Centre for Internet and Society

Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at 'Swa'-Roopwardhinee, Pune

Subodh Kulkarni — 2017-04-16T14:31:46Z

A Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was held at 'Swa'-Roopwardhinee, Pune on 7th February 2017

A Marathi Wikipedia edit-a-thon conducted by CIS-A2K in partnership with 'Swa'-Roopwardhinee, an organisation working in the field of education and social work was held on 7 February, 2017. The aim of the workshop was to train participants from 'Swa'-Roopwardhinee on the basics of Wikipedia editing. The theme of the edit-a-thon was to build resources on education and community development on Marathi Wikipedia. Six participants took part in the three hour workshop conducted at the 'Swa'-Roopwardhinee premises.

This edit-a-thon is part of CIS-A2K's ongoing effort to engage communities of interest to partner and collaborate on contributing to Wikipedia so as to utilize their domain knowledge on the free encyclopaedia. Five articles were created and edited by participants.

The link to event page on meta can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-at-swa-roopwardhinee-pune

Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

subodh — 2017-03-05T01:31:31Z

A Marathi Wikipedia edit-a-thon was conducted by the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS-A2K) on February 5, 2017 at Vigyan Ashram, Pabal in Pune.


Discussion on themes	Hand holding

CIS-A2K aims to build resources in the field of appropriate rural technologies on Marathi Wikipedia and encourage the participants to contribute and enrich Marathi language on Wikipedia. The workshop besides encouraging participants to develop village articles also focused on:

Introducing Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia for research.
Promoting Marathi Wikipedia community and use of Marathi on Wikipedia.
Open interactions within the editors, new as well as old.
Spreading awareness of Wikipedia as a power digital tool of knowledge.
Developing articles on gender and environment related issues.

The workshop was highly interactive and participants were able to discuss specific problems in content creation and seek appropriate guidance from the trainer conducting the edit-a-thon. Seven articles were created at the workshop:

विकिपीडिया:मराठी विकिपीडिया संपादन कार्यशाळा - विज्ञान आश्रम,पाबळ https://mr.wikipedia.org/s/306z
विज्ञान आश्रम https://mr.wikipedia.org/s/307h
पाबळ https://mr.wikipedia.org/s/300s
कन्हेरसर https://mr.wikipedia.org/s/306p
केंदूर https://mr.wikipedia.org/s/3070
भैरवनाथ मंदिर, पाबळ https://mr.wikipedia.org/s/3078
श्री पद्ममानी जैन कॉलेज पाबळ https://mr.wikipedia.org/s/307w

For more info see the Wikimedia Blog

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-february-5-2017-in-pune

Marathi Wikipedia - Vishwakosh Workshop for Science writers in IUCAA, Pune

manasarao — 2017-12-20T02:42:39Z

A day-long workshop was organised for science writers at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-University_Centre_for_Astronomy_and_Astrophysics Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics], Pune on 7 October, 2017. Eminent astrophysicist-mathematician couple en:Jayant Narlikar|Jayant^[+] and en:Mangala Narlikar|Mangala Narlikar^[+] , and renowned ecologist en:Madhav Gadgil|Madhav Gadgil^[+] were among the dignitaries present at the event.

The workshop was planned in three sessions. Presentations and discussions were conducted in first session, while second session was focused on actual editing demonstrations on Wikipedia. In the same session the new websites based on different subjects developed by Marathi Vishwakosh were presented. The process of content contribution in text, images, audio and video forms was explained in this session. The third session was to explore networking with Dyanmandals formed by :en:Marathi Vishwakosh|Marathi Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal^[+] . Insisting the expertise of invited authors to contribute the articles in their own chosen fields in a well-structured format, this session will not only train the authors in content generation but also make them understand the expectations of laymen and common readers.

The mete page of the event is here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune

Marathi Language Day events by CIS-A2K in February 2018

subodh — 2018-03-17T08:58:44Z

Marathi Language day is celebrated all over world on 27th February. Dnyanpeeth award winning writer V.V.Shirwadkar alias Kusumagraj was born on this date. Various events and activities were conducted in collaboration with community, institutions and government departments.

Online Workshops

These were conducted at Jeevan Jyoti Women empowerment centre,Velhe ; Garware College of Commerce, Pune and Dayanand college in Solapur. Proof reading of marathi book on Wikisource was completed by the students of Garware college on this day.

