Centre for Internet and Society

Wikipedia Women's Workshop in Mumbai

noopur — 2012-12-03T06:01:18Z

The Wiki Women Workshop was organized at the Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Wadala in Mumbai on November 4, 2012. It was attended by over 60 women participants who were taught how to contribute to Wikipedia articles and briefed about the knowledge gaps in Wikipedia — the free encyclopedia. Noopur Raval has prepared a report of the event.

It is a well known fact that over 91 per cent of the contributors on Wikipedia are men. Women contribution comes to around 9 per cent only. As illustrated by this infographic, the articles edited by women also significantly differ from those edited by men or users who do not identify themselves. The major articles are on people, philosophy and arts. The month of November was celebrated by wikipedians across the globe to promote women editors and do women related outreach in different parts of the world. I was part of a similar initiative organized by the Wikipedia community of Mumbai in India on November 4, 2012.

The workshop was planned on e-mail more than a month in advance with inputs from various volunteers of the community as well as members of the Wikimedia India chapter. Once the logistics were taken care of, it was also suggested that the workshop be kept exclusively for women to provide them an uninhibited space to express themselves and learn editing. Although the initial response was huge (over a hundred registrations), eventually about 65 women turned up for the event.

Agenda of the workshop

The community members conducted this workshop differently to how it is usually done — they started with hands-on editing straightaway instead of giving an introduction to the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia policies. After an hour of teaching the basics of wiki editing the participants were shown a presentation on making user accounts and start contributing articles of their choice. I helped a participant create an article on her village: Vempadu.

In the post-lunch session, participants were asked about the problems they faced and were shown how to contribute images to Commons — the free repository. The winners of the Indian leg of Wiki Loves Monuments were also announced at the workshop. The workshop ended with feedback, Wikipedia quiz and group photographs with the participants.

Feedback

For me, the feedback was particularly interesting because not many women-centric workshops have been conducted in the past. It was good to know that most of the women participants were not feeling left out or grappling with the Wiki interface. There was a diverse age range — from young school girls to retired professionals. Wireless internet access was irregular and not all could connect, which caused a lot of time to be wasted. We (community members and A2K team) would be keeping the participants updated on more events and hope they become an active part of the Wikipedia community as well. This workshop has also opened up avenues for more outreach events in other institutions.

A special thanks and acknowledgement to Vidyalankar Institute (VIT), Wadala for hosting us and to Bishakha Dutta, Moksh Juneja, Aditi Vashisht, Pranav, Krutika, Rohini, Netra, Pradeep, Samir, Netha, Nikita, and everyone else who put this event together.

Here is the blog post written by community members who attended the workshop: http://bit.ly/S78z93

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-womens-workshop-in-mumbai

Wikipedia Indian Languages Workshop at IIT, Bombay

noopur — 2013-03-28T11:44:04Z

This is a brief report on the Wikipedia Indian languages workshop held on March 9, 2013 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in partnership with Vaani, the Hindi bloggers' club at IIT, Bombay.

Vaani is a group of students at the institute who maintain personal blogs in Hindi language. They upload stories, poems and other original material in Hindi and hold regular meetings as a part of Vaani. Their motive is to conserve and promote the love for native languages, especially that of Hindi.

The A2K team had proposed a meeting and workshop to Vaani students earlier in February but it was eventually scheduled in March. The date also coincided with Women's day celebrations which gave us an opportunity to discuss questions of gender, access, knowledge bias on Wikipedia and more. It was attended by 17 participants and was coordinated by Apoorv Maheshwari from Vaani.

The participant group was diverse – it consisted of doctoral students from humanities as well as sciences and a few graduate students from different departments. Before talking about how to contribute to Wikipedia, we had a round of introductions and questions from participants about what they wanted to know. Most of the participants had seen the 'edit' button and had clicked on it but were clueless beyond that. They also wanted to know about the style guide to writing articles on Wikipedia. After initial discussions and a few edits on English Wikipedia, we moved to exploring Indian language Wikipedias. Surprisingly, only a few of them knew that Wikipedia exists in Indian languages. This led to questions of font support, readership and contribution – who contributes to Indian Wikipedias, why one should contribute and more.

Unfortunately, since the institute's IP address has been reported and blocked for vandalism, we could not make user accounts on the spot. However, they tried their hand at editing to understand the process itself. Another challenge while doing workshops with Indian language Wikipedias is font support for individual computers that participants bring. Perhaps there is a need to carry support documentation and tools (keyboard layouts and free fonts). Towards the end, they expressed an interest in a longer Wikipedia program for all the bloggers on campus in different languages.

