Centre for Internet and Society

Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018 report at Asomiya Pratidin ePaper- Highest Circulated Assamese Daily

jayanta — 2018-12-10T15:08:56Z

Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018 report at Asomiya Pratidin ePaper- Highest Circulated Assamese Daily

Volunteers from various Indic Wikisource projects took part in a discussion organized by Centre for Internet and society: access to knowledge (CIS:A2K) in Kolkata recently. Dr. Gitartha Bordoloi participated in this consultation on behalf of the Assamese Wikisource which included other Indic languages like Bengali, Odia, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Punjabi, Telugu and Sanskrit. It is worth mentioning here that Wikisource is another important project like Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc operated by Wikimedia Foundation. Anyone can contribute to this wikisource project which stores copyright-free books, plays, lyrics, speeches, translated works etc. Such works are first scanned and digitalized and then converted to unicode so that everything becomes searchable. Assamese Wikisource (as.wikisource.org), started in 2013, so far includes various literary works of Guru Sankardeva and Madhavdev, Jyotiprasad Agarwala, Lakshminath Bezbaroa, Padmanath Gogain Baruah, Chandraprasad Agarwala, Amulya Barua, Dandinath Kalita etc. Measures to popularize Wikisource among masses, increasing numbers of readers and contributors, correct techniques to digitalize a book etc were discussed at the event in Kolkata.

Translated from Assamese by Dr. Gitartha Bordoloi

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/indic-wikisource-community-consultation-2018-report-at-asomiya-pratidin-epaper-highest-circulated-assamese-daily

Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018

jayanta — 2018-12-08T18:22:29Z

A group of Indian Wikisource leader from 12 different language communities gathered in Kolkata to attend the Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018

There was a long time required of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Indic language computing. There was not at per OCR available in Indic languages before 2015. Most of the Indic subdomain was created in 2007 to 2011, but due to not availability of OCR, the Indic Wikisource Community used to type the whole book or import the Unicoded text from other non-reliable sources. In 2015 the after Google Drive OCR released Indic community relief from the typing era.

Later Shrinivasan T developed an OCR4wikisource script to use the Google Drive OCR as Bot. Since the implementation of the OCR, there has been a lot of progress in Indic Wikisource. But we have realized the there should be a common platform where we can share our knowledge. Then one-month planning we have organized Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018. in Kolkata. this is first such consultation at this scale, convened by the CIS A2K team.

The meeting had a representation of one volunteer from the Assamese, Bangla, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Telugu, and Sanskrit language Wikisource communities. Ananth Subray (Kannada ) Bodhisattwa (Bengali) Hrishikes Sen (English ) Gurlal Maan (Punjabi ) Gitartha Bordoloi (Assamese ) Pooja Jadhav (Marathi ) Pankajmala Sarangi (Oriya ) Shubha (Sanskrit ) Sushant Savla (Gujurati ) Ranjith siji (Malayalam ) Ajit Kumar Tiwari (Hindi ) Ramesam54 (Telugu ) Jayprakash (Indic Tech team) Chinmayee Mishra (Oriya ) as well as Tito Dutta, Tanveer Hasan, Subodh Kulkarni and Jayanta Nath, four members of the Access to Knowledge Programme of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS-A2K) .

The objectives of the consultation are:

Share views and preferences on the most effective ways to pursue our shared vision of creating and sharing free knowledge in India and in the Indian languages (including English) around the world through the Indic Wikisource Project.
Attempt to come to an agreement on a roadmap for a future where our resources are better utilized, our volunteers are better served, and progress on our mission is more steadily attained.

We have started our discussion on day zero with the agenda of the main aims of this consultation and what all participants want from this program. The discussion was started at 6 PM and ended at 10 PM night. After discussion, we have summarized and set-up for two days agenda which was actually coming from the participants. The CIS-A2K team arranged for the travel and stay of all participants, as well as a night stay for all participants between the zero and second day, to ensure that the programme started on time on.

Day one started with Introduction of Wikisource by me were introduce the workflow of Wikisource, adding text, finding the source, basic copyright checking, creating Index pages, OCRed the page, Proofreading, layout with typography, Validation, Transclusion and Finishing touch. Later on, Hrishikes Sen demonstrated each segment broadly. Bodhisattwa (Bengali) demonstrated Wikisource Tool, like IA-UPLOAD, Vicuna Uploader, URL2COMMONS, Fill index Gadget etc. And all participants implement hands-on. Bodhisatta showed the Bengali Wikisource promotional videos.

Day two was started with Google Drive OCR without using Bot solution developed by Jayprakash (Indic Tech team). Later on OTRS process by Jayanta Nath, Wikisource Roadmap by Tanveer Hasan, Institutional Partnership - by Subodh Kulkarni and Transclusion in Wikisource by Susant Salva presented. The most achievements of this meeting were the second day, Jayprakash leads the task myself to clear the Wikisource technical backlog.

There were also some ideas coming up by the session by Tanveer. This included awareness, outreach, followups, and evaluation. A report about this meeting was published at Asomiya Pratidin. Some feedback from the participants can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/indic-wikisource-community-consultation-2018

Indian English Wikipedian Nvvchar completes 1500 Did You Know articles

tito — 2017-06-28T10:03:41Z

Indian English Wikipedian Nvvchar has completed 1500 Did you know articles. This is the second highest on English Wikipedia.

Indian English Wikipedian User:Nvvchar has completed 1500 Did you know (DYK) articles. DYK is a short piece of fact (hook) taken from Wikipedia's newest content and is showcased on the "Did you know" section on the Main Page. On English Wikipedia 18-24 hooks appear on the Main Page every day. Since mid-2012 Nvvchar has been diligently working on this DYK project and has created (or expanded) articles on a very wide range of subjects such as religion, history, geography, arts, literature, women's achievement, education etc.

On 27 July 2011 Nvvchar completed 500 DYK articles. On 23 August 2013 his 1000th DYK appeared on the Main Page. The DYK nomination and review process need a lot of effort and sometimes it takes weeks to fully finish the process. However after the 1000th DYK in August 2013, in just 2 years 8 months Nvvchar touched another milestone. On 26 April 2016, his 1500th DYK appeared on the Main Page of Wikipedia and the fact was from an article Rudra Mahalaya Temple, an ancient ruined temple located Sidhpur in the Patan district of Gujarat.

A few Wikipedians congratulated him for this achievement. User:Ijon, a Hebrew Wikipedian, appreciated him saying-

Thank you for the persistent and quiet work you do to contribute much-needed knowledge to Wikipedia!

User:Victuallers, an English Wikipedia administrator, wrote on Nvvchar's talk page-

Lets just guess that the average DYK gets read by 100 people - that means you have a readership of 150,000 people. I think its more like 1000 per DYK appearance so that means that your words have been read by over 1 million people and thats just on the first day of publication! There must be multi-millions of people who know a little more about Asian settlements, buildings, people and artefacts then they would have done without the efforts of Nvvchar. . . . . . Great respect for your efforts. Thanks from the Wiki and its many readers

As of 9 May 2016, Nvvchar has 1503 DYKs.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/nvvchar-1500-dyk

India's 23rd regional Wikipedia, in Tulu, goes live

praskrishna — 2016-08-07T10:31:21Z

The Tulu Wikipedia has just gone live, giving another boost to yet another ancient Indian language otherwise struggling to keep up with the times and speedily changing technology.

Originally published by IANS, it was mirrored by Business Standard on August 6, 2016.

The news was announced by two key community organisers on Saturday who helped to make an eight-year-dream come true. Dr Vishwanatha Badikana, a PhD in Kannada literature in Mangalore (Karnataka) and Bharathesha, a mechanical engineer based in Muscat, announced this while attending Wikiconference India 2016, India's second national Wikipedia meet in half a decade being held here this weekend.

Tulu is a language spoken by around two million native speakers mainly in southwest Karnataka and in Kasaragod district, Kerala. It belongs to the Dravidian family of languages. Some scholars suggest Tulu is among the earliest Dravidian languages with its roots going back some 2000 years.

