Centre for Internet and Society

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: Gender Gap in Indian Language Wikipedias – Projects, Outreach and Outcome

pavanaja — 2016-08-17T02:43:54Z

India is not much different from the global statistics when it comes to gender gap issues in Wikipedia. Indian language Wikipedias are known to have similar ratio of male to female editors.

The submission was included as part of a panel related to the gender gap at the WikiConference India 2016.

Many activities are being made to bridge the gender gap in Indian language Wikipedias. These are aimed both at improving the ratio of female to male editors and increasing women related content in Indian language Wikipedias. Some of the notable projects are Art+ Feminism editathon, Lilavati’s daughters editathon, International Women’s day or month editathon, editathon to add articles about woman writers of coastal Karnataka. Sizeable number of students who are part of the Wikipedia in Education Program which are being run at many educational institutes of India are female. Some of these students continue editing and contribute to Wikipedia. Some female students worked as interns and have contributed by improving the quality of articles written by their peers. Outreach is one of the regular activities of taking Wikipedia to people. Outcome of the projects and the data on retention of the participants of outreach activities as regular contributing Wikipedians, survival of the newly created editors for short and long periods are documented and will be presented at the conference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-gender-gap-in-indian-language-wikipedias-2013-projects-outreach-and-outcome

WikiConference India 2016 Starts Friday in Chandigarh

praskrishna — 2016-08-05T01:48:32Z

India, a key growth area for Wikipedia, is gearing up for a national conference "for Wikimedians in India to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other information".

First published by Indo Asian News Service was mirrored on NDTV website on August 4, 2016. Sunil Abraham will be participating.

While the conference is open to "Wikipedians" from across the globe, organisers announced here that it would have a "very distinct Indian flavour and will deal primarily with issues relating to India on Wikipedia and its sister projects".

Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is the world's sixth-most popular website in terms of overall visitor traffic. Its worldwide monthly readership totals almost 500 million.

Since 2011, the Wikipedia has been working to expand its growth in India, and it held its first Indian conference in Mumbai in November that year, which was attended by 700 persons and addressed by website founder Jimmy Wales.

This year, the meet takes place from August 5-8 in Chandigarh, the city and a Union territory of a million population that serves as the capital of the states of Punjab and Haryana.

"The main objective is to reduce the gap between different communities and get help from other community members on technical issues and other things like best practices in decision making and how we resolve the disputes in the community," the organisers said.

Those attending including Wikimedia Foundation executive director Katherine Maher, board member Nataliia Tymkiv, senior programme officer for emerging Wikimedia communities Asaf Bartov, language engineering team international manager Runa Bhattacharjee, Punjabi poet Dr Surjit Patar, and Wikipedia education programme senior manager Tighe Flanagan.

From India, participants will include The Centre for Internet and Society executive director Sunil Abraham, and Wikimedia India president Yohann Varun Thomas.

This event includes "hackathons" and "edit-a-thons" - collective workings towards improving the content available online. It will also see sessions on the Wikimedia movement in India, examples of its use in education, innovative tech solutions from India, content translation, a "gentle introduction" to Wikidata, gender gaps, and case studies from various Indian languages.

Participants are coming from the Wikipedias in languages including Punjabi, Kannada, Odia, Tamil, English, Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Sindhi, Hindi and Chinese.

Because of its widespread popularity - and contrary to fears that a website "anyone" can edit will not have quality - the Wikipedia notches often among the highest results when information is searched for on the world wide web.

It is a project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of "openly editable content". As the site explains: "The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning quick) and encyclopedia."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/indo-asian-news-service-ndtv-august-4-2016-wiki-conference-india-2016-starts-friday-in-chandigarh

WikiConference India 2016

praskrishna — 2016-08-07T01:35:50Z

WikiConference India 2016 is an event to provide a common platform for all Wikimedians in India to meet and share their views, discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other information. The Conference is open for participation of Wikimedians from all nations, and will be taking place on the 5th, 6th, and 7th of August 2016 at Chandigarh.

The Conference has a very distinct Indian flavor and deals primarily with issues relating to India on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The main objective is to reduce the gap between different communities and get help from other community members on technical issues and other things like best practices in decision making and how we resolve the disputes in the community.

