Centre for Internet and Society

Writing skills improve with Wikipedia editing

praskrishna — 2016-12-15T02:21:23Z

Pavan Santhosh said that contributing to Wikipedia and working in Wikimedia community improves our leadership qualities and writing skills. In an awareness session conducted about "You can edit Wikipedia" in JKC college, Guntur, Santhosh explained how to create and improve articles about Wikipedia in this program. Principal I.Nageswara Rao presided over this meeting.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/eenadu-december-3-2016-writing-skills-improve-with-wikipedia-editing

వంద రోజులు.. వంద వ్యాసాలు - తెలుగు వికీపీడియాలో మోత్కూరు యువకుని రికార్డు (100 Days...100 Articles: Wikipedian from Motkur created record in Telugu Wikipedia)

pavan — 2016-12-18T15:09:54Z

Pranay Raj Vangari of Motkur Padmashali colony created record in Telugu Wikipedia. "100 Days- 100 Articles" is already going on in many languages worldwide and Pranay Raj took challenge in Telugu Wikipedia, completed it successfully. Pranay is theatre scholor. He started first article in this challenge on september 8 and continued to write articles on every day till December 16 to complete 100 articles. Pranay said that two other Telugu Wikipedians (Pavan and Meena) successfully completed the challenge and explained that he inspired from them to complete it. Telangana state language & cultural department director Mamidi Harikrishna felicitated Pranay in His chamber on this occasion and appreciated for his work.

Clipping of the article in Andhra Jyoti:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/100-days-100-articles-wikipedian-from-motkur-created-record-in-telugu-wikipedia

Pranay Raj record in 100 days-100 articles

pavan — 2016-12-19T18:16:03Z

Telugu Theatre scholar Pranay Raj Vangari from Motkur of Yadadri District, Telangana created record by completing a challenge that is famous worldwide in Wikimedia community - "100 Days-100 Articles". Pranay Raj is a theatre scholar and artist who used to travel length and breadth of Telangana & Andhra Pradesh for research and performances.

Even in that situations, he started first article in challenge on September 8th and completed 100 articles in December 16th. Telangana State Language & Cultural department director Mamidi Harikrishna felicitated Pranay Raj after completion on completing 100 Wikidays challenge. Pranay said that two other Telugu Wikipedians completed this challenge successfully before him and he told they inspired him to take this up and complete. Pranay agreed that he faced some difficulties in writing articles in places where network is low. He said that he wouldn't stop with 100 wikidays but would continue challenge for whole day by creating 365 days and also said he would create more Telangana related articles.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/pranay-raj-record-in-100-days-100-articles

వికీపీడియాతో విజ్ఞాన విప్లవం

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:36:06Z

The article appeared in Andhra Bhoomi on December 11, 2016.

హైదరాబాద్, డిసెంబర్ 10: అన్ని భారతీయ భాషల్లో వికీపీడియాను అభివృద్ధి చేసేందుకు అవసరమైన శిక్షణ అందిస్తున్నామని వికీ ట్రైనర్, ఆంగ్ల వికీపీడియన్ టిటో దత్తా పేర్కొన్నారు. వికీపీడియాను అభివృద్ధి చేసేందుకు వివిధ కార్యక్రమాల నిర్వహణకు అవసరమైన నాయకత్వ శిక్షణ, వికీపీడియాలో పనికొచ్చే ఉపకరణాల గురించి రెండు రోజుల శిక్షణ కార్యక్రమాన్ని ఆయన శనివారం ప్రారంభించారు. తెలుగు వికీపీడియాను అభివృద్ధి చేయడం ద్వారా తెలుగు భాషాభివృద్ధితో పాటు ప్రపంచవ్యాప్తంగా ఉన్న తెలుగు వారికి తెలుగు విశేషాలు అందించిన వారమవుతామని, దీంతో సరికొత్త విజ్ఞాన విప్లవం వస్తుందని ఆయన పేర్కొన్నారు. వికీపీడియాను అభివృద్ధి చేయడానికి కాలేజీల్లో కార్యశాల, ఫోటోవాక్, ఎడిట్ ఆ థాన్ తదితర కార్యక్రమాలను నిర్వహించవచ్చని చెప్పారు. చరిత్రకారుడు, రచయిత, తెలుగు వికీపీడియన్ కట్టా శ్రీనివాసరావు మాట్లాడుతూ గోల్కొండ వంటి ప్రదేశాల్లో కూడా ప్రజలకు తెలియని చారిత్రక, సాంకేతిక ప్రదేశాలు అంశాలు ఉంటాయని అన్నారు. వాటి ఫోటోలు తీసి వికీమీడియా కామన్స్‌లో చేర్చవచ్చని తెలిపారు. ఈ కార్యక్రమాన్ని సిఐఎస్-ఎ2కె ప్రతినిధి పవన్ సంతోష్, వికీపీడియన్ ప్రణయ్ రాజ్ వంగరి నిర్వహించారు. కార్యక్రమంలో తెలుగు వికీపీడియన్లు కశ్యప్, నాగేశ్వరరావు, మీనా గాయత్రీ, వౌర్య వంటి వారితో పాటు కొత్తగా వికీపీడియాలో చేరిన వారు కూడా పాల్గొన్నారు.

