Centre for Internet and Society

Wikipedia Orientation Programme for the Second Language Students of Christ University

praskrishna — 2013-11-14T05:16:07Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team will organize an Orientation Workshop entitled on Wikipedia for the undergraduate language students of the Christ University, Bangalore on November 16, 2013.

Trainers

T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet Society

Syed Muzammiluddin, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet Society

Dr Pavanaja,Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet Society

Interested Participants

The three days of the orientation programme will cover 1200 second language students of the Christ University, Bangalore.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/events/wikipedia-orientation-programme-for-second-language-students

Wikipedia now available in Tulu

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T03:05:28Z

In another boost to yet another Indian language, the Wikipedia in Tulu has gone live.

This was published by domain-b.com on August 8, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

The news was announced by two key community organisers on Saturday who helped to make an eight-year-dream come true, IANS reported.

Dr Vishwanatha Badikana, a PhD in Kannada literature in Mangalore (Karnataka) and Bharathesha, a mechanical engineer based in Muscat announced at the Wikiconference India 2016, India's second national Wikipedia meet in half a decade which is being held in Chandigarh this weekend.

Tulu, which is spoken by around 2 million speakers mostly in southwest Karnataka and in Kasaragod district of Kerala belongs to the family of Dravidian languages. According to some scholars, Tulu is among the earliest Dravidian languages with its roots going back some 2,000 years.

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

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

It was reactivated around 2014, following some meetings and workshops and the concept was also showcased that year at a "World Tulu Conference" stall in December.

"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 UB Pavanaja from the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and one of the mentors of Tulu Wikipedia, told The Hindu newspaper.

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

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

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

The inclusion of Tulu takes the count to 23.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/domain-b-august-8-2016-wikipedia-now-available-in-tulu

Wikipedia Meet-up in TERI

praskrishna — 2011-09-22T12:21:53Z

The Wikipedia Bangalore meet-up is a monthly get-together of Wikipedians (contributors and users) to meet, discuss, share experiences, reach out and advocate for Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Danese Cooper, Chief Technical Officer, Wikimedia Foundation, Alolita Sharma, Engineering Programs Manager, Wikimedia Foundation, Erik Möller, Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation and Achal Prabhala, Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board Member attended the meeting. The Centre for Internet and Society made arrangements for this event.

The Indian wiki community is dedicated to mainly improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to the Republic of India and the history and culture of the Indian subcontinent.The efforts of Indian Wikipedians in English wikipedia is coordinated through Wikiproject India.

This meeting was held at The Energy & Resources Institute (TERI), near to Domlur Club in Bangalore on Saturday, 18 December 2010 and was attended by about 41 participants. There was good attendance from various professional fields – wildlife photographers, journalists, techies, students from Rajasthan (who were in Bangalore to attend FOSS.in) and many who were interested in Indic versions of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has 250 language versions. Their main data center is in Tampa (Florida). Most surfers from India would be hitting their caching servers in Amsterdam. The primary data however, will always reside in the United States of America as Wikipedia appreciates the freedom of speech provided by the US govt.

Wikimedia Foundation officials have met many important government departments in Delhi for promoting the Indic versions of Wiki. But the Government of India is not willing to open-source the fonts that are developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. There are 278 wikipedias including one wikipedia each for English and Simple English and there are more than 79,000 articles related to India on English Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation wants to promote Indic versions on mobile in a big way and is keen to work with Indian mobile handset makers to have the offline version of Wikipedia shipped with handsets. English has about 3.5 million articles. Indic has far lesser but can catch up with English provided people start contributing content. Indic editors can set up their own rules for content contribution and it need not be as tight as they have for English. Examples were cited from other countries. For example, Russia has been doing exceptionally well in adding Russian content and nobody in the world can beat the Germans for perfection. They pay a lot of attention to quality. Indians should also do so, it was felt.

Also see

The Wikipedia page
Mahesh's Blog Post

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-meet-up-bangalore

Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (Coverage in Prajavani)

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T11:04:24Z

Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave a presentation on Wikipedia with a special focus on students and women at Roshini Nilaya, Mangalore on February 26, 2014. An event report was published in Prajavani the following day.