Guests

Katherine Maher, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Nataliia Tymkiv, Board Member, Wikimedia Foundation
Asaf Bartov, Senior Program Officer, Emerging Wikimedia Communities, Wikimedia Foundation
Runa Bhattacharjee, Manager, Language Engineering Team (International), Wikimedia Foundation
Dr. Surjit Patar, Punjabi poet and writer
Tighe Flanagan, Senior Manager, Wikipedia Education Program, Wikimedia Foundation
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society
Yohann Varun Thomas, President, Wikimedia India
María Kreuz, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Social Media Campaign

Facebook event page - https://www.facebook.com/events/146258892472025/ (More suited for conference participants only)
Facebook Page - https://www.facebook.com/WikiConferenceIndia2016
Facebook group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikiConferenceIndia2016/
Official Twitter Handler - https://twitter.com/WikiConIndia
IRC Channel - #wikiconferenceindia

More Info, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/wikiconference-india-2016

Wiki Women's Workshop

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T10:37:57Z

As part of the commemoration of the International Women's Day, International Centre Goa (ICG) in association with the Centre for Internet & Society’s Access to Knowledge team is organising a Wiki Women’s Workshop on Sunday, March 9, 2014 from 3.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m. at ICG – Dona Paula.

8th March is International Women's Day and to celebrate, women in India are organizing edit-a-thons and meetups to create and expand articles of importance to women in Wikipedia in English and various Indian languages. The goal of the month-long event is to encourage more women to contribute to Wikipedia and increase representation of articles related to women in Wikipedia. The event aims at creating new articles, expanding the existing stubs and translating English articles to various Indic languages.

The main aim of the event is to get more women aware about Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. Participants would be guided on "How to contribute to Wikipedia?" by a hands-on session and make the knowledge available for free.

Click here to view the poster and registration details.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/international-womens-day-2014

Wiki Women's Day in Goa

nitika — 2013-03-19T06:32:25Z

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Wiki Women for Women Well-Being: An Initiative to Bridge the Gender Gap in the Wikimedia Community

Nitesh Gill and Shruti Anandan — 2020-12-28T14:58:45Z

WWWW is a project which focused on bridging the female related content gap on Indic Wikimedia communities. The idea of WWWW was given by Dr. Manavpreet Kaur, who worked with other women leaders from different communities and made a plan to engage with the editors for this project. CIS-A2K has started a series of interviews to introduce women with brilliant ideas and who have done contributions for Wikimedia and this is the first interview under the “Series of Interviews.” This Interview was done by Nitesh Gill.

Image Source: Wiki Women for Women Wellbeing logo. 30 September 2018. Author: Satdeep Gill

“The Wiki Women for Women Well-Being (WWWW) event proved that women should be recognized as leaders, as they can plan, design, run, and report a project as large as WWWW. We haven’t seen any other volunteer lead event bring so many communities together. Women are growing as leaders and will continue doing so.” - Dr. Manavpreet Kaur

Dr. Manavpreet Kaur started her journey as a Wikimedian in 2015 by participating in the Wikipedia Asian Month. Since then, she has participated and organized events such as WikiConference India 2016, Wiki Women for Women Well-being (“WWWW”), Syberthon, and Women’s Train the Trainer workshop. Dr. Manavpreet is a free knowledge enthusiast and a believer of education for enlightenment. She focuses her efforts on designing and facilitating programs to include more women in leadership roles in the Wikimedia community. Through a Q&A session with Dr. Manavpreet, CIS-A2K attempted to capture her experience of designing the WWWW event.

Q&A:

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us Dr. Manavpreet.

We want to start off by asking you, when was the first time you thought of WWWW ?

The event was proposed during the Wiki Advanced Training at Ranchi in 2018. This was initially planned to be a month long edit-a-thon for women by women where different Indian Communities and Maithili Communities of Nepal come together for a joint cause of creating content related to women’s health issues and also to explore women’s leadership opportunities in Wikimedia projects. Through WWWW, we attempted to train some interested women Wkimedians of different communities for outreach activities by guiding and supporting them to organize the event in their respective communities. We aimed to explore and promote women’s leadership in different languages, thus helping to bridge the gender gap along with the accomplishment of content creation.

What was the motivation behind this initiative?

I had met many women Wikimedia editors at various events and training. I realised we never took initiatives to build women’s leadership and women centric projects. The team of WWWW realised that the most important thing was to raise awareness on women’s health concerns as we all had some shared experiences that made us realise the need.

What was the objective of facilitating WWWW?

