Centre for Internet and Society

Now, Tulu set to be promoted through Wikipedia articles

praskrishna — 2014-12-06T01:23:43Z

With the dream of including Tulu in the list of official languages of the country (eighth schedule of the Constitution) remaining far from being realised, enthusiasts seem to be keen to promote the language through Wikipedia.

The article by Govind D. Belgaumkar was published in the Hindu on November 24, 2014.

Beginning on Wednesday, a three-day convention at Sahyadri College will ideate to find means to achieve this goal with the Karnataka Tulu Academy leading the initiative.

The convention will focus on writing Wikipedia articles in Tulu.

Nearly 30 students, mostly from Canara College and some from Aloysius College, and some teachers from Bantwal have registered for the event.

The plan is to ensure that about 25-30 people keep writing in Tulu on Wikipedia.

Some students from the Government Girls PU College in Udupi had already been contributing articles in Tulu, according to the academy’s registrar Chandrahas Rai.

He hoped that the activity would help to pressure authorities to include Tulu in the eighth schedule of the Constitution.

The convention comes ahead of the mega Tulu event – Tuluvere Parba planned in December – and it is hoped that it would awaken the Tulu spirit among the people of the region.

The resource person will be Wikipedia representative and Bengaluru-based Programme Manger, Indian Languages, The Centre for Internet and Society Sri Pavanaja U.B..

Mr. Rai said the articles need to be written regularly to keep the language alive on the platform otherwise it would be notified as inactive.

The convention will be inaugurated by Shivaram Shetty, professor in Mangalore University’s SVP Kannada Study Centre.

President of the academy Janaki Brahmabar, president of Bantwal Tulukuta A.C. Bhandary and Tuluvere Parba’s chief convenor Kadri Navaneet Shetty will be present.

Others who are expected to take part include Mangaluru Tulukuta President Damodar Nisarga, General Secretary of Tuluvere Parba Nitte Shashidhar Shetty.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-november-24-2014-govind-d-belgaumkar-now-tulu-set-to-be-promoted-through-wikipedia-articles

Meet the Newly Born Tulu Wikipedia, the 23rd in a South Asian Language!

subha — 2016-08-30T02:14:13Z

The Tulu language Wikipedia became the latest entrant in the family of 294 world-language Wikipedia projects after the project went live from Wikimedia Incubator earlier this month.

The post was published in Global Voices on August 28, 2016.

The project waited as long as eight years in the Incubator before becoming the 23rd South Asian language Wikipedia. Available at https://tcy.wikipedia.org, the Tulu Wiki space has a total of 1,285 articles contributed by 198 editors, about 5-10 of which are active with over five edits every month.

The announcement about the project going live was made by Katherine Maher, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation during the WikiConference India.

Wikimedia Incubator is a sister project of Wikipedia and before any new language Wikipedia is created, an Incubator project is created and grown by volunteer editors. Once the project gains momentum with more editors developing more content more often, the project goes live as a new Wikipedia project.

The Tulu language is spoken by about three to five million people in the Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala, and there is a sizeable diaspora living in US and the Gulf countries.

Eight years back in 2008, Tulu Wikipedia was created in Incubator with just a handful of editors. But apart from a few sporadic edits every so often, there was little impetus to take the project forward.

A community in a real sense is one that engages in discussion, consensus and collaboration. This never existed for Tulu Wikipedia as individual editors were working in isolation from each other.

There was therefore a need for them to meet and form a strategic plan to grow the community and the Incubator by brining in more active contributors.

In 2014, the need to connect the Tulu Wikipedia editors and foster an interactive editorial group was discussed and a meetup was organized in Mangalore by the Centre for Internet and Society—Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) program, a catalytic program funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and grow Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects in the Indian subcontinent.

As an offshoot of that meeting, more community meetups started to happen. A few workshops were organized in Mangalore to provide hands-on training to participants and the city's St. Aloysius College opened its door to include Wikipedia editing as part of its syllabus.

A Wikipedia Education Program was promptly organized for the undergraduate students in this college where students started editing Wikipedia as a classroom assignment and the faculty was involved both in providing training and evaluating the articles.

Vishwanatha Badikana, assistant professor of the Kannada language department at St. Aloysius College, became an active Tulu Wikipedia editor himself and led outreach activities at the institution. His students have enriched the Tulu Wikipedia with articles across a broad range of topics.

