these students don't have many books to read apart from the prescribed textbooks. There are some Tulu books in the creative writing domain, but there is hardly any book of an encyclopaedic nature in Tulu language which the students can refer to. This is where Tulu Wikipedia becomes extremely significant.

Tulu Wikipedia has been in incubation since 2007[5]. Some editing activities in Tulu Wikipedia were carried out during 2007-08. But the initial momentum gradually subsided, and most editors stopped editing. Tulu Wikipedia thereafter went into a dormant status. During the Alvas Vishwa Nudisiri Programme at Moodabidre in December 2013, Dr BA VivekaRai, former vice-chancellor of Kannada University, who was the President of the cultural and literary meet, dwelt at length on the importance of implementing Tulu language in technology. This was followed by a talk by Dr UB Pavanaja, a member of the CIS-A2K team. He continued from where Viveka Rai left off, and talked about bringing world knowledge in Tulu, rejuvenating Tulu Wikipedia, and pressuring the state and Union governments towards including Tulu in the 8^th Schedule of the Constitution.

Subsequently, a workshop on editing Tulu Wikipedia was held at Mangalore on January 19 this year under the leadership and initiative of Dr BA VivekaRai. This was followed by another edit-a-thon at Mangalore on April 5 and another workshop at Udupi on May 25. All these efforts have given a new impetus to Tulu Wikipedia. The number of articles in Tulu Wikipedia was 147 as in March 2014, which went up to 365 in July. The Tulu Sahitya Academy realised the importance and pitched into the effort of making it live.

[1] http://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/dravidian

[2] http://www.censusindia.gov.in/%28S%28i4hlwuf0ltgmdnejdawhdr45%29%29/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_Online/Language/partb.aspx

[3] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/requests-to-include-38-languages-in-constitution-pending-govt/article58221.ece

[4] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mangalore/Include-Tulu-in-8th-Schedule-demands-forum/articleshow/38992142.cms

[5] http://tools.wmflabs.org/meta/catanalysis/?title=Wp%2Ftcy&cat=0&wiki=incubatorwiki#overview_edits

Media Coverage

http://www.mangaloretoday.com/newsbriefs/Wikipedia-can-establish-Tulu-in-a-wider-way.html

http://v4news.com/enliven-the-tulu-viki-fidia-first-and-then-add-tulu-to-the-8th-schedule-dr-ug-pavanaja-bangalore-rep-in-udupi/

http://www.mangaloretoday.com/newsbriefs/2-Day-Workshop-on-Tulu-in-internet.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/tulu-wikipedia-workshop-cum-editathon-at-udupi

Converting from nonUnicode (Nudi, Baraha, ...) font encoding to Unicode Kannada

pavanaja — 2016-10-23T15:36:25Z

People have been using computers for typing and printing Kannada text for more than 25 years. Most of the usage of Kannada on computers was limited to the DTP arena.

People made use of packages like PageMaker (Version 6.5 or 7) to type and compose pages. Even now, many people still use these packages for Kannada DTP work. The text entered into these packages is stored as font glyph codes rather than character encodings. Non-Unicode truetype fonts like Nudi, Baraha, ShreeLipi, Akruti, etc, are some of the most popular fonts being used.

The system does not understand these characters as Kannada characters. Any text based operations like search, replace, sorting, spell-check, text-to-speech, etc, are not possible with this kind of text. Employing Unicode for all digitisation works of Kannada text solves this problem. Usage of Unicode for Kannada has become prominent only recently. All websites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Wikisource, etc, want the text only in Unicode. There is still a large amount of text entered and stored with old non-Unicode font based encodings. These are mostly present in the form of PageMaker files. This blog post explains the process of converting the text present in PageMaker into Kannada Unicode text.

The Kannada and Culture Department of the Government of Karnataka have released Unicode complaint open-type fonts and Unicode based software for Kannada under GPL. These are available for free download on their website (http://kannadasiri.co.in/index/software). Download and
install “Ascii to Unicode Kannada Converter” from this page. This software works only in Windows. Now you are ready to convert the text from PageMaker file into Unicode.