We had the following objectives in mind when we designed the event:

To promote content creation relating to women’s physical and social well-being in different languages
To build women’s leadership and women centric projects
To guide new women editors to lead projects and take ownership while creating information about women’s well-being.
To train women Wikimedians of different communities to conduct outreach activities by supporting them to organize events in their respective communities.

How did you prepare for this event?

A group of interested women Wikimedians was created for online discussions, time to time updates and task management. The discussions started in the month of July 2018. Different language communities were contacted to join the program. A total of 11 languages participated. We had Netha Hussain from the Malayalam community in the team but we could not have Malayalam as a participating language community because of the Kerala floods that year.

In August, the representatives from every community were asked to fill a google form and a budget was planned on the basis of their submissions. The draft message was created in English and translated to Indic Languages. The same message was then floated in the mailing lists. It was also posted on village pump of different participating languages. The list of articles was finalised after discussion with Diptanshu from WikiMed and Dr Rajender Prabhune from Marathi Wiki Community. Dr James Heilman also suggested a list of 107 articles.

How did you communicate and share the plan with communities and co-organisers?

We created a Facebook page and group for internal discussions. We organized hangout calls and hundreds of individual calls to discuss the progress and next steps. We also prepared a meta page for transparent updates and information sharing. The language project pages were created and posted on the village pump and on our mailing lists multiple times. We posted on off-wiki channels as well and sent out individual messages. Finally, we also reached out to Wikimedia Medicine to identify the priority topics. As a part of the edit-a-thon, several offline events were also organised.

Please tell us a little about the co-organisers of the project. How did you choose and contact them?

I reached out to different affiliates (contacts I knew) to identify the new women Wikimedians who might benefit from the training and who will be willing to work on a cumulative project. As women kept on joining, we used their network to identify the language leads. Women who were a part of the team from the very beginning, who were involved in planning, discussions, decision making, organizing and reporting were identified as Organizers and the supporting community members as Co-Organizers. Considering the capacity building aspect, only women were Leads (Organizers) but there was no such condition imposed for co-organizers.

How was your overall experience conducting this event?

It was our first experience and it was amazing in so many ways. I believe everyone was a star performer but in different sections -- some rocked the awareness campaigns, getting expert speakers, awareness videos, scalable vector graphics, articles or partnership. The communities were also generally supportive. This event proved that women should be recognized as leaders, as they can plan, design, run, and report a project as large as WWWW. We haven’t seen any other volunteer lead event bring so many communities together. Women are growing as leaders and will continue doing so.

What were some of the challenges that you experienced while facilitating the event?

We experienced a few challenges as it was the first time that we facilitated this event. These challenges definitely served as learning experiences which we will reflect on moving forward.

Some of the challenges we experienced were related to:

Participation:

We tried working with medical students, but every institute that initially agreed to collaborate couldn't do it because of mid-term exams of the students.
Some of the leads were new Wikimedians who had relatively less knowledge of wiki and different projects. Also, they didn't know the fellow Wikimedians from their community much which acted as a hindrance in planning an offline event.
Participants sometimes did not check the messages posted to their social media accounts. An attempt will be made to engage people in on-wiki discussions rather than forming any other group.

Content:

Anticipating the challenges relating to the nature of the content, the team decided to expand the theme from women’s physical well-being to social well-being.
However, it was difficult to get participants for the program because the medical terms and topics were difficult for them to comprehend. Participants were facing issues to write about them since the nature of the subject was also sensitive. Many Wikimedians were not comfortable with the idea of working on the articles listed because of the complexity of the subject and the limited understanding of information provided.
The guidelines fixed for the article quality were not easy to work on but we do not regret the decision because the article should at least cover the basics of a concern.

Logistical :

It is sometimes difficult to keep individuals from different regions in loop and that's where they miss the pace with which other communities progress.
Timely record maintenance could have been better. There were delays in grant release that affected the way things were planned and the dashboard was faulty for some languages.
The clash of dates of the event with Hockey edit-a-thon by the Odia community affected the WWWW edit-a-thon. The second iteration of Project Tiger was also planned around WWWW which resulted in less participation and comparatively more effort investment to get participants for our event.

What is the future plan? Is there going to be a WWWW 2.0?

Not in October, but the conversations have started.

What is your vision for WWWW 2.0?

More editor participation, more engagement, new women editors, continuous future cycles.

Anything else you want to share with us?

