Centre for Internet and Society

Kolkata: Tasting the Sweetness of Wikipedia!

subha — 2012-12-04T07:19:54Z

Recently, Access to Knowledge team member Subhashish Panigrahi spent some time with wikipedians in Kolkata. Through this blog post he shares his experience and learning from the interaction. This post explores the journey of three wikipedians — Jayanta Nath, Deepon Saha and Ashwin.

Jayanta Nath and Deepon Saha — Lecture on Bangla Wikipedia

Jayanta is one of the active contributors in Bangla Wikipedia. He has supported community building for Bangla Wikipedia in India. Apart from contributing articles Jayanta supports many wikipedians for fixing technical issues on various language wikis. Deepon is another active wikipedian from Kolkata who contributes mostly to English Wikipedia besides contributing to WikiCommons and Bangla Wikipedia and taking active part in community building in Kolkata and other places. I met both Jayanta and Deepon recently in Kolkata and discussed about Bangla Wikipedia and the role of contributors from India.

Over the last few years Bangla Wikipedia has seen enough growth — growth in number of articles, growth in number of outreach, growth in number of contributors and lot more. However, there is something missing in this list, and that is the growth in number of Bangla editors from India. Sadly, though Bangla speaking people constitute a major part of the intellectual sphere. Bangla Wikipedia has not seen many new faces in the recent past from the Indian subcontinent. "English has become like a mother language of most Bengalis in Kolkata and Bengalis residing in other major cities", expresses Jayanta with grief. "Most of the Bengalis speak and are adhered to Bengali language but the use of language is limited only to speaking. And they no more use Bangla in writing. That is what makes it more difficult to tell them about Bangla Wikipedia", adds Deepon. Bangla Wikipedia in India is facing one more major challenge: media coverage. There is not much coverage about Bangla Wikipedia in Bangla media, especially print media. "I was interviewed by the Times of India, Hindu, Telegraph and few other English newspapers but, surprisingly there was not much coverage in Bangla media. There are almost 12 Bangla newspapers being published from Kolkata and in spite of our efforts the outcome is far below expectation", explains Jayanta. Jayanta feels there is much scope for community building for Bangla Wikipedia in rural West Bengal. Unlike urban Bengal, Bangla is the primary medium of both verbal and written communication.

Computer literacy might be a big hurdle when it comes to spreading words about editing Bangla Wikipedia. But it is difficult to predict about the status of government schools, computer and internet penetration before initiating outreach for rural places. Deepon also suggests about making a small survey in Bangla medium schools in Kolkata to understand the scope for any Bangla education program in those schools. We discussed about the internet penetration to measure and assess the state of Bangla on internet and its public usage. Out of the ten Bangla newspapers only two are available in unicode for their online edition. The state of unicode and online usage of Bangla in unicode is much better in Bangladesh which also explains that Bengalis in Bangladesh are using Bangla to a great extent including reading, writing and upon internet.

Typing is another challenge to be tackled. DTP operators, government offices where Bangla typing is used normally use a different typing scheme and non-unicode fonts (mostly old ISCII or ASCII fonts). "We could bring many Bangla enthusiasts to Bangla Wiki projects by simplifying the typing solution and making people aware about the available typing tools. Simple video tutorials and smaller help pages with easy-to-understand guidelines will be helpful and these should be linked from other pages so the new editors will find them and make use of them to learn editing", adds Deepon.

The Full Story Began with Loads of Curiosity and a Small [Edit] Button!

Deepon was searching for some information online while he discovered the available information on wikipedia is incorrect. He was searching for a help desk to ask to correct it. Suddenly he discovered the "Edit" button, when he clicked on it a new page opened up with a warning: "You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. Please log in or sign up to have your edits associated with a user name, among other benefits." He clicked, signed up and created a new account and corrected the mistake. That was the first time Deepon made his first edit on Wikipedia and never stopped after that.

Ashwin (User:AshLin): Passion to Contribute to Wikipedia still Flying like Butterflies

There was no book available in the early 80s when Ashwin wanted to know more about Indian butterflies. There was no article on Wikipedia about Indian butterflies and there were very less available resource on Indian butterflies. Ashwin along with Shyamal and other enthusiasts collaborated to start working on this project which brought many other contributors. The other project he was quite involved was about Indian snakes. One of his key motivations for contributing to Wikipedia was making the resource about Indian butterflies available for others.

