Centre for Internet and Society

What is Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference?

sailesh — 2019-06-22T09:37:23Z

The Wikimedia Education SAARC conference is on 20th June 2019. A conference for Wikimedians, Wikimedia education leaders, educators and researchers engaged with Open Education and free knowledge movement.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is the regional union of nations in South Asia. Wikimedians belonging to these nations share several common challenges and many of them are emerging communities within the Wikimedia movement. The community members to attend the Wikimedia Education SAARC conference are involved in Indic language Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Education SAARC conference will be the first of its kind conference in SAARC countries which will engage Wikimedians, education program leaders, educators and researchers engaged with Open Education and free knowledge movement. We believe that the students of all ages should not only consume the knowledge available on the Internet but also be a part of the larger Open Internet movement, and help in creating open knowledge resources.

The event will be organised in and by the Christ (Deemed to be University) in Bengaluru from 20th June 2019 to 22nd June 2019. CIS-A2K team has been working with the department of languages in this university from 2013, where students of the university are contributing to multiple Wikimedia projects. Our education activity at this university has inspired us to plan this event. To know more about this university, Please see here.

This conference will allow us to understand the different efforts made by the SAARC communities involved in the Wikimedia Education movement. This will help us to create models, templates and documents that can be replicated in by other institutions or programs.

Conference Goals:

To know the Wikimedia Education activities happening in South Asia by different community members/Languages.
Sharing the knowledge and best practices of how to build "trust relationship" with new partners/teachers and how to improve trust in Wikimedia projects.
Challenges on student retention and how to engage them in the broader Wikimedia movement.
The best method to evaluate and measure the quality of the work done by the students.
To introduce tools like the dashboard, not in your language, and other tools which will be useful for the tracking, assessment, allocation of the topics and others.

The program structure for Wikimedia Education SAARC conference has been developed by keeping the general and specific challenges and opportunities in South Asia, and the submission selected from the participants.

Follow the hashtag #EduWikiSAARC19 for more updates.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/what-is-wikimedia-education-saarc-conference-1

What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India

subha — 2016-10-22T04:12:40Z

The number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.

This was published by Your Story on October 20, 2016.

State of Indian languages on the internet

Based on a study, Internet activist Anivar Aravind mentioned that in 2014, although 89 percent of Indian population used mobile phones, only 10 percent of the population used smartphones (contributing to 13 percent of total mobile users). This means we can safely assume that a large section of online activity in India is through mobile devices ‑ thanks to the declining data charges because of high competition. That said the mobile internet connectivity in rural India is growing at a fast pace and vernacular content plays an important role in this great journey. With over 90 percent of the users being comfortable in their own native languages, websites that are producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this bandwagon.

Why open access is important for Indian languages?

Open access, in a nutshell, would mean research outputs and other educational resources that are free from restriction of access and use. The former includes resources like journals that are not paywalled, and the latter is freedom from copyright restriction. Open access as a movement encourages license migration ‑ a process of migrating from several copyrighted license terms to Creative Commons licenses and several other licenses that provide freedom to use, share and remix. In a country like India where there are only a handful of research journals available in vernacular languages, the need for open content becomes much more important. The more the restricted content, the less will be the access to knowledge. Creating more vernacular content with open licenses is like digging a well in a dessert.

Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals

It’s been almost a decade since most largely spoken Indian languages started having a Wikipedia project of their own. Presently, there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias, including newest entrants like Konkani and Tulu. That said, these projects are growing with more and more encyclopedic content written with a neutral point of view, which any internet user will find useful. Wikipedia is considered as the people’s encyclopedia and hence can have quite contrasting content ‑ some being poor because some volunteer editors lack expertise in high quality articles written by professionals. A great example of creating very high quality content in one particular subject area is Open Textbook of Medicine ‑ an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine that was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happened to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high quality content.

How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool

The list of challenges to grow Wikipedia-like projects with volunteer effort could be endless. And one of the biggest challenges is bringing self-motivated people who are willing to contribute as volunteers. Also, there are many such people who are not aware that they can contribute to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem by having several Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates that are run by both volunteers and paid staff ‑ the Wikimedia Foundation, a paid staff-run organisation that is responsible for fundraising, major technological and some community support. In India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K) and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates that are working on catalysing the growth of the content and the communities. Where the affiliate Punjabi Wikimedians focuses on Punjabi language (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), both Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K focus on all the Indian languages. CIS-A2K also specially focuses on five languages; Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu. Indian language Wikipedia projects can only grow if people can edit their own language Wikipedias.

With the Open Access Week—a week dedicated for promoting Open Access globally—around the corner with “Open in Action” as the theme of the year, there is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india

Web Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective

nirmita — 2012-09-25T05:33:25Z

G3ict and CIS are pleased to announce the publication of a new, improved edition of the Web Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective. The report published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation provides an updated synopsis of the many policies that governments have implemented around the world to ensure that the Internet and websites are accessible to persons with disabilities.

The report contains a Foreword by Axel Leblois, Founder and Executive Director of G3ict, an introduction and studies from countries like Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union. The report contains contributions from Prashanth Ramadas, Asma Tajuddin, G Aravind, Katie Reisner, Sucharita Narasimhan, Bama Balakrishnan and Nirmita Narasimhan. Axel Leblois, Donal Rice, Immaculada Placienca Porrero, Kevin Carey, Licia Sbattella and Sunil Abraham are the expert reviewers.

Foreword by Axel Leblois

This third edition of our joint report with CIS “WEB ACCESSIBILITY POLICY MAKING: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE” provides an updated synopsis of the many policies that governments have implemented around the world to ensure that the Internet and web sites are accessible to persons with disabilities. With 153 countries parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as of December 2011, an increasing number of governments are now in the midst of developing policies and programs to ensure that web sites and services under their jurisdictions are accessible.

Indeed, the Preamble of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes “the importance of accessibility to the physical, social, economic and cultural environment, to health and education and to information and communication, in enabling persons with disabilities to fully enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms”. Its article 9 stipulates that: “To enable persons with disabilities to live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life, States Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure to persons with disabilities access, on an equal basis with others, to the physical environment, to transportation, to information and communications, including information and communications technologies and systems” (1). It further specifies that “State Parties shall also take appropriate measures to … Promote access for persons with disabilities to new information and communications technologies and systems, including the Internet” (2.g).