I hope I soon have updates on next WWWW :)

For more information about WWWW, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wiki-women-for-women-well-being-an-initiative-to-bridge-the-gender-gap-in-the-wikimedia-community

Wiki Winter Camp - Coverage in Sakshi

praskrishna — 2015-01-01T16:58:23Z

Media coverage for the Wiki winter camp held at Andhra Loyola College.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/sakshi-december-31-2014-wiki-winter-camp

Wiki Winter Camp - Coverage in Eenadu

praskrishna — 2015-01-01T17:17:42Z

Media coverage of Wiki Winter Camp held at Andhra Loyola College.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/eenadu-december-31-wiki-winter-camp

Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion on Suvarna News

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T16:36:11Z

Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in a panel discussion around Wikipedia in general and about Kannada Wikipedia in specific. This was telecast by Suvarna News 24x7 (Kannada) TV channel on June 13, 2013.

Videos

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/suvarna-news-june-13-2013-wiki-rahasya-panel-discussion

Wiki Meet-up in Bangalore: Talk by Vishnu Vardhan

praskrishna — 2013-02-11T06:22:56Z

Vishnu Vardhan, Director of Access to Knowledge team at CIS has been invited by the Bangalore SIG Chair. Vishnu will speak on the Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) project. The talk is scheduled for February 25, 2013 at 2.00 p.m. in Bangalore.

Agenda

Wikimedia Projects
Access to Knowledge by Mr.Vishnu Vardhan, Director A2K, CIS
Guest Talk by Mr.Joe Justice, Founder WikiSpeed & Mr.Vibhu Srinivasan, MD, Solutions IQ
Audience address by Chief Guest, Mr.KS Viswanath, Vice President, Industry Initiatives, NASSCOM
Networking

KS Viswanath

Mr. K.S. Viswanathan, Vice President, Industry Initiatives, NASSCOM, has around 32 years of general management and leadership experience in the Indian business context, building key executive relationships and a strong customer capital in diverse business environment. His extensive work experience in the IT industry and social sector comprises of developing and executing operational strategies, managing customer engagement programs, and establishing models for customer acquisition and retention. Over the span of his career, Mr. Viswanathan has held strategic & leadership positions at Wipro, Dell, Azim Premji Foundation and Hilleman Laboratories. As the Head for India geography at Wipro Infotech (2003-2008), he led the positive transformation of and business landscape for Wipro in India. He was the first country manager for Dell in India in 2000 and was instrumental in establishing Dell’s direct business model in India. Mr. Viswanathan is a graduate from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (1979 batch). He holds a MBA in marketing from PSG College of Technology (1981 batch).

Vishnu Vardhan

Vishnu Vardhan is the Programme Director-Access to Knowledge at CIS since February 2013. His experience spans across academics, industry (media) and not-for-profit sectors. Over the last 11 years he has worked in various capacities as researcher, grant manager, teacher, project consultant, information architect and translator. Prior to joining CIS, Vishnu managed the Art, Crafts and Culture portfolio of the Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT); where had spent 5 years in project conceptualization, management and assessment of quality and impact in the not-for-profit sector. Vishnu managed more than 30 projects and funds to the tune of Rs. 160 million. He also anchored SRTT’s automation and knowledge management activities. Vishnu worked as Research Coordinator at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore where he a) coordinated the online M.A. in Cultural Studies; b) managed the Library Fellowship programme; c) conceptualized and coordinated national and international workshops and short-term courses in Media and Cultural Studies; and d) helped in building academic institutional partnerships. Vishnu is a superannuated doctoral candidate at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster and CSCS, Bangalore.

Joe Justice

Joe Justice (@WIKISPEED) Founder, CEO, WikiSpeed Joe's team tied for 10th place in the mainstream class of the 2010 Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, a $10 million challenge for 100+ MPG automobiles. WIKISPEED now uses agile processes to solve problems for social good. Joe has spoken to audiences at TEDx, Denver University, University of California Berkley, Google, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary International, and others about social web application development, project methodology, and agile best practices. He is CEO of WIKISPEED and works at SolutionsIQ, a leading provider of Agile consulting, certified training, coaching, development, and Agile talent services, where he helps clients leverage Agile project management and team development methods to deliver solutions more reliably.