Scanned version of the report published by Prajavani on February 27 is below. The event was organised by Roshini Nilaya and co-sponsored by CS-A2K.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-workshop-mangalore-coverage-prajavani-february-27-2014

Wikipedia Live Phone-in Programme on HMTV

praskrishna — 2013-06-18T05:54:01Z

Vishnu Vardhan took part in a one hour live phone-in programme on Wikipedia. This was telecasted in HMTV on June 1, 2013.

Dr. Rajasekar, Administrator on Telugu Wikipedia; Malladi Kameshwararao, Journalist and Telugu Wikipedian; Rahimanuddin Shaik, Telugu SIG, Wikimedia India Chapter; and T. Vishnu Vardhan Programme Director, CIS-A2K participated in a one-hour live phone-in programme on Telugu Wikipedia broadcast by HMTV (a Telugu News Channel) on June 1, 2013. This is probably for the first time a television news channel in India has done a live phone-in programme on Wikipedia. HMTV had also done a half-an-hour feature on Wikipedia which was broadcast on May 30 and May 31, 2013.

Videos

Part 1

Part 2

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-live-phone-in-programme

Wikipedia launches in Tulu, its 23rd Indic language

praskrishna — 2016-08-09T13:56:00Z

Wikipedia has launched in Tulu, making it the 23rd Indian language Wiki, reports domain-b. The announcement was made at the Wikiconference India 2016 held in Chandigarh last weekend.

This was published on Medianama website on August 9, 2016.

The Tulu wiki is located at tcy.wikipedia.org, and has been in ‘incubation’ since 2008, basically still waiting to go live or active. However, it was reactivated in 2014 following meetings and workshops at the ‘World Tulu Conference’ held the same year. As of now, the Wiki has about 200 registered editors, of which it claims around 100 have more than 10 edits, with 8-10 active editors online on an average. Note that there are around 2 million Tulu speakers.

Other Indic language wikis: In September 2013, the Goa University had entered into a three year memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani Wikipedia, which was launched 6 months later. Similarly in August 2014, former Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar launched the ‘Bihar on Wikipedia’ campaign inviting people of the state to write about their villages, towns, and the unique culture of the state, its history, development over the years, eminent personalities and other important aspects of the state.

Wikipedia is currently available in 23 Indian languages including Tulu, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Note that in 2012, Wikipedians were digitizing Indian language, out-of-copyright texts online, trying to address the comparative paucity of Indic language texts online.

Wikipedia Indic language stats: As of June 2016, Wikipedia had 16 million page view per month on the Hindi wiki, with overall 106,844 articles. This is not a significant increase. According to this August 2011 report, there were 0.1 million Hindi articles on the platform, and 9 million overall views.

Ban for paid advocacy: In September last year, the editors at the English Wiki blocked 381 user accounts for ‘black hat’ editing. The platform claims that these users were engaged in undisclosed paid advocacy, the practice of accepting or charging money to promote external interests on Wikipedia without revealing their affiliation, a violation of Wikipedia’s terms of use.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/medianama-august-9-2016-vivek-pai-wikipedia-launches-in-tulu-23rd-indic-language

Wikipedia is a Newspaper

praskrishna — 2016-12-17T01:27:21Z

Coverage about Mini MWT and TTT first day. News item also explains about Telugu Wikipedia and its growth. Mentioned some of the participants and organizers Pranay, Katta Srinivasa Rao, Kasyap, etc.

Clipping of the article as it appeared in Namaste Telangana on December 11, 2016:

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/namaste-telangana-december-11-2016-wikipedia-is-a-newspaper

Wikipedia initiative - Celebrating legacy of Bangalore Blue grapes online

praskrishna — 2016-01-29T15:44:36Z

Black is beautiful, and it can go places if it is well researched. When HL Omshivaprakash wrote a Wikipedia article about Karnataka's bidriware, the metal handicraft where gleaming black bowls and hookahs are dotted with delicate silver strips, he didn't expect it to be picked up by the French and Swedes.

Read the article published in the Times of India here. Subhashish Panigrahi gave inputs.