Wikipedia itself is available in 22 Indian languages, with Tulu becoming the 23rd. There are another one-and-half dozen Indian language Wikipedias in the incubator stage at present. Not all languages have an active wiki community.

Located at tcy.wikipdia.org, the Tulu Wikipedia has been in "incubation" since 2008. This term is used to describe such online collaborately-crafted encyclopedias which are still waiting to to go "live" or active and come online.

Around 2014, it was reactivated. Following some meetings and workshops, the concept was also showcased that year at a "World Tulu Conference" stall in December of that year.

After much work, some 1,100 articles (or 1,050 if one could ignore those which are not redirects) went live. There are currently about 100 editors who have made over 10 edits each.

"Dr Vishwanatha and Bharathesha are the number one and number two contributors," said Dr UB Panavaja, a former scientist and techie and long-term supporter of Kannada computing. Pavanaja currently looks after the CMR (Creating Movement Resources) of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society which works with some language groups to promote their Wikipedia presence.

"After we became live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump', set up policies, administration structure, info boxes and templates," said Pavanaja, describing the tools that any new Wikipedia needs to set up.

Scholars like the nineteenth missionary-linguist Bishop Robert Caldwell have called this language "peculiar and very interesting". According to him, "Tulu is one of the most highly developed languages of the Dravidian family. It looks as if it had been cultivated for its own sake."

The language has a lot of written literature and a rich oral literature such as the Epic of Siri, according to the Wikipedia itself.

In coastal Karnataka, both the Mangalore and Udupi areas today allow the language as an optional third-language in local schools.

This role in schooling makes it all the more mandatory to create encyclopaedic texts in the language, say its Wikipedia promoters. Mangalore University also has a Tulu language chair while St Aloysius's Radio Sarang community radio station broadcasts daily in this tiny language and the local All India Radio also broadcasts in the language.

Some five Kannada language representatives and one from Tulu are presently in Mohali-Chandigarh attending Wikiconference India 2016.

Indian Wikipedias include Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, besides, now, Tulu.

(Frederick Noronha can be contacted at fredericknoronha1@gmail.com)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/business-standard-august-6-2016-india-23-regional-wikipedia-in-tulu-goes-live

India's 23rd Regional Wikipedia Launches

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T03:14:58Z

A Tulu version has gone live on Wikipedia, making it the 23rd one in an Indian language to do so.

The blog post by Ranu P. was published by CCM.net on August 8, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

Tulu, an Indian language that is popular in the southern part of the country has received its own Wikipedia version — for which over 100 editors created 1,100 articles. The announcement was made on Aug. 6 during the Chandigarh-based WikiConference India 2016 by Vishwanatha Badikana and Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, two community organizers who made an 8-year-old dream come true. The greatest hope is that the Tulu wiki will lend support to the struggling language, which is used by just over 2 million native speakers who largely reside in Karnataka. Some research even suggests that it is among the earliest of Dravidian languages, which would make it roughly 2,000 years old.

"After we became [sic] live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump,' set up policies, administration structure, info boxes, and templates," said Dr. UB Panavaja, an engineer and a longtime supporter of regional language computing. In addition to the 23 already-launched Indian Wiki versions, which include Bengali, Manipuri, Hindi, Nepali, Punjabi, and Urdu, there are another 18 Indian languages that are still in the incubator stage awaiting publishing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/ccm-august-8-2016-ranu-p-india-23-regional-wikipedia-launches

India's 23rd Regional Language Wikipedia Goes Live in Tulu

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T03:02:16Z

The Tulu Wikipedia has just gone live, giving another boost to yet another ancient Indian language otherwise struggling to keep up with the times and speedily changing technology.

Originally published by Indo Asian News Service, the blog post was mirrored by NDTV on August 8, 2016.

Located at tcy.wikipedia.org, the Tulu Wikipedia has been in "incubation" since 2008. This term is used to describe such online collaborately-crafted encyclopedias which are still waiting to to go "live" or active and come online.

Around 2014, it was reactivated. Following some meetings and workshops, the concept was also showcased that year at a "World Tulu Conference" stall in December of that year.

After much work, some 1,100 articles (or 1,050 if one could ignore those which are not redirects) went live. There are currently about 100 editors who have made over 10 edits each.

The language has a lot of written literature and a rich oral literature such as the Epic of Siri, according to the Wikipedia itself.

In coastal Karnataka, both the Mangalore and Udupi areas today allow the language as an optional third-language in local schools.

Some five Kannada language representatives and one from Tulu are presently in Mohali-Chandigarh attending Wikiconference India 2016.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/indo-asian-news-service-ndtv-august-8-india-23-regional-language-wikipedia-goes-live-in-tulu

India and France to Digitise Manuscripts, Artworks & Archives

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:15:15Z

The Indian and French governments have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) which will assist in technical knowledge sharing, competency, skill building and cultural exchange between the two countries, as per a PIB release.

This was published by Medianama on October 29, 2015. CIS memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Goa University was mentioned.

The MoU will assist a program on digitisation of old manuscripts and documents, which began in France 7 years ago. The Ministry of Culture will benefit from this and build a national virtual library in India, which will store and share manuscripts, archives and artworks. This library will also link and share all knowledge resources from various Indian and French government institutes and organisations.

The French government is also keen on sorting and deciphering its collection of thousands of Indian documents in Sanskrit, Tamil and other Indian languages with the help of the Indian government, which also incidentally includes correspondence between Rabindranath Tagore and French scholar Sylvan Levin.

NMM digitised over 30 lakh manuscripts last year
In March, we reported that the 12 year old government body National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) had digitised over thirty lakh manuscripts and 18,588,390 pages in all as of 31 December 2014. Mahesh Sharma, Union Minister of State for Culture, Tourism & Civil Aviation said that the National Archives of India (NAI) was set to digitise another 1,100,000 historic records.

Previous digitisation initiatives:

In November 2014, around 55 books written by the Indian author and activist Niranjana in Kannada would be digitized and made available on Kannada Wikisource, allowing Kannada speakers to access these books easily.
In October 2014, the Ministry of Culture launched a national portal for museums. Collections in all museums under its control and those under the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) will be digitized and presented on this portal.
In July 2014, the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology released the draft of Open Access Policy under the Ministry of Science and Technology.
In September 2013, Goa University entered into a 3 year MoU with the Centre for Internet and Society for building the Konkani Wikipedia.
In June 2013, Tata Communications Media Services planned to digitize documents of historical and cultural significance such as films and documentaries from the archives of Doordarshan and Films Division of India which go back to 1947 including speeches of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders.
In May 2013, Punjabi Sahitya Akademi Reference Lab scanned and saved around 1,000 manuscripts, stone-printed scripts, poetry books on computer hard discs, adding that the digitized editions will be available across the globe through the internet.

Check out our digitisation and government coverage.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/medianama-sneha-johari-october-29-2015-india-and-france-to-digitise-manuscripts-artworks-and-archives

In Tulu, India's 23rd Regional Wikipedia Goes Live

praskrishna — 2016-08-08T01:27:58Z

In a major boost to ancient Indian languages, Tulu wikipedia has finally gone live.

The article by Naina Chaturvedi was published in Huffington Post on August 7, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

According to a report in The Hindu, eight years after its launch, Tulu Wikipedia has gone live with over 1,000 articles.

The announcement was made by Katherine Maher, executive director, Wikimedia Foundation, USA, at the Wikiconference India 2016, India's second national Wikipedia meet in half a decade, held in Chandigarh on Friday.

"There are about 200 registered users (editors), out of which around 100 have more than 10 edits. On an average, there are about 8 to 10 active editors," Dr. U.B. Pavanaja from the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and one of the mentors of Tulu Wikipedia, told The Hindu.

He further added that, "Vishwanatha Badikana, a Kannada professor, followed by Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, an engineer, are the highest contributors."

The language is spoken by around two million native speakers, mainly in southwest Karnataka and in Kasaragod district, Kerala, The Indian Express reported.