Vibhu Srinivasan

Vibhu Srinivasan (@vibhu_s) Managing Director, SolutionsIQ India Vibhu Srinivasan is an Entrepreneur, Agile Coach, Technologist and currently heads SolutionsIQ India. Vibhu has an extensive technology, process, and consulting background allowing him to work with a diverse set of clients and teams. Vibhu has been practicing agile practices since 1997 (officially called Agile only in 2001).He brings to his consulting, deep rooted passion and practices gained by working in the trenches with hundreds of developers on real projects. He is very passionate about software development and can code in multiple languages. He has helped many teams in their quest for agility. He is a CTO of a early stage start up in Seattle and has an MBA in strategic management from school of business Madison. He has a very solid understanding of building large scale scalable systems having participated in various roles over the years, most recently chief architect for a game, Lead for virtualization product at Microsoft and CTO of his own start-up. He has worked in financial, gaming, visualization domains to name a few. An entrepreneur by choice he is always busy building a company/product and is currently in India heading Solutions IQ a premier provider of Agile consulting and development services in the US.

Participants

Intended Audience

Anyone interested in Wikipedia (user, contributor or curious about it). Wikipedians from any part of India or the world and anyone who is interested in Wikipedia! Meetup is open to members of all Wikimedia projects and Wikipedians from all languages. All are welcome, and we are especially interested in seeing newcomers to join the experienced Wikipedians/Wikimedians. If you are interested in coming, please add your name below.

The full details can be accessed on the Wikipedia page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wiki-meet-up-bangalore

Wiki Media Foundation keen on developing Urdu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-11-01T13:23:54Z

The Wikipedia India Community Consultation 2014 was organized by the Wiki Media Foundation (WMF) and Wikipedia India Chapter in collaboration with Centre for Internet Society (CIS A2K) Bangalore on The venue was Movenpick Hotel and scheduled for October 4th and 5th here.

The article was published in the Siasat Daily on October 24, 2014.

The objectives of the meet up according to the organizers are “to share views and preferences on the most effective ways to pursue our shared vision of creating and sharing free knowledge in India and in the Indian languages, and to arrive at an agreement on a road map for a future where its resources are better utilized, its volunteers are better served and progress on its mission is more steadily attained. “

I reached Bangalore on 3rd October and invited Urdu speaking people and the Urdu media from Bangalore for a general meet up. Mr. Azeez Belgaumi a renowned Urdu Poet & writer and Mr. Syed Tanveer Ahmed, as senior Journalist heading “Karnataka Muslims” News portal approached me and we had a good conversation to know more about Urdu Wikipedia. They appreciated Wikipedia and promised to extend their support to the Urdu Wikipedia.

Mr. Syed Tanveer Ahmed and Mr. Azeez Belgaumi promised to take up the initiative to conduct some Wiki workshops in collaboration with Salam foundation and CIS A2K. Mr. Vishnu the Project Director CIS has also agreed to extend his best support to organize the outreach programmes in Bengaluru and other parts of India to develop Urdu Wikipedia.

An introductory meeting was held in the evening of 3rd October in which members of WMF and the Wikipedians representing languages viz. English, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Odia, Assamese, Kannada, Konkani, Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, and Gujarati attended.

On 4th October after noon the scheduled meet up was conducted wherein WMF Senior Director Grantmaking Mrs. Anasuya Sengupta from US, Head of Wikimedia Grants & Global South Partnerships Mr. Asaf Bartov from US, Chief Financial Officer Mr. Garfiled Byrd from France and Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees Mr. Petricio Lorente from Argentina Trustee Bishakha Datta participated. Mr. Gagan Sethi from Counterviews Gujarat facilitated the programme.

The Indic language bureaucrats, sysops and representatives participated actively and focused on the topic how to improve the Wikipedia in Indic languages. This session gone up to 7 p.m. and in the night too, the delegates had the get together to discuss on various issued related to Wikimedia programmes in India.

On the 5th October morning the work shop continued with dignified discussions. Various user groups from different languages took part and presented their views and successes. The discussions focused on wiki tools, various practical problems, do’s and don’ts. It’s a fabulous meet to take part, comprehend, and show the spirit of volunteerism towards Wikipedia.

During discussion on Urdu language, Mr. Asaf appreciated the contributions of Mr. Muhammad Shuaib. Mr. Nisar Ahmed Syed administrator in Telugu Wikipedia represented Urdu Wikipedia too as he is a contributor to Urdu Wikipedia. He discussed issues and stressed the need of outreach and developmental activities for Urdu Wikipedia in India. Mr. Muzammil Ahmed from Hindi and Urdu Wikipedia advocated its importance.

Ms. Anasuya and Mr. Asaf Bartov accepted the need of Urdu Wiki development programmes in India and they said they are ready to prepare a road map for the same.