His article has now been translated into their languages. Though it might not lead to more money for the struggling artists of Bidar, they might get an edge while marketing their wares, says Omshivaprakash. This is the advantage that a week-long editathon hopes to achieve. Editors of the online encyclopaedia are celebrating Republic Day by encouraging people to upgrade and contribute articles on those arts, crafts and goods unique to various parts of India. "People are already working on 15 products from Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Assam and West Bengal," says Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikipedian and language activist.

India has 213 goods and crafts with geographical indication (GIs) tags. The GI mark is a kind of trademark, which indicates that a product's reputation is linked to its origins in a particular area. Of 213 GI tags, only 70 have English entries. So while intricacies of Muga silk-making in Assam and cultivating Bangalore Blue grapes are explained in detail in English, Alleppey coir has only a sketchy Malayalam entry.

"People should know the history of each item. For example, they should know how Kondapalli toys from near Vijayawada are made,"says Nageswara Rao Gullapalli.

Omshivaprakash, who created a signboard outside Bidar Fort last year, with a QR code that allows users to read the relevant wiki entry on their mobile phones, says a change in design can make a difference."The QR code was etched in bidri to create a socio-economic link between readers and artisans. Though the art is expensive, the artists are not paid well,"he says.

It is this desire to unearth new facts that will see Santosh Shinga, an IIT-B researcher, delving deep into Nagpur oranges, Nashik grapes and Mahabaleshwar strawberries. "I am from Nagpur and interested in fruits,"says Shinga, who knows a bit of orange farming.The only exception in his list is Puneri pagadi, the elaborate headgear recently spotted on actor Ranveer Singh in Bollywood movie 'Bajirao Mastani'.

Panigrahi hopes to finish the edits in English by January 30, right in time when the event wraps up by January 31. Karnataka, which tops the list with 30 GI goods, has only a handful of articles and images, says Panigrahi.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/times-of-india-january-27-2016-wikipedia-initiative

Wikipedia in UG Education program at Christ University

praskrishna — 2014-05-27T10:19:48Z

On May 15, 2014, Prajavani published an article about Wikipedia in UG Education program in Christ University.

Click to read the online version published by Prajavani here.

A scanned version of the article is given below:

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/prajavani-may-15-2014-wikipedia-ug-education-christ-university

Wikipedia in Indian Languages on Mobile Phones

praskrishna — 2013-10-25T06:00:28Z

Wikipedia in India's regional languages and accessible over mobile phones is revolutionising the way Internet content is used in this multi-lingual country, say information technology (IT) experts.

This post by Megha Prakash was published in Sci Dev Net on October 15, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

"Developing Wikipedia and other content in regional languages is a way forward to bridge the knowledge gap," says T. Vishnu Vardhan, programme director of the Access to Knowledge project at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore.

In September, CIS signed an agreement with Goa University to train students and foster collaborative content development with Wikipedia libraries and archives in view. A similar agreement was signed in August with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, while a third is due to be signed this month with Christ University, Bangalore.

India's 28 states and seven union territories are organised on a linguistic basis and three of its vernaculars — Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi — rate among the world's ten most widely spoken languages, each with its own script.

With 70 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people and the market flooded with affordable feature phones, the majority of India's 1.2 billion people potentially have access to IT. Current usage, however, is limited to downloading entertainment content and to such applications as mobile banking.

Vardhan tells SciDev.Net that attention is now being paid to developing knowledge repositories in India's regional languages.

M. Sampath Kumar, who heads the Telugu department at the University of Madras in Chennai, says the Telugu Wikipedia is regularly used by students and researchers and is a resource for speakers of the language living abroad but eager to maintain community links.

Kumar tells SciDev.Net that literary content is popular and that there is a future for regional Wikipedia in educating the younger generation and serving as a free repository for traditional knowledge in the vernacular.

Subbiah Arunachalam, a Chennai-based IT consultant, says the effort will benefit non-English speaking rural youth at school and college levels and help bring them on par with their urban counterparts in terms of knowledge.

A programme funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and due to end in June 2014 covers the Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, Bengali and Konkani languages. A Hindi version already has 100,000 articles and recorded eight million views.