Pavanaja, further explained how this achievement would help create pressure on the government to include Tulu in the Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution.

"After we became live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump', set up policies, administration structure, info boxes and templates,"IANS quoted Pavanaja saying.

Wikipedia which is available in 22 Indian languages include, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, now, including Tulu making the count 23.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/huffington-post-august-7-2016-naina-chaturvedi-in-tulu-indias-23-regional-wikipedia-goes-live

Imperial College Orientation Program, Bargarh

Sailesh Patnaik — 2017-04-16T19:51:29Z

An Odia Wikipedia workshop was conducted at Imperial College, Bargarh on 12 February, 2017.

An Odia Wikipedia orientation workshop was conducted at Imperial College, an affiliate of Sambalpur University, on 12 February 2017 for 60 undergraduate students of the College. The aim of the workshop was to introduce students to Odia Wikipedia while also giving them a broad overview of the global free knowledge movement. This workshop was conducted as part of CIS-A2K's ongoing efforts to expand the reach of Odia Wikipedia in Western Odisha in conjunction with the Odia Wikipedia community members.

The students were also introduced to the process of digitisation and how digitisation was fundamental to the preservation of language and local knowledge. The students also showed an interest in the digitisation sprint for the Dadhivamana Temple's Pothi digitisation project, an ongoing effort to digitise 250 ancient palm leaf manuscripts from the Dadhivamana Temple in Bargarh.

The meta page for this event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/imperial-college-orientation-program-bargarh

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

pavan — 2018-07-19T14:56:45Z

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

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

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

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

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

How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias

subha — 2016-10-25T01:39:42Z

Mobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like India in which only a handful of journals are available in Indian languages, open access to research and educational resources is hugely important for populating content for the various Indian language Wikipedias.

This was published by Opensource.com on October 24, 2016.

Indian-language Wikipedias and open access

Most commonly spoken Indian languages have had Wikipedia projects for almost a decade. Languages like Konkani and Tulu are new entrants in the Wikipedia family, and currently there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias. One example of high-quality open access content is the Open Textbook of Medicine, an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine, which was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happen to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high-quality, open content like this.

To help fuel the growth of Wikipedia and its various projects, such as the Indian-language Wikipedias, the Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem with Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates, which are run by both volunteers and paid staff from the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization responsible for fundraising, technical, and community support. In India, Wikimedia India, the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates working on catalyzing the growth of the content and the communities.

Whereas Wikimedia India focuses on expanding all the Indian-languages content, Punjabi Wikimedians focus on Punjabi language content (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), and CIS-A2K focuses on five languages: Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu.

Indian-language Wikipedia projects can only grow with the help of volunteers editing their own language Wikipedias and adding missing information from a reliable sources, which is where open access content can help.

Open in action

The 2016 International Open Access Week will be held October 24-30, 2016. The theme this year is Open in Action. The announcement explains, "International Open Access Week has always been about action, and this year's theme encourages all stakeholders to take concrete steps to make their own work more openly available and encourage others to do the same. From posting preprints in a repository to supporting colleagues in making their work more accessible, this year’s Open Access Week will focus on moving from discussion to action in opening up our system for communicating research."

Indian contributors show the spirit of Open in Action as they help add content to the various Indian-languages Wikipedias. They depend on open access to research and other publications to help millions of people, including those living in rural areas, who are joining us online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-october-24-2016-open-access-growth-indian-language-wikipedias

Guru-G Learning Labs and CIS A2K Institutional Partnership

hasan — 2015-12-15T07:52:06Z

Incorporated in 2013, Guru-G is the world’s first gamified platform for teaching and teacher training.

Guru-G converts existing textbooks and teacher resources into adaptive teaching packs (or guided lesson plans), which provide in-class guidance to teachers on different ways in which they can teach a topic. The guidance adapts to the teacher’s past behavior, student moods & the practices that have resulted in best learning outcomes for their students. These packs save preparation time & effort for a teacher before class plus make teaching fun and interesting during and after class. Teachers can also track their progress and train at their own pace if interested.

Rationale for Institutional partnership:
A2K aimed at developing additional resources that would supplement the learning curve of students at High school and undergraduate levels. The partnership also aimed to build digital research skills into the students so as to equip them for the new modes of knowledge aggregators.

Both Guru-G labs and CIS work at the intersection of technology, education and social empowerment, it was planned that due to the mutual interests, the partnership will be able to identify a large group of Wikipedia users in Kannada and it was hoped that of these new generation readers some of the students would be trained as Wikipedians. Contribution towards Wikisource was also discussed in the MoU.

Plan of Action:
Due to the internal team movement and shortage of manpower from at CIS, we were unable to work closely with the Guru-G Lab. However, we have recently restarted our conversations with them.

Plans for Future:
As Guru-G Learning Labs provide platforms to collaboratively discuss ideas, A2K team, would like to use this partnership in designing our training activities.

Nature of collboaration and rolling out of resources for better implementation of Wikipedia in Education programme run by CIS-A2K. CIS-A2K will work with educational institutions, developmental organisations and teachers who have already been identified by Guru-G labs and provide to them resources such as Offline Wikipedia.

Training programmes may be designed and customised for Wikipedia in Education programme run by CIS-A2K across different colleges. Creating platforms and activities for A2K's community capacity building activities such as TTT and MWTTT.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guru-g-learning-labs-and-cis-a2k-institutional-partnership

Guest Blog: Retd. Col. Ashwin Baindur on Strategy, Wikimedia Strategy Salon, Vijayawada

manasarao — 2017-10-24T11:52:49Z

User:AshLin aka Col Ashwin Baindur (retd) gave a Plenary Speech(in absentia) on Strategy at the Wikimedia Movement Strategy Salon, held in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh on 27 August 2017. It is reproduced here with permission:

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and my dear Wikimedia friends and colleagues,

I am deeply honoured to be asked to say the opening words for the Movement Strategy Salon being held today at Vijayawada. The problems of ill health prevent me from coming to be with you as I most dearly wish, but I do hope my few words and thoughts will make do instead. Let me introduce myself. I happen to be a retired army officer but I see myself as a citizen of the world, as a Wikipedian whose cherished dream is to make Jimmy Wales dream come true.

“Imagine a world where the sum of all knowledge is available to all mankind!”

The occasion for this conclave or salon is timely. The twenty first century paradigm of Open Culture, of sharing and collective intelligence are well established. Crowdsourcing, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and so many other important global resources are proof.

Education has received a huge fillip by the vastly increased amounts of data and knowledge on the Internet. Open sourcing has made its mark in the software side of the business world. Just as has open access publishing in Academia. Society as a whole has gained by all these manifestations of open culture.

And today, we are gathered here to begin thinking on the directions for the future of the Wikimedia movement in India.

What does this mean in our case? India is a country of many languages, dialects, people, communities, religions, tribes. Along with this are the collective efforts of 1.3 billion people to make a secular, democratic, economically strong nation. The ability to share learning, understanding, experiences are key to this process. And for this, collaboration is a vital necessity.

As of now the Wikimedia effort in India consists of a potpourri of projects, encyclopedia, quote, text repository and the use of Wikimedia Commons as a media repository. We have to grow this into a large, useful and versatile resource in each of our Indic languages.

The Wikimedians, a small band of volunteers to date, must take along the entire society of India so that we have betterment as a nation by first creating and using these resources. And today’s conclave with kindred souls from society, academia, industry.. is a beginning in this regard.

Now we are here to think what directions this Movement must take. I am envious that I can’t be part of this process with you. However, as a retired military person, let me say a few words on strategy and how it is decided.

All planning occurs at three levels. The most basic of activities to be done are referred to as tactics. Tactics are governed by operational planning which comprises of a worked out plan of how to achieve the overall plan or the goal.

The deciding of this overall plan or goal is referred to as strategy.

To be more specific..

“a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty..”

And when we do this for a long period of the future, it is more appropriately termed as ‘grand strategy".