We thank the members of Vaani for their support and participation and hope to build and sustain this relationship further.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-workshop-at-iit-bombay

Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad!

noopur — 2013-02-13T11:40:06Z

This post is a report on the series of Wikipedia meets organized in the city of Hyderabad on September 29-30, 2012. These workshops were a a part of the larger effort to help Wikipedia contributors in the same city to meet each other and strengthen the local community.

The city of Hyderabad is not only an IT hub but also home to many English and Indian language Wikipedians. In a recent series of weekend workshops and meet-ups conducted within the city, I had the opportunity to interact with many of them. We conducted a Wikipedia workshop at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad, an Odia Wikipedia workshop as well as a general Wikipedia workshop for people interested in contributing to all language Wikipedias. I would like to convey my gratitude to the Computer Science department students at BITS, Hyderabad, Odia Wikipedians Swetapadma and Amaresh and English Wikipedians Tausif and Abhijith for making these events happen despite festivities and protests in the city.

To provide a brief report on the events, the BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad workshop was organized as a general introduction to Wikipedia. The event was organized with the support of the Computer Science department at the college and saw a presence of more than 60 students. It was 2 hour session where 6 students created their Wikipedia user accounts and entered their names on the BITS project page. They were also shown how Wikis work – live and global.

Students were encouraged to make changes to their college article and they discovered how to view recent changes, page views and other functions. It was a particularly informative session because majority of the group did not know that Wikipedia articles are written by common people from all walks of life! The session ended with a proposal to start a Wiki club for their college. The Odia Wikipedia meetup organized on the same day registered 11 participants while the general meetup on the next day had over 20 participants. In all three workshops, the majority of participants were not aware how one could contribute to Wikipedia articles.

Next steps:

It was great to see existing Wikipedians discuss the idea of having a Hyderabad SIG (special interest group) to conduct regular meetings, workshops, photo walks and more! Since the participants have shared their email-IDs, we will stay in touch and inform them about upcoming Telugu and English editing workshops. Students at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad have also requested a Wikipedia workshop and hackathon for their upcoming techfest this month. A Telugu Wikipedia workshop has been proposed for the second week of October.

For more information on how to conduct a Wikipedia workshop in your city, you could contact noopur@cis-india.org

There was newspaper coverage about this event:

Wiki Meetup, Hindu, September 28, 2012

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-hyderabad-report

To be Counted When They Count You: Words of Caution for the Gender Data Revolution

noopur — 2022-02-01T01:06:08Z

In 2015, after the announcement of the SDGs or Sustainable Development Goals, a new global developmental framework through the year 2030, the United Nations described data as the “lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability” for the purpose of realizing these developmental goals. This curious yet key link between these new developmental goals and the use of quantitative data for agenda setting invited a flurry of big data-led initiatives such as but not limited to Data2X, that sought to further strengthen and solidify the relationship between ‘Big Development’ and ‘Big Data.’

One of those SDG goals (Goal 5) prioritizes gender equality and empowerment of women and girls not only as a standalone goal but also as a crucial factor to realizing the other goals. In response, several academic and non-profit initiatives have begun to interpret and conduct data-led gendered development or the “gender data revolution”. As with other data discourses, the gender-data discourse is also one of ‘speed’, charging ahead using a variety of quantitative and visualization approaches to reveal and eventually solve gendered problems of development.

These interventions also invite some classical critical questions: who is setting the agenda for the gender data revolution and who are its imagined subjects? How are questions of participation and asymmetries of power in developmental research being addressed? How does the gender data revolution address the situatedness as well as incompleteness of data records in the Global South (where most sites of intervention are)? Speaking specifically to the theme of this special issue (‘cross-cultural feminist technologies’), this paper demonstrates how the welfarist discourse of data-led gender development is, in fact, assembled through the overwhelming enumeration of female-identifying bodies in the Global South.

The paper offers critical historical insights from the fields of international development, anthropology, and postcolonial history to caution against both, the possible harms of gender disaggregated datafication as well as the consequences of non-participatory datafication of women, the subjects of the gender data revolution.

Read the full paper here.

