Centre for Internet and Society

Odia Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-04-08T05:29:02Z

The article was published in the Telegraph on March 29, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi spoke about the Odia Wikipedia plan.

Odia Wikipedia community recently celebrated Odisha Day at Jayadev Bhavan. Inaugurating the event, linguist Debiprasanna Pattanayak said that that most of the Odia publications were not available on the Internet and readers were devoid of easy access to those. He discussed the process of digitisation for preserving valuable books that are out of print.

Odia wikipedia has been trying to popularise use of the language on the Internet since 2002. The aim of the gathering was to enrich the online encyclopaedia and get more books digitised. Eleven volumes of works of Jagannath Mohanty were released on the occasion.

The Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences will digitise these books by training their students.

Guests released a DVD containing a new Odia Unicode font designed by www. odialanguage. com.

Subhashish Panigrahi from the Centre for Internet and Society read out the annual report and the vision of Odia wikipedia.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-telegraph-march-29-2014-odia-wikipedia

Odia Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T11:13:26Z

Odia Wikipedia Article

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

Odia Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2015-06-01T16:39:47Z

Odia Wikipedia

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/OdiaWikipedia13bannerCCbySA4.0.png

Odia WikiMeetup

praskrishna — 2014-02-03T06:46:33Z

CIS-A2K organized an Odia Wiki meetup in Bhubaneswar on January 11.

The event was attended by Odia Wikipedians Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, Shitikantha Dash, Jnanaranjan Sahu and Sailesh Patnaik. T. Vishnuvardhan, Programme Director and Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, CIS-A2K met Odia Wikipedians to discuss about various ongoing projects in Odia Wikipedia, potential projects and incubator projects.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/odia-wiki-meetup-january-11-2014

Odia Wikimedia community has celebrated Odisha day

praskrishna — 2014-04-08T06:21:38Z

Odisha Day 2014 was held on March 29, 2014. A report was published in FullOrissa News on April 2, 2014.

Click to read the original story here.

Odia Wikimedia community has celebrated “Odisha day” today at Jayadev Bhawan. Inaugurating this event eminent linguist Padmashree Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak said, ‘Collaborative effort and open access to knowledge repositories will enrich our language an culture’. He also discussed about the efforts being laid for bringing Odia language as the sixth Indian classical language. Majority of the Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easily accessible. He discussed about the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm leaf manuscripts.

Odia Wikipedia has been trying to popularize use of Odia language in the Internet since 2002. Available at or.wikipedia.org it is now 6000 articles rich and growing. More than 470,000 visitors visit Odia Wikipedia every month which also gives it the status of the largest Odia encyclopedia on the Internet. To enrich the online encyclopedia and getting more books digitized, Wikipedians organized a two day event at Jayadev Bhawan. Along with Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak, Professor Udayanath Sahu, The Odisha Review’s editor Dr. Lenin Mohanty, Odisha Bhaskar’s editor Pradosh Pattnaik, language researcher Subrat Prusty, Kalinga Institute of Social Science (KISS)’s principal Dr. Madan Mohan Sahu, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa’s chairman Allhadmohini Mohanty along with the trust’s secretary Brajamohan Patnaik and senior members Sarojkanta Choudhury and Shisira Ranjan Dash.

11 books of eminent Odia writer Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were released in Creative Commons 3.0 license that will allow anyone to reuse and even make commercial use of the content with attribution. KISS will be digitizing these books by training their students. Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to Odia Wikimedia community for releasing and digitizing these books. Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty from the Institute of Odia Studies and Research also fomally released three books in Creative Commons licenses: Two Odia ones-”Bhasa O Jatiyata” and “Jati, Jagruti O Pragati” and an English book “Classical Odia”. Guests released a DVD containing a new Odia Unicode free font, “Odia OT Jagannatha” designed by Sujata Patel from OdiaLanguage.com, a new Odia input tool, free softwares and offline Wikipedia. It was declared that the Odia WikiSource project will be active soon and would be available at wikisource.org.