For this we have to ponder - What is our aim? What are our strengths? What are our challenges? What are our opportunities? What are our resources and what are our constraints? What path should we take to achieve our aim?

These are to be reduced into a few directions which are broad based, actionable and full of potential. A good strategy must open huge opportunities, new fields, new possibilities.

The is not easy to do or quick to make. It will take more than one session, more than one day, week or even a month to get our strategy right.

Most important of all is that we learn to think in the new paradigm of sharing and open culture. We should leave behind the mindset of scarcity, possessiveness and personal benefit and embrace the values of the common good, creation of opportunities and innovation.

On our success in making a good strategy, depends the fate of millions of our children and youth who will either benefit from our decisions or lose opportunities if we are not wise and generous. We have to believe in the future. We have to want to make that future great for our nation.

I wish you the very best in this endeavour. I repeat, that I am envious that I can't be with you today. I pray that the things we decide from today onward in this process of grand strategy for the Wikimedia movement in the decades to come.

At the very end, I would like to thank the Wikimedia movement in India, CIS-India, the organisers of this salon and of course, my young friend Krishna Chaitanya Velaga for this opportunity.

Jai Hind!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guest-blog-retd-col-ashwin-baindur-on-strategy-wikimedia-strategy-salon-vijayawada

Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Impact report form

hasan — 2016-10-09T14:40:36Z

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year).

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog here.

This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Global metrics overview - all programs

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Global Metrics. We understand not all Global Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

Next to each required metric, list the outcome achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success.

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Overall

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	157	CIS-A2K has been able to increase participation of female editors across its Focus Language Areas.
2. # of new editors	799	Our WEP initiatives have helped in introducing and retaining editors across FLA (except for Odia).
3. # of individuals involved	1200	Public events and anniversary celebrations held in Odia and Kannada have helped Wikimedia projects in reaching the general public as these events have been widely covered by media.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	2823	Photo-walks, WEP activities and image re-licensing efforts have helped the A2K team in achieving this metric.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	18998	Thematic edit-a-thons anchored by A2K and Collaborative edit-a-thons that have been supported by A2K have been a big hit during the last grant period amongst Indic Wikimedians.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	109.64 MB

Kannada

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	23	As of now the Kannada community is relatively small, A2K would like to expand the user and editor base by taking Wikimedia activities to various parts of the state.
2. # of new editors	609	These numbers include new editors from WEP initiative and editathons conducted as part of 13 Kannada Wikipedia anniversary.
3. # of individuals involved	700	Public event organised during the 13th Kannada Wikipedia anniversary has boosted our reach.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	1290	Due to the Photo walk organised as part of the 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary celebrations.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	8132	Most of the articles created under WEP initiative are still under sandbox (as a quality enforcing measure), hence the number is low. The number also includes Wikisource folios.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	56.5 MB

Konkani

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	4	Activities in Konkani Wikipedia dipped after the project became live.
2. # of new editors	20	The new editors were introduced to Konkani Wikipedia with the help of Nirmala Institute of Education, Panjim an institutional partner of CIS-A2K.
3. # of individuals involved	50
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	34
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1546	Konkani Wikipedians took the project of creating one article per village in Goa quite enthusiatically.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	8.11 MB

Marathi

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	64	Events conducted at Pune University, Pune and IIT-Bombay involved existing Wikipedians.
2. # of new editors	59	Activities conducted at SWERI, Pandharpur, TISS, Mumbai and IIT-Mumbai have contributed to this.
3. # of individuals involved	150	Involvement of Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited opened up new readership to get involved in Marathi Wikimedia projects.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	27	A2K team could not organise a dedicated photo walk or invest in image re-licensing activity.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	331	Although the number of the articles is low, many new female editors were introduced and have taken up editing on Marathi Wikipedia.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	2.64 MB

Odia

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	21	Wiki Tungi activities are lead by active Wikimedians from the Odia community.
2. # of new editors	56	Nabakalebara edit-a-thon gained a lot of currency on the social media platforms which in turn resulted in new editors for Odia Wikimedia projects.
3. # of individuals involved	120	Three events with Puri WikiTungi (Puri Workshop, 15th Anniversary celebration, and Mission Odisha event), Wikipedia workshop in Utkal University.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	601	Nabakalebara edit-a-thon had an in-built component of adding images related to the Rathayatra.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1780	Only pages created in Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource are indicated and not article improved.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	9.56 MB

Telugu

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	30
2. # of new editors	45	Need to try getting more New users on to the board.
3. # of individuals involved	150
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	871
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1342	Includes folios digitized in Wikisource.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	7.23 MB

Train-a-Wikipedian

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	15	Editors who have participated in at least one training session.
2. # of new editors	10	Editors who got beginners' training (includes account creation and basic Wikipedia training such as Wikiformatting, components of Wikipedia, article structure).
3. # of individuals involved	30	#1+#2 and the people who were involved during training sessions.
4. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	5867
5. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	25.6 MB

Telling your program stories - all programs

Please tell the story of each of your programs included in your proposal. This is your chance to tell your story by using any additional metrics (beyond global metrics) that are relevant to your context, beyond the global metrics above. You should be reporting against the targets you set at the beginning of the year throughout the year. We have provided a template here below for you to report against your targets, but you are welcome to include this information in another way. Also, if you decided not to do a program that was included in your proposal or added a program not in the proposal, please explain this change. More resources for storytelling are at the end of this form. Here are some ways to tell your story.

We encourage you to share your successes and failures and what you are learning. Please also share why are these successes, failures, or learnings are important in your context. Reference learning patterns or other documentation.

Make clear connections between your offline activities and online results, as applicable. For example, explain how your education program activities is leading to quality content on Wikipedia.

We encourage you to tell your story in different ways by using videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g.), compelling quotes, and by linking directly to work you produce. You may highlight outcomes, learning, or metrics this way.

We encourage you to continue using dashboards, progress bars, and scorecards that you have used to illustrate your progress in the past, and to report consistently over time.

You are welcome to use the table below to report on any metrics or measures relevant to your program. These may or may not include the global metrics you put in the overview section above. You can also share your progress in another way if you do not find a table like this useful.

A2K key activities

During this grant period CIS-A2K has organized and supported a number of events in collaboration with Indic Wikimedia community members. Some of those are:

July 2015	August 2015	September 2015
Konkani Wikipedia goes live, (See more)	Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Annamacharya library Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore (See more)	Seminar on "Empowering Marathi Schools", Pune, Kannda Wikipedia meetup (See more)
October 2015	November 2015	December 2015
Konkani language book donation (See more)	4 Indic language communities IRC meeting, Community discussion for making Tulu Wikipedia live (See more)	Sau Dhuni Teen Project: December Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Initiative to bring 1000 books about the culture of Maharashtra on Marathi Wikipedia (See more)
January 2016	February 2016	March 2016
Konkani-language Edit-a-thon and English-Romi Konkani dictionary release, Geographical Indications in India Edit-a-thon (See more)	Digitisation sprint at Andhra Loyola College, Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary (See more)	(See more) National Wikipedia Education review program, Odia-language Women’s History Month edit-a-thons (See more)
April 2016	May 2016	June 2016
Odia Wikipedia's 14th anniversary (See more)	Mini TTT and MWT in Pune, Advanced training for Kannada-language Wikimedians (See more)	Train the Trainer 2016, MediaWiki Training (See more)

Capacity building

Train the Trainer

Train the Trainer (or TTT in short) is a residential program that attempts to groom leadership skills among the Indian Wikimedians. Participating Wikimedians interact with A2K staff members and community leaders towards designing, implementing and documenting activities such as outreach, GLAM projects, edit-a-thons, etc. Various topics such as grants' structure, funding opportunities both with A2K and WMF, effective reporting and documentation, use of Global and other metrics, etc., are also covered.

After the first 2 iterations in 2013 and 2015, the third iteration of the training program was conducted in June 2016.

Diversity

In this iteration—

Language: 16 Wikimedians from 10 different language communities participated as shown in the pie chart below.