This study was undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development network supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada, and is shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of their individual authors. Unless the opposite is explicitly stated, or unless the opposite may be reasonably inferred, CIS does not subscribe to these views and opinions which belong to their individual authors. CIS does not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the views and opinions of these individual authors. For an official statement from CIS on a particular issue, please contact us directly.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/to-be-counted-when-they-count-you-words-of-caution-for-the-gender-data-revolution

To be Counted When They Count You

noopur — 2022-02-01T01:00:11Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/to-be-counted-when-they-count-you.pdf

Thinking Digital Beyond Tools: Interview with Dr. Nishant Shah

noopur — 2013-09-12T09:09:57Z

Dr. Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He is an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany and a Knowledge Partner with the Hivos Knowledge Programme, The Netherlands. He is committed to producing infrastructure, frameworks and collaborations in the global south to understand and analyse the ways in which the emergence of digital technologies have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu.

This post by Noopur Raval was published in HASTAC on September 10, 2013.

What topics interest you and what questions drive your current work?

I wish there was a key-word generator which actually answered this question for me. My current work is influenced by the various hats that I wear and it is often difficult to figure out what binds all my interests together. But if I had to list the three chief topics that inform most of my work, they would be questions at the intersection of body and technology, digital activism and social change, and critical practices of knowledge production. In all of these, the central concern is about the ways in which these intersections are created.

If you look at the larger discourse in the field, it revolves around a conjunction between two separate areas: Body and technology, for instance, refers to the ways in which people use technologies, the different interactions that technological apparatus and prostheses have with the biological, and the everyday negotiations that bodies perform as a part of the mechanics of urban survival. This results into a litany of practices which get understood as identities. My own interest is in trying to figure out how to do away with the dichotomy between body and technology that is inherent in such a discourse. Or, in other words, instead of thinking of the body and technology as two separate entities, which now need to be juxtaposed against each other, forced to coexist, how do we think of our bodies as shaped by, through, and with technologies? How do we understand the technological through the metaphor of the bodily and the human.

Similarly, with digital activism and social change, my interest is not in the tools and applications and platforms that orchestrate new spectacles of social change. Instead I am more curious about how new modes of measurement, documentation and archiving help in defining conditions, contexts and catalysts of change; and further, how imaginations of future change lead to innovation within the technological domain.

What makes you interested in the digital or interdisciplinary aspect of your field? Also, would you call yourself a field expert?

So, to build on my first response, my interest in the digital is actually inspired by the fact that digitality or digital cultures or digital studies is not a field. It is not a self-contained discipline from within which certain questions need to be asked. It is a framework or a lens, and it cuts across and intersects with every other domain of knowledge production and discourse that exists. I see the digital not as contained within tools, apps, technologies, code and infrastructure, but as a way of thinking that questions earlier modes of inquiry, understanding and knowledge production. So, interdisciplinarity is not something that the digital has to work towards. But, in fact, working on the digital is necessarily to be interdisciplinary.

And hence, it resists the idea of a field expert or an omniscient guru. Instead, it promotes the more democratic digital aspect where everybody is simultaneously a novice and an expert. I have my experiences, interactions, negotiations, practices and engagements with different activities and discourses. These are rich. They might not always be academic and they might not always adhere to codes and conventions of ‘research methods’. But they do inform my everyday practice, and hence they give me some expertise. However, the function of that expertise is not to establish myself as a preceptor who shall now enlighten the rest of the world. The function of that expertise is to realise what are the other new conversations and dialogues which need to be built and opened up so that my knowledge become stronger. For me, this is the true potential of networks – where each node has specific knowledge that is important, but its real value is only in the ways in which it can interact with the other specialised knowledges distributed across the network.

And hence, it resists the idea of a field expert or an omniscient guru. Instead, it promotes the more democratic digital aspect where everybody is simultaneously a novice and an expert. I have my experiences, interactions, negotiations, practices and engagements with different activities and discourses. These are rich. They might not always be academic and they might not always adhere to codes and conventions of ‘research methods’. But they do inform my everyday practice, and hence they give me some expertise. However, the function of that expertise is not to establish myself as a preceptor who shall now enlighten the rest of the world. The function of that expertise is to realise what are the other new conversations and dialogues which need to be built and opened up so that my knowledge become stronger. For me, this is the true potential of networks – where each node has specific knowledge that is important, but its real value is only in the ways in which it can interact with the other specialised knowledges distributed across the network.

How do you see your field (academia and more) changing? What excites you most about the future of humanities?