Finally with the initiations of Mr. Nisar Ahmed Syed and with the kind cooperation of Mr. Asaf Bartov and Mrs. Anasuya Sengupta, an Urdu user group was set and introduced. The user group initially was gathered by backing of Mr. Asaf Bartov. The group has Mr. Syed Nisar Ahmed (Pune), Mr. Muzammil Ahmed (Hyderabad), Mr. Azeez Belgaumi (Bengaluru) and Mr. Satdeep Gil (Punjab).

The contributions of Muzammil Ahmed and Nisar Ahmed to Urdu Wikipedia were appreciated. The WMF team thanked all the Urdu users from India who rendered their best contributions.

Emphasis was laid to improve the Urdu Wikipedia India group.

As WMF intends to focus on the online encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA in the Indian languages Urdu users too expressed willingness to work for the mother tongue Urdu by enriching Urdu Wikipedia.

Mr. Nisar Ahmed said, “It is true that the awareness among the Urdu speaking community about Urdu Wikipedia is very less.” He emphasized the need to take a small step to lead to a large extent to bring awareness by means of outreach programmes, meet ups, seminars. It was accepted and appreciated to initiate outreach work among the Urdu speaking states and clusters in India.

In India about 450 newspapers and magazines are being published in Urdu language. And it is an amazing fact that many of the Urdu newspapers are using the Wikipedia as their source material from English Wikipedia as it has a large and authentic content, but they are not aware about the need to enrich Urdu Wikipedia. It should be known that everyone can edit, resource and enrich it. Hence it is decided to start a user group for Urdu Wikipedia India and to bring the same message to the masses.

“Bring Urdu Wikipedia from budding stage to a blooming stage.”Courtesy:Karnataka Muslims

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/siasat-daily-october-24-2014-wiki-media-foundation-keen-on-developing-urdu-wikipedia

Wiki Media Foundation keen on developing Urdu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-11-01T13:29:32Z

The article by Nisar Ahmed Syed was originally published on the website of Karnataka Muslims on October 22, 2014.

India Community Consultation 2014 held in Bangalore

Ms. Anasuya and Mr. Asaf Bartov accepted the need of Urdu Wiki development programmes in India and they said they are ready to prepare a road map for the same.

The contributions of Muzammil Ahmed and Nisar Ahmed to Urdu Wikipedia were appreciated. The WMF team thanked all the Urdu users from India who rendered their best contributions.

Emphasis was laid to improve the Urdu Wikipedia India group.

As WMF intends to focus on the online encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA in the Indian languages Urdu users too expressed willingness to work for the mother tongue Urdu by enriching Urdu Wikipedia.

“Bring Urdu Wikipedia from budding stage to a blooming stage.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/karnataka-muslims-nisar-ahmed-syed-october-22-2014-wiki-media-foundation-keen-on-developing-urdu-wikipedia

Wiki Loves Pride 2014 and Adding Diversity to Wikipedia

dorothy — 2014-07-25T10:56:38Z

Since Wikipedia’s gender gap first came to light in late 2010, Wikipedians have taken the issue to heart, developing projects with a focus on inclusivity in content, editorship and the learning environments relevant to new editors.

Click to read the original published on Wikimedia blog here.

Wiki Loves Pride started from conversations among Wikipedians editing LGBT topics in a variety of fields, including history, popular culture, politics and medicine, and supporters of Wikimedia LGBT - a proposed user group which promotes the development of LGBT-related content on Wikimedia projects in all languages and encourages LGBT organizations to adopt the values of free culture and open access. The group has slowly been building momentum for the past few years, but had not yet executed a major outreach initiative. Wiki Loves Pride helped kickstart the group’s efforts to gather international supporters and expand its language coverage.

Pride Edit-a-Thons and Photo Campaigns Held Internationally

We decided to run a campaign in June (LGBT Pride Month in the United States), culminating with a multi-city edit-a-thon on June 21. We first committed to hosting events in New York City and Portland, Oregon (our cities of residence), hoping others would follow. We also gave individuals the option to contribute remotely, either by improving articles online or by uploading images related to LGBT culture and history. This was of particular importance for users who live in regions of the world less tolerant of LGBT communities, or where it may be dangerous to organize LGBT meetups.