Media

Guest editorial in leading newspaper Sakal was published on 10th Feb. The gist is - Everyone speaks, discusses about status of marathi on the occasion of language day on 27th feb and Yearly Litfest. If we want to make marathi, a global language for knowledge sharing and connecting to world lang' communities, it is necessary to adopt unicode and open source softwares in writing, publishing,printing etc. The collaborative works also need unicode as it is a universal bridge. The Wikipedias in 288 lang's is a great success story because it is based on Unicode & open source. The editorial also gives future action plan to achieve this, viz. upgradation of academic courses related to language business, writers/publishers workshops, Indic lang computing centre, digitisation/OCR and content donation in Wikisource, Wiktionary etc., Copyright free/relicense movement among writers or copyright holders, Appeal to social and educational magazines to upload their old issues on Wikisource as reference material.

Radio Interview on Tomato FM 94.3 Kolhapur on 27th Feb. The promotion was made through Facebook post and ads on Radio. The interview received good response from 2 districts.

Event in Sangli

A special event was arranged by 'Janswasthya organisation on 28th Feb. Nearly 80 prominent personalities from Sangli district gathered together to discuss about growth of marathi language. Alongwith Subodh Kulkarni, writer Ramdas Phutane also participated.

Media Coverage

News in Pudhari
News in Lokmat
News in Samana

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-language-day-events-by-cis-a2k-in-february-2018

Mapping Content on Gender and Sexuality in Indian Languages

Yashashwini Srinivas — 2022-10-21T13:03:20Z

This research study explores content production processes on gender and sexuality in Indian languages, its digital documentation and factors that affect its availability and use on open access platforms. The research was undertaken by Yashashwini Srinivas, with editorial inputs by Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and Torsha Sarkar. This research was part of short-term studies undertaken at the CIS-A2K programme 2021-22.

Read the report on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki here.

Introduction

Mapping Content on Gender and Sexuality in Indian languages is a research project that studies the content production process on gender and sexuality in Indian languages and challenges it with its digital documentation. It examines the diverse nature of content creation on these topics, processes of its digitalisation and related challenges that contribute to the disparity in its availability and use on open knowledge platforms such as Wikimedia projects, and potential strategies to address the same.

Through conversations with individuals and institutions working on gender, sexuality and allied topics like feminism, with a focus on women, non-binary and LGBTQIA+ related content, the study explores various aspects of content creation across multiple Indian languages, its access and use. Based on analysing this data and drawing on ongoing work within the mainstream discourse on gender and sexuality, the report offers a set of observations on ways to address challenges related to the gender gap in the content creation process on open knowledge platforms.

Context and Methods

Collaborative knowledge production platforms such as Wikimedia projects have recognised the existence of a gender gap and bias across its projects, understood largely as disparities in participation by and content related to women and, by extension, individuals across diverse gender and sexual identities. As observed in global literature as well as by work done by Indian language communities (with a focus largely on women Wikimedians), the gap is a result of various infrastructural and socio-cultural factors, including limited access to devices and the internet; balancing professional, domestic and volunteer work; lack of technical capacity-building and communication skills; limited presence in leadership positions, and the need for safe and healthy working environments among others. Several efforts have been made globally and in Indian language communities to address these challenges.

The issue of the gender gap, or indeed the challenges identified, are not unique to Wikimedia projects alone but are reflective of gender disparities in the public sphere and across the internet more broadly. Key learning from previous work in this space has been the need to connect these conversations and efforts to bridge the gender gap with the wider public discourse related to content creation on gender and sexuality online and in Indian languages. This study aimed to map such content with perspectives drawn from diverse gender and sexual identities. Importantly, it sought to understand better some of the infrastructural and cultural factors that shape creating such content and making it publicly available in diverse languages.

This study was done across four Indian languages - Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu (while English remained inevitable), focusing on content under two sub-themes– a. Cultural History and b. Feminist Production/Publication. The respondents in the study included organisations and individuals working in the areas of gender, sexuality and allied areas like feminist interventions and publishing, with a focus on writers, translators, artists, and multi-format content creators and curators. The study adopted a qualitative approach and comprised 19 semi-structured interviews (including four focused group discussions with organisations). Owing to the pandemic, all interactions for this study were done through telephonic conversation, email and virtual conferencing. These interactions have helped us understand the process of content creation in these areas. These problems manifest as gendered disparities in engagement with online platforms and potential solutions to address the same.