I was recently given the most important career advice of all times – the only way to be an academic is to not be an academic. And in many ways it makes sense to me. Within academia, especially within people engaging with the digital technologies, there is a clear idea that we need to reshape our understandings of learning, knowledge production, ownership and expertise. I increasingly see people not only incorporating the now accepted dialectics between theory and practice in their work, but also about transforming this knowledge into prototypes. The DIY nature of the digital is where the future of the academia seems to be heading. We still have excellent tools for producing knowledge, but how is this knowledge going to be useful, and relevant, legible and intelligible, accessible to the larger publics. This, for me is the challenge to Humanities, and this is hopefully the direction that Digital Humanities will take us in – not about merely replacing older skills with new skills, not trying to reinvent the Humanities by making it ‘professional’ and catering to job markets, but by developing new tools that will help transform the knowledge of the Humanities to everyday social and political contexts.

Has your HASTAC experience altered your conceptions of online communities? What would you like to see happening differently here?

As an online community, HASTAC is unique. It brings together a distributed mass of people who have very different thematic and theoretical interests but are bound together by faith and trust and common belief systems. And that is interesting. Because it actually reinforces the ideas that communities are not just brought together by practice and performance. Communities develop affective and ephemeral forms of functioning and proximity, which play out in interesting collaborations and conversations. The one hope that I always have, with all knowledge communities, and so also have with HASTAC, is that the discussions and knowledge that are captured here, have a life outside of the community. The ability to make it travel, in different forms and formats, and to track the kind of conversations it opens up, is an ideal state dream. And while it might be difficult to achieve it, it is definitely something to aspire for.

(Image 1 curtsy: http://www.wssf2013.org/speaker/nishant-shah and image 2: http://instagram.com/p/c8jtrdD8JD/)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/hastac-blogs-september-10-2009-noopur-raval-thinking-digital-beyond-tools-interview-dr-nishant-shah

Open Education Week: Interview with Subhashish Panigrahi

noopur — 2014-04-04T09:20:49Z

Noopur Raval interviewed Subhashish Panigrahi from the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team about sharing information resources and attribution in academia.

Subhashish Panigrahi works as a Programme Officer for Community and Program Support, Access To Knowledge (A2K) for Centre for Internet and Society. Supported by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Access to Knowledge program promotes participation in Indian language Wikipedia projects. As a part of his role, Subhashish interacts with school and university students from different parts of India regularly. In this interview, he reflects on how students are aware (or not) of attribution.

Read the original published on Commons Machinery website here.

What is the general trend around sharing information resources and attribution among students and teachers?
It is funny to know most students I have spoken to rely on photocopied notes provided by their teachers and try to keep the writing style and sentence structure same as the notes. They don’t know that copying answers or quotes amounts to plagiarism. It is the same for many teachers who teach them to keep the beauty of the author’s writing without modifying it. Also, when I visit universities and interact with professors and students, most consider Google and Wikipedia their best friends, primarily for the quick access to information and imagery. I get a lot of questions about the proper procedure of inserting images that appear in Google search in Wikipedia entries. Many student projects are focused on getting the best pictures available on the internet which means they may download copyrighted images (with watermarks) and modify them. With music and video, it is even worse.

Does the current situation become problematic when you encourage students to contribute to Wikipedia?
It often does. For instance, when we initiated the India Education Program (IEP), as a part of Wikipedia Education Program (WEP), to include editing Wikipedia articles as part of academic curricula. Started in 2011 as a pilot program in the city of Pune, IEP engaged with over 1000 students on English Wikipedia. But the lack of education about copyright violation, and a habit of copying notes from books and other sources affected the program outcome. Many articles were copied from books and internet portals without even paraphrasing, which is completely against Wikipedia policies.

What could be the possible reasons for the lack of basic awareness about how to share information among these students?
Self-taught knowledge about the Internet and the idea of the Internet as a place with few restrictions could be a few of the reasons for these problems. Frequently, social media platforms do not have barriers to downloading and sharing content produced by people in your network. With mobile devices, all incoming content is downloaded and stored on your phone. Often, people crop incoming images or modify them and share them in small networks. Although they do it in good faith, information keeps getting reused very rapidly without any credits or metadata.For a new media educator like me, it is easy to explain why and how to contribute to Open Knowledge projects like Wikipedia…but attribution, and why appropriate attribution is crucial to information sharing, are very difficult things to teach. Most students feel like it is not really important to attribute correctly as long as you are not using it for profit or with bad intentions.