However, what has been achieved so far is still only the tip of the iceberg. The community is still fairly small and has to grow beyond one supporting institution. The larger Tulu language community also has to take ownership and become stewards in growing Tulu Wikipedia.

Despite its long, rich linguistic heritage, Tulu is still struggling in terms of achieving wider usage in written form, especially in its native script. The lack of promotion is also quite evident as the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy, an official body set up by the Karnataka government uses Kannada and English for its official portal.

The biggest challenge of all is the lack of Unicode support. Unicode is a global standard for scripts, and the Tigalari script that is used to write in Tulu is not encoded in Unicode. At the moment, all the articles in the Tulu Wikipedia are written in the Kannada script as most of the speakers are based in the state of Karnataka, and speak Kannada as a second language.

The only possibility of using Tigaliri script is tied to standardizing the script on Unicode, releasing a freely licensed typeface so that it can be bundled as a web font to display the script in the case of any mobile or desktop user not having the font installed on their device.Finally the script for existing content must be converted from Kannada to Tigaliri.

There is a series of eight how-to video tutorials that have been created to help new and existing editors to learn more about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, style and the editing process.

“Many students have contributed by creating these tutorials,” says Dr. Badikana.

The current set of editors are doing their best to spread the word about the project while safeguarding the core values of Wikipedia.

In an interview to the media portal Daijiworld, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu, an active editor based in Oman said, “Anyone can write or edit articles on Wikipedia Tulu, but it should not be plagiarised [..] Photos should be one's own or uploaded with valid permission from the owner. This will help the future generation to know more about the language and act as a source of information on Tulu language and culture.”

Dr. Badikana moreover shared in an interview with this author that he is hopeful of seeing more Tulu speakers contributing to Tulu Wikipedia, as he feels that growing language content online, combined with work in conventional classrooms, is the best approach to preserving the language.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/global-voices-august-28-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-meet-the-newly-born-tulu-wikipedia-the-23-in-south-asian-language

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

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

Exercise to Correct articles in Tulu Wikipedia begins

praskrishna — 2016-05-01T10:37:12Z

It will go on till Saturday at the Ramakrishna pre-university college.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/exercise-to-correct-articles-in-tulu-wikipedia-begins

Community Discussion for Making Tulu Wikipedia Live

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T07:45:54Z

CIS-A2K Programme Officer Rahmanuddin Shaik visited Mangalore on October 28 and 29 and again on November 5 and 6, 2015. During his visit he interacted with Wikipedians for making the Tulu Wikipedia live.

There were discussions on translations of system messages that appear on Wikipedia interface, creating templates pages and adding images. Around 79 strings were translated on Translatewiki.net, the community project for MediaWiki localization, and about 500 strings were approved. This event was organised at Tulu Bhavana, Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Akademy. The director of the institution was part of the meeting who agreed for the following:

To relicense a lower resolution cover pages, and metadata of their 157 volumes of books under Creative Commons licenses. This will bring in those many articles on Tulu Wikipedia.
To give detailed information of winners of Tulu Sahitya Akademy award winners (this was being given away across 6 disciplines from 1993 onwards), which would add close to 100 biography articles on Tulu Wikipedia.

A possibility of CIS-A2K and Tulu Sahitya Akademy collaboration was also discussed briefly. Vishwanatha Badikana was there throughout these talks and he would be the contact person for further work.

Rahmanuddin was also invited to be a part of the World Konkani Literature festival where he spoke briefly about Konkani Wikipedia to the gathering.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/making-tulu-wikipedia-live

Community Digest: Tulu Wikipedia Goes Live after Eight Years in Incubator; News in Brief

Subhashish Panigrahi and Ting-Yi Chang — 2016-08-26T15:21:58Z

Eight years after being created in the Wikimedia Incubator, the Tulu-language Wikipedia is now live as the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia.

The blog post was published in the Wikimedia blog on August 24, 2016.

Available at https://tcy.wikipedia.org, the project has a total of 1285 articles contributed by 198 editors.

Tulu is spoken by between three and five million people principally concentrated in the states of Karnataka and Kerala in south-west and south India (respectively), with more in the US and in Gulf countries. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director Katherine Maher announced that the project would go live in her keynote at WikiConference India 2016.