Read the original published by Andhra Bhoomi on December 11, 2016

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/andhra-bhoomi-december-11-2016-article-on-wikipedia

Wikipedia Event in Mangalore

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:43:30Z

The article was published by Vijaya Karnataka on December 18, 2016.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/vijaya-karnataka-december-18-2016-wikipedia-event-in-mangalore

Mini Workshop on Tools: Wikipedia Monthly Meetup, Hyderabad

Manasa Rao and Pavan Santhosh — 2017-02-06T12:49:00Z

Telugu Wikipedia community held its monthly meet-up in Hyderabad on 28 August 2016.

The event was marked by a presentation on quick tools by Pavan Santhosh, Community Advocate and long time member of the Telugu Wikipedia community. He demonstrated the use of PrepBio, a tool that helps create infoboxes on biographical articles. “This make the process of editing and updating edits easier,” he said. He also spoke about Wiki ToDo, a tool that helps find articles with specific edits or improvements required. “This ensures that even new editors can contribute to quality improvement on wikis,” he pointed out. At the end of the session, the community members engaged in an activity that gave them a hands on insight into using these tools.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mini-workshop-on-tools-wikipedia-monthly-meetup-hyderabad

Only 8.5pc of Wikipedia Editors are Women. How do we fix the Gender Gap on the Internet?

ting — 2017-02-09T02:49:47Z

Women-related articles are generally shorter, more prone to deletion, and more likely to be peripheral pieces under male-centric articles.

This was published by Your Story on February 7, 2017.

I was beginning an introduction session at a college in Vijayawada. While my audience (mostly female students) was giggling, I wrote down a simple question on the whiteboard:

“I see more men than women in _____”

The response was some more shy giggling until some students slowly raised their hands. “Sports!” “Technology companies!” “Conferences!” “In governments!” “…When I am in my class.” There is no denying that we all observe the underrepresentation of women at some points and occasions in our lives. However, it is much harder to imagine and notice that Wikipedia, the most used online encyclopaedia and the 7^th most visited website worldwide, also poses a problematic imbalance in its content and editor demographics.

In 2011, a survey carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation found that only 8.5 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. Since then, the awareness has risen; many have found the editor demographic imbalance is a strong reflection of what the encyclopaedia does or does not cover, how the written language and discourse were constructed on the pages, and how discussion flows on article talk pages[1].

For example, scholars discovered that women-related articles are generally shorter, more prone to deletion, and more likely to be peripheral pieces under male-centric articles. To elaborate, in the network structure of Wikipedia articles, women’s pages lack centrality as they often provide links and mention related male figures in their writing but not the other way around. A glass ceiling also exists for the notability criteria. The threshold for a woman to be “notable enough” (from the perspective of a male-dominant community) to deserve a Wikipedia page is higher than that of male figures. Thus, the lack of women editors and an already male-centric structure pose a threat not only to the diversity of content but also to the very definition of knowledge.

But why?

For years, the foundation and local communities have tried to discover the reasons behind the gender gap and solutions to it. Former Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner posted on her blog nine reasons that are off-putting for women when they edit Wikipedia.