There is therefore no doubt that all State Parties have an obligation to act upon those commitments. However, as this report demonstrates it clearly, web accessibility policies and their levels of enforcement vary considerably among countries with some common denominators such as the compliance with the W3C – WAI guidelines on web accessibility.

G3ict and CIS hope that this new, improved edition, which will now be available in print as well as in electronic format, will help accelerate the development of web accessibility policies and programs around the world. We want to express our sincere appreciation to Nirmita Narasimhan, programme manager at CIS and editor of the G3ict Publications and Reports for her dedication to this report which would not have been made possible without her incredible work and motivation as Disability Advocate.

Download a PDF of the Web Accessibility Policy Making here [335 KB]

Download the Daisy File [23412 KB]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/web-accessibility-policy-making-an-international-perspective

We’ve All Got Some Baggage

lawrence — 2014-05-29T07:22:29Z

America’s newest trade agreement is not going to kill only iPods. The article appeared in the Tehelka Magazine Vol 7, Issue 45, Dated November 13, 2010

EARLIER LAST week, a group of renowned academics in the United States wrote a letter to President Obama criticising his administration for the secrecy with which a new trade agreement, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), was being negotiated. They argued that the agreement that has immense public interest implications, including freedom of speech and expression, privacy, access to medicines and access to technology, has been conducted only with the interests of large corporations in mind. The first official release of the draft text of this treaty took place only in April 2010, and since then there has not been a single public meeting to invite comments on the text. So what is the deal on ACTA, also known in some circles as the ‘iPod killer’ agreement, and why should we in India be concerned about it? To get a sense of the importance of ACTA, it would be useful to understand briefly the history of negotiations on multilateral agreements on intellectual property.

The establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the successful conclusion of the negotiations of the TRIPS agreement set a minimum standard for intellectual property laws across the world. In the absence of an international standard, countries have far more flexibility in creating national laws that may be more suited to the development or technological needs of their society, and this is especially for developing countries hoping to create indigenous technological capabilities.

The best example of this perhaps is the rise of the generic pharmaceutical industry in India. Till the Patent Amendment in 2005, India did not recognise the grant of a product patent for drugs, and only allowed a process patent. This enabled pharmaceutical companies in India to import expensive drugs, reverse engineer them and create cheaper alternatives. And it is through this that India became a country that not only produced affordable medicines, but also exported them to many other countries, particularly in Africa.

After India became a member of the WTO and a signatory to the TRIPS agreement, it was obliged to change its patent laws to recognise product patents on drugs. It is clear then that the establishment of a multilateral venue for the creation of common norms can often act against the interests of developing countries that have much less of a bargaining power. This was particularly true in the early days of the WTO.

However, as countries like India, China and Brazil grew in strength and others also started getting a better sense of how developing countries could play the multilateral game, the very mode that was supposed to guarantee the protection of the interests of the global north became the basis through which other countries started articulating their own concerns. In 2004 for instance, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) adopted a proposal for the establishment of a Development Agenda. This declaration proposed by Brazil and Argentina and supported by many countries of the southern hemisphere sought to bring development concerns into the agenda of the WIPO, thereby limiting the absolute rights of owners of intellectual property and argued for a more equitable global IP regime.

Two weeks after WIPO’s September 2007 adoption of the Development Agenda, the US, European and Japanese officials announced that they would seek to negotiate a new agreement in order to “set a new, higher benchmark for enforcement that countries can join on a voluntary basis”. Thus began the negotiations around the Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement.

ACTA is a new and separate international agreement dedicated to the enforcement of intellectual property. While some alleged that it was an effort to address existing limitations in the TRIPS agreement, it actually creates a wide range of policing powers. The two biggest concerns about ACTA include the creation of a new global IP enforcement regime by granting powers to customs officials to act as watchdogs for IP infringement. This essentially means that customs officials have the right to inspect any electronic device, including computers, hard drives and music devices, for copyright infringing materials. A scary proposition for anyone who travels. While apparently there are discussions over whether personal use items will be exempt, the fact that the agreement is being negotiated in such secrecy means that we don’t really know what the implications actually are. The second area of concern is the fact that ACTA dramatically intervenes in the creation of Internet policy — notably in regard to the liability of ISPS, search engines and other third parties to charges of ‘contributory’ infringement.

A pirated DVD is very different from a spurious drug, which is very different from a fake Gucci bag, and yet ACTA treats them all alike

THE PRIMARY supporters of ACTA include the US, the European Union, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, South Korea, Canada, New Zealand, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore and the UAE. Notably absent are many of the industrialised middleincome countries that have been the principal targets of the US and European enforcement concern in the past decade: Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa and China.

ACTA introduces a confusing language that deliberately attempts to bring things together that are not related. A pirated DVD is very different from a spurious drug, which is very different from a fake Gucci bag, and yet ACTA brings them all under the ambit of counterfeit goods. The negotiations of ACTA highlight the fact that the US and some countries in Europe have realised that multilateral venues like the WTO and WIPO are no longer the happy hunting grounds of hegemonic aspirations, and that it makes more sense now to have an agreement that is initiated by powerful countries who then use a bilateral mode of coercion to have countries sign on and then make it a multilateral agreement.

The classic mode of coercion, followed for instance by the US, has been the annual United States Trade Representative (USTR) reports that rank countries on the basis of their IP enforcement. Based on their assessment, they place countries on different watch lists, and these are backed by trade sanctions against a country. India and China have consistently made it to the priority watch list for the past 10 years, and using a carrotand- stick approach, the USTR makes recommendations for changes in national laws. It seems the failure to create norms at multilateral forums necessitated the creation of forums like ACTA, which when combined with the USTR, are used to exert pressure that can convert countries resistant to a dominant IP system into accepting higher norms on a voluntary basis.