Key Research Areas

The three major thematic areas this research study focused on are as follows.

Nature of the Knowledge Produced
Content production on gender and sexuality in Indian languages spans several areas, including education, activism, advocacy and rights and justice, to name a few, given the location of much early writing in this space within the women’s rights and several other social movements in India. Important observations on the nature of this content by respondents include the emergence of a feminist critique across fields and disciplines, active interventions in the public discourse around gender and sexuality and the need for an intersectional approach to the process of content production. The growth of content in Indian languages and their increased availability on online platforms is also an important step towards addressing the predominance of Anglocentric and academic perspectives in these areas of research and work.

Digital Spaces, and movement of Content from Paper to Pixel
The cohort of the participants of this study has pointed out the evolution of the internet and digital tools from a luxury to a necessity but also acknowledged the widespread disparity in their access and use. However, the interesting outcome of this has been the transformation of traditional publishing methods and the emergence of cost-efficient space to produce content in various formats (like on social media) which fosters wider dissemination and engagement. However, increasing digital content production also comes with the need for advancements in digital literacy, resources and infrastructure. Digitalisation and open access to content on gender and sexuality in Indian languages is, therefore, a resource-intensive process, with related challenges such as copyright restrictions and technical limitations to access and use of Indian language content etc.

Indian Languages
The content creation process on gender and sexuality in Indian languages is complex given the country's diversity. Still, socio-cultural factors continue to determine the growth and use of languages, often resulting from asymmetries of power amongst diverse communities. This includes the marginalisation of certain forms of language use and content production processes that are not seen as within the ambit of dominant languages. Further, the lack of a gender-neutral vocabulary across many Indian languages and the significant challenges in the translation are important issues that emerged in this space. While the translation of content on gender and sexuality into Indian languages from English and other foreign languages is challenging due to the lack of a gender-neutral and conceptual vocabulary, as noted earlier; the lack of reverse translations and limitations within publishing and wider circulation of content are some of the factors that continue to affect work in this space.

Learnings

The learnings from this study outline the many challenges in content production on gender and sexuality, especially in Indian languages and its availability in digital spaces. These include the need to recognise that gendered disparities result from asymmetries of power, thus calling for a more critical outlook and intersectional approach towards the processes of content production (and related work such as translation, digitisation and archiving). They also offer several strategies and best practices drawn from observations by the respondents to address some of these gaps in content creation and circulation to ensure sustainable knowledge production ecosystems.

These include the dire need to bridge technical and infrastructural gaps, facilitate visibility and engagement with content through collaborations with key institutions and individuals in this space, and capacity-building through developing pedagogy and tools. Further, there is a need to diversify the approach towards creating and sourcing content and creating safe working environments by developing redressal mechanisms for marginalised and vulnerable communities. As Wikimedia projects constitute a major part of the digital knowledge ecosystem and have been working towards more diversity and inclusion across their projects, a sustained approach to bridge these gaps may be adopted in the Indian context. This would contribute immensely to efforts to bridge the gender gap across Wikimedia projects and in the larger digital public sphere.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/research-mapping-content-on-gender-and-sexuality-in-indian-languages

Making Telugu Suitable for Internet

rahim — 2016-09-06T14:21:49Z

In brief, the article speaks of steps in making a language other than English suitable for Internet and computers, what input methods, fonts and content are available in Telugu as on date and what challenges are ahead in making language fully available on Internet and in computers.

Click to download the file here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ammanudi-september-6-2016-making-telugu-suitable-for-internet

Looking ahead to the future of the Kannada Wikipedia: Vasanth S.N.

subha — 2016-02-29T14:15:41Z

Vasanth S.N. has edited the Kannada-langauge Wikipedia since 2006. As part of the WikipediansSpeak series, I caught up with Vasanth to learn about his contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia, which just celebrated its 13th anniversary. In the discussion Vasanth shares his long time involvement in the Wikimedia movement, and what drives him every day to edit Wikipedia and helping other fellow Wikimedians.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Hi Vasanth, thanks for agreeing to share about yourself. Can you tell me little about yourself and how you started contributing to Kannada Wikipedia?