The non-beginner-friendly editing interface
Lack of personal free time
Lack of confidence and self-efficacy
Unwillingness to stir up or participate in conflicts and edit wars
Feeling that their edits are “too likely to be reverted or deleted”
Misogynistic environment
“Wikipedia culture is sexual”
Being addressed as male in languages that have grammatical gender
Wikipedia is not as socialising or as welcoming as other websites

In India and other parts of the world, various reasons can also contribute to the problem. Awareness, for example, is the first barrier to be tackled. Many women did not know that Wikipedia is editable or that there are Indian language versions that they can contribute to. Internet access and facilities are a couple more reasons. In case someone does not have a personal computer, a woman is usually more cautious and skeptical when using a public internet café and staying out late. Similarly, families of young women editors can be more concerned about their daughters’ participation in men-organised/male-dominant communities, especially when there are offline (on-site) activities. The roots of the issue are not merely at the community level, but also sociopolitical and cultural.

Many events and initiatives have been carried out from local to global community levels. ‘Women in Red (WiR)’, for example, is a global initiative to bring more women-related articles online. It encourages editors to turn ‘red links’ (non-existing pages) into ‘blue links’ (existing Wikipedia page). The project has helped increase female biographies from 15 percent (November 2014) of total biographies on English Wikipedia to 16.75 percent (November 2016)[2]. In March, Wikipedia communities around the globe also celebrate ‘Women’s History Month’, when edit-a-thons (marathons for Wikipedia editing) are held to help create more women’s articles online as well as to recruit more female volunteers and spread awareness. However, is this enough?

“A new debate: what matters?”

As we are raising more awareness, integrating gender gap issues into the community’s strategy plans and coming up with more intervention ideas to reach more potential women editors, it is time to revisit the meaning behind the work. In my early research time, I was to believe that ‘retention rate’ (whether female participants will stay active after an event), ‘number of articles created’, and the ‘event continuation potentials’ are the key factors in determining whether an event can be called successful. But the ideas have slowly changed as I have got to reach more female participants.

As a matter of fact, Wikipedia is about voluntary contribution and negotiating for consensus in quality knowledge creation as well as maintaining a friendly and open environment for all. In other words, we can ‘nudge’ people into Wikipedia editing but we should not (and need not to) ‘push’ them to do it. Especially in the situation of a wide gender gap, we should not make women feel like they are tokenised in the process — that we are targeting them due to their gender and that they should contribute more because they are female, the minority. When asked about the existing problems in the current gender gap interventions, an active Wikipedian once explained to me:

“Say if you are writing the biography of someone then you should be familiar with and interested in that person’s work. That’s why sometimes those gender-specific edit workshops backfire... If you are creating a bio just because this person is a woman, then I think it is missing the whole point of Wikipedia.”

In my opinion and through discussions with several female Wikipedians, I have realised that there should be a new debate and investigation on how intervention goals should be set and what these actions’ long-term results would be. While focusing on the retention rate of a new Wikipedian after an intervention, we limit ourselves in the frame of time and numbers. We should, instead, understand more about new members’ experiences and feedback to pinpoint the good motivations and expected barriers for them. With this information, we should help establish the motivation in event follow-ups and to minimise their barriers as much as the community can. Secondly, article quality should be stressed upon —even if it takes more time to publish her/his first article, it is a much more fruitful learning experience to understand the responsibility of a Wikipedian. After all, low-quality articles not only do not contribute to Wikipedia content but also lead to more deletion, which can be a discouraging experience for those who are new.

For event continuation, we should guide the participants to community engagement and support them to carry out more event ideas that can suit their interests and goals. In short, it is about creating involvement, discussion, and a sense of community instead of continuously pushing events on our end and have the women be passive participants. When asked about how one can define a “successful gender gap-bridging event,” one of the active organisers told me:

“For me, it is when conversations are happening. It is when we have both men and women, and that we can openly have a discussion about the issue and the difficulties and how we want to see changes.”

To put it simply, I believe that we should look at experiences more than numbers, focus on quality more than quantity, and try to reach people (both men and women) to stimulate discussion more than being fixated on the contents needed to balance out the asymmetry.

How to fix the Wikipedia gender gap is never an easy question to ask, but what I am sure about is that Wikipedia and its communities should be empowering rather than result-oriented and that our learning still has a long way to go.