Participants of TTT 2016, representing different language communities

Gender: This year we had 5 female participants (out of 15 participants). After the 2013 iteration we felt we should try to encourage more female Wikipedians to participate in TTT. However, this does not mean that we had any different eligibility criteria set for the female Wikipedians.

Participants division by gender

Representation of Indic Wikimedia communities: We had participants from all over India. Although TTT is a national-level event, we also had participants from outside of India (Nepal and Sri Lanka).

Lessons learnt

TTT 2016 participants

After the 2015 version we found that a few participants faced difficulties to understand and work on the pre-event presentations. This year (2016), we have given more detailed instructions and were in touch with the participants while they were doing pre-event works.
By dovetailing TTT and MWT, A2K team was able to bring Indic Wikimedians working for outreach and on technical front together. This helped the participants to create a wishlist regarding tools, gadgets, and other technical help required to conduct effective outreach activities.

Based on participants' feedback and suggestions plus our own observations, while keeping Wikimedia Foundation's guidelines in mind, we make necessary changes to our program structure. In this year's TTT we made a number of changes‖

We encouraged more eligible female editors to participate.
We found that the objective and aims of the event remained unclear to a few participants in the earlier iterations. This year we have given more attention to explain the program's objectives, aims and expectations.

Challenges

We expected that the participants would be in touch with us while planning, conducting, and making reports of an event. After 2015 TTT^[1] we found a few participants did not respond to our emails or messages.
While TTT 2016 participants have shown active interest during WCI-related edit-a-thon, the same level of interest was not seen during regular monthly meetups.
Despite having communicated to the TTT 2015 participants that a mini TTT should be organized in their communities, however this was not taken up actively.

Mediawiki Training

Participants of MWT 2016, during the workshop

MediaWiki Training (MWT) is an annual residential training workshop that intends to bridge the prevalent gap between outreach volunteers and MediaWiki volunteers and developers. MWT attempts to create and groom 'tech' leaders from the existing Indian language Wikipedians. It aims to facilitate discussions around nurturing leadership regarding technical issues such as filing bugs that hinder the growth of Indian language Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. At the same time, it encourages active contribution towards improving the existing MediaWiki software from the participants to understand importance of utilizing technology for outreach activities.

The first iteration of the event was held on 24-27 June 2015. 14 editors from 8 Indic communities participated in this workshop. Some of the topics taught during the workshop were: Bugs -presentation, demo & case study, Bots - Pywiki & AWB, MediaWiki tools, TranslateWiki, Quarry, WikiMetrics, APIs, User scripts.

The second iteration of the workshop was conducted on 17-19 June 2016 in Bangalore. MWT 2016 was planned to facilitate an idea-exchange platform between outreach volunteers and MWT participants. 11 editors from 6 Indic Wikimedia communities recieved training during this workshop. Some of the topics discussed during the program were Wikidata, usage of Wikimedia labs tools, templates and infobox creation, as well as AutoWikiBrowser (AWB).

Lessons learnt

Ensure better logistics co-ordination thus guaranteeing involved participation from the participants.
Priority topics must be given more time.

Challenges

Scheduling follow-up events such as mini version of MWT across Indic Wikimedia communities.
To identify female Wikimedians and encourage them to participate in MWT.

Train-a-Wikipedian

Train-a-Wikipedian session in Hyderabad on 15 May 2016

Train-a-Wikipedian (TAW) was started in December 2015 to identify enthusiastic Indic Wikipedians, to train and groom them to develop their editing skills. Inspired by the Adopt-a-User program of the English-language-Wikipedia, this initiative is working on encouraging new Wikimedians who nominate themselves to learn basic Wikimedia policies. Until 30 June 2016, more than 25 training sessions have been conducted.

The concept of Train-a-Wikipedian was appreciated by several Indic Wikimedians from different communities.
More than 25 Wikimedians signed up for this program.

Reflections

These are some of the reflections/feedback we received from Train-a-Wikipedian participants:

Username

	Community	Topics/Learnings	Feedback/Reflections
User:Nrgullapalli (Training page)	Telugu Wikipedia	Policy discussion such as civility, stub, How to search in a better way using operators etc on the web to get references Introduction to The Wikipedia Library / Resource exchange / CIS-A2K Resource exchange.	“ The training was helpful, I learned a couple of new tools. But I feel such trainings should be conducted on regular basis and follow-ups should be done. ”
User:Mouryan (Training page)	Bengali Wikipedia	Essentials of conducting local Wiki-event. Using special pages such as Special:UncategorizedPages,, Special:ShortPages etc., Google Books citation, Metrics.wikimedia.org	“ It was amazing and a quite enriching experience for me at a personal level sir. The things I learnt at Train-a-Wikipedian Hyderabad actually paid the results soon enough.and it enabled to successfully conduct my first offline Wikipedia Meetup in Kolkata just within one month's time. . . ”
User:Rajasekhar1961 (Training page)	Telugu Wikipedia	AdminTools such as MoreMenu, QuickWikiEditor, Citation making using Google Books citation tool, autofilling (from reftoolbar), DOI citation tool; Quick Page purging	“ I picked up some very useful skills & learnt good tools. But, I became a little inactive after that so could not utilize these learnings much. I hope to do so in future.

Lessons learnt

This initiative was inspired by English Wikipedia's program Adopt-a-user, however we found that we must make necessary changes to meet requirements of Indic Wikimedians.
Real-life training sessions left a deeper impact and motivated Wikimedians much more than online training modules.

Challenges

We failed to conduct sufficient number of offline training sessions.
Follow-ups have not been done for a couple of workshops, for example a TAW workshop was conducted in Hyderabad on 15 May and was well-received, but no follow-up TAW workshop has been conducted since then in the city.
From A2K's side sometimes there were delays in connecting and co-ordinating with the signed-up participants. On the other hand sometimes, we did not got responses from the participants when we contacted them.

Policies and guidelines on Indic Wikipedias

Indic Wikipedia policy handbook

CIS-A2K started working on a project to support and encourage Indic Wikipedians to create and/or localize policies in their native languages. A survey was conducted and a policy handbook was also created.

Lessons learnt

Efforts must be taken to initiate discussion regarding creation, localisation of policies in events organized by A2K

Challenges

Although a few policy-discussion meetups have been conducted (such as this one), we faced difficulties finding volunteer translators to translate the handbook into Indic languages.

Play media

Dr. Soubhagyavathi talks about Kannada Wikipedia

Kannada

Kannada Wikipedia Edit-a-thon partcipants at DSERT in January 2016

Kannada Wikipedia has reached the 20,000 article mark during this year. Kananda community members collaboratively designed the plan for the 13th Kannada Wikipedia anniversary. This activity brought together Wikimedians from different parts of Karnataka. By applying for a PEG Kannada Wikipedians have interacted with global Wikipedians and WMF staff. This event resulted in new editors and outreach activities in various parts of Karnataka. A2K has appointed a Program Associate as per its revised strategy A2K 2.0 for Kannada Wikimedia projects.

Institutional partnership

Two new partnerships have been initiated during this grant period–

The Department of State Educational Research and Training (DSERT), Government of Karnataka and
Alva's Education Foundation at Moodabidri.

While Alva's Education Foundation is going to be a partner in implementing Wikipedia Education Program. DSERT is an institution that trains school teachers all across Karnataka state. A2K will be training the trainers about using and editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in the context of their classroom. However, the 3 other institutional partnerships - Karnataka Janapada University, Manjusha Museum, Dharmasthala, and Tumkur University, Tumkur- that were anticipated during the writing of workplan, could not materialize. This was due to the delay in recruiting a Program Associate for the Kannada Wikimedia projects.

A2K has successfully continued its earlier partnerships and has benefited from their advice regarding our WEP activities and workplan.

Awareness and Outreach

Both the DSERT partnership and the 13th anniversary helped raise awareness around thematic article writing which encouraged Kannada Wikipedians to engage in projects. Various editing projects on literature, science, engineering subjects were taken up actively by the community members. Approximately 225 articles were created exclusively as part of 13th year anniversary celebrations.