Read the original here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/some-baggage

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

Voices from Goa: Rusita Paryekar, a MA student writes articles on Konkani Wikipedia

subha — 2013-09-06T12:30:19Z

Rusita Paryekar is one of the 38 students from the MA Konkani department of Goa University gathered at the State Central Library to learn writing and editing articles on Konkani Wikipedia. Currently Konkani Wikipedia is in incubation and needs more voluntary participation from enthusiasts who want their language, Konkani to strengthen its base in the digital knowledge domain.


					Wikipedia editor Rusita Paryekar speaks about her editing experience on Konkani Wikipedia.

Thirty-eight M.A. students from the Konkani department of Goa came together for a four day long Konkani Wikipedia editing fun workshop and created history. Konkani Wikipedia is one of the Wikipedia projects that went into incubation (a phase every new Wikipedia project goes to allow the editor community to grow and take the project to a sustainable position) seven years back. Sadly it is still in incubation. One of the major reasons is the conflict for script. Konkani is written in 5 different scripts; Devanagari in Goa (as the official script of Goa) and Maharashtra, Roman (also known as Romi) and written by Goan Christian population, Kannada in Mangalore region of Karnataka, and Malayalam in Kochi region of Kerala. The Konkani speaking diaspora is now very much part of the the socio-ethnic groups of these neighbouring regions. The language of these states has naturally influenced Konkani spoken and written by the Konkani diaspora which has resulted in multiple writing standards and dialects. There are four standards of writing systems:

Writing standard that is officially approved by the Directorate of Official language, Government of Goa written in Devanagari script. Majority of the books (includes all Government of Goa publications) are written in this standard.
Writing standard that was influenced by the Portugese language during the Portuguese rule. Earliest available writings in Konkani including The Holy Bible are written in this standards.
Writing standard that Mangalorean Konkani diaspora use.
Writing standard that Keralite Konkani diaspora use.

Interestingly Konkani diaspora of all these regions have produced books in the writing standards mentioned above. The Konkani Wikipedia incubation project currently has 133 articles written in 3 different scripts; Devanagari, Roman and Kannada which has been a problem to get the approval. But this has not stopped the language enthusiasts to stop contributing. While meeting these students I felt that urge for bringing up Konkani in a digital domain and telling the Konkani diaspora about the untold story of Goa. This is the motivation that drives Rusita and many others to contribute to Wikipedia. Her first contribution was about Goan folk songs (गोंयची लोकगितां) which is the first Konkani article about this topic on the internet that is available for free. ‘If I would not write about my culture in my language who would do that?, says Rusita.

Further reading
Manohar L. Sardessai. Influence on Konkani. Journal of South Asian Literature. Vol. 18, No. 1, Goan Literature: A Modern Reader (Winter, Spring 1983), pp. 155-158.

Copyright note: The video and the content of this post are in CC-BY-SA 3.0. Feel free to use, share and remix the content and attribute me.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/voices-from-goa-wikipedia-editor-rusita-paryekar

Voices from Goa: Frania Pereira tells Why She Writes Articles on Konkani Wikipedia

subha — 2013-09-05T09:24:57Z

Konkani as a language has seen geographical, political and religious conflicts. Being the official language of Goa and spoken widely in the Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra it is still trying to strengthen its base. Recently the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) in collaboration with the Konkani department of Goa University organized a four-day Wikipedia workshop for MA, Konkani language students. This workshop involved 38 students creating 43 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia which is incubation. We’re hoping that these efforts will contribute towards bringing this 7 year old project out of incubation to a live Wikipedia project.

				Video by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Video by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Why do you [edit] Wikipedia?

Wikipedia editors are always volunteers which translates to “Anyone and everyone can contribute to Wikipedia”. What is that brings people in today’s date to write articles on Wikipedia. This is a question we are not sure at times. You get up late in the night and check how many times your article has been edited and feel excited. This happens to many of the wikipedians including myself. It has been a personal journey to ask Wikipedians about the same. While conducting this workshop along with my colleague Nitika, I spent some time with the students asking about their experience of Wikipedia editing. We found that many of them were shy enough to sound low and we could not take the videos. This particular video features Frania Pereira, an MA student from Konkani department of Goa University. She attended the Wikipedia workshop we organized at the Central Library at Panaji for two days and edited articles on Bebinca (Konkani article here) and Colvá fama (Konkani article here), a local festival celebrated by the Colvá Catholics. Frania is worried how people stereotype Goa to be the just land of enjoyment and not look at the diverse culture, its ethnic food and festivals. Even the Konkani speaking population in other regions (Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and abroad) don’t know much about this socio-language-cultural diversity. No other language than her mother-toungue Konkani could tell about these. And that is why she edits Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/voices-from-goa

Views on on the proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations at side-event organised by Knowledge Ecology International

sinha — 2018-11-29T10:48:40Z

On November 27, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) organised a side event during deliberations of the 37th Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), Electronic Information for Libraries (eiFL.net), Corporacion Innovarte, Creative Commons, and Knowledge Ecology International appraised the current text for the proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Revised Consolidated Text on Definitions, Object of Protection, Rights to be Granted and Other Issues, SCCR/36/6). Speakers provided an overview of the treaty, explained the potential risks and problems caused, and proposed solutions to narrow the Treaty’s scope and limit the damage. Below is a transcript of the remarks made by Anubha Sinha who represented CIS at this event.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My presentation will be in reference to the revised consolidated text SCCR 36/6 and the US proposal SCCR 37/7.

In essence, this treaty is trying to create a new set of rights for broadcasters operating in both mediums (first, traditional – satellite, airwaves, cables, and second, the internet), ostensibly to counter signal piracy. We are looking at updating a neighbouring rights or related rights regime to protect signals across both mediums.