'Lilavati's Daughters', a book on Indian women scientists published by the Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences, is currently being translated into the regional languages with a view to engaging women content developers and editors.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/sci-dev-net-megha-prakash-wikipedia-in-indian-languages-on-mobile-phones

Wikipedia Hackathon at BITS Hyderabad

praskrishna — 2012-10-25T08:42:56Z

CIS - A2K team and BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad Campus are organizing a hackathon for their tech fest — ATMOS on October 26 - 27, 2012, from 6.00 p.m. on October 26 to 6.00 a.m. on October 27.

An all night hackathon to get started in contributing technically to the world’s largest source of free information – Wikipedia. The code that you write (and eventually deploy) will be viewed/used 7,938,026,125 times a month! Write user scripts that fix annoying little things with the way Wikipedia functions. Write bots to import (and accurately maintain) large amounts of information from various sources into Wikipedia. Write tools to make it easier to maintain Wikipedia’s standards and fight spam. Most of all join the awesome Open Source community and have fun!

Pre-requisites:

Preferable working knowledge of HTML/CSS/Javascript *or* python.

Laptops, which you will have to carry with you.

To register for the event, click here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-hackathon-bits-hyderabad

Wikipedia Gender

praskrishna — 2016-10-04T23:00:27Z

Wikipedia Gender Gap

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy_of_Wikipedia.png

Wikipedia Gains Massive Traffic Thanks To Vernacular Languages

praskrishna — 2013-08-19T04:18:24Z

The blog post was published in Before It's News on August 1, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

Click to read the original published in Before It's News

Non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, the parent company of knowledge-based article collating platform Wikipedia seems to be receiving enhanced traction on the portal from India. The reason for this upswing in activity is apparently its decision to expand the scope of the portal via multiple Indian Languages, revealed a recent study by the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society (CIS).

A while back Wikipedia, sensing the need of non-English speaking /understanding audience had opened its doors for about 18 Indian Languages. The main attractions seemed to be articles penned down in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam & Kannada, which managed to attract a lot of writers who have come forth & added “thousands” of new articles in these & other native languages, all within a span of 8 months ranging from September 2012 to April 2013.

Interestingly, the study reveals that though a lot of pages did get created, many of these articles did not enjoy equally massive visitor count. However, when Wikipedia subsequently extended the support to Marathi & Bengali, the reader-count picked up. Started just a few months back, about 40,000 articles written in Marathi have been getting 30 Lakh visitors & these pages have collectively managed to add another 10 Lakh monthly visitors, while Bengali articles has been steadily getting about 14 Lakh Page Views per month.

Wikipedia seems to have undoubtedly fueled the consumption of online content. It has proven that people actually craved for knowledge in the native language, but didn’t have a proper platform. However, there were a few technological hurdles as well. Web Browsers, in their formative stages, simply didn’t have the capability of pulling, processing & displaying languages or alphabets other than English. Additionally, having been used to type in English-only keyboards, penning information-laden articles in native languages did have a long & steep learning curve.

Thankfully, such petty, but pestering issues seem to have been ironed out & creation, publication & consumption of content in local languages has evidently picked-up steam. Now the writers, who are fondly called ‘Wiki foot soldiers’ have been forwarding the crusade of offering free knowledge to anyone interested & numbers at both the end is growing healthily.

Judging by the appetite for online content in their local avatar, T Vishnu Vardhan, Program Director, Access to Knowledge Project, CIS has aptly summarized the current state of altered necessities. He says “In the last two years, the demand for knowledge in Indian languages has grown as we have moved to the motto of ‘roti, kapda and internet” What do you think?

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/beforeitnews-august-1-2013-wikipedia-gains-massive-traffic-thanks-to-vernacular-languages

Wikipedia Event in Mangalore

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:43:30Z

The article was published by Vijaya Karnataka on December 18, 2016.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/vijaya-karnataka-december-18-2016-wikipedia-event-in-mangalore

Wikipedia Editors

praskrishna — 2016-01-26T15:48:17Z

Wikipedia Editors

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/WikipediaEditors.png