Offline versions of Kannada Wikipedia (using kiwix) were distributed through flash drives like this during 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary

CIS-A2K also tried to engage in skill-building activities for the Kannada community members. As per the requests from volunteers, capacity building programs were arranged both in groups and in one-on-one settings to individual Wikimedians. Both TTT and MWT saw active participation from Kannada community. The results of these would be visible in the coming months.

In order to increase the offline readership of Kannada Wikipedia, offline versions of Kannada Wikipedia (using kiwix) were distributed through flash drives during 13th year Kannada Wikipedia anniversary held at Mangalore. 50 such flash drives have been distributed so far to those in need.

Lessons learnt

Kannada was not properly represented in terms of blogs and media coverage and we have been working on addressing this issue.
A better communication method would be devised with inputs from the community members.

Gating factors

A2K has not been successful towards re-releasing of textbooks published by the Government of Karnataka under CC-by-SA licences.

An orientation for Kananda bloggers, some of who could be potential Wikimedians, has not taken place.
Some community members have repeatedly emphasized on having better communication, documentation of activities taken up by the Program Associate.

Odia

Active editors in Odia Wikipedia during the period July 2015 to Feb 2016

Through the community building activities such as the formation of Puri WikiTungi and revival of Bhubaneswar WikiTungi, active editors of the Odia Wikipedia movement reached 30 editors (as of 30 June 2016). Regular follow-up with Wikimedians on-Wiki and via different social media channels along with monthly meetups has helped in editor retention. This has further encouraged Odia Wikimedians to participate in both on-Wiki and off-Wiki activities.

CIS-A2K has supported the community to celebrate the 14th Anniversary of Odia Wikipedia, which facilitated 30 Wikimedians to meet and discuss the future activities for Odia Wikimedia projects.

Formation of Puri WikiTungi

Play media

Adyasha Sahu a Wikimedian from Puri community sharing her journey in the Wikimedia movement.

Puri WikiTungi is a city-based editing group formed by Wikimedians from Puri to spread awareness about Odia Wikimedia projects in and around the city. This group was formed after the first Wikipedia workshop in Puri. Around 30 individuals attended the workshop. 14 participants from this workshop have emerged as active editors on Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource. They are also involved in conducting offline meet-ups, seminar and workshops.

Bridging the Gender gap

Gender diversity in Odia Wikimedia community during 2014-16. For this statistics Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource have been considered.

CIS-A2K has engaged with seven new female Wikipedians and this has resulted in their active participation on Odia Wikimedia projects. One of the female Wikmedians, Chinmayee Mishra has independently conducted a Wikipedia orientation workshop. This workshop has boosted participation of female Wikipedians. Their efforts have been discussed through blog posts and other social media platforms.

Lessons learnt

Two organizations are unofficially supporting Odia Wikimedia community by providing meetup space and internet access for Bhubaneswar and Puri WikiTungis. A2K must make official agreements with these institutions.

Gating factors

Failed to build a partnership with any institution for running Education program for Odia Wikimedia projects. Awareness about the importance of WEPs is required for achieving this.

Telugu

A2K team has been successfully collaborating with Telugu Wikipedia community to improve content quality on Telugu Wikipedia and strengthen the community by increasing its reader and editor base. The team also shares ideas by providing and extending support such as involving community members in discussions with potential partners and designing programs based on their suggestions. Such collaboration has strengthened communities to conduct many Edit-a-thons which have resulted in a wide variety of quality articles. A2K intends to continue such collaborative activities resulting in improvements of stub and poorly translated articles.

Activities and Events

CIS-A2K team has been involved in conducting (holding or co-ordinating) several edit-a-thons in Telugu Wikimedia community, while a few were anchored in Telugu, others were multi-lingual. Many initiatives of the last grant period (i.e. July 2014 to June 2015) have been continued. A2K and the community have collaboratively organised an of sharing resources has resulted in which focused on improving Telugu movie articles. Community members have expanded stubs with information, references and photos. For the edit-a-thon A2K provided resources and references and the community members developed stub articles and created new articles.

Capacity building activities have also been carried out with Telugu Wikipedians. A copyrights session was conducted to improve Telugu Wikimedians' understanding on the subject and clear doubts for Wikisource contributors. Community members, Meena Gayathri and T.Sujatha, attending CIS A2K's Train-a-Wikipedian session have expressed that they gained invaluable knowledge and skills in content translation. The two later initiated a project to improve the quality of Google Translated articles. More than 30 such articles have been improved through it.

Similarly, the Quick introduction sessions held in Hyderabad community meet-ups by CIS A2K helped explain some online tools usage and enabled Wikipedians to contribute better for Wikimedia projects. One of the most active Wikipedians, Swaralasika, said that he was able to make better citations after the sessions which has helped him improve his editing.

Institutional Partnership

With the institutional partnerships established between CIS A2K and Annamayya library, Telugu Wikisource community members have uploaded some of the missing pages in on Telugu Wikisource. Due to the attempts of the community members towards proofreading these books can be downloaded now. The Andhra Loyola College partnership has also cultivated new editors and engage in WEP activities.

Outreach and Media

Increased media coverage has helped the cause of Telugu Wikimedia projects. Hard work of several Telugu Wikipedians (such as Pranayraj and Viswanadh) has been recognized and highlighted. Pranayraj points out that the media coverage helped him reach more people who want to contribute to Wikipedia.

Lessons learnt

A2K team has been working to make Telugu Wikipedia more visible in popular Telugu media, especially in printed media such as off-wiki and on-wiki events coverage in major local newspapers like Eenadu, Sakshi, Andhra Jyothi
WEP activities at partner institutions need to be synchronized with their academic schedule.

Gating factors

Technical support requests from the community were delayed on our end. To overcome this, we are trying to find interns to assign technical tasks requested from communities.

Konkani

Play media

Darshan Kandolkar talks about Konkani Wikipedia

Having gone live since July 2015 after nine years of incubation, Goan Konkani Wikipedia has developed and expanded with the help of CIS A2K to draw more contributors and resources into the project. CIS-A2K has attempted to develop Konkani Wikipedia in all the three scripts (Romi, Devanagari, Kannada). Institutions such as Thomas Stephen Konkani Kendra (TSKK) for Romi script, Goa Konkani Sahitya Academy for Devanagari script, Karnataka Konkani Sahitya Academy for Kannada script have agreed to donate content.

Department of Computer Science, Goa University, had organized an edit-a-thon to include the villages of Goa state on Konkani Wikipedia.

Due to the discontinuation of the Program Associate for Konkani, several of our programmatic activities have not been accomplished during this grant period.

Partnership

In the past year, CIS-A2K had the honour to collaborate with Mannd Sobhaann and World Konkani Centre, organizations working with Konkani language and culture, to bring in more resources into Konkani Wikipedia. These two organizations work for popularization and conservation of Konkani culture and language. Mannd Sobhaan has donated three Konkani books under CC-BY-SA license which has provided great sources for citation and references. On the other hand, these organizations have also agreed to hold GLAM activities, while A2K would digitize their archives of audio, video and text resources to further expand resources available for Konkani Wikimedia projects.

Activities and Events

A one-day edit-a-thon was organized at Krishnadas Shama Central Library, Goa in January 2016. Members of CIS-A2K participated in this event to help mentor the participants. The event created 100 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia in a single day.

Lessons learnt

Increase editor base by engaging academicians and bloggers.
Increase readership by introducing Konkani Wikipedia in primary and higher primary schools.

Gating factors

Activity in the end of 2015 was low in Konkani Wikipedia that no new articles were created in November and December.
Non-availability of a Program Associate

Marathi

Partnership

Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) has re-licensed 1000 books on the culture, history, and literature under CC-by-SA 4.0 license in October, 2015. In December 2015, a discussion was initiated by CIS A2K at The Energy Resources Institute (TERI) to plan digitization and uploading of the books for Marathi Wikisource.