Vasanth S.N. (VSN): I grew up in a small town in the Indian state of Karnataka. After completing my PG Diploma in Human Resources studies from Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) I started working at Dharmasthala temple in Karnataka where I have been working over last 35 years. As a student, I was voracious reader of Kannada-language books. Science, art and culture were my favorite subjects back then. I started contributing to Kannada Wikipedia back in 2006. Shushrutha, a scientist based outside India helped me with several technical needs like creating templates in Kannada Wikipedia. With his help, I contributed to articles related chemical elements. He helped a lot in importing templates then. These days another Wikipedia editor Omshivaprakash is helping in importing templates and several other technical needs I have, thanks to Pavanaja who is also helping and encouraging me regularly.

SP: What are you currently working on?

VSN: After the 14 volume Kannada encyclopedia “Kannada Vishwakosha” got relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license by Mysore University, we have started digitizing it on Kannada Wikisource. I am taking the digitized articles from here to Kannada Wikisource. I first check for the English Wikipedia article, use some of the updated content from there with citations, and wikify the Kannada Vishwakosha articles to create articles on Kannada Wikipedia.

SP: What are the kind of challenges you generally face?

VSN: Something that really bothers me is the low participation of Kannadiga s in contributing to Kannada Wikipedia. I wish there could be more discussions in the village pump and collaborations between fellow editors. Many of the long time Wikimedians like Radhatanaya, who is probably over 70 years old, need more support with complex Wikipedia policies, and more appreciation. And so are B.S. Chandra from Sagara, Karnataka and many other editors so that every single editor feels to be an important aspect of the community. We also have to bring back editors like Tejas Jain who were active some time back but have slowed down over time. I feel bad that we are lagging behind our neighboring Wikimedia communities like Tamil and Malayalam. When we cannot scale up too fast, a valuable resource like Kannada Vishwakosha that I mentioned before would be really useful in populating Kannada Wikipedia with good quality article. The Vishwakosha is not just compiled by subject experts but has been updated over time. I am more than happy if more editors are willing to join use this encyclopedia as a resource and I am sure we could create over 14,000 articles that a handful of editors like me will take over years to complete otherwise. However the community is skeptical about just one citation but i think we could always rely on English Wikipedia and search for more resources for additional citations.

SP: What do you suggest we—all the Wikimedians, the Wikimedia India chapter, and us (CIS-A2K)—should work on?

VSN: I feel that we are focusing so much only on cities and there might be potential editors in rural areas. But may be reaching out to people who have access to computer and internet is a low hanging fruit as compared to outreach in rural Karnataka. There are over 46,000 state-run schools and many have computers. Taking Kannada Wikipedia to select schools with the facilities needed might result in bringing in flesh blood to the community. I also think that the veteran professors and educators could help grow Wikipedia by correcting articles and wikifying if not writing articles. There might be collectives of such people that I do not know of but in my opinion, it is worth trying. I tried to request some professors in Ujjire, Karnataka to help with correcting over 60 articles related to plant varieties of Karnataka but could not get much help. But that is just one failure and should not stop reaching out to more professors. And if a collective of professors does not exist we could find a common area of interest and create a group.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society

This post is part of the WikipediansSpeak series, which aims to chronicle the voices of the Wikipedia community. You can find more of these posts on the Wikimedia Commons. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section below.

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-february-28-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-looking-ahead-to-future-of-kannada-wikipedia

Karavali Wikimedians at All India Radio, Mangaluru

Bharathesha Alasandemajalu — 2019-06-13T08:54:57Z

This blog is about the experience of visiting All India Radio Mangaluru station as a part of the Karavali Wikimedians outreach program.

I was really surprised to get an early morning call from Dr. Sheni, Principal PU College Mangaluru, an educationalist, & folklorist. The reason for the call added my surprise he got a message from AIR Mangaluru inviting Tulu Wikimedians for a discussion.

I feel extremely proud to share the memorable experience of visiting All India Radio Mangaluru station as a part of the Karavali Wikimedians outreach program.