Open the PageMaker file. Select the Text tool depicted by a big “T” shaped icon. Click anywhere in the text area. Select the entire text (Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C). Now open Notepad and paste this text into that (press Ctrl-V). The text will appear gibberish in Notepad. Don’t worry about it. Save the file as plain text file (.TXT file). Remember where you have saved the file.

Now run the “Kannada ASCII Unicode Converter” software. In the first textbox enter the name of the ASCII file to be converted (the file you just saved from Notepad). In the bottom textbox enter a filename for the Unicode text file that will be created by the software. Select the default “GOK (Kuvempu Nudi Baraha)”, or other encoding as the case may be, as the encoding from which the text has to be converted. Click on the button written “ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿ”. It will show the progress of conversion.

Once the conversion is complete, it will display an appropriate message to indicate completion of the conversion. If you open the text file created by the software, it will have the text converted into Unicode. This text can be used in Wikisource, Wikipedia, etc.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/converting-from-non-unicode-nudi-baraha-font-encoding-to-unicode-kannada

ನಿರಂಜನರ ಕೃತಿಗಳು CC-BY-SA 4.0 ಪರವಾನಗಿಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ಮರುಪ್ರಕಟಗೊಳ್ಳಲಿವೆ

Omshivaprakash and Tejas Jain — 2014-11-03T15:04:23Z

ಕನ್ನಡ ರಾಜ್ಯೋತ್ಸವದ ಸಂದರ್ಭದಲ್ಲಿ ನಿರಂಜನರ ಬಹುಪಾಲು ಕೃತಿಗಳು CC-BY-SA 4.0 ಪರವಾನಗಿಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ಮರುಪ್ರಕಟಗೊಳ್ಳಲಿವೆಯೆಂದು ಸಿಐಎಸ್-ಎ೨ಕೆಯ ಸಹಯೋಗದೊಂದಿಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಳಗವು ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ಹರ್ಷಿಸುತ್ತದೆ.

The article by Omshivaprakash and Tejas Jain was published in ನನ್ ಮನ on November 1, 2014.

ನಿರಂಜನ (೧೯೨೪-೧೯೯೨) , ಇದು ಕುಳಕುಂದ ಶಿವರಾವ್ ಅವರ ಲೇಖನಾಮ. ಇವರು ೨೦ನೇ ಶತಮಾನದ ಪ್ರಮುಖ ಲೇಖಕ ಮತ್ತು ಪ್ರಗತಿಪರ ಚಳವಳಿಯ ಮುಂದಾಳು. ಅವರ ಸುಮಾರು ಐದು ದಶಕಗಳ ಸಂಮೃದ್ಧವಾದ ಕೃತಿಗಳು ಕಾದಂಬರಿ, ಸಣ್ಣ ಕಥೆಗಳು, ನಾಟಕಗಳು, ಜೀವನ ಕಥನಗಳು, ರಾಜಕೀಯ ವ್ಯಾಖ್ಯಾನಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಭಾಷಾಂತರಗಳನ್ನು ಒಳಗೊಂಡಿವೆ. ಅವರು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಾರ್ತಾಪತ್ರಿಕೆ ಮತ್ತು ನಿಯತಕಾಲಿಕಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನಿಯತ ಅಂಕಣಕಾರರಾಗಿದ್ದರು. ಅವರ ಸಾಧನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಯುವಕರಿಗಾಗಿ ೭ ಸಂಪುಟಗಳ ಜ್ಞಾನ ಗಂಗೋತ್ರಿ ಮತ್ತು ೨೫ ಸಂಪುಟಗಳ ಪ್ರಪಂಚದ ಮಹತ್ತರವಾದ ಕಥೆಗಳ ಸಂಕಲನಗಳು ಸೇರಿವೆ.