The intent of treaty is to exclude entities exclusively delivering their programmes over the internet. I fear that the results would create an unequal playing field between broadcasters and internet streaming entities. This would be the first, immediate impact. To then catch up, perhaps, internet streaming services would look to satisfy the treaty requirements to avail protection. This would involve satisfying the definition of a broadcasting organisation (as in SCCR 36/6), and for their country to have ratified the treaty. The characteristics of a broadcasting organisation can be satisfied by acquiring any traditional broadcasting service, for such an entity, as per the current text of the treaty. This would require serious capital, and most start up innovations in the area would not be in a position to undertake such a step. And then there is the question of asserting the rights and enforcing them in other countries – this will be an extremely expensive affair. The point I’m trying to make is that this treaty seems to be set to protect a narrow slice of broadcasters, with significant market power in their home markets.

My co-panelists will discuss specific harms that this will have on the building of commons, and other damaging effects on global efforts to build an affordable and accessible knowledge system. This is unfortunate, and hence we urgently need text that provides for a mandatory list of limitations and exceptions, and not work with the soft language that is present right now. We have to accept that multilateral norm-setting at the international level sets the tone for countries to enact their own national legislations – indeed, before the Marakkesh treaty there were hardly any developing countries which had an expansive beneficial copyright exception for the visually impaired (except India - that I'm aware of), and look who the first few countries to ratify the treaty were – India, Argentina, El Salvador, Paraguay, Uruguay, etc – all developing countries leading to adopt this international standard.

The US delegation’s proposal, introduced yesterday, pushes the idea of limiting exclusive rights granted under this treaty to broadcasting organisations, so long as the countries provide adequate protection against piracy in other bodies of law. This seems like a promising idea – one that does not upend the legal theories of neighbouring rights and also shrinks the proposed model in the treaty that seeks to grant monopolistic property rights for a long and unclear period of time to powerful organisations – organisations that by their very nature and functions are chroniclers of our times and keepers of valuable cultural heritage.

At a seminar on this very treaty organised last month by KEI, Proffessor Bernt Hugenholtz flagged off the problematic justifications provided for increasing the strength of this neighbouring right. He said that the justifications should indicate a corresponding increase in cost of disseminating content. Should new exclusive rights be created for gradation-like increase in investment? He was not convinced that the costs had gone up significantly, and he also pointed out that this cost should not account for money spent on acquiring the rights to broadcast the content. Further, going back to the US proposal, the proposal recognises the persistent conceptual difficulties of distinguishing between signal protection and content protection. This very difficulty has been raised by many civil society organisations in the past, and more recently it cropped up at a discussion on the treaty in New Delhi, where both civil society organisations and representatives of broadcasters were present. Another practical challenge (that remains) will be to separate the computer network based operations from the non-computer network based operation; however, in this age, is it technically possible to do that?

To conclude, I think that fundamental concepts and terms need to be properly clarified to arrive at an understanding that is shared across all stakeholders; and a corresponding strengthening of limitations and exceptions is urgently needed.

Thank you.

For a complete list of speakers at the event, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-views-on-on-the-proposed-wipo-treaty-for-the-protection-of-broadcasting-organizations-at-side-event-organised-by-knowledge-ecology-international

Varsha Kavlekar on Konkani Wikipedia Incubator

nitika — 2013-12-31T10:56:22Z

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

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

Video


Above: Varsha speaks about Konkani Wikipedia

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

Van Bodh Workshop for content development on Forest Resources at Gadchiroli

Admin — 2018-11-06T01:36:39Z

CIS-A2K has collaborated with Tribal Research and Training Institute (TRTI) to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation. These contents will become a part of "Van Bodh Knowledge repository".

Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy, Bombay University has formulated and going to start a "Diploma course in Community Resource Management " with the support of TRTI, Pune from 2nd of oct 2018. This is a historic attempt to impart education of the level of a diploma to rural, especially tribal youth without any condition of academic qualification. The course was conducted at Mendha(Lekha) an hamlet in Dhanora taluk of Gadchiroli District. CIS-A2K has collaborated with TRTI to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/van-bodh-workshop-for-content-development-on-forest-resources-at-gadchiroli

Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature

subha — 2014-04-08T01:48:18Z

The blog post throws light on providing access to Vachana Sanchaya, a eleventh century Kannada literature.

The article was published in Open Access Week on April 3, 2014.

During early 11th century a form of spiritual Kannada language poetry in the Indian state of Karnataka called Vachana sahitya became quite popular. It started flourishing in the 12th century by a religious movement called Lingayatha movement. More than 259 Vachana writers, called Vachanakaru, compiled over 11,000 vachanas (verses). 21,000 of these verses in 15 volumes were published by the Government of Karnataka into an online portal called Samagra Vachana Samputa. Two Wikimedians along with two linguists brought these verses on a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya. Kannada Wikimedians, Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI along with Kannada linguist O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy converted the font to Unicode to make the verses searchable on this project. The entire collection is now ready to enrich the Kannada WikiSource.

The text in Samagra Vachana Samputa were typed using fonts of ISCII, an Indian character encoding standard. Indic characters generally replace Latin ones inside the font that makes them completely useless when someone does not have the particular font installed in the computer. This is a typical problem with non-Latin fonts, especially Indic typefaces. In case of this particular publication, there were more than 5 ISCII standards which made searching and reusing content completely impossible. Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash started writing scripts to make the Vachanas searchable through an index. This demanded a user friendly platform for the linguistic researchers, students, and the public interested in accessing this literature.

Omshivaprakash worked on designing the architecture for this platform using open source software tools. Hanchagaiah was involved in providing critical hacks for digitization and valuable inputs through suggestions, feedback, and quality assurance.

At present, Vachana Sanchaya project has around 200,000 unique words that were derived from these verses. The public has been using the repository and accessing vachana from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles. There are thousands of people now who read a Vahana as part of their daily routine. Vachana Sanchaya is not only a gateway for reading the literature, but also a research platform for Kannada language and literature. It has options for researchers to help in reviewing content which in turn will help to add references from research papers.

All of the content is currently available to the public through the OpenData API, and once the reviewing the work is complete, it will be distributed in the public domain through WikiSource. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers, and anyone interested in building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. Users will be able to use our code to digitize any book available in the public domain. Early literature in any language is well-respected, so making it available via an open platform allows for reuse of the content for research, publication, and other documentation work.

Other similar projects could take help from this project and use any part of the processes.