We decided to run a campaign in June (LGBT Pride Month in the United States), culminating with a multi-city edit-a-thon on June 21. We first committed to hosting events in New York City and Portland, Oregon (our cities of residence), hoping others would follow. We also gave individuals the option to contribute remotely, either by improving articles online or by uploading images related to LGBT culture and history. This was of particular importance for users who live in regions of the world less tolerant of LGBT communities, or where it may be dangerous to organize LGBT meetups.

In addition to New York City and Portland, offline events were held in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with online activities in Houston, Seattle, Seoul, South Africa, Vancouver, Vienna and Warsaw. Events will be held in Bangalore and New Delhi later this month as part of the Centre for Internet and Society’s (CIS) Access to Knowledge (A2K) program. Other Wikimedia chapters have expressed interest in hosting LGBT edit-a-thons in the future.

Campaign Results

The campaign’s “Results” page lists 90 LGBT-related articles which were created on English Wikipedia and links to more than 750 images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Also listed are new categories, templates and article drafts, along with “Did you know” (DYK) hooks that appeared on the Main Page and policy proposals which may be of interest to the global LGBT community.

The campaign also attracted participation from Wikimedia projects other than Wikipedia. Wikimedia Commons hosted an LGBT photo challenge, which received more than 50 entries and an LGBT task force was created at Wikidata. So far the group, which also seeks to improve LGBT-related content, has gathered 10 supporters and has adopted a rainbow-colored variation of the Wikidata logo as its symbol.

	Continuing Efforts Our hope is that the campaign will continue to grow and evolve, galvanizing participation in more locations and in different languages. Wiki Loves Pride organizers will continue to provide logistical support to those interested in hosting events and collaborating with cultural institutions. Contiguous with the events of Wiki Loves Pride, Wikimedia LGBT has an open application to achieve user group status from the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee and looks forward to expanding its members and efforts on all fronts.

Continuing Efforts

Our hope is that the campaign will continue to grow and evolve, galvanizing participation in more locations and in different languages. Wiki Loves Pride organizers will continue to provide logistical support to those interested in hosting events and collaborating with cultural institutions.

Contiguous with the events of Wiki Loves Pride, Wikimedia LGBT has an open application to achieve user group status from the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee and looks forward to expanding its members and efforts on all fronts.

Jason Moore, Wikipedian

Dorothy Howard, Wikipedian

Copyright notes: "SF Pride 2014 - Stierch 6.jpg" by SarahStierch , under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons, "Portland Pride 2014 - 036.JPG" by Another Believer , under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikimedia-blog-dorothy-howard-wiki-loves-pride-2014-and-adding-diversity-to-wikipedia

Wiki Loves Mayabazaar

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-06-07T09:24:35Z

On the 60th anniversary of the movie Mayabazar, Telugu Wikimedians celebrated Wiki Loves Mayabazar, an event to commemorate the cult Telugu film Mayabazar. As part of the celebrations, an edit-a-thon of the same name was held at Ravindra Bharathi in Hyderabad. Interestingly, the Cultural Department of Telangana Government sponsored the entire event.

In the Telugu speaking regions, there is a well-known appreciation of the cinematic arts. Mayabazar, released in 1957 captured the imagination of fans like no other film had before. Telugu Wikipedians decided to pay tribute to the movie by improving articles and content related to it on Telugu Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

The edit-a-thon was held on 30 April, 2017 at the monthly Wikimitra Vedika meetup of Telugu Wikipedians. A screening of the film took place followed by discussions on references, citations, film studies and articles related to the film. From 1 May 2017, the edit-a-thon took place online.

There were 15 participants of which only one member was female. Telugu Wikipedian, Kasyap hoped for more participation as this "is an interesting event."

However, the event was made popular by the wide ranging media coverage in print and electronic media.

Media pieces on the event:

1. ‘మాయాబజార్‌’కు వినూత్న షష్టిపూర్తి

(Eenadu Newspaper; 1 May, 2017)

2.‘మాయాబజార్’కు 60 ఏళ్లు.. వినూత్న షష్టిపూర్తి వేడుకకు సిద్ధమవుతున్న వికీపీడియన్లు! (Ap7am.com; 1 May 2017)Wiki Loves Mayabazaar

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wiki-loves-mayabazaar

Wiki donors

praskrishna — 2013-07-01T04:19:13Z

Time Out finds out what Wikipedia’s doing to turn the info mammoth Kannada friendly

The article by Akhila Seetharaman was published in TimeOut Bengaluru on June 21, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Dr. U.B. Pavanaja are quoted.