We a team of Six Karavali Wikimedians Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana a professor Kannada Department of Saint Aloysius College Mangaluru, Dr. Kishore Kumar Rai Sheni Principal Ramakrishna Pre University College Bunts Hostel Mangaluru,

(from Left Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, Dr. Kishore Kumar Rai Sheni, Dr. Sadananda Perl, Dr. A V Navada, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu and Mrs. Akshatha Raj Perla(standing))

Dr. A V Navada former Kannada Professor from Hampi University Karnataka along with two Women Wikimedians Mrs. Vinodha Rai & Mrs. Kavitha Ganesh & myself BharatheshaAlasandemajalu took part in a fruitful discussion of around one hour at All India Radio Mangaluru on 18 March 2019

I wish to underline that this is not our first visit, Dr. Sadananda Perla program coordinator & staff coordinator Mrs. Akshatha Raj of All India Radio Mangaluru had also given us an opportunity to participate in a program in a previous occasion. But this was a memorable day one can cherish. I will treat this as recognition for the humble work we have done with limited resources available to us.

Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana explained about how to edit the Tulu Wikipedia & its significance in days ahead. He elucidated how this can act as a beneficiary for future research students as well as for those contributing to have an archive including Wikisource & Wikicommons.

Mr. Kishore Kumar acted as program co-manager, his questions were very relevant to the subject & he was persuasive & logical in his questions.

Dr. A V Navada guided the Karavali Wikimedians, how to utilize the sources available presently with the help of Tulu Academy a Govt Body of Karnataka state. He Enlighted about copyright of books using to Wikisource & requested all Tulu writers to give their right to Karavali Wikimedians for preserving knowledge & exhorted listeners to edit & read Wikipedia for boosting the reach vocal knowledge of Tulu.

Myself Bharathesha Alasandemajalu explained about uses of Tulu Wikipedia template. How to navigate & find the right article at the right time for editing. About Wiktionary work, currently it is in incubator stage how to come out from incubator & make it live, as a postgraduate student of Tulu MA from Mangaluru University it sounds a lot, an online dictionary, it will help me & also the student fraternity.

In addition gave some very valued suggestions also, how Tulu as a language can improve, as an alternative to conducting a number of lavish financial burden programs, Organizing conclaves & conducting competition between school, college in cluster, Taluk & District level will be more meaningful. Children of Tulunadu will talk & think in his native language, that's how to preserve the language in the era of globalization.

Mrs. Vinodha & Kavitha discussed the activities of Women's Wikipedia & illustrated their active wiki project about topics related to women health.

We canopy light on our project about new initiation ‘ Wikimedians Home to Home ’ this is a special & innovative function. Here we are preserving & reconstructing folk art & dance by text document.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedians-at-all-india-radio-mangaluru

Kannada Wikipedia Orientation Workshop at IISc, Bengaluru

Gopalakrishna A — 2017-12-19T16:16:29Z

A Kannada Wikipedia orientation workshop was held at the Entrepreneurship Centre, SID, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru on 26 November, 2017. The day long event was aimed at adding content to Kannada Wikimedia projects on topics such as ecology, environment, wildlife and sciences of Karnataka. The event was organised by Gubbi Labs in conjunction with CIS-A2K. Gubbi Labs is a research collective and social collective run by environmental scientists. The event was attended was attended by 8 participants of which one member was female.

The participants created six articles and expanded one article. The impact of this workshop was the fact that participants were made aware of the importance of open access data. It helped initiate another similar workshop in Mysuru. Upon sharing the idea for projects like Wiki Loves Butterfly Idea, a participant was interested in starting a project titled 'Wiki Loves Spiders'. We are hoping to take this project forward on Kannada Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/kannada-wikipedia-orientation-workshop-at-iisc-bengaluru

Kannada Wikipedia not on top of the charts

praskrishna — 2016-06-18T16:23:37Z

It occupies the 10th place among Indian languages.

The article by Muralidhara Khajane was published in the Hindu on January 19, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

Bengaluru being the IT capital of the country has made little difference to Kannada’s presence in the cyber world. Compare any major Indian language on Wikipedia with the 13-year-old Kannada language pages, and you are in for a surprise: Kannada occupies the 10th place among Indian languages, while Urdu occupies the first slot in terms of number of articles.

As on January 2016, the number of articles in Kannada Wikipedia is just 19,070, while Tamil (83,432), Telugu (64,451), and Malayalam (41,334) are way ahead. Urdu version occupies the first place with 1,10,367 articles and Hindi version follows with 1,00,912 articles.