Tulu Wikipedia was started in the Wikimedia Incubator back in 2008 with a one or two editors, but neither the project nor the community remained active except sporadic edits. Without any meetups and outreach, it was difficult for those editors to work as a community to bring the project live from Incubator. The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program, a catalytic program funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to support and grow Indian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects in the Indian subcontinent, started building a Tulu-language community in 2014. They and the community conducted Wikipedia editing training workshops at St. Aloysius College in Mangaluru, who opened their doors to introduce the Wikipedia Education Program (WEP). As part of the WEP, students started editing Wikipedia as part of their syllabus with the leadership and guidance of Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, assistant professor of the Kannada-language department at St. Aloysius, who himself became an active Tulu Wikipedia editor. Similarly, many students from both the institutions also contributed articles of diverse subject areas.

However, the community is fairly small and needs a way to grow outside the institution. “A series of eight how-to video tutorials have been created to help editors to learn about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, manual of style and overall editing. Many students have contributed in creating these tutorials”, Badikana says, and the existing set of editors are doing their best to spread the word about the project. In an interview with the media portal Daijiworld, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu, an active editor based in Oman, said, “anyone can write or edit articles on the Tulu Wikipedia but it should not be plagiarised. The photos should be one’s own or uploaded with valid permission from the owner. This will help the future generation to know more about the language and act as a source of information on Tulu language and culture.”

One of the biggest challenges in growing the project—apart the community’s limitations within institutional frameworks and having just a handful of editors outside—is the lack of codification of the project as per Unicode compliance. Unicode is a global standard for scripts, and the modern Tulu script (derived from the original Tigalari script) is not yet encoded in Unicode. As a result, all the articles in the Tulu Wikipedia are written in the Kannada script, as the speakers are mostly based in the state of Karnataka and speak Kannada as a second language.

Despite a long linguistic heritage, Tulu is still struggling to be widely used, especially in its native script. Badikana says that he is really hopeful that he will see more Tulu speakers start contributing to the language’s Wikipedia, as he feels that growing language content online would be the best thing to do while working in a conventional classroom.

In brief

Ongoing India At Rio Olympics 2016 Edit-a-thon promises to plant one tree for every 20 new articles created

India this year has a great participation in the Rio Olympics; some of the participating athletes have brought medals and glory for the country and some lost in the tight competition. But for Wikipedia, every single athlete matters! An edit-a-thon is being organized by Wikimedia India in collaboration with not-for-profit “Sankalp Taru”, publication house Niyogi books. Several Indian-language Wikipedia communities are participating in creating Wikipedia articles related to the Rio Olympics and India’s participation in it. A unique goal is set for this edit-a-thon where a tree will be planted for every 20 new articles created and it could also be monitored online. The edit-a-thon started officially at 0:00 UTC on 29 July 2016 and will go on 23:59 UTC on 18 September 2016. Apart from several other rules for participation, the rule also discourages pure machine translation of the articles as historically there has been disastrous impact of Google Translate for many Indian language Wikipedias.

Wiki Loves Monuments returns to India after three years

Wiki Loves Monuments, the global photo competition that is organized by the Wikimedia communities in September with the focus of getting good quality photographs of monuments of historical interest, will be organized in India. “The aim of the contest is to ask the general public—readers and users of Wikipedia, photographers, hobbyists, etc.—to take pictures of cultural heritage monuments and upload them to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and its other sister projects.”, shared Abhinav Srivastava, Executive Committee member of Wikimedia India which is the official organizer of the event. More details about participating in this event could be found in the event page.

WikiConference India 2016, the largest Wikimedia community gathering of the year in South Asia comes to an end

Organized by the Wikimedia communities in India, the WikiConference India 2016 was the largest Wikimedia gathering in the subcontinent of this year. After a long break of five years, the event has about 250 participants including over 100 scholarship recipients from four countries representing Wikimedia projects in 20 Indic languages. As reported in the Signpost, nearly 25% of scholarship recipients were women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. There were 89 accepted submissions including workshops, presentations, The event also included an edit-a-thon to improve the content related to Punjab, Punjabi language and culture as a gesture of respect to the place where the event was organized. Over 2000 articles have been created by more than 150 editors in 12 different language Wikipedias.