Some Wikipedia numbers: Two hundred and eighty-six languages, 42 lakh articles in English. 2.6 crore articles totally. One lakh articles in Hindi, 50,000 in Telugu and Tamil each. Forty thousand in Marathi; 30,000 in Malayalam; 14,000 articles in Kannada. Number of Kannada Wikipedia contributors: 25. Kannadaspeaking population: 47 million. “That’s half a person working to build this public knowledge repository for every million Kannada speakers,” said Vishnu Vardhan, who directs the Access for Knowledge programme in India, a programme that is anchored by the Centre for Internet and Society. “While Hindi Wikipedia gets 60 lakhs page views per month, Kannada gets nine lakh eyeballs monthly.”

Vardhan and his team do outreach programmes, training college studentsin Karnataka on Wikipedia and encouraging them to contribute to its growing body of knowledge in Kannada. So far they’ve had 16 programmes and reached out to 2,500 people. Vardhan admits that there’s a mixed response. “It’s not a labour of love for everyone. Some people are excited to contribute, others feel it’s too much work.”

But he believes it’s important to get across the main message: that Wikipedia is a public knowledge infrastructure for the future. “In our minds libraries, books, newspapers, archives are knowledge repositories,” he said. “But the book is a relatively recent phenomenon, only about a hundred years old. And now everything is becoming the Internet. What is going to happen to our language or culture in the digital era?” Vardhan explains to people that this is the gap they could be filling by taking part in Indian language Wikipedia.

On the agenda for the coming year is growing the content in five Indian language Wikipedias, including Kannada. It’s a gargantuan task. Nobody gets paid to write on Wikipedia and there are technical challenges: you need browser support, Kannada fonts, and most keyboard layouts are in English. But as Vardhan says the Kannada font can be downloaded for free.

But free knowledge communities in each language have to overcome hurdles if there’s to be a valuable repository of knowledge for the public in Indian languages. “We are all netizens. We are all educated, metro people. We’re comfortable accessing the Internet but how many of us use it in our own language? Do we type in Kannada or write in Kannada? While access to knowledge happens in English there is still a large population that does its business in Kannada,” he said. Visit kn.wikipedia.org.

Tech’s messages
UB Pavanaja was among the first eggheads to take Kannada content online. Time Out spoke to him about the city’s lingo

Could you tell us about a little about yourself?
I worked as a scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Mumbai for 15 years before getting into the emerging field of computers and Indian languages. I started the first Kannada website, and the first Kannada online magazine. I also created the first Indian language version (Kannada) of Logo software, a popular programming language for children and advised the Government of Karnataka on standarising Kannada on computers. I now work with the Centre for Internet and Society as part of the Access to Knowledge team.

How has Kannada changed in the past two decades?
There have been lots of changes. It is mostly Kanglish now, no more Kannada. Most people have replaced common Kannada words like “appa”, “amma”, “anna”, “akka”, “chikkappa”, “atte”, with dad, mom, bro, sis, uncle, aunty. Nobody uses Kannada numbers. Go to any shop and the shopkeeper will give you the price in English and not in Kannada. Even the display boards in shops are now in English. Common vegetables and fruits names are now displayed in English. I don’t know the names of common vegetables and fruits in English so I can’t rely on the boards for information. I either know the vegetable by looking at it or I don’t. If the price board is moved slightly, then I won’t know the price of the vegetable. For example, in Reliance Fresh, they write “coccinea” for our common vegetable which we know as “tondekaayi”. Let them write coccinea in English script. But why do they write that in Kannada script?

How have information and communication technologies influenced Kannada language over the years? About ten or 15 years ago when developments in IT were rapid, the implementation of Kannada in IT was not keeping pace with time. Hence people thought it was not possible to use Kannada in IT. But that has changed now. Whatever is possible with English in IT is now possible with Kannada also. But people lack awareness and willingness to adopt it. Wherever there is computerisation, it is automatically in English and not Kannada. For, example, the online booking of tickets by KSRTC is in English only. Technically it is now possible to develop a data-driven website in Kannada. But KSRTC is not willing to do so.

Any Kannada lingo that didn’t exist two decades?
There are many. Some samples: “message maadu”, “delete maadu”, “missed call kodu”, “update maadu”, “copy maadu”. Most of them are derived from using technology.

What have been the biggest influences on the Kannada language in recent times?
Mobile phones, smart phones, FM radio, TV channels, and movies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/timeout-bengaluru-akhila-seetharaman-june-21-2013-wiki-donors