Odia Wikipedia administrator Mrutyunjaya Kar gave the inaugural speech and hosted the event. Subhashish Panigrahi from the Centre for Internet and Society read the annual report and shared the vision for the Wikimedia movement. Active Odia Wikipedians Ansuman Giri, Diptiman Panigrahi, Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, Jnanaranjan Sahu, Sasanka Dash, Aditya Mahar and Srikant Kedia coordinated the event.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/full-odisha-april-2-2014-odia-wikipedia-community-celebrated-odisha-day

Odia Wikimedia community celebrated Odisha day, bringing 14 copyright free Odia books

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T12:25:46Z

Odia Wikimedia community has celebrated “Odisha day” today at Jayadev Bhawan. Inaugurating this event eminent linguist Padmashree Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak said, 'Collaborative effort and open access to knowledge repositories will enrich our language an culture'.

This was published in Odishadiary on March 29, 2014.

Odia Wikipedia has been trying to popularize use of Odia language in the Internet since 2002.

To enrich the online encyclopedia and getting more books digitized Wikipedians are organizing a two day event. Along with Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak, Professor Udayanath Sahu, The Odisha Review's editor Dr. Lenin Mohanty, Odisha Bhaskar's editor Pradosh Pattnaik, language researcher Subrat Prusty, Kalinga Institute of Social Science (KISS)'s principal Dr. Madan Mohan Sahu, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa's chairman Allhadmohini Mohanty along with the trust's secretary Brajamohan Patnaik and senior members Sarojkanta Choudhury and Shisira Ranjan Dash.

11 volumes of eminent Odia writer Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were released in free Creative Commons licenses. KISS will be digitizing these books by training their students. Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to Odia Wikimedia community for releasing and digitizing these books. Guests released a DVD containing a new Odia Unicode free font designed by OdiaLanguage.com, a new Odia input tool, free softwares and offline Wikipedia.

It was declared that the Odia WikiSource project will be active soon. Odia Wikipedia admin Mrutyunjaya Kar gave the inaugural speech. Subhashish Panigrahi from the Centre for Internet and Society read the annual report and vision of Odia Wikipedia. Chief guest Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak discussed about the efforts being laid for bringing Odia language as the sixth Indian classical language. Majority of the Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easily accessible. He discussed about the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm lead manuscripts.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/orissa-diary-march-29-2014-odia-wikimedia-community-celebrated-odisha-day-bringing-14-copyright-free-odia-books

Odia Wiki1

praskrishna — 2015-06-29T14:30:58Z

Odia Wiki1

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Odia Wiki1

praskrishna — 2015-06-29T14:25:49Z

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Odia Wiki Editing

praskrishna — 2013-08-27T11:30:24Z

Odia Wiki Editing

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Odia Wiki Community at Bhubaneswar

praskrishna — 2013-04-26T04:39:27Z

Odia Wiki Community Meetup in Bhubaneswar

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Odia waits for Google Translate debut - Nine Indian languages available

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T01:27:21Z

Odia getting the "classical" status last year was certainly a proud moment for the people of the state, but, it is yet to feature among the languages available in Google's popular translation service.

The article by Anwesha Ambaly was published in the Telegraph on April 6, 2015. Subhashish Panigrahi was quoted.

Over 90 languages, including nine from India (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu) are part of the service.

Odia, which is spoken by over 45 million people globally, is yet to debut here.

Techies working in the field attribute the reason to the lack of web presence of the language.

"Google has set parameters on the basis of which translations are available. Only those languages that have a wide use on the Internet and have enough online content are included in the list. The online presence of Odia is quite insignificant," said Subhashish Panigrahi, programme officer at Centre for Internet and Society and a regular contributor to Odia Wikipedia.

Among the limited data in Odia available online, Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource have emerged as important reference sources for all kinds of information.

The Odia Wikipedia serves as an online encyclopaedia that was initiated in 2002 and hosts over 8,000 articles in Odia. The Odia Wikisource was launched in the state last year and is run by volunteers and communities. It is a sister concern of Odia Wikipedia that makes rare Odia books available on the Internet.