Plans going foward:

To initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researches help to tag words and grow the glossary.
To continue work on subsequent, similar projects for Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya (work has begun) and Vyāsa and Muddann (work to be started)
To extend this platform to other the contemporary literature works available in the public domain.

Authored by Pavithra Hanchagaiah, Omshivaprakash HI and Subhashish Panigrahi. Draws inspiration from another article published on Opensource.com under CC-BY-SA 4.0

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/openaccessweek-april-3-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-vachana-sanchaya

Vachana Sanchaya: 11th century Kannada literature to enrich Wikisource

subha — 2014-03-20T11:13:22Z

Kannada Wikipedian Omshivaprakash, Pavithra and I co-authored this article on digitizing Vachana Sahitya, a 11th century Kannada literature on WikiSource.

Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI, Wikimedians from India are co-authors with Subhashish Panigrahi in this article. This was originally posted on Wikimedia blog and published by GlobalVoices on March 18, 2014.

In the poetry of Kannada (an Indic language), Vachana sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing that evolved in the 11th Century C.E. and flourished in the 12th century, as part of the “Lingayatha” movement. More than 259 Vachanakaras (Vachana writers) have compiled over 11,000 vachanas. 21,000 of these verses which were published in a 15 volume “Samagra Vachana Samputa” by the government of Karnataka have been digitized. Two Wikimedians along with a Kannada linguist and author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy are involved in the Unicode conversions, corrections and writing preface for these verses. The entire work is now available as a standalone project called “Vachana Sanchaya” and ready to enrich Kannada Wikisource.

This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O.L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had trouble using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII standard and searching text was a huge problem. I (Pavithra Hanchagaiah) started to help gather information about vachanas and document it in Unicode by writing scripts for open source software. Further discussions were had to get thousands of vachanas in the form of a database, so that they could be easily searchable with an index. This demanded us to build a platform supporting all these activities, which would help the linguistic researchers, students and members of the general public who have an interest in reading and studying Vachana literature. With this idea, Omshivaprakash started designing the model, and his colleague Devaraju started building it. In the meantime I was running various scripts to fix errors in conversion of ASCII text to Unicode, confirming that the data was ready to consume by the modules developed for concordance. We spent weekends & holidays executing this project from home. With the constant feedback and guidance from Mr. Swamy and Vasudendra, we learned how concordance of text is used by researchers and what would make it easier for them to research on Vachana Sahitya. Omshivaprakash worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements – free and open source software technologies were used to keep the platform active while managing the entire project. I provided critical hacks for digitization and gave feedback through suggestions.

Working System Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki’s jquery-ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!	Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Working System

Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki’s jquery-ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!

Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Public Response

We are glad to see people accessing vachanas from our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels. There have been approximately 500,000 pageviews to our site in the first few months of our platform’s public launch. Interestingly, commonly searched Kannada words like “ಕರ್ಮ”(Karma en:Work/Deed) , “ಸತ್ಯ” (Sathya -en:Truthfulness ) and “ನದಿ” (River) have resulted in quick and easy results.

Plans for the future

ಆಂಗೀರಸ, ಪುಲಸ್ತ್ಯ, ಪುಲಹ, ಶಾಂತ,ದಕ್ಷ, ವಸಿಷ್ಠ, ವಾಮದೇವ, ನವಬ್ರಹ್ಮ, ಕೌಶಿಕ, ಶೌನಕ, ಸ್ವಯಂಭು, ಸ್ವಾರೋಚಿಷ, ಉತ್ತಮ, ತಾಮಸ, ರೈವತ, ಚಾಕ್ಷಷ, ವೈವಸ್ವತ, ಸೂರ್ಯಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಚಂದ್ರಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಬ್ರಹ್ಮಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಇಂದ್ರ ಸಾವರ್ಣಿ ಇವರು ಇಪ್ಪತ್ತು ಮಂದಿ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ನಿರ್ಮಾಣ ಸಹಾಯ[ದ]ವರು. ಹತ್ತೊಂಬತ್ತು ಎಂದರೆ ಪುಣ್ಯನದಿಗಳು. ಅದು ಎಂತೆಂದಡೆ: ಗ್ರಂಥ

Our system is extensible with respect to adding new feature – we have a review desk for researchers to help us with the review of content. Later we will also be adding required references to Vachanas from various research works that have been done around this literature. The content is available to the public through OpenData API and will be distributed as public domain through Wikisource once the review work is complete. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers and anyone interested in working around building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. This system is meant to evolves around other works rather than having to change and re-invent the wheel for more such projects. Vachana Sahitya will further help us to initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researchers get together to tag the words, glossary etc in the coming days. We can also fulfill the need of various language tools like spelling and grammar checker for users through crowd-sourcing the development. The next projects under the “Kannada Sanchaya” are Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya which are in the pipeline with initial phases of work underway. Our idea is to extend this platform from Vyasa to Muddanna and possibly the contemporary literature work available in the public domain.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/vachana-sanchaya-11th-century-kannada-literature-to-enrich-wikisource

UTF-8, Indic and Stub Length Article in Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2016-10-20T02:26:29Z

One of the activities conducted as part of Wiki Conference India 2016 was the Punjab Editathon. It was about adding articles related to Punjab to Indian language Wikipedias and English Wikipedia. There was also an announcement made about some award for highest contribution.

See the original blog post at Dr. Pavanaja Blog

This lead to continued discussions in a closed chat group on how do we decide the winner. People thought it is very simple to announce the winner just based on highest number of bytes added. On first look, it looked very trivial and a simple case. I pointed out during the discussions about the encoding used in Wikipedia is UTF-8 and it uses different number of bytes for English and Indian languages. Before giving more details I would like to draw your attention to a simple experiment.

I typed Kannada letter ಅ (a) in my Sandbox in Kannada Wikipedia and saved it. Then I checked the RecentChanges page in Kannada Wikipedia. That showed that I have added 3 bytes to my Sandbox page. But I had added just one Kannada character. I did the same experiment in English Wikipedia. I just added one letter, the English letter “A” to my Sandbox in English Wikipedia and checked the number of bytes added. It showed just one byte.