[1] A “talk page” is attached to each Wikipedia article (found on the top-left corner of an article), where editors can hold discussions and debates or leave comments during the editing process.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-ting-yi-chang-february-7-2017-only-8.5-percent-of-wikipedia-editors-are-women-how-do-we-fix-the-gender-gap-on-the-internet

How to write differently for different Telugu digital platforms - awareness session to Indu Gnana Vedika

pavan — 2018-07-19T14:56:45Z

Different digital platforms require a different style of writing based on nature, ethos, and audience of the platform. Without which writer and piece of writing can only find rejections and deletions.

On June 9th, CIS-A2K Community advocate, and Telugu Wikipedia Admin Pavan Santhosh took a session which aimed to improve writing abilities on various digital platforms to members of Indu Gnana Vedika, who earlier collaborated with A2K to release and digitize their books in Wikisource. On 22 June 2014, CIS-A2K conducted an event to re-license 10 books into CC license and Training on Tewiki to members of Indu Gnana vedika. Later Indu Gnana Vedika members started digitizing those books in Telugu Wikisource & Creating articles about Indu Gnana Vedika books and other aspects in Telugu Wikipedia.

Telugu Wikipedia admins found many of those articles are not notable to be in Telugu Wikipedia, notified and discussed. Finally deleted majority of them. One of the users introduced to Tewiki during this project - Indusri Ushasri continued to contribute improving those 10 books in Telugu Wikisource and undeleted articles about Indu Gnana vedika in Telugu Wikipedia.This event intended to be respectful and good closure for the partnership. The event was designed to provide a better idea to interested members of the organization about varying styles of different digital platforms like Telugu Wikipedia, e-Magazines, Websites, etc., and help them to choose various platforms to contribute according to the subject they wanted to write.

Pavan demonstrated various aspects that needed to look into while writing such a piece like the ethos of the platform, target audience, etc., 5 participants from Indu gnana vedika along with Indusri Ushasri participated in this event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/how-to-write-differently-for-different-telugu-digital-platforms-awareness-session-to-indu-gnana-vedika

Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in Kolhapur

subodh — 2016-12-16T23:34:10Z

On behalf of CIS-A2K team Subodh Kulkarni conducted a Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Shivaji University in Kolhapur on 15 December 2016. The goal of the Wikipedia edit-a-thon was to build resources in the field of Political Science on Marathi Wikipedia and equip its participants with the process of contributing to Wikipedia, and to introduce it as a concept to them.

The workshop was conducted at the Political Science Department of Shivaji University for post graduate and research students and professors. The Head of the Political Science Department, Dr. Prakash Pawar actively took part in all the process. In all 22 new editors began their contribution on Wikipedia. The effort is the first step towards building long term institutional partnership with Shivaji University where many courses are run in Marathi language.

The Department of Mass Communication and the Department of Environment and Science have also evinced interest for conducting edit-a-thons for their students.

Overall the primary goals of the project include:

To introduce Wikipedia as an encyclopedia for research and a concept to new editors.
To Promote Marathi Wikipedia Community & promote the use of regional languages in Wikipedia.
To have an open interaction within the editors, existing as well as new.
To spread the awareness of Wikipedia as a powerful tool.

For more info, read the meta page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-in-kolhapur

Wikipedian Pavan Santhosh says Telugu Wikipedians are creating Knowledge revolution (in Telugu)

praskrishna — 2016-12-17T01:35:04Z

Pavan Santhosh said that Telugu Wikipedians are creating a knowledge revolution in Telugu. On Sunday, December 12, 2016, in Golden Threshold, Abids, Telugu Wikipedians celebrated Telugu Wikipedia day. Telugu Wikipedians Pranay Raj and Meena Gayathri who successfully completed 100 Wikidays challenge successfully were given mementos and cut a cake on this occassion.

Clipping of the article that appeared in Andhra Jyoti on December 12, 2016:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/andhra-jyoti-december-12-2016-telugu-wikipedians-are-creating-knowledge-revolution

Changing the typographic landscape of a country: one letter at a time

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:06:51Z

My interest in designing typefaces in Indian scripts grew out of years of disappointment with the way most Hindi books I came across looked. Apart from a few exceptions, they looked like poor cousins of English books. Whether it was a children’s story book or a novel or magazine, there was usually the same drab typeface.

The blog post by Pooja Saxena was published in Storyweaver on December 1, 2016.