How do you deal with it individually and as a part of the A2K team?

It is crucial for educators, academics and everyone else to include education about Copyright and Copyleft in their syllabus so that students and faculty alike can know how not to violate copyright. At the same time, I think schools and universities are a great place to educate students about Open Access journals and the entire culture of knowledge producing/sharing beyond commercial gains.I often cite the example of one of my pictures that got featured in many international magazines and newspapers including The Conservation magazine and The Huffington post, which would not have happened if I hadn’t let the copyright go. I tell students that the biggest perk of contributing works in Creative Commons licenses is having a wide audience, especially young people. People release published information in free licensing when they hear about the opportunity to get enormously popular.

Similarly, BBC and Al-Jazeera have set great examples of mass donating imagery and video footage under CC. In one of our recent collaborations at the A2K program, the Goa University, on our request, changed terms of their licenses for a Konkani language Encyclopedia to Creative Commons license that has brought many volunteers to digitize and enrich the Konkani Wikipedia.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/commons-machinery-march-14-2014-noopur-raval-open-education-week-interview-with-subhashish-panigrahi

New Avenues: Media Wiki Groups

noopur — 2013-01-05T01:46:41Z

This blog post is a brief recap and snippets of my conversation with Harsh Kothari, a volunteer on Gujarati Wikipedia on what we've been doing to help with MediaWiki groups.

Earlier in December, Harsh posted an e-mail to announce India's first MediaWiki group in Ahmedabad. The group is in its final stage of approval. The e-mail also generated curiosity among community members, some of whom had discussed starting similar technical initiatives earlier on the list.

I came across the idea of MediaWiki groups while Harsh, Yuvi Panda, Sheel and I were trying to conduct a mini hackathon in Delhi. The mini hackathon was a great success and very helpful to Harsh and Sheel. That is when we realized that the best way of repeating such training sessions would be to help foster the interaction of all technical volunteers within a city. Harsh told me Quim Gil from the Wikimedia Foundation had already proposed this and it would be best if I helped him frame a proposal for a MediaWiki group in India. I was told by Yuvi and Harsh that from their discussions on IRC with Quim they all agreed that local groups would serve better than a single national group given the expanse of India.

I thought this post would lend some perspective on how we could go about supporting technical outreach in India specifically for two reasons one, because Indian language Wikipedias could massively benefit from increased functionality — new gadgets, referencing and more. Apart from this, as we all might have encountered during our outreach sessions in technical colleges, there is great interest among students in contributing to MediaWiki but not enough resources or people who could spread the word.

A local MediaWiki group could serve multiple purposes supporting the relevant language Wikipedia as well as attracting and fostering a FOSS community in their city. It could also take up the responsibility of conducting events — small and large including hackathons, workshops and more. Especially in the context of smaller cities, towns and large university campuses, setting up a technical group similar to a LUG would be very beneficial. There will definitely be challenges, as questions come by and none of these groups can follow a standard model. But, I believe a major advantage of technical groups would mean faster resolution of bugs, more frequently updated infrastructure and consequently more activity on relevant Wikipedias. I have contributed to the proposal and am helping shape the first group. In case you want to set one up in your city or university, or wish to be put in touch with people who can help please do write to me at noopur@cis-india.org.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/new-avenues

Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia

noopur — 2012-11-04T02:12:56Z

This was a competition to raise Wikipedia awareness and help students discover the joy of writing articles in their native language and an attempt to connect producers having knowledge in Gujarati to a wide audience of more than four lakh readers.

The Gujarati Wikipedia article writing competition was held among 10 Gujarati medium schools of Ahmedabad city in Gujarat with the support and cooperation of The Open Page publication and Gujarati Lexicon in two phases over a period of two months.

Initial discussions about doing something to promote Gujarati language on the internet started when Shiju Alex, Indian language Wikipedia consultant met Yatrik Patel from Inflibnet. With Mr Yatrik Patel's intervention we were able to meet Mr Archit Bhatt, the director of Tripada Education Trust in Ahmedabad.

