Centre for Internet and Society

Participants at Tewiki hackathon 2014

rahim — 2015-02-10T16:32:27Z

Participants at Tewiki Hackathon 2014

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/Telugu_Wikimedia_Hackathon__2014_40.jpg

Odia Wikipedia progress from July to December, 2015

rahim — 2016-02-05T02:45:19Z

Odia Wikipedia, one of the very active Wikipedias in Indian languages has been showing a negative rate of growth for the last 6 months. We will try to analyse, what has been happening and how can that be improved.

Odia language is one of the 22 languages recognized by Indian union in 8th schedule. It has 31 million population as per 2001 census. Odia language has its own Wikipedia created on 3rd June 2002. This blog post will try to put out Odia Wikipedia's growth from a perspective based on Wikimedia stats.

Odia Wikipedia started on 3rd June 2002 and for almost 4 years, it survived with only one page in the project. Until an IP edit created the home page mimicking Sanskrit Wikipedia's homepage. This continued for over a year and then from an IP address, a word to word translation of home page was made into Odia. Around the same time, an entry for an article - (ଭାରତ)India was created. The homepage of Odia Wikipedia and other articles continued to be edited by IP address users until ଓଡ଼ିଆ created his/her account and started modifying the homepage.

Today, Odia Wikipdia has 10,187 articles in article namespace, 47,291 pages in all (including article namespace pages); 10,574 registered users which includes bots. Of these registered users, as of November 2015, 63 users have done at least one edit in November, 13 is the number of users flagged as bots. There are 4 administrators on Odia Wikipedia.

When we look at the stats table of Odia Wikipedia taken from stats.wikimedia.org, below,

	Total Editors	New Editors	Active Editors	Very Active Ediors	Articles	New Articles per day
July, 2015	127	2	12	2	8,800	1
August, 2015	129	2	15	6	8,900	3
September, 2015	131	2	15	6	9,100	5
October, 2015	136	5	21	4	10,100	36
November, 2015	136		11	2	10,500	2

Some of the direct observations are : Over a 5 month period, only 9 people joined Odia Wikipedia, average Indian count for this is 9 per month.

The active editors count, which is about 20% of Total editors is at 10% or less for most of the months.

The very active editors count, again 40-50% of active editors is still low.

There have been no new editors who have come to Odia Wikipedia and registered for the month of November.

Though the articles per day count has been at rise, we need to analyze what kind of content it is and what is the size of articles being added.

	Bytes added	Files/ images added
July 2015	6656008	0
August 2015	28507493	0
September 2015	12403456	0
October 2015	25281989	1
November 2015	5442630	0
December	8492735	4

The above table shows the overall bytes added to Odia Wikipedia (both added and removed) and he files uploaded.

The bytes added is generally an indicative of how much content is being added to the project. If an average good article has, say 10kb length on Odia Wikipedia, then what th above table interprets is that a good amount of content is added to Odia Wikipedia for thee months of August, and October, but same thing did not happen in July, September, October and December.

The files/images added to the project is not a direct indicative of any quality change on the wiki. As all file uploads happen on commons. But this is of course and indicative of non-free fair use images being added, and if that is the usability, then Odia Wikipedians do not seem to be utilizing it properly or Odia Wikipedia has content that does not depend on such images.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-sad-state-of-odia-wikipedia

Making Telugu Suitable for Internet

rahim — 2016-09-06T14:21:49Z

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

Click to download the file here

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

Images and links matter quality

rahim — 2016-06-08T09:54:21Z

Wikipedia articles are considered of a higher quality when they have illustrations. An article without images is considered dull. Wikipedia is all about references. Any information on Wikipedia is encouraged to have verifiable citations. Hence images and external links form a criterion for quality of articles on Wikipedias. This blog post tries to analyse the current scenario of CIS-A2K's Focus language areas with respect to images and links.

If we read through the page on English Wikipedia that talks about why adding images improves the quality of Wikipedia, we realise that writing an article is a very difficult task on Wikipedia as it involves one to generate content in their own words, Wikipedia cannot be a copy paste of some content taken from somewhere. Wikipedia has its own style of writing articles, and when we look at the five basic pillars of Wikipedia and the core content policies, they structure the knowledge that we have to a form that best fits Wikipedia and is proven to be effective to larger masses. At the same time, illustrating an article further improves the comprehensibility of an article on Wikipedia.

This takes us to the next question - If only free licensed images are allowed on Wikipedia, how can we illustrate articles where no image is available under a free license, say you are writing about Doraemon or Godrej and want to add the sketch of the character or logo of the company - they are not allowed on commons. What is the way out then?

Some Wikipedias such as English Wikipedia have allowed Wikipedians to upload images locally on the wiki under fair usage policy. This allows Wikipedians to upload low resolution images or audio or video with a pre-defined small length. IT not only helps enrich the Wikipedia content, it also helps in understanding the copyright implications to larger masses editing Wikipedia.

Animation of the act of unrolling a circle's circumference, illustrating the ratio π. Author : John Reid

There are more than 31 million images/videos/audios/documents on commons, which is the central media repository for all Wikipedias. Commons has a policy to keep only free licensed images.

Why references/citations are so important?