	Ashwin is one of those active contributors from India who are active for the last few years for bringing more editors onboard to write on articles of Indian context, primarily on English Wikipedia. Out of his own passion Ashwin started contributing to several projects like WikiProject Lepidoptera which brought many wonderful articles on Wikipedia. Ashwin is greatly appreaciate for his participation in projects like WikiProject Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools, Collaborations of the month. Ashwin extended his help to the Pune community when he was in Pune from organizing outreach events to bringing editors onboard to take leadership for new projects. "There is a lot of scope for regional language wikipedians to learn from the English Wikipedia projects. Projects on English Wikipedia involves more people and the lessons would be helpful for other regional language wikipedians and English wikipedians in India are always interested to help", expresses Ashwin. Currently he is in a small wikibreak and will be back soon!

Ashwin is one of those active contributors from India who are active for the last few years for bringing more editors onboard to write on articles of Indian context, primarily on English Wikipedia. Out of his own passion Ashwin started contributing to several projects like WikiProject Lepidoptera which brought many wonderful articles on Wikipedia. Ashwin is greatly appreaciate for his participation in projects like WikiProject Offline Wikipedia for Indian Schools, Collaborations of the month. Ashwin extended his help to the Pune community when he was in Pune from organizing outreach events to bringing editors onboard to take leadership for new projects. "There is a lot of scope for regional language wikipedians to learn from the English Wikipedia projects. Projects on English Wikipedia involves more people and the lessons would be helpful for other regional language wikipedians and English wikipedians in India are always interested to help", expresses Ashwin. Currently he is in a small wikibreak and will be back soon!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kolkata-tasting-the-sweetness-of-wikipedia

Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success!

subha — 2012-11-10T08:30:09Z

A2K team members Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval participated in the "WikiWomenDay" organized by Wikipedia Club Pune at PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus on October 28, 2012. Subhashish unfolds the happenings of this full day free fun workshop.

Globally participation of women on Wikipedia is less than 10 per cent. Women wikipedians across the world have joined hands to boost women's contribution to Wikipedia. Recently the A2K team was in Pune for the WikiWomenDay 2012. Wikipedia Club Pune, the first Wikipedia club in India, to encourage women's participation on Wikipedia, had organized a full day fun event on October 28, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions.

Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of Wikipedia Club Pune briefed about the agenda of the event. Noopur spoke about the global contribution on Wikipedia in terms of various topics and how male-centered topics were well covered. Few of the male centric articles were taken up for comparison with those of women to make the audience understand the gap of contribution. A good majority of articles which were of interest to men were well written whereas women centric articles were of bad shape due to lack of contribution from women. A visual representation was shown to the participants to explain the statistical information about gender gap on Wikipedia. Apart from article contribution, male editors were found to be more social and discussed more on talk pages which also bring more male editors on Wikipedia.

Participants were introduced to the basics of Wikipedia editing (five pillars, notability, importance of source of references, vandalism) before they were explained about actual editing. Each of the participants were provided with a computer and one of them was invited to create her user account.

Thereafter Abhishek demonstrated searching an article on Wikipedia and how logging in to Wikipedia allows editors to edit articles which are protected from editing by anyone. One of the logged in editors was asked to make a small edit on an article which surprised many of the participants. They realized that even they can make changes to the articles, for the first time in their life. Then there was a buzz about the credibility of the articles as they all saw that anyone can edit the articles. So the Wikipedia article on Pune was vandalized and Pune was made the capital of India for a few minutes! The page was refreshed after a while and reverted. This was clear enough to demonstrate how active the editor community is on Wikipedia.

Abhishek Suryavanshi demonstrates wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012

Most of the errors and typos get corrected quickly as someone or the other notices that there is a mistake and correct it. However, there are many articles, especially articles of Indian context which still have wrong information because the number of Indian editors are less. A series of editing for various favourite articles chosen by new wikipedians opened up the window for them to understand how important their participation could be. Abhishek, Nikita, Noopur and Subhashish helped the editors with editing.

After engaging the editors for quite sometime with editing there was a fun quiz session to brush up what was taught. The participants were asked questions based on the previous session.

Winners of the quiz were awarded with Wikipedia stickers and badges.

A picture of participants learning wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012 in Pune

Some of the participants left after the lunch break. Those who came back then gathered for a Indian language Wikipedia session. Out of the whole audience there were Bengali, Hindi, Marathi and Odia speakers. They all were showed their respective language wikipedias. A demonstration was given to show the typing tool. As the editors were completely new to the Indian language typing, some of them started typing using default Narayam transliteration tool and some took the help of Microsoft ILIT and Google Transliterate as well. During this session new wikipedians edited many articles on Marathi, Hindi and Bengali Wikiepdia. After the whole day session there was still some time left for acclaim and fun. The participants were awarded with participation and contribution certificate by the Wikipedia Club Pune. All the new wikipedians registered on Wikipedia Club Pune.