A gender gap-focused panel, led by formed Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees member Bishakha Datta, was held on the second day of the conference to share the research and outreach experiences in different communities (featuring Kannada, Tamil, and Marathi communities). Researchers proposed new strategies and practices in tackling the systematic and social barriers for Indian women joining Wikimedia projects. Other presenters shared tips and event-organizing experience on various outreach activities—from edit-a-thons and photo-thons in the International Women’s Month to student-led events in college institutions—demonstrating respective communities’ efforts on the local, national, and global scales. The panel was followed by a Wikiwomen’s Lunch meetup attended by most female Wikipedians at the conference along with Bishakha, Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees member Nataliia Tymkivand WMF staff members.

Ashutosh Sarangi, the youngest Wikimedian from the oldest Indian-language Wikipedia community

At the closing ceremony WikiConference India 2016, Ashutosh Sarangi was awarded as the youngest Wikimedian at the conference by , two days after Katherine congratulated the Odia Wikipedia for celebrating its 14th birthday, where the project happens to be the oldest of all Indian-language Wikipedias. Ashutosh, a 6th grade student, is the son of Pankajmala Sarangi, the most active Odia Wikisourcer, and is active in Odia Wikisource with 226 edits for digitization of two books so far. “Living and studying in New Delhi where Hindi is predominantly the primary language, having a conversation in our native language Odia itself is so difficult. I am proud to be a mother who not only teaches Odia language to her kids but also helps them contribute to the open Internet. At some point of time, these valuable books Ashutosh has contributed in digitizing on Odia Wikisource will be of great read for others”, she shares. Long time Hindi-language Wikipedian Raju Suthar has mentioned in a news article in Hindi newspaper the Sanjivani saying, “Ashutosh has won everyone’s heart as the youngest Wikimedian in this conference. Asaf Bartov and Nataliia Tymkov have awarded him for his contribution”. Ashutosh started contributing to Odia Wikisource in February this year on the day of the second workshop in New Delhi.

MediaWiki hackathon at WikiConference India 2016 has seven important outputs

The MediaWiki hackathon that was running at the WikiConference India in the leadership of Santosh Shingare was productive to engage with several participants and bring as many as seven most important outcomes:

WikiSpeak, an easy-to-use Android (source code) and web app (source code) that read the the Wikipedia articles in native languages.
Edit Tamil Wiktionary, android app that helps create entries in Tamil-language Wiktionary from a spreadsheet created with a .tsv extension. The app checks for existing entries and creates only entries that are not existent. (source code)
Commons audio uploader, Android app that helps a user to log in using Mediawiki credentials, create audio recordings using their phone microphone, and upload them on Commons. (source code)
Wikipedia articles on Google map, web application that can show Wikipedia articles with geo-cordinates in Google Maps when the phone’s location is enabled for Google Maps. The application is responsive enough to adjust the portion of the Wikipedia article it displays on the screen, and works for all the Indian languages. (source code)
OCR (Native Application) : Convert scanned book copy to Indian language text with google doc (Tested for Hindi and Malayalam).
Communication platform[WebRTC] (Web Application) : Community used this to talk or conference (Audio/video web conferencing application)
Notification (Event based) : showing popup on event eg (If recent changes happen, It will show popup which article was updated)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-digest-tulu-wikipedia-goes-live-after-eight-years-in-incubator-news-in-brief

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship

manasarao — 2017-12-14T08:55:05Z

The Centre for Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge program, in partnership with Christ University, is announcing its annual internship program for the 1200 students enrolled in the Wikipedia Education Program. The Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University, now in its fourth year, is an effort to bring together educators and students to use Wikipedia as an educational implement. CIS-A2K conducts the internship activity for passionate Christ University students to improve the quality of the articles created or edited by their fellow WEP peers. The internship will largely involve improving upon the articles created by their peers as well as gathering community consensus based on which these articles would be moved to the main namespace.

The students will be working on Wikipedia over the course of 21 days in developing upon the content created by Christ University Wikipedia Education Program participants. The fledgling articles currently housed in the individual “sandboxes” of the WEP participants will be improved upon by the interns through addition of detailed content, images and info-boxes.

The students are selected based on three main criteria: fluency of language(written and spoken), knowledge of Wikipedia and its processes, and their personal interest levels. The applications are open from 13 to 17 December, 2017. Interested students can apply here:

https://goo.gl/forms/Ffxh3T3DRZz8Q25F3

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/christ-university-wikipedia-education-program-internship-1

ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಯಲ್ಲೂ ಬಂತು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ

praskrishna — 2016-09-23T00:22:53Z

ಪಂಚ ದ್ರಾವಿಡ ಭಾಷೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂದಾದ `ತುಳು' ಸಹ ಇದೀಗ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾಗೆ ಎಂಟ್ರಿಯಾಗಿದೆ. ಭಾರತದ 23ನೇ ಪ್ರಾದೇಶಿಕ ಭಾಷೆಯ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾ ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಆರಂಭವಾಗಿದೆ.

ಈ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾ ಸೃಷ್ಟಿಗೆ ಕಾರಕರ್ತರಾದ ಮಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಡಾ. ವಿಶ್ವನಾಥ ಬಡಿಕಾನ ಮತ್ತು ಮಸ್ಕತ್`ನ ಮೆಕಾನಿಕಲ್ ಇಂಜಿನಿಯರ್ ಭರತೇಶ ಈ ವಿಷಯವನ್ನ 2016ರ ವಿಕಿ ಕಾನ್ಫರೆನ್ಸ್`ನಲ್ಲಿ ಘೋಷಿಸಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ದಕ್ಷಿಣ ಕನ್ನಡ ಮತ್ತು ಕೇರಳದ ಕಾಸರಗೂಡಿನ ಸುಮಾರು 20 ಲಕ್ಷಕ್ಕೂ ಅಧಿಕ ಜನರಿಗೆ ತುಳು ಮಾತೃಭಾಷೆಯಾಗಿದೆ. ಪಂಚದ್ರಾವಿಡ ಭಾಷೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂದಾದ ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಗೆ 2000 ವರ್ಷಗಳಷ್ಟು ಇತಿಹಾಸವಿದೆ.

The news was published by Asianet Suvarna News on August 7, 2016

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/asianet-suvarna-news-august-7-2016-tulu-wikipedia-goes-live

ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಗೆ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಮನ್ನಣೆ!

praskrishna — 2016-09-23T00:01:44Z

ಮಂಗಳೂರು: ಇಂದಲ್ಲ ನಾಳೆ ಸಂವಿಧಾನದ ಎಂಟನೇ ಪರಿಚ್ಛೇದಕ್ಕೆ ಸೇರ್ಪಡೆಯಾಗುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂಬ ಆಶಯದಲ್ಲೇ ಇರುವ ಕರಾವಳಿಯ ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಗೆ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಮನ್ನಣೆ ನೀಡುವ ಮೂಲಕ ಜಾಗತಿಕ ಮಟ್ಟದಲ್ಲಿ ಗುರುತಿಸುವಂತಾಗಿದೆ.

ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಫೌಂಡೇಷನ್‍ನ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥಾಪಕ ನಿರ್ದೇಶಕಿ ಕ್ಯಾಥರಿನ್ ಮಹೆರ್ ಶನಿವಾರ ಪಂಜಾಬಿನ ಚಂಡೀಗಡದಲ್ಲಿ ನಡೆದ ‘ವಿಕಿ ಕಾನ್ಫರೆನ್ಸ್ ಇಂಡಿಯಾ-2016’ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದಲ್ಲಿ ಈ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಅಧಿಕೃತವಾಗಿ ಘೋಷಿಸಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ಇದುವರೆಗೆ ಇನ್‍ಕ್ಯುಬೇಟರ್‌‌ನಲ್ಲಿ ಇದ್ದ ತುಳು ಲಿಪಿಯನ್ನು ಈಗ ಲೈವ್ ಸ್ಥಾನಕ್ಕೆ ತರಲಾಗಿದೆ. ಅಂದರೆ ತುಳು ಜಾನಪದಕ್ಕೆ ಸಂಬಂಧಿಸಿ ಯಾವುದೇ ವಿಷಯ ಟೈಪ್ ಮಾಡಿದರೆ ಸಾಕು. ತಕ್ಷಣ ಸಮಗ್ರ ವಿವರ ಅನಾವರಣಗೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತದೆ.