Some letters didn’t look like what we were taught in school, on others the matras (vowel marks) didn’t arch at the right places. Overall, the books and the letters inside them had an air of neglect. They looked old and completely unexciting. When I first learned that designing typefaces was a real job, I thought here was the opportunity to change all that.

Cambay, Devanagari typeface designed by Pooja Saxena for Google Fonts

Changing the typographic landscape of a country as diverse as India is not a one-woman job, but every now and then a project comes by that has the potential to make a small difference. Two years ago, as a result of a conversation with Subhashish Panigrahi, the Access to Knowledge programme at the Centre for Internet and Society commissioned a Ol Chiki typeface family. The Ol Chiki script, about which I knew precious little at the time, is used to write the language Santali, which is spoken by over six million people in India and its neighbouring countries. At the time that we started working on this project, there was no Unicode compliant typeface available in the script, making it impossible for it to be used on computers and cellphones, and online in a consistent and future-proof way. We hoped to change that by designing a small, but useful typeface family (it comes in regular, bold and italics) along with input methods and keyboard layouts that would allow a person to type Ol Chiki text easily.

Guru Gomke, Ol Chiki typeface designed by Pooja Saxena with research inputs from Shubhashish Panigrahi,for the A2K Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society.

This project was especially challenging because not only was Ol Chiki a completely unfamiliar script to me and Subhashish, but there was limited material available for us to consult. While designing a typeface in a script one reads and/or writes, or is at least familiar with, one’s experience with those letters can act as a guide. By writing them and seeing them printed in different fonts, in many people’s handwriting — some good, some bad — and on hand painted signs, one develops an instinct for identifying which parts of a letter make it recognisable. That way we know what parts of the letter can be exaggerated, and what others can be played down without compromising legibility. For an unfamiliar script, this visual vocabulary and the traditionally correct way of writing letters must be learned. Manuscripts, printed documents, handwriting manuals and samples, metal type, linguistic information about the script, feedback from native readers — all form parts of a puzzle that needs to be put together to design a competent typeface.

The story of Ol Chiki script is fascinating. The script is less than a century old, and was devised by Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who wanted to create a script that could accommodate all the features of the Santali language — something that the scripts used to write Santali so far had failed to do. Legend has it that he based the design of the letters on objects commonly found in the everyday environment of the Santals. Even though the script was created between 1920 – 1940, the Santal community has many myths about how it was created. One says that the script came to be at the time when the Earth itself was created, another says that the script was given as a divine gift to a learned man, Pandit Raghunath Murmu. It is after Pandit Raghunath Murmu, who is reverentially called Guru Gomke, that the Ol Chiki typeface that I designed was named. You can find out more about the Ol Chiki typeface and input methods project here.

Custom lettering for the Tamil branding of the Coovum Art Festival, designed by Pooja Saxena

If you’re interested in Indian type design and le ering, consider following the work of these exceptional designers — Noopur Datye, one of the co-founders of type design collective, Ek Type, who has designed custom typefaces TV channels like LifeOK; Kimya Gandhi, who is partner at Mota Italic, and recently designed an inventive Devanagari handwriting font; or Lipi Raval, whose flamboyant Gujarati typeface Mogra is a complete head-turner.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/story-weaver-december-1-2016-pooja-saxena-changing-the-typographic-landscape-of-a-country

విజ్ఞాన నిధి వికీపీడియా..

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:38:48Z

The article about Telugu Wikipedia appeared in Namaste Telangana on December 11, 2016.