What is going on? Here is the explanation. There are different ways Unicode text can be stored. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are the prominent ways. UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for all characters. UTF-32 uses 4 bytes. UTF-8 is a special kind of encoding. It uses series of single bytes to represent Unicode data. The first character, called Byte Order Mark (BOM) indicates what encoding is being used. Unicode website has more details on these. UTF-8 was mainly used for web as the networking devices used on the initial days of Unicode could handle only 8 bits (1 byte) of data. In other words, UTF-8 was used for backward compatibility with ASCII, the original 8-bit encoding used prior to the advent of Unicode. Even today the default encoding used by HTML is UTF-8.

Does these answer our original question? Not yet. I said UTF-8 uses series of single bytes. It uses 1 byte for English, 2 bytes for European languages and 3 bytes for Indian languages. That is the reason why we saw 3 bytes for one Kannada character.

This pops up another interesting question regarding the definition of a stub article in Wikipedia. As per Wikipedia, an article which has less than 2048 bytes is considered as a stub article. Go to any language Wikipedia’s search page and type Special:ShortPages to get the list of all articles which are having less than 2048 bytes. If we convert this into number of characters it turns out to be 2048 for English but about 682 for Indic. That means the length of a stub article will be different for English and Indian language Wikipedias. Should we have a different yardstick for the definition of a stub article for Indian language Wikipedias then? I think yes.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/utf-8-indic-and-stub-length-article-in-wikipedia

USTR elaborates the Two Dozen Digital Rules of Club TPP

sinha — 2016-07-29T08:00:00Z

Members of the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are now scrounging the world to include more countries in its fold. The Digital 2 Dozen(D2D) is a bite-sized document which packs the TPP into 24 key tenets. The D2D, aggressively championed by the US as the path forward for the global digital economy poses some critical questions for India: first, how will India position itself against US pressure in the larger scheme of US-India foreign relations, and how much is it willing to concede its policies in the name of trade; second, how will reduced barriers and establishment of a level field for Indian and foreign IT and internet companies alike, hurt Indian consumers and businesses? This week, the Deputy US Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Holleyman discussed the Digital 2 Dozen document with Ambassador Shyam Saran (Chairman, RIS). The exchange was moderated by Samir Saran (Observer Research Foundation). I attended the discussion and this post is a summary of the key points.

For a background on the data protection and privacy aspects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and Digital 2 Dozen principles, please read CIS' piece here.

Ambassador Robert Holleyman

Ambassador Holleyman opened with stating that trade agreements are created to build a foundation for national policies. He added that the D2D is not merely a tech D2D, rather it is based on the premise that our economies have digitised to a large extent, and hence, the TPP contains provisions on agriculture as well. The TPP tries to combat barriers to the growth of digital economy, and the D2D provides the most modern and the highest standard of such provisions. The D2D tenets can be divided into three categories:

1. Provisions to ensure the internet is open and safe, and an effective channel for trade and services.

2. Provisions to combat protectionist and restrictive provisions of member nations. The D2D talks about eliminating rules that seek to make foreign companies localise their data by building expensive data centers in every market they seek to serve. Further, TPP also seeks to prevent countries from 'forcing' foreign companies from transferring their technologies and production processes as a pre-condition for doing business there.

3. Provisions on IPRs to 'build a level playing field' in order to 'protect' innovators and creators in the digital space.

“ ...The TPP rules on enforcement of IPRs are strong and balanced and embody the TRIPs standards. For instance, countries are required to to impose criminal penalties on trade-secret violations such as cyberhacking.”

He added:

“We believe these rules are the foundation for next 20 years of the digital economy. To make sure that India does not fall behind we want to work with India (for the adoption of these rules). We're encouraged by the new government's programmes and the PM's engagement with US and silicon valley leaders.

We encourage India to level the playing field. To that end the USTR is working with the Indian Ministries of Communications and IT, and Commerce and Industry to exchange practices for building open markets. We want to work together in eliminating localisation policies given that how a lot of IT companies have established investment heavy R&D centers in India, and they rely heavily on the free flow of cross border data. Imposition of localisation of data would be detrimental in this age of cloud-computing. We're aware that the Indian government is reviewing its policies on cloud-computing and encryption, and we encourage the government to consider the implications of the such policies carefully, for India is also a leader in global IT and would be a potential framework setter at that.”

The D2D also endorses elimination of custom duties on ICT products, and the Ambassador added that the US was very pleased to see India deposit their instrument of accession on the Trade Facilitation Agreement with the WTO. The US has been pleased to see India's ratcheting up its norms for IPR protection. He mentioned that the two countries held a successful copyright workshop earlier this year, and later this year they plan to conduct a workshop on trade secret protection. The D2D also says that conformity assessment procedures are excessive and should be eliminated. This emerges from US' IT industries concerns on the compulsory registration of ICT products that required re-testing in Indian labs.

He made a case for opening up Indian markets by quoting a study which revealed that the Indian market for ICT products is worth 65bn dollars, while the global market stands at 2 trillion dollars. So while India could leverage its exports to meet the demand, the question remains if we want to foster a market based on openness. In his opinion, openness has enabled the IT sector in India to access other markets. However, he observed that countries were erecting barriers to this openness by restricting the cross-border free-flow of data, particularly and this is where the TPP assumes importance. The real challenge now is for the US and India to prepare their own version the the D2D.

On the route of D2D, the Ambassador was largely optimistic:

“The TPP has Obama's backing and the US Congress should ratify the deal before the elections. Other TPP members have already initiated steps to ratify the deal in their countries. For phase II, 13 non-member countries have already approached the US to be a part of TPP since the deal was concluded.”

Ambassador Shyam Saran

He began by stating that the India-US engagement on digital economy would become an area of close cooperation for US-India relationship. A few years ago the US pharma was unhappy with Indian generics, and this tussle left a bad taste between the countries, and also spilled over into the political side. Disagreements on several issues such as IPR, WTO subjects, etc still persist, despite some developments reflecting mutual trust and confidence (for instance the counter-terrorism initiative).