After a round of presentations from Wikipedians, Gujarati Lexicon and interested schools in August, we charted out a rough sketch of the article competition. Then, this plan was proposed to Gujarati editors online. Again, without the cooperation and encouragement of long term members like Mr Dhaval S Vyas, Mr Ashok Modhvadia, Mr Sushant Savla and Mr Maharshi Mehta, these students would not have had the freedom to make mistakes and learn as they progressed. Apart from these online members, constant guidance and support was provided by Mr Ashok Vaishnav, Mr Harsh Kothari and Mr Konarak Ratnakar. They coordinated with Ms Hemangini Kanth from The Open Page and Ms Shruti from Gujarati Lexicon to materialize the competion.

Structure

Phase I: Over 200 students from the ten schools were invited to write articles with references on Gujarati literary personalities (poets and writers) on paper. These entries were then collected and checked by Mr Yogendra Vyas, a consultant to GSEB (Gujarat Education Board) and Mr Ashok Vaishnav.

The above picture shows a student learning Gujarati typing

Phase II: 20 students were selected from these entries and invited for a workshop on Gujarati typing, introduction to GU WP and were briefed on how to write articles. Once the deadline was over, these on-wiki articles were checked by Mr Dhaval Vyas and Mr Ashok Modhvadia and two winner entries were selected. They were subsequently awarded trophies and certificates in a small ceremony on 21^st October.

Here is a list of articles written by the students.

Learnings

Given that this was a pilot program and I have read about only one such prior attempt in Javanese Wikipedia, we had much to learn:

It was a wise decision to take primary speakers of Gujarati because their proficiency in spelling, punctuation and vocabulary was good. This may not be possible for students with Indian languages as secondary language.
While we had estimated a maximum of one month's time, it took us nearly two months to accomplish it because of the huge number of entries. Perhaps, the work should be distributed amongst more people.
The biggest challenge that lies ahead is retaining these editors – we are working to get feedback from students to see how this could have been better and what attracted them about Wikipedia.

This competition has given the community a batch of new editors along with valuable content and we hope to retain the momentum by engaging more Gujarati students further.

Click below to download the posters

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/gujarati-wikipedia-article-competition

Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot

noopur — 2012-10-31T08:17:56Z

This report analyses a series of meetings and workshops held in Rajkot, a city in Gujarat, India during the month of October 2012.

I visited Gujarat for a few Wikipedia activities – including Wikipedia meets in the cities of Ahmedabad and Rajkot, interacted with students and teachers from various colleges as well as to successfully conclude the Gujarati Wikipedia article writing competition.

I visited Rajkot on October 17, 2012 with two Wikipedians – Harsh Kothari and Konarak Ratnakar, both from Ahmedabad. We were scheduled to take up a small introductory lecture on contributing to Wikipedia at Christ College, Rajkot in the afternoon and meet up with other Gujarati Wikipedians from Rajkot and Junagadh later in the day. Fortunately, I was able to connect with Rashmikant Makwana, a teacher at TGS (The Galaxy School) in Rajkot. I had first met up with him during the photo walk – Wiki takes Ahmedabad in January 2012. He had shown a great deal of interest in doing something for his school students. Thanks to Mr. Makwana's prompt response and support, we visited three branches of TGES (The Galaxy Education System) and had the opportunity of interacting with over 100 students from secondary and higher secondary divisions.

Interactions with TGES students

I got to read Mr. Makwana's email only after I reached Rajkot. He wrote that he spoke to a couple of teachers about our visit and their students were very eager to meet us as they had many questions about Wikipedia! I was pleasantly surprised because once we met these students (mostly 11^th standard, English medium students) we realized they had already tried their hand at editing and even creating articles! So, they had far more advanced queries like how to verify information on Wikipedia, what is the authenticity of information there, questions on notability and so on. Next, we were taken to the vadi branch of the education group. These were children from fifth and sixth standards and who also had questions and better ones about stories of vandalism they had committed on Wikipedia! We told them how Wikipedia was one of the best ways of telling people about their culture, identities, city and language. Besides students, we also met teachers who taught Gujarati, History and Geography.

Interactions with Christ College students

Wikipedians giving lecture.

Christ College offers a variety of graduate courses. We were connected with their faculty, Mr. Rushabh, by Umesh Joshi from the Open Page publication in Rajkot.

I am thankful to both of them for their support in gathering their MBA students! Harsh Kothari, a Gujarati Wikipedian presented on how one can contribute to Gujarati Wikipedia while Konarak helped them in a live editing session. One question that everyone asked us was – WHY do people edit Wikipedia?