As far as the world ranking of languages is concerned, Kannada stands 107th. It is interesting to note that Cebuano spoken by 21 million people and second most spoken language in the Philippines stands fourth in the list of global languages with 18,65,033 articles after English, Swedish, and German.

It has been 13 years since a small group of tech-savvy Kannadigas got together to create the first few article stubs on Kannada. This resulted in starting the Kannada language edition of Wikipedia in 2003.

Though the articles in Wikipedia pages drew flak for their lack of depth and quality initially, the site showed signs of improvement only to fall back again. Initially, it was the issue of fonts that came in the way of developing Kannada pages and interestingly very few people knew that Wikipedia could be written in a regional language.

Omshivaprakash, one of the five administrators of Wikipedia’s Kannada version, blames laxity in community participation for Kannada version’s poor show. “Authors, publishers, government bodies don’t seem to be confident enough to use Wikipedia platform. Not many show interest to learn and contribute,” he says.

Awareness of Kannada Wikipedia, lack of awareness about Kannada typing tools, Internet accessibility issues, and lack of self-motivated volunteers who can drive the Wiki learning activities are reasons for the slowdown, he says.

Admitting that Kannada Wikipedia is lagging behind in terms of quantity (number of articles), U.B. Pavanaja, another administrator, argued that it was however good in terms of quality.

Attributing the rise in number of articles in other Indian language versions, especially in Tamil and Telugu, to uploading government data, he said, “But we have not done that. Our focus was mainly on quality, rather than quantity and the intention is to make the page more theme-based. We have deleted some 2,000 articles to provide the content in Encyclopaedia format.”

According to him, things are now moving in a positive direction with more people showing interest in this community attempt.

Kannada Development Authority chairperson L. Hanumanthaiah said he would immediately convene a meeting of administrators of the Kannada version of Wikipedia and discuss the mode of support Kannada bodies could expend in enriching Kannada pages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-hindu-january-19-muralidhara-khajane-kannada-wikipedia-not-on-top-of-the-charts

Kannada Wikipedia Education Program at Christ university: Work so far

Ananth Subray — 2016-11-18T02:45:05Z

As you know we are working closely with Christ university in Bengaluru for the Education Programs in Kannada Wikipedia and Kannada Wikisource, we worked on redesigning the programme for this academic year 2016-17 based on the lessons learned from the earlier intervention.

Before beginning this programme, we provided training for campus ambassadors who in turn provided training to the faculty and fellow students. This new design of the programme allowed us to spend more time with the undergraduate students of various disciplines in Arts, Science and Commerce that are part of the programme. And this exercise resulted in improving the quality of the articles created by the students. So far, 218 second-year students in total have created 108 good quality articles in Kannada Wikipedia and 70 start class articles. The latter ones will need further work like adding images and citations. 20 of the articles are stub-start class articles, and 20 more are stubs of poor quality. The articles are still in the user sandboxes for the evaluation work and will soon be moved to the article namespace.

The freshman year students contributed in digitising books on Kannada Wikisource by proofreading about 2000 folios from four books.

How we did things differently this time?

Focus on multiple workshops that were conducted by multiple facilitators to ensure the series does not become monotonous. Facilitators included myself, some of the faculty and the Campus Ambassadors where the latter was useful for more peer-to-peer to learning.
Sessions were made more interactive and were spaced evenly that gave the students go through a learning curve.
Faculty support and engagement that was less last year was increased this year.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/kannada-wikipedia-education-program-at-christ-university-work-so-far

Kannada Wikipedia Editathon: Vijayavani

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:34:46Z

The article was published in Vijayavani on December 11, 2015. A scanned version of the article is given below.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/kannada-wikipedia-editathon-vijayavani

Kannada Wikipedia Editathon: Vijaya Karnataka

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:35:13Z

The article was published in Vijaya Karnataka on December 11, 2015. A scanned version of the article is below.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/kannada-wikipedia-editathon-vijaya-karnataka

Kannada Wikipedia Editathon: Udayavani Coverage

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:36:53Z

The article was published in Udayavani on December 7, 2015. A scanned version of the article is below.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/kannada-wikipedia-editathon-udayavani-coverage

Kannada Wikipedia Editathon: Prajavani

praskrishna — 2016-01-05T06:40:23Z

The article was published in Prajavani Mangal on December 11, 2015. A scanned version of the article is given below.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/kannada-wikipedia-editathon-prajavani-mangal