He welcomed potential cooperation in the digital field, because that would dispel the negativity and prevailing perception of India and US not being on the same page. The one area that has been a shaky pillar is the trade and economic relationship. In his frank opinion, the Indian establishment perceives USTR's outlook on trade issues as quite adversarial. He was mindful of a developing India's unique needs and priorities:

“In regard to the differences between India and US on trade and economic issues, it is not surprising because we must also be mindful of the reality- we are a developing country, wheras the US is highly developed and technologically advances - thus, we need different lenses for each. This is something we need to address, (remember how we acknowledged and fixed this in our defence relationship re the nuclear deal). The lesson that I draw is that here is an area critical to both countries' growth, and we need to address this differential aspect...”

According to him, right now India has an ambiguous position on the TPP. Holleyman had mentioned that the deal was based on an open platform, and Shyam pointed out that it was in fact conceived through closed door negotiations. It is common knowledge that rules at TPP were arrived at through complex negotiations between 13 countries, which surely was a process of complex give and takes. At this stage, it was not possible for India to look at one chapter and agree to meet the “gold standards” set in it.

According to him, D2D was important to the US solely in terms of trade benefits for its own businesses. He said that to convince the Indian government, the USTR will have to first convince the Indian IT industry the D2D benefits- which he was skeptical of. The reason was that this 'opportunity' comes across as a clear case of double-standards when the US talks about lowering barriers in India, and on the other hand is increasing barriers on its own shores (several pending bills in the US Congress indicate this). Similarly, immigration troubles for the Indian talent pool have only gone up. The other aspect he raised was on localisation and IPRs. He said that while stands on these issues were being formulated, it should also be expected that the government will take into account concerns of privacy and security. In the US itself, the US treasury has said in regard to banking and financial transactions localisation may be necessary.

He closed by offering an alternative route to the US – one of working with India as a partner in the Digital Economy instead of fixating on barriers and/or nitpicking on Indian legislations. This would be a more sustainable way to capitalise on India's growth potential and align with its digital future.

Samir Saran

Samir responded to the discussants by offering his thoughts (and questions) on D2D and the digital economy, broadly:

“...Can the digital space be a new space for a partnership? Three stories are important in the context of a trade document:
First is dominated by access – India is seeing 6 million new internet users every month and most of them are on low-cost mobile devices. Can a trading normative process allow to continue this phenomenon as it is?
Second is opportunity – India is already responding to investment flows. In terms of privacy and security – if India believes that it can become the digital infrastructure hub, it will need to develop world-class encryption tools. Similarly in terms of free-flow of information, when Obama and PM met they endorsed the same. So it is a step back from localisation, anyway. So you see India changing positions to make the atmosphere more business conducive.
Third is security – How can you make free-flow of data uni-directional? Why is it that you want data to flow unfettered when it creates value, but you are creating barriers for giving data for security purposes?...

...Further, in a phase when the mood worldwide is in favour of de-globalisation, will hyperglobalisation through FTAs work?...”

Finally, Holleyman acknowledged that historically India and US have had differences, but with the digital economy perhaps they can forge some approaches. He accepted that some of the points were written squarely for the US tech sector, but he hoped that the other 11 partners of the TPP will come out with what the D2D means to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ustr-elaborates-the-two-dozen-digital-rules-of-club-tpp

Using the Wikimedia sphere for the revitalization of small and underrepresented languages in India

subodh — 2024-02-10T04:35:45Z

This report explores opportunities within the Wikimedia movement and projects to help revitalise small and underrepresented languages in India and provide recommendations to CIS’s Access to Knowledge team in furthering this effort. The report is mainly based on a roundtable conversation on Digital Access in Bhubaneswar with a diverse range of backgrounds and professions, including independent researchers, representatives from non-profit organizations, retired government officials, Wikimedia contributors (both Odia and Santali), ecological activists, directors of research institutes, consultants, and journalists. This was organized by the Access to Knowledge team of CIS in collaboration with Vasundhara, Bhubaneswar.

This strategic note discusses a broad program idea of offering barrier-free open access to resources in various underrepresented languages in India.

Languages spoken in the Republic of India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians. Languages spoken by the remaining 2.31% of the population belong to the Austroasiatic, Sino–Tibetan, Tai–Kadai, and a few other minor language families and isolates. According to the People's Linguistic Survey of India, India has the second highest number of languages (780), after Papua New Guinea (840). Ethnologue lists a lower number of 456.

The UNESCO endangerment classification is as follows:

Vulnerable: most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)
Definitely endangered: children no longer learn the language as a 'mother tongue' in the home
Severely endangered: language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves
Critically endangered: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently
Extinct: there are no speakers left

North-East India is home to more than 200 languages, out of which 82 are listed as Vulnerable, 63 as Definitely Endangered, 6 as Severely Endangered, 46 as Critically Endangered and 6 as Extinct (The Guardian Dataset). Arunachal Pradesh is the state with the highest number of languages, with as many as 66 languages spoken there, while West Bengal has the highest number of scripts, nine, and around 38 languages.

The state of Odisha has 62 Scheduled Tribes who speak as many as 74 dialects. Their ethos, ideology, worldview, value orientations and cultural heritage are rich and varied. Odisha has the unique distinction of having 93 different Scheduled Caste communities spread over 30 districts and 314 blocks of the state having different dialects. Apart from the languages of the North-East and the state of Odisha, there are several other languages all over India that deserve better representation on the Internet. While a handful of these languages enjoy status and visibility as official languages of the states and thereby hold some currency as widely spoken languages in their linguistic territories, there are many more languages that do not have speakers counting beyond a few hundred. Examples include the Bellari language (Spoken in Karnataka by 1000 speakers), the Toda language (Spoken in Tamil Nadu by 1600 speakers) and the Naiki language (Spoken in Maharashtra by 1500 speakers). What these languages do share in common with the languages of the North-East mentioned earlier is that they all lack free and open source knowledge and data.

Some of these languages are the official languages of the states and are widely spoken in this region. On the other hand, some of the languages have a few hundred native speakers. However, irrespective of the size of the native population or official status of the language, they all lack free and open source knowledge & data.