So, we called upon Jitendrasinh Chauhan, a long-term Gujarati Wikipedian. He came up and spoke to them on how he discovered Gujarati Wikipedia and has not only gained in terms of knowledge but also friendships that he has made with fellow editors across the state and overseas! We also explained the importance of learning correct ways of editing to these students who might pursue public relations as their professions.

Meeting Wikipedians

The trip to Rajkot, apart from meeting a whole bunch of new people, was also about connecting offline with Gujarati Wikipedians. Their warmth and day long support in terms of logistics, context and guidance kept us enthused. I extend my gratitude to Jitendrasinh Chauhan and his friend Harsh, both Wikipedians for their help. They have also helped us establish a dialog with Saurashtra University where we hope to plan a two-day conference centered around Gujarati language and digitization.

Given here is a network visualization infographic highlighting the key points.

Videos

Gujarati Wikipedia workshop at Christ college - 1

Gujarati Wikipedia workshop at Christ College - 2

Write about your city on Gujarati Wikipedia

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/gujarati-wikipedia-education-program-rajkot

Fifty-fourth Bangalore Wikimedia Meet-up at IIM, Bangalore

noopur — 2013-03-06T09:09:03Z

The 54th Wikimedia meet-up in Bangalore was held at the Indian Institute of Management on February 25, 2013. The event was planned and organized by Radhakrishna Arvapally, SIG (Special Interest Group) Chair, Bangalore (a part of the Wikimedia India Chapter) with support from Solutions IQ, Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS.

The proposed agenda was as follows: an introduction to Wikimedia projects by Sudhanwa Jogalekar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, a talk on accessibility and knowledge by T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, followed by a session on WikiSpeed – extreme manufacturing of high speed cars by Joe Justice and Vibhu Srinivasan from Solutions IQ. Mr K S Viswanathan, Vice President (NASSCOM) was the chief guest. He spoke to the participants about the importance of developing a digital hub of free knowledge.

Sudhanwa gave a brief introduction to the world of Wikimedia including projects like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Incubator, MediaWiki and more. He also explained how one could contribute to each of these projects. He mentioned two upcoming projects – Wikivoyage and Wikidata. He answered a few questions after his session and encouraged participants to become members of the Wikimedia India Chapter and get involved in Wikimedia activities in India. Here are the details to become a member.

Vishnu’s talk was about understanding why Wikipedia and what is the importance of enabling access to knowledge resources. He took the example of older technologies and what propelled their invention. In the interactive session, we explored our relationship with knowledge resources, how happy we are with the knowledge we get and how we can make the access better and wider. The discussion also touched upon knowledge resources in Indian languages in the digital domain and the problems associated with them. Participants noted some challenges like affordability, awareness, fonts, low visibility in search etc. They also agreed that given the multilingualism, machine translations are not the solution to knowledge gaps in Indian languages in the digital domain. Another question was about awareness versus access to existing knowledge.

We also discussed how audio technologies could help the cause of Indian languages in education. Radhakrishna coordinated the sessions and answered questions related to content on Wikipedia, authenticity of knowledge on Wikipedia.


Participants seen in the classroom during the Wiki meetup at IIM, Bangalore

In the next session, Joe Justice and Vibhu Srinivasan spoke about WikiSpeed cars, a DIY project to make high-speed cars by harnessing work methods from the Open Source movement. Joe spoke of Kanban and agile engineering. He also explained how the car uses Arduino circuit boards and this project is being scaled so that people across the world can make functional cars collaboratively. He also invited the participants to WikiSpeed event in Bangalore.

Mr Viswanathan then spoke about TEQIP (Technical education and Skill Development Cycle), a program devised to ensure industry exposure and experience to students in technical fields. He also mentioned how the curriculum would be freely available online for all to use. Radhakrishna made the concluding remarks and thanked all the participants and guests for attending.

The meetup ended with questions and more interaction. Details of upcoming Wikimedia meetups in Bangalore can be found here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/fifty-fourth-bangalore-wikimedia-meetup

Alternate Visions: Accessing Leisure Through Interfaces

noopur — 2012-02-18T15:18:34Z

Name(s): Noopur Raval
Location: Delhi, India
Age: 23
Profession: Student, researcher

Video Genre: Animation

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/alternate-visions-accessing-leisure-through-interfaces

Access to Knowledge Report — September to December 2012

noopur — 2013-01-31T10:14:26Z

This post provides an overview of the activities done by the Access to Knowledge team under the grant provided by the Wikimedia Foundation from September 2012 to December 2012.