ಈಗಾಗಲೇ ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಗೆ ಸಂಬಂಧಿಸಿದ 1,050 ಲೇಖನಗಳು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಅಡಕವಾಗಿವೆ. ಸುಮಾರು 200 ಮಂದಿ ಲೇಖನ ಬರೆದಿದ್ದು, 100ಕ್ಕೂ ಅಧಿಕ ಮಂದಿ ತುಳು ಲೇಖನದ ಸಂಪಾದಕರಾಗಿದ್ದಾರೆ. 10ಕ್ಕೂ ಅಧಿಕ ಮಂದಿ ನಿರಂತರ ಲೇಖನ ಅಪ್‍ಲೋಡ್ ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಸೆಂಟರ್ ಫಾರ್ ಇಂಟರ್‌‌ನೆಟ್ ಅಂಡ್‌ ಭಾರತೀಯ ಭಾಷೆಗಳ ಯೋಜನಾ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥಾಪಕ ಡಾ. ಯು.ಬಿ.ಪವನಜ ಅವರ ಮಾರ್ಗದರ್ಶನದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಉಪನ್ಯಾಸಕ ಡಾ. ವಿಶ್ವನಾಥ ಬದಿಕಾನ ಮತ್ತು ಭರತೇಶ್ ಈ ಮನ್ನಣೆ ದೊರೆಯಲು ಶ್ರಮಿಸಿದ್ದಾರೆ.

2008ರಿಂದ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಕ್ಕೆ ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಯನ್ನು ಸೇರಿಸುವ ಕಾರ್ಯ ಆರಂಭಗೊಂಡಿತ್ತು. ಇದರಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಲಿಪಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಯನ್ನು ಬರೆಯಲಾಗಿದೆ. 2014 ಜನವರಿಯಿಂದ ತುಳು ಭಾಷೆಯ ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಸೇರಿಸುವ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ಕೆ ವೇಗ ಹೆಚ್ಚಿದೆ.

This was published by Mumbai News World on August 8, 2016.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/mumbai-news-august-8-2016-tulu-wikipedia-goes-live

After eight years, Tulu Wikipedia goes live

praskrishna — 2016-08-07T10:34:21Z

Around eight years after its launch and in incubation, the Tulu Wikipedia has gone live with over 1,000 articles. It can be accessed at http://tcy.wikipedia.org

The article by Raviprasad Kamila was published in the Hindu on August 7, 2016

Katherine Maher, executive director, Wikimedia Foundation, USA, made the announcement at the three-day Wikiconference India 2016, which began at Chandigarh on Friday.

U.B. Pavanaja, program manager, Indian Languages, The Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, one of the mentors of the Tulu Wikipedia told The Hindu that the page has about 1,100 articles.

“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,” he said, adding that Vishwanatha Badikana, a Kannada professor, followed by Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, an engineer, are the highest contributors.

Mr. Pavanaja said that a series of workshops and editathons in Mangaluru and Udupi helped its growth. “A live Tulu Wikipedia will help bring pressure on the government to include Tulu in the Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution,” he said. If the page is to be active, between five and 10 articles would have to be uploaded and at least 15 editors will have to edit it on a monthly basis, he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/hindu-raviprasad-kamila-august-7-2016-after-eight-years-tulu-wikipedia-goes-live

‘Tulu Wikipedia’ in incubation stage, 600 articles uploaded, says U.B. Pavanaja

praskrishna — 2014-12-07T03:21:11Z

In all, 600 articles have been uploaded to the Tulu Wikipedia which is still in its incubation stage, according to U.B. Pavanaja, Wikipedia representative and Programme Officer, The Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru.

The article by Ravi Prasad Kamila was published in the Hindu on November 26, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave his inputs.

Speaking at a workshop on writing articles in Tulu, using Kannada script, for Wikipedia at Sahyadri College of Engineering and Management here on Wednesday, he said that since 2007 till this January there were 135 Tulu articles. The remaining 465 articles were added in the last over nine months.

Workshops on writing articles in Tulu for Wikipedia organised in Udupi and Mangaluru had helped in adding more articles.

Mr. Pavananja, originally hailing from Sullia in Dakshina Kannada, said that if Tulu Wikipedia was to be kept alive at least 50 to 60 articles would have to be uploaded a month and it required at least 10 dedicated writers.

If one wants to write articles in Tulu, he or she would have to log on to bilty.com/tuluwiki and later register there like registering while creating a new e-mail id. Later one can write, edit or read articles written in Tulu using Kannada script.

Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy had organised the workshop as a prelude to the three-day ‘Vishwa Tuluvere Parba’ (Global Tulu Festival) scheduled at the college from December 12.

President of the academy M. Janaki Brahmavar requested the participants to write articles about Tulu language and culture and about the coming festival and upload.

One can contact Mr. Pavanaja through pavanaja@gmail.com.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-november-26-2014-ravi-prasad-kamila-tulu-wikipedia-in-incubation-stage