Events and Outreach

A two-day workshop was organised by the CIS A2K Program Associate in August 2015 at Srimati Savitribai Phule Pune University. This workshop was an attempt to bridge the gender gap on Marathi Wikipedia. The "Sau Dhuni Teen" project focused on creating Wikipedia articles on notable women, themes and works related to gender studies. This event attracted new editors and introduced to them input methods for Marathi methods and basic guidelines of contributing to Wikipedia. The event also served as an important initiative to utilize Wikipedia in generating Indian language annotations on academic sources in Women's Studies and the Social Sciences.

In May, 2016, CIS A2K organized a two-day mini version of Train-the-trainer (TTT) and Mediawiki Training (MWT) for Marathi Wikimedians in Pune. Topics covered in the Mediawiki training include Wikidata, bug triage, Mediawiki extensions, etc., while the TTT session focused on advanced editing skills, outreach planning, and grants structure introduction.

Lessons learnt

A strategy is required to utilize books donated by Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) as references on Marathi Wikipedia.
Spreading Marathi Wikipedia-related activities to different parts of Maharashtra .

Gating factors

Some participants of workshops reflect that unavailability of sandboxes in Marathi Wikipedia was a concern for new editor as they were unsure if the article might be changed during the time they edit.

General Support and Service to the Movement

Play media

Odia Wikisourcer Pankajmala Sarangi shares her experience and future plans to grow the community. Video by Pankajmala Sarangi (original video) and Subhashish Panigrahi (post production), CC BY-SA 4.0. Pankajmala recorded the video herself covering a few specific topics sent over email.

Partnership Summary

Growing partnerships in WEPs: A2K team has successfully continued all the partnerships form the previous grant period and has also been able to bring new partners onboard thus adding value to the Wikimedia movement. A2K conducted a review program for its WEP partners in Bangalore during the last grant period. This review program allowed the WEP partners across 3 different states to meet and discuss the salient features of the WEP initiative being run at their institutions. This review program helped A2K team to understand institutional expectations and challenges. The review meeting also helped us to generate inter institutional collaboration and sync A2K schedule with academic calendar of these institutions.
Book/Resource donation and digitization: A2K team is immensely happy to have partnered with Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha which has donated 1000 books about the Maratha administration, culture, history and social life. Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited, Pune has offered us in-kind support by digitising all these books and making them available to be uploaded on Marathi Wikisource.
Our collaboration with Manasu Foundation, Bangalore has also allowed us to digitise content donated to A2K for free. Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada now hosts a Digital Resource Lab that provides nevessary infrastructure (Computers, Internet access and printing facility) for all the Telugu Wikimedians.
Centurion University, Bhubhaneswar has expressed in digitising Odia publications from the copyright lapse period. With this partnership A2K expects to add close to 50000 folios to Odia Wikisource.
Goa University partnership and Indian village articles: After a brief lull in the activities of Konkani Wikipedia activities have spiked up again mainly because of the encouragement offered by Goa University. Prof. Madhav Gadgil with support from Goa University has launched a project of using the Census of India data to create articles on Villages of India. This activity has been eagerly taken up by the Konkani community members.Encouraged by the level of enthusiasm shown by the Konkani community members Telugu, Marathi and Odia community members have also been engaged in creating articles on villages of India in their respective languages.
Partnership in image re-licensing: Alva's Education Foundation have donated more than 15000 images under CC-BY_SA license. These images depict the folk art forms, famous personalities, cultural practices, tribal costumes and other areas regarding the social and cultural life of Karnataka in particular and South India in general.
Decision of focusing on existing partnerships: Many institutions that were indicated under the category 'To be explored' for a partnership during this plan year have not been approached as A2K team worked towards consolidating its work with the existing institutions rather than crowding our resources. This decision was taken in accordance with the suggestion of community members and FDC suggestion.
Partnership re-assessment: A further re-assessment of Institutional partnerships based on the parameters of RoI, contribution to Global Metrics and community support will be undertaken during the grant period July 2016- June 2017. Thus providing the A2K team opportunity to consolidate its work further and adopting course corrections (such as working with a different Wikimedia project, changing target group, conducting intensive summer/winter camps and if necessary exiting the partnership).

Outreach Strategies Development

Online and offline media outreach strategies: Stories related to Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects used to get less attention in the regional language media in India. There has been a hike in news articles and columns related to Indic-language Wikimedia projects both in print and electronic media. One of the most important reasons behind this is the establishment and growing relations with journalists and news editors that are responsible for specific genre of news. Actively writing opinion pieces to newspaper editorials and making blog posts on popular online portals are another reason.
Laying out strategies for recruiting new contributors using social media: Learning from our past initiative experiences such as the movement where new contributors on social media helped Odia Wikisource go live^[2], CIS-A2K has been helping communities with online outreach strategies. Some of the lessons learned can be found in this learning pattern.

Other Communication and Contribution

Balance of Focus Language Area (FLA) and non-FLA language: As CIS-A2K has been working primarily in five focus languages (Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu, with Tulu and Santali as two additional languages), there has been more attention paid to the aforementioned seven languages and less on the remaining Indian languages. The same pattern also reflects in our media outreach. To balance this and to provide support in the larger Indic language community, CIS-A2K has made efforts in connecting non-FLA Wikimedians with global community leaders^[3] and writing about work accomplished in non-FLA communities.^[4]
Highlighting the' community-led projects and less-known languages: CIS-A2K has contributed and highlighting in promoting the projects that are primarily community-led^[5] that are not necessarily catalyzed by the CIS-A2K. Also, via public speaking and publications, CIS-A2K has attempted to promote indigenous and the less-known languages of India.^[6]

Challenges

Labor intensive WEP programs: WEP initiative at many of our institutions have proven to be labour intensive. A2K team has not been able to integrate its efforts with the community members. There has also been a perception that the participating Higher Education institutions are required to only provide infrastructure and carve time out of academic schedule. This leads to a situation where the A2K team is often forced to devote time and resources towards the evaluation of assignments.
Lack of institutional partnership in Odia community: Despite the A2K team's attempts to establish formal institutional partnership and further a WEP initiative in Odia language, we have not been successful. With the consent of the Odia community A2K team has approached Centurion University regarding setting up a Wikisource Learning Centre.

CIS-A2K request page

CIS-A2K has a request page intended for Wikimedian/s from India to place requests for support from CIS-A2K. Between 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2016, CIS-A2K has supported 21 such programs/initiatives. The communities supported by CIS-A2K include Odia, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali etc. Besides offering financial support to conduct events, CIS-A2K has also provided non-financial support such as SWAG material, and technical and documentaion support.

Some of the events/initiatives we have supported are

Odia Wikipedians conducting Nabakalebara edit-a-thon (July 2015), Odia Wikisource 1st anniversary celebration (October 2015), Wikipedia's 15th Birthday celebration (January 2016)
funding Bengali Wikipedia community to conduct a workshop (Wikiacademy) (August 2015), a meetup (October 2015), and an "in-depth Meet-up of Bengali Wikipedia editor community in Kolkata" (June 2016)
helping Malayalam Wikimedia community to organize a meet-up at Kozhikode, Kerala (July 2015), and Wikisangamotsavam 2015 (December)
support Telugu Wikipedians to conduct a photowalk and a joint Telugu-English Wikimedians’ meetup in Hyderabad (both in December)
supporting two-day workshop on Samskrit Wikisource - 2016

Lessons learnt

WMF grants opportunities should be discussed and promoted amongst Indic Wikimedia communities.
Wikimedia communities must be encouraged to optimize in-kind support such as event venue, internet connectivity.

Challenges

We have continuously informed communities that a request (specially if it is a large one) should come to us at least 3-4 weeks before the event date(s). However we have received requests at the last moment and hence faced difficulties (such as time-pressure) reviewing and process these requests in time.
We ask communities to submit expenditure details and narrative report of an event soon after its completion. However, we have faced difficulties collecting the said records in time.

Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)

Provide exchange rate used:

1 USD = 61.88 INR

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.