There was a special announcement for Wikipedia Summit India, Anniversary Celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune. Club members celebrated with cutting a special Wikipedia cake. Rishi Aacharya and Ketaki Pole from PAI International Learning Solutions extended their support for this event.

Meeting with Wikipedia Club Pune members

There was a meeting with some of the Wikipedia Club Pune members on October 27, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions. It was attended by Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval. Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of the club brought a proposal about the Wikipedia India Summit, anniversary celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune which is planned in the first quarter of 2013. Importance of a India level summit, plans and agenda, logistics and partnership and sponsorship options were discussed during this meeting. There will be public announcement regarding this summit.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-women-day-2012-pune

Wikipedians after the workshop

subha — 2012-11-01T10:34:39Z

Odia Wikipedians socializing after the workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/topic_images/1st_Pune_Odia_Workshop7.jpg

First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized!

subha — 2012-11-30T12:44:44Z

The first Pune Odia Wikipedia workshop was organized in Pune on October 27, 2012. Subhashish Panigrahi recollects his experience about the events through this report.

Recently Odia Wikipedia (http://or.wikipedia.org) crossed 3000 articles. After being dormant for 8 long years, Odia Wikipedia emerged as one of the active South Asian wikipedias. I visited Pune on October 27, 2012 to participate in an Odia Wikipedia workshop celebrating this success with the wikipedians and also attend the WikiWomenDay 2012.

Over the last few months Odia Wikipedia has seen many active faces. One of them is Suratha Parhi, a very active Odia wikipedian. Suratha reached out to his friends, colleagues and existing wikipedians staying in Pune to celebrate the success with an Odia Wikipedia workshop. As it was after Durga Puja only a few Odia people in the city were there to attend. We saw a gathering of 10 people at PAI International Learning Center for this workshop. Abhishek Suryavanshi from Wikipedia Club Pune extended his support for organizing the venue for us.

Prior to the workshop I interacted with the participants to understand their interests and efficiency with Odia typing. To my surprise two of the participants were good in typing in phonetic and Inscript. Suratha took the audience through a presentation about Odia Wikipedia explaining the history of Odia language, importance of Wikipedia, how to contribute to Wikipedia, manual of style for writing articles, dos and do nots, rules and regulations and validating articles by adding sources. After the preliminary sessions participants started asking questions about numbers of readers, how to type in Odia, use of Odia Wikipedia and various such questions. Suratha answered their questions with examples and illustrations.

To demonstrate editing on Odia Wikipedia we invited one of the participants. We helped her to create her user account and others also created their user accounts on Odia Wikipedia. Then we invited Sudhir Patel, a type designer and technologist working with CDAC, Pune to introduce Odia typing and how to type easily in Odia. After a small hands-on training for typing, all of the participants were able to start searching for articles they wanted to edit. Some of them created new articles and some edited existing articles. At the end of the session we shared our contacts to stay in touch. We also showed them Chatasabha, a friendly desk on Odia Wikipedia and demonstrated how they can ask questions and see the answered questions. New wikipedians will be also connected to the facebook group to be updated about events and activities. New Wikipedians have decided to meet once again in November for a Odia Wikipedia meetup. Sudhir and Suratha are also planning to organize a introductory session on Odia Wikipedia during the cultural gathering organized by Odia communities.

Above is a picture of participants from the Orissa Wikipedia workshop held on October 27, 2012

More pictures on WikiCommons.

Press Coverage:
OdishaDiary.com, Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language (October 31, 2012)

Videos

Suratha Parhi explaining about Odia Wikipedia

Sudhir Patel explaining about Odia Typing

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-pune-odia-wikipedia-organized

New Wikipedians trying their hand on editing Odia Wikipedia

subha — 2012-11-01T10:12:39Z

Here is a picture of new Wikipedians editing Odia Wikipedia for the first time.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/copy_of_1st_Pune_Odia_Workshop4.jpg

New Wikipedians trying their hand on editing Odia Wikipedia

subha — 2012-11-01T10:10:38Z

Here is a picture of new Wikipedians editing Odia Wikipedia for the first time.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/1st_Pune_Odia_Workshop4.jpg