ನಿರಂಜನರ ಒಟ್ಟು ೫೫ ಕೃತಿಗಳು ಮರುಪ್ರಕಟಗೊಳ್ಳಲಿವೆ. ಇದು CC-BY-SA 4.0 ಪರವಾನಗಿಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ಭಾರತೀಯ ಭಾಷೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಕಟಗೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತಿರುವ ಒಬ್ಬನೇ ಲೇಖಕನ ಕೃತಿಗಳ ಅತಿ ದೊಡ್ಡ ಸಂಗ್ರಹವಾಗಿರಬಹುದು. ಇದನ್ನು ಆಚರಿಸಲು ಒಂದು ಔಪಚಾರಿಕ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮವನ್ನು, ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟೀವ್ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್ ಪಾಮುಖ್ಯತೆಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಒಂದು ಅಭಿಶಿಕ್ಷಣದ ಜೊತೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ೨೦೧೪ನೇ ನವೆಂಬರ್ ತಿಂಗಳಿನ ಮೊದಲ ವಾರದಲ್ಲಿ ನೆಡೆಸಲು ಯೋಚಿಸುತ್ತಿದ್ದೇವೆ. ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ಕರಾರುವಾಕ್ಕಾದ ವಿವರಗಳನ್ನು ಸಧ್ಯದಲ್ಲೇ ಹಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲಾಗುವುದು.ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಳಗ ಮತ್ತು ಸಿಐಎಸ್-ಎ೨ಕೆಯು ನಿಮ್ಮನ್ನು ಸಮಾರಂಭದಲ್ಲಿ ನೋಡಲು ಸಂತಸಪಡುತ್ತದೆ. ಕೆಳಗಿನ ಪುಸ್ತಕಗಳು CC-BY-SA 4.0 ಪರವಾನಗಿಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ಮರುಪ್ರಕಟಗೊಳ್ಳಲು ಸಿಐಎಸ್-ಎ೨ಕೆಯ ಸಲಹೆಗಾರರೂ ಆಗಿರುವ ತೇಜಸ್ವಿನಿ ನಿರಂಜನರ ಮಹತ್ತರವಾದ ಆರಂಭಿಕ ಕೆಲಸವನ್ನು ನಾವು ಸ್ಮರಿಸುತ್ತೇವೆ.

ಲೇಖನದ ಕನ್ನಡ ಅನುವಾದ: ತೇಜಸ್ ಜೈನ್

ಚಿತ್ರ, ಇನ್ಫೋಬಾಕ್ಸ್ ಮತ್ತು ಇತರೆ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಮೂಲ: ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ

About the Authors

OmShivaprakash and Tejas Jain are long time Kannada Wikimedians and enthusiasts of free and open knowledge in Kannada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kannada-work-released-under-cc-by-sa

More Than 40 Million People Await the Launch of Odia Wikisource

subha — 2014-11-04T13:58:48Z

Speakers of Odia will soon have mountains of books to read online in their mother tongue, following the launch of the Odia Wikisource, which will make accessible many rare books that have entered the public domain.

The article by Subhashish Panigrahi was published in Global Voices on October 18, 2014 and thereafter mirrored on the Wikimedia Blog on October 21, 2014.

Authors and publishers are also invited to donate their copyrighted work, possibly bringing open access to large volumes of books and manuscripts, creating a vast archive of educational resources. And everything will be in Odia.

One of the biggest advantages of Wikisource is that all its books are available in Unicode, meaning that Google's search engine indexes the texts’ entirety, and readers are able to copy easily what they wish. (Most conventional archival systems lack this feature.) A volunteer community administers Wikisource. To upload a book's content, volunteers either retype the books word-for-word, or, when possible, use Optical Character Recognition (commonly known as “OCR“), which converts scanned images into editable text. Available at or.wikisource.org, Odia is Wikisource's eleventh Indic language.

There are more than 40 million native Odia speakers in the world. Most live in the Indian state of Odisha and its neighboring states, but there is a large diaspora in countries like the US, UK, UAE, and across South and East Asia. Despite being spoken by so many people, Odia's online presence is relatively small.

As of October 2014, Odia Wikipedia hosted 8,441 articles. The state government's websites have Odia-language content, naturally, but none of the text is in Unicode, making the materials invisible to search engines and difficult to share. Thanks to individual and organizational efforts, some Odia-language websites have recently emerged with Unicode content.