Adding references to articles is important to make Wikipedia's content more accurate and reliable. One of the three core content policies on English Wikipedia which is adopted by most Indian languages is to have "Verifiable" content on Wikipedia. This essentially means, whatever content is added to Wikipedia has to have proper links to citations given. If its a book, an ISBN number is desired. In case of newspapers and websites, URLs with access dates are encouraged to be added. If the newspaper does not have a proper archive, Wayback machine from archive.org can be used to create a permanent accessible URL that in turn can be added to the article.

In order to prove NPOV, one can add the same issue opinionated in 3 or more newspapers or books. Here too, an external link is used to provide the verifiable reference.

So, its safe to say that all articles that have an external link in them may have been properly referenced. A list of such articles is generated and the count of such articles that do not have external links is provided below.

Language	Articles without images	Articles without external links	Deadend Pages
Kannada	6,993	10,839	97
Konkani	1,876	1,351	836
Marathi	12,678	29,064	861
Odia	1,227	3,080	11
Telugu	35,701	19,359	585

The numbers in the above table throw the areas of improvement for the focus language area Wikipedias of CIS-A2K. Especially with respect to adding references to articles where in every Wikipedia, almost as much as 50% of the articles do not have proper references.

Deadend pages are those articles on Wikipedia which do not link to any other page on Wikipedia. In recently changed convention, zero namespace pages on Wikipedia that are not redirect pages are not counted as articles if the fall under Deadend pages. A count of deadend pages is also given in the above table for reference. So, effectively total number of articles in any Wiki = total article count shown on home page + deadend pages.

If these three criterion are improved upon, quality of Wikipedia may also go up.

Of course quality of articles depend upon language, spellings, grammar and several other things. But these are broad methods of improving quality.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/images-and-links-matter-quality

Eenadu coverage of event

rahim — 2015-01-19T09:32:01Z

Eenadu coverage of event

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/eenducenterspread6jan2015.jpg

Creating Free Software Environment at Andhra Loyola College

rahim — 2015-05-27T00:54:42Z

Andhra Loyola college has signed an MoU with CIS-A2K and as part of it CIS-A2K team has provided a free and open software environment at Andhra Lyola College's Computer Center. Thirty machines have been installed with free software Operating system and some useful applications such as GIMP, Inkscape, firefox, libreoffice, etc.

Principal, Vice-principal, management and faculty at Andhra Loyola College expressed interest in upgrading their lab computers to latest software without having the glitches of piracy issues. The obvious solution to this was to install Linux based free OS like Ubuntu/Debian

Program Director of CIS-A2K advised to have this process done in a pilot manner instead of forced imposition on faculty and students to use a totally new working environment. So, 30 machines from PG lab were selected for this purpose.

These machines were installed with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS edition. In addition to the default available Libre office, firefox and terminal, Tools like Gimp, inkscape, apache web server were also installed.

Each of the faculty and students present at the installation time were evangelized about Free Software and its wise uses in the long term.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creating-free-software-environment-at-alc

Andhra Loyola College and the Centre for Internet & Society sign MoU for Better Net Access

rahim — 2015-01-20T18:47:13Z

Andhra Loyola College (ALC) and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to steward the growth of Telugu Wikipedia and to make available free knowledge in Telugu to all Telugus across the globe.

Highlights

Ten theosophical books authored by Rev. Fr. P. Jojaiah, SJ released under free license (CC-BY-SA-4.0)
For the first time an educational institution in the state of Andhra Pradesh is signing an MoU with CIS-A2K to work collaboratively to qualitatively improve Telugu Wikipedia.
ALC faculty and students to create free e-content in Telugu on Telugu Wikipedia.
Digital content from the fields of Botany, Physics, Chemistry, Telugu, Statistics, Ethics and Religion, Music and Dance to be produced on Telugu Wikipedia

This is a big leap for the college in opening up itself to the internet world. The college is planning to train its faculty and students to create free econtent in Telugu. These resources will in turn be dedicated to the society.

The signing of the MoU took place in the college premises on August 14, 2014 at 2.00 p.m.

Ten theosophical books authored by Rev. Fr. P. Jojaiah, SJ was released under free license (CC-BY-SA-4.0) on the same stage.

The event was organized by ALC and CIS.

CIS-A2K has been closely working with ALC. They have organised 4 workshops for students and faculty. CIS-A2K also helped in QR coding of the institute.

Now, this MoU would further enable CISA2K and ALC to collaboratively work on creating free and open knowledge in Telugu across various disciplines on Telugu Wikipedia. This collaboration is set to benefit millions of Telugus to freely access knowledge in Telugu on the internet.

Media Coverage

ALC signs MoU for better net access (The Hindu, August 15, 2014)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/alc-cis-sign-mou-better-net-access

Ammanudi my article.pdf

rahim — 2016-09-06T14:15:51Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/Ammanudi%20my%20article.pdf

ALC Wiki Winer Camp students

rahim — 2015-01-13T07:03:10Z

Students and Faculty who attended Wiki Winter Camp

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/ALC_Wiki_winter_camp_students.JPG

ALC Wiki Winer Camp

rahim — 2015-01-13T06:34:37Z

Students and Faculty who attended the Wiki winter camp.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/DSC00773.JPG