These languages show a range of marked cross-linguistic features which pose several interesting questions to Linguistic theories and speech processing research. Moreover, the close geographical proximity of these languages makes them vulnerable to changes in multiple linguistic levels, making these languages an excellent resource to study language change. Despite this, these languages severely lack digital preservation. One of the major reasons that contribute to the lack of resources is the difficulty in human access to some of the areas in these regions. Moreover, with English and Hindi being used as a lingua franca in these regions, the actual number of speakers proficient in their native language is much fewer than the number shown in the census reports. This makes it more important than ever to initiate a preservation process which does not primarily depend on fieldwork while also increasing the presence of the language in the digital sphere.

As language technologies advance and more sophisticated tools are built using Artificial Intelligence, the divide between low resource languages and others is likely to get even larger as a common prerequisite of these advanced systems is the existence of a large amount of digital data. Low resource languages are at a risk of being left behind.

Research on these languages by researchers are mostly conducted by collecting data personally, which causes a huge hindrance to the research process, as most of it remains as a private collection or published in closed journals. Moreover, data collection through fieldwork is particularly challenging in this region due to the restricted access to most of the disturbed areas.

The goal of this program is to facilitate the study of these languages by making existing resources discoverable and building open-source structured datasets and tools using the Wikimedia sphere to enrich the language research landscape of small and underrepresented Indian languages.

Role of CIS-A2K

To design and commission relevant research studies in collaboration with language communities to define the premises of the program. The plan is to work with languages which are being written in single or multiple scripts in the pilot phase.
To develop strategies regarding the integration of language datasets with Wikimedia projects
Skill building of volunteers and community leaders in Wikimedia projects
Structure of local knowledge to be compiled for contribution
To identify the specific Wiki projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Lingua Libre etc to build the archives of these languages
Designing outreach and knowledge dissemination processes
To develop partnerships with other academic, social, cultural and research institutions in the language sector for the sustainability of the project
Material support - Sound recorders, microphones, hard discs, laptop, scanner, internet hardware
Financial support - Remuneration of intern/fellow, internet data recharge

Specific objectives

Empowering the communities by enhancing digital literacy and connecting them with the world of knowledge and people outside.
Revitalizing/enriching the languages by increasing their use, coverage and depth using technological interventions.
Creating an ecosystem for developing language learning resources and tools; particularly, in the context of the New Education Policy.
Enabling scholars and researchers to overcome the challenge of finding appropriate data and expanding the knowledge on these languages.
By using the Wikimedia sphere, the infrastructural and technological support is secured, so that these languages are able to function in the digital world.

It is important to realise that these objectives can introduce new dynamics into other spheres of activity, such as education and the development of language.

Methodology

Our target languages broadly belong to two sets:

Languages which are primarily spoken in various states of India and have some or no digital presence on the internet.
Endangered languages which have extremely limited or no digital presence.

Survey of ongoing work

Several individuals and institutions are working on languages across the globe. There are significant initiatives in India also to revitalise the small languages in the digital sphere. Some of these are listed in the reference section at the end. An exhaustive survey of all such efforts will be done to map the present status as well as a listing of stakeholders. The target languages for A2K’s future work and the potential collaborators will also be identified through these exercises.

Digital Dictionary Making

A dictionary is a vital resource for any language learning. The idea of collaborative dictionaries using platforms like Wiktionary or Wikidata Lexemes eliminates the need for expert lexicographers and terminologists and rather follows the method in which the users enter data as new entries, definitions, and so on, and the same is reviewed by editors, once published. An offline e-dictionary application using this dataset could be developed to overcome the problem of sparse internet connectivity where the user is only expected to download & install the application once and use the dictionary offline at any moment.

Data Acquisition Strategies

Leveraging Crowdsourcing using LinguaLibre for the creation of Speech CorporaGiven the scarcity of text and speech corpora for these low-resource languages, the main potential source for dataset creation is by crowdsourcing.
Using Optical Character Recognition techniques -

The digitisation of texts in the public domain would be done and made available freely by uploading them on Wikimedia projects. The digital copy will be made machine-readable using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Processing the acquired data

Preprocess
Processing Speech Corpora
Processing Bilingual Parallel text Corpora

Housing datasets

Wiki Commons for media files
Wikidata for Lexemes
Wikisource for texts

Capacity Building workshops

Promoting the language among the young speakers of the community, since they are the future of the language and if it survives, it will belong to them.

Help language speakers possess up-to-date digital competencies and feel confident about them to actively participate in the digital world and increase content in their own native language.

Promoting contributions on platforms like Storyweaver, Pratham Books, Eklavya etc.

Promote the upskilling of native speakers and other disseminators

Facilitate knowledge exchange through participatory mechanisms both virtually and face-to-face.

The potential communities would be introduced to Incubator for building new Wikimedia projects

Educational development

Applying Open access philosophy to advance language pedagogy.

Develop language learning resources and tools, particularly, in the context of the New Education Policy.

References

Wikipedia articles
SCSTRTI, Odisha - https://www.scstrti.in/index.php/resources/mle-initiative/bilingual-dictionaries
Most populous languages of Odisha - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Languages_of_Odisha.svg
People’s Linguistic Survey of India - https://www.peopleslinguisticsurvey.org/
The state and fate of linguistic diversity and inclusion in the NLP world - https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.560/
Bhasha India - https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/bhashaindia
Omniglot - https://www.omniglot.com/index.htm
Bharatavani - https://bharatavani.in/
Storyweaver - https://storyweaver.org.in/
Dimasa Thairili - https://www.dimasathairili.com/
SIL International - https://www.sil.org/
Ethnologue - https://www.ethnologue.com/
Global Recordings Network - https://globalrecordings.net/en/
Glottolog - https://glottolog.org/
Endangered Languages Project - https://endangeredlanguages.com/

This is a report by Subodh Kulkarni with editorial oversight and support by Tanveer Hasan and Soni Wadhwa. Click to download the PDF here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/using-wikimedia-sphere-for-revitalization-of-small-and-underrepresented-languages-in-india