సిటీబ్యూరో:ప్రాపంచిక విషయాలను, చారిత్రక ఘట్టాలను, శాస్త్రీయ విషయాలను ప్రపంచానికి చేరువ చేస్తున్న విజ్ఞాన నిధి వికీపీడియా. ఆధునిక సాంకేతిక పద్ధతుల ఆధారంగా ఆన్‌లైన్‌తో ప్రపంచంలోని పలు ఆసక్తికరమైన విషయాలన్నింటనీ ప్రజలందరికీ చేరువ చేసే నేస్తం ఇది. అందరికీ ప్రవేశం, అందరికీ ఉచితంగా అందుబాటులో ఉండే ఈ ఎన్‌సైక్లోపెడియాలో మన చరిత్ర, మన సంస్కృతి మరెన్నో విషయాలను జోడించేందుకు సమాచార సైనికులతో వికీపీడియా డేను పురస్కరించుకొని గోల్డెన్ త్రెషోల్డ్‌లో శనివారం ఓ కార్యశాలను నిర్వహించింది. విజ్ఞాన సమాచారం,భౌగోళిక, చారిత్రక అంశాలు, సాంస్కృతిక విషయాలను వికీపీడియాలో చొప్పించేందుకు చేపట్టాల్సిన కార్యక్రమాలను ఈ కార్యశాలలో చర్చించారు. వికీపీడియాలో అందరూ తమకు తెలిసిన ఆసక్తికరమైన అంశాలపై వ్యాసాలు రాయవచ్చని, ప్రపంచానికి కొత్త విషయాలను పరిచయం చేయవచ్చని ఆంగ్ల వికీపీడియన్ టిటో దత్తా అన్నారు. వికీ ట్రైనర్, ట్రైనర్ ద ట్రైనర్ కార్యక్రమంలో వికీపీడీయన్లు కశ్యప్, ప్రణయ్ పలు సాంకేతిక అంశాలను తెలుగు వికిపీడియన్లకు వివరించారు. చరిత్రకారుడు, కవి కట్టా శ్రీనివాస్ మాట్లాడుతూ గోల్కొండ వంటి పలు చారిత్రక ప్రదేశాల్లో ప్రజలకు తెలియని చారిత్రక, సాంకేతిక ప్రదేశాలు, ఆసక్తికరమైన అంశాలు ఉన్నాయని వాటన్నింటినీ సేకరించి, ప్రపంచానికి చేరవేయాల్సిన అవసరం ఉందన్నారు. ఈ కార్యక్రమాన్ని వికీపీడియన్లు చేపట్టి విజయవంతం చేయాలన్నారు. సీనియర్ జర్నలిస్ట్ బీవీ ప్రసాద్, మౌర్య, మీనా గాయత్రి పాల్గొన్నారు.

Link to the original in Namaste Telangana

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/namaste-telangana-december-11-2016-article-on-wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Rajahmundry Book Fair

manasa@cis-india.org — 2017-02-06T12:48:36Z

Telugu Wikipedia community put up a stall at the three day Rajahmundry Book Fair from 20 - 23 November 2016.

The initiative was supported by The Centre for Internet and Society and NTR Trust. The stall was run by long time community advocates and editors of Telugu Wikipedia. The volunteers distributed pamphlets and explained to the visitors the basics of editing Wikipedia. They distributed a survey to understand current topics of interest in order to update the Telugu wiki pages. Some visitors utilized the expertise of the volunteers and set up Wikipedia accounts at the stalls.

The book fair in the river side city didn’t see many takers this time round considering the move to demonetise was announced the previous week. The organizers had not made alternative payment arrangements at such short notice. Volunteer Pranay Raj said, “although there were uncontrollable factors at play, the city has great potential and Telugu Wikipedia plans to expand its editor base in the city through institutional partnerships from schools and colleges.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikipedia-stall-at-rajahmundry-book-fair-1

Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Hyderabad Book Fair

manasa@cis-india.org — 2017-02-06T12:48:09Z

Telugu Wikipedia community put up a stall at the Hyderabad Book Fair in December welcoming members of the public to join as editors on the regional encyclopaedia.

The Telugu Wikipedia community put up a stall at the 30th edition of the Hyderabad Book Fair from 15th to 26th December, 2016 at the NTR Stadium. Supported by The Centre for Internet and Society, the volunteers were long time Telugu Wikipedia community members. They helped visitors set up Wikipedia accounts and become editors on the free access encyclopedia. They also spoke to the visitors and explained how Wikipedia works and the collaborative efforts undertaken by various language communities in maintaining the regional language wiki pages. Additionally, a survey was conducted to find out what topics of interest are currently trending among the public. The Telugu Wikipedia community aims to take this feedback into consideration in order to update the topics they frequently edit.

Some visitors seemed interested in attending upcoming Wikipedia events and workshops. The organisers welcomed interested members of the public to attend the Hyderabad Wikipedia Monthly meetup on 22nd January, 2017.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikipedia-stall-at-hyderabad-book-fair