With support from the non-profit organization Pragati Utkal Sangha and the National Institute of Technology Rourkela, a Bhubaneswar-based outfit has digitized about 740 books through the Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB) project. Most of these texts were published between 1850 and 1950. The OAOB project is the largest existing digital archive of Odia literature, but the archived books are only available as scanned PDFs, restricting readers’ ability to search within the texts.

As a Wikimedia project, Odia Wikisource underwent a long approval process, after running as an active incubator project for nearly two years. Both the Language Committee and the Wikimedia Foundation's Board reviewed and endorsed the project.

Odia Wikisource has already digitized and proofread three books entirely. In collaboration with the Wikimedia-funded Centre for Internet and Society‘s Access to Knowledge, the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) has partially digitized another book, as well. KISS is also busy digitizing another Nine books by Odia-language author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty that were relicensed to CC-BY-SA 3.0 earlier this year.

In response to posts on Twitter and Facebook, four new contributors recently joined Wikisource to help digitize “The Odia Bhagabata,” a literary classic compiled in the 14th century. “Content that have already been typed with fonts of non-Unicode encoding systems could be converted by converters which was the case of Odia Bhagabata. New contributors did not face the problem of retyping the text, as the book was already available on a website Odia.org and is out of copyright”, says Manoj Sahukar, who (along with yours truly) designed a converter that helped to transcribe “Bhagabata”.

Rising Voices contacted some of those whose efforts made this happen.

Mrutyunjaya Kar (MK), Long time Wikimedian who has proof-read the books on Odia Wikisource
Rising Voices (RV): Youre there with Odia Wikisource since its inception. How you think it will help other Odias?
MK: Odias around the globe will have access to a vast amount of old as well as new books and manuscripts online in the tip of their finger. Knowing more about the long and glorious history of Odisha will become easier.

Nihar Kumar Dalai (NKD), Wikisource writer
RV: How does it feel to be one of the few contributors to digitize Odia Bhagabata. How you want to get involved in future?
NKD: This is a proud opportunity for me to be a part of digitization of such old literature. I, at times, think if I could get involved with this full time!

Nasim Ali (NA), Oldest active Odia Wikimedian and Wikisource writer
RV: Do you think any particular section of the society is going to be benefited by this?
NA: Books contain the gist of all human knowledge. The ease of access and spread of books are the markers of the intellectual status of a society. And in this e-age Wikisource can be helpful by not just providing easy access to a plethora of books under free licenses but also aiding the spread of basic education in developing economies. Together with Wikisource and cheaper internet this could catalyze a Renaissance of 21st century.

Pankajmala Sarangi (PS), Wikisource writer
RV: You have digitized almost two books, are the highest contributor to the project and also one of the main reasons for Odia Wikisource getting approved. What are your plans next to grow it and take to masses?
PS: I would be happy to contribute by typing more books on Odia so that they can be stored and available to all. We can take this to masses through social, print and audio & visual media and organizing meetings/discussions.

Amir Aharoni (AA), Wikimedia Language Committee member and Software Engineer at the Language Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation
RV: What you feel Wikisource could do to a language like Odia with more than 40 million speakers?
AA: In schools in Odisha, are there lessons of Odia literature? If the answer is yes, then it can do a very simple thing – make these lessons more fun and help children learn more! Everybody says that in Kerala this worked very well with Malayalam literature.

Clearly, strong passions motivate Odia Wikisource's volunteers, like Nihar Kumar Dalai, who writes on Facebook:

Hindi and English are fine, but our native language it bit more special! Who of us does not now about the art, culture, noted personalities, tourist spots and festivals of Odisha? But if you search online about all of these then there is very little available. There comes a simple and easy solution Odia Wikipedia. Like Odia Wikipedia, Odia Wikisource is another great place and this is my small contribution to bring Odia Bhagabata on Odia Wikisource.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/global-voices-subhashish-panigrahi-october-18-2014-more-than-400-million-people-await-launch-of-odia-wikisource