The information provided in this post can also be viewed in form of a presentation here.

The activities done by the Access to Knowledge team have been listed under events, meetups and programs. Here, events indicate workshops conducted and outreach activities supported for people outside the existing community while meetups indicate the meetings with existing community members and programs refer to education programs and competitions across different language Wikipedias. A detailed list of these events and meetups can be found in the presentation.

During this period of four months, a total of 22 events were conducted in 7 languages across 14 cities reaching out to a total of 2,250 participants between the ages of 15 and 52. There were 27 meetups where approximately 150 community members participated. To list briefly, these were in the cities of Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, Anugul, Dhenkanal, Hyderabad, Panjim, Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Karkala and Delhi.

The focus of the Access to Knowledge team has significantly shifted in terms of concentrating on Indian language projects as well as limiting the scale of initiatives to ensure more engagement. We conducted and supported 5 programs including the Malayalam education program, Gujarati Wikipedia article competition, Assamese education program, Odia education program, supporting Konkani Wikipedia incubator project and Wikipedia takes Pune. In line with the Wikimedia Foundation’s narrowed focus which includes promoting technical volunteer initiatives, the Access to Knowledge team has been helping with filing bugs for Punjabi, Assamese, Odiya, Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi communities. We conducted two hackathons at BITS-Pilani Hyderabad and in Delhi and have been helping connect interested volunteers across the country including initiatives like MediaWiki groups.

Including all the activities listed above, we reached out to a total of approximately 2,050 people and have connected with about 49 per cent of them who continue to receive updates on Wikipedia activities in India through our newsletters, mails, etc. Of these, approximately 387 participants (37.9 per cent) created usernames and made edits. The total number of female participants were 288 approximately which is about 28.2 per cent of the total people engaged. However, we are yet to generate a list of articles edited and the list of current active users. One useful way of tracking active editors on different Wikipedia projects is being developed by WMF Labs. Here is an example of the increase/decrease in editor count on Gujarati Wikipedia. We feel that more work needs to be done around studying editor retention.

From the team’s experience with outreach in these months, I want to share a few qualitative insights. For instance, we do think that there is great enthusiasm and potential among engineering students to contribute to MediaWiki and more initiatives need to be planned in order to welcome them and utilize their potential to the benefit of Indian language Wikipedias. Similarly, in terms of gender gap, while the initial barrier of participation can be overcome with outreach, a systematic strategy needs to be developed in order to make female editors feel a part of the existing community and ensure they continue contributing to topics that interest them. Also, right now the team conducts outreach sessions and workshops in all institutions that invite us with no specific approach based on subjects, gender or other parameters. Currently, the Access to Knowledge team has been sharing reports and blog posts with the community via mail, newsletters, tweets and social media fora. We hope to start monthly IRC meets with the community to improve communication and brainstorm together on what challenges each community faces.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/access-2-knowledge-report-2012

A Wikipedia Workshop at SRM University, Chennai

noopur — 2012-12-27T05:57:34Z

The Centre for Internet & Society, Delhi in association with Metawings Institute organized a one-day workshop on contributing to Wikipedia at SRM University on December 17, 2012. About 40 students from different engineering colleges in Chennai participated in the workshop. Metawings coordinated for the logistics and for spreading the word among the students.

The three-hour workshop was mostly interactive. Since most students had a fair idea of what Wikipedia is and who writes articles on Wikipedia, they had many queries on who the 'editors' were, who selects them, how one can become an editor, how to determine reliability and authenticity of Wikipedia articles and so on. This was a pattern that I observed in many workshops that we conduct where people who have a level of ease and familiarity with using Wikipedia to get information, have often wondered if the information they are using is reliable or not. This also gives us a chance to explain how their contributions can make the encyclopedia more inclusive, informative and reliable.

One student was called upon to create a user account and instead of answering his query on patrolling edits, I encouraged him to vandalize a popular article just to see how quickly it is reverted and the correct version is restored. Some students were also interested in knowing about Indian language Wikipedias. So, I invited a student to create his account in Tamil Wikipedia and create his user page subsequently.

After the workshop the students wanted to stay in touch and receive more information on Wikipedia projects they could contribute to and filled up contact forms.

Special thanks to Metawings for helping us out with the logistics and to the student coordinators at SRM University for their cooperation!

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-workshop-at-srm-chennai