Revenue source	Currency	Anticipated	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Cumulative	Anticipated ($US)*	Cumulative ($US)*	Explanation of variances from plan
GSMA	INR	263,783.00	263,783.00	-	-	-	263,783.00	4262.73	4262.73
Wikimedia Foundation	INR	12,000,000.00	6,997,845.00	-	4,998,082.00	-	11,995,927.00	193,923.72	193,857.90
Kusuma Foundation	INR	15,000,000.00	7,500,000.00	-	7,500,000.00	-	15,000,000.00	242,404.65	242,404.65
MacArthar Foundation	INR	6,593,625.00	6,593,625.00	-	-	-	6,593,625.00	106,555.03	106,555.03
Cybersteward Project	INR	495,100.00	495,100.00	-	-	-	495,100.00	8,000.97	8,000.97
Big Data MF	INR	4,578,734.00	-	4,578,734.00	-	-	4,578,734.00	73,993.76	73,993.76
Privacy International	INR	3,883,300.63	-	405,388.00	3,477,912.63	-	3,883,300.63	62,755.34	62,755.34
IDRC	INR	6,751,260.57	-	-	6,751,260.57	-	6,751,260.57	109,102.47	109,102.47
The Mozilla Corporation	INR	662,173.00	-	-	-	662,173.00	662,173.00	10,700.92	10,700.92

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

Grants	Explanation
GSMA	This fund is allocated to CIS for GSMA project undertaken in collaboration with Privacy International. The research has sought to understand different legal and regulatory aspects of security and surveillance in India.
Wikimedia Foundation	Wikimedia Foundation has given this grant, as part of their APG, to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand Wikimedia’s Indic language free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia in Indic languages. In addition, the grant aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects and wider distribution of free knowledge within India.
Kusma Foundation Fund	Kusuma Foundation funds the core of CIS programmes.

Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)

Expense	Currency	Budgeted	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Cumulative	Budgeted ($US)*	Cumulative ($US)*	Percentage spent to date	Explanation of variances from plan
Staff Cost	INR	5,884,320.00	986,800.00	1,328,057.00	1,695,815.00	1,455,531.00	5,466,203.00	95,092.44	88,335.54	92.9	Slightly under spent
Staff Travel & Stay	INR	985,000.00	211,267.00	162,566.00	453,724.00	-	827,557.00	15,917.91	13,373.58	84.02	Due to inclusion of Program Associates presence staff travel has come down
Volunteer Support	INR	1,530,000.00	41,847.00	422,041.00	100,631.00	764,787.00	1,329,306.00	24,725.27	21,482.00	86.89	Increased activities with the intervention of Program Associates
Meetups	INR	895,000.00	84,285.00	4,679.00	151,904.00	114,825.00	355,693.00	14,463.48	5,748.11	39.74	A2K team has conducted Train-the-Trainer and Media Wiki Training during the last quarter of the grant period. These receipts will be updated in the final cumulative financial report
Digitization	INR	150,000.00	5,250.00	-	10,250.00	-	15,500.00	2,424.05	250.48	39.74	Purchase of scanners to assist communities towards digitisation has been done
Equipment	INR	80,000.00	-	170,000.00	362,430.00	122,660.00	655,090.00	1,292.82	10,586.46	819	Essential equipment such as laptops, video camera and hard disks purchased for newly hired Program Associates and A2K staff
Assistant/Intern	INR	110,000.00	20,000.00	30,000.00	110,000.00	-	160,000.00	1,777.63	2,585.65	145.45	Hiring of 3 Program Associates has resulted in over spending
Consumables (Printing, Statinery, Swag)	INR	460,000.00	-	-	-	-	0	7,433.74	0	0	A2K was unable to utilise these funds for publishing and distributing of Community Resources
Miscellaneous	INR	165,000.00	89,003.00	21,207.00	50,978.00	50,442.00	211,630.00	2,666.45	3,420.01	128	Unanticipated expenses regarding orientation of PA
Design/Documentation & Research	INR	50,000.00	-	20,950.00	-	16,508.00	37,458.00	808.02	605.33	75	Optimal spending
Program Advisor	INR	580,800.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	132,000.00	528,000.00	9,385.91	8,532.64	90.9	Optimal spending
TOTAL	INR	11,979,132.00	1,570,452.00	2,291,500.00	3,067,732.00	2,656,753.00	9,586,437.00	193,586.49	154,919.80	80	Final Financial report will have the cumulative details.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

Compliance

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

References

2016 TTT version was conducted between 15–17 June 2016, and in this impact report we are reporting only till 30 June 2016. Although we have seen positive impact after this year's TTT, we are not including these in this report.
Panigrahi, Subhashish. "More Than 40 Million People Await the Launch of Odia Wikisource". Wikimedia Blog (21 October 2014).
[ Roali], an IME for Assamese language that is quite popular in the Assamese speakers, came live after long time. CIS-A2K has worked closely with the developer of this IME, some of the Assamese Wikipedia community members and Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team in the entire process.
Broadening the scope of blogs CIS-A2K has contributed to the larger Indic communities has been a constant effort, though in a limited capacity. A few such blogs can be read here: 1, 2, and 3.
In this article, a community-led project for creating a script encoding converter for the Odia-language Wikimedia projects was highlighted. There were more publication in the Odia newspapers and the project was promoted on social media so that more people contribute using the Unicode standard. The latter will eventually help spread the language's reach on the Internet.
CIS-A2K and type designer Pooja Saxena submitted a paper and presented a paper titled "Bringing Ol Chiki to the digital world" at the Typoday 2016, an annual conference in India to bring type designers and script experts under one roof. The presentation is about CIS-A2K's work in bringing a freely-licensed typeface for the Ol Chiki script that is used to write Santali, an indigenous language spoken across several countries in South Asia.

Signature

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Lahariyaniyathi (talk) 17:01, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

Resources

Resources to plan for measurement

Global metrics are an important starting point for grantees when it comes to measuring programmatic impact (Learning Patterns and Tutorial) but don’t stop there.
Logic Models provide a framework for mapping your pathway to impact through the cause and effect chain from inputs to outputs to outcomes. Develop a logic model to map out your theory of change and determine the metrics and measures for your programs.
Importantly, both qualitative and quantitative measures are important so consider both as you determine measures for your evaluation and be sure to ask the right questions to be sure to capture your program stories.

Resources for storytelling

WMF storytelling series and toolkit (DRAFT)
Online workshop on Storytelling. By Frameworks institute
- The origin of storytelling
- Story frames, with a focus on news-worthiness.
Reading guide: Storytelling and Social change. By Working Narratives
- The uses of the story.
- Case studies.
Blog: 3 Tips on telling stories that move people to action. By Paul VanDeCarr (Working Narratives), on Philanthropy.com
Building bridges using narrative techniques. By Sparknow.net
- Differences between a report and a story
- Question guides and exercises.
Guide: Tools for Knowledge and Learning. By Overseas Development Institute (UK).
- Developing a strategy
- Collaboration mechanisms
- Knowledge sharing and learning
- Capturing and storing knowledge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/grants-apg-proposals-2014-2015-round2-the-centre-for-internet-and-society-impact-report-form

Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise: January iteration

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-15T17:47:50Z

The January iteration of the Google-translated Telugu articles prioritisation exercise took place online.

The Google-translated Telugu articles prioritization is an online exercise intended to prioritize and improve over 1,900 machine-translated articles on Telugu Wikipedia. This project began from 2009- 2011 when Google translation project took place on Telugu Wikipedia in several rounds. Jointly organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community and CIS-A2K, this exercise saw the participation of 1 female Wikipedian and 4 male Wikipedians.

12 machine translated articles were improved and 39 have been deleted due to their poor quality. In addition to this, 42 articles have been prioritised for further improvement. Says Telugu Wikipedian User:Meena gayathri.s, "people who wanted to improve Google-translated article waited [for a] long time to get a priority list of articles to be improved and in that aspect, this exercise is very useful."

Several such iterations are planned for the coming months. The meta page for the event can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/google-translated-telugu-articles-prioritisation-exercise-january-iteration