However, a Google spokesperson said: "We value all Indic languages and search and Gmail are available in 16 Indian languages with more languages to follow"

Recently, the entire Odia Bhagbata by Jagannath Das was made available on Wikisource. Also, Bhubaneswar-based organisation Srujanika, in collaboration with NIT, Rourkela, has digitized over 750 books. But these apart, there are no major online portals available in Odia.

Panigrahi and his contributor friends are presently working at promoting the Google Translate community, which is a platform for language enthusiasts and volunteers interested in improving translation quality for their language or help Google add it to translate.

"To ensure more availability of online content, people should be encouraged to share information on the web. More Odia content on the web will get a wider reach," said the techie.

"We are quite hopeful that the translator would be available in Odia soon."

The universal web-compatible Unicode font for Odia language was developed in 2000. Despite the Unicode standard having been made available over a decade ago, Odia language is not used actively on the Internet.

"We are still stuck to using outdated fonts such as Akruti and Sreelipi for typing text in Odia and most of these are not compatible for using on the Internet. There are thousands of book and articles available in these fonts. Most of the important content available on the government portals also uses the older fonts. Unless content is available in Unicode, it will not be searchable, sharable and reusable on the Internet," said Panigrahi.

One of the earliest websites in Odia was developed by Ganesh Mishra in 1999 for a popular Odia daily. But the website was shut down after six years when the concept of e-paper came into being.

"These days, most of the publishers of Odia newspapers and magazines have come up with e-papers which are nothing but the scanned images of the original pages. But an online search won't display them as results. Online content in Unicode is accessible through search engines," said the website developer.

He said that people have so many alternatives on the Internet that the absence of Odia language is not felt. "Customers often initiate commercial websites in Odia but soon request us to change it to English because it was inconvenient for users," said Mishra.

Some youngsters in the state are coming up with online portals to promote Odia literature. Jyoti Prasad Patnaik, a doctor by profession, has been running an online Odia literary magazine since 2006.

"The Internet is the most powerful medium of communication these days and there could be no better way to popularise our language other than this. When I started out, there were hardly any readers. Today my website has around 5,000 visitors every month. The number is growing slowly and I hope it will increase in the future," said Patnaik.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/the-telepgrah-april-6-2015-anwesha-ambaly-odia-waits-for-google-translate-debut-nine-indian-languages-available

Odia Paper

praskrishna — 2015-05-27T15:21:24Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-paper.doc

Odia Loves Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2014-04-14T09:56:20Z

Odia is a 2,500 year old language native to the area of Odisha (formerly known as Orissa). The language has recently gained the status of an Indian classical language.

The article by Laura Morris was published in Rising Voices on April 10, 2014. Subhashish's article on Odia Wikipedia is mentioned.

Recently, the Odia Wikimedia community met to celebrate the language's new status in Bhubaneswar.

The following is an excerpt from a recent article on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, by Subhashish Panigrahi, sharing information about the Odia WIki community:

14 copyrighted books have been re-licensed under the Creative Commons license and the digitization project on Odia WikiSource was formally initiated by an indigenous educational institute, the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) [...] KISS is going to digitize some of these books and make them available on Odia Wikisource.

An OpenType Odia Unicode font, “Odia OT Jagannatha” designed by Sujata Patel from Odialanguage.com was released under the OFL license. This is the first Odia OpenType font that the community actively tested.

A new Odia offline input tool called “TypeOdia” by Wikipedian Manoj Sahukar was also released for public distribution. DVDs containing the font, the input tool, Odia language dictionaries, offline Odia Wikipedia in Kiwix, Wikipedia editing guide, ISCII to Unicode font converter, various free and open source software packages and Ubuntu operating system [...]

A large majority of Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easy accessibility. [Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak] discussed the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm leaf manuscripts [...]

The Odia fonts can be downloaded for free. The developers of the font say:

We advocate for the use of Odia language in true spirit, in the domain of day-to-day administration, justice delivery, apart from the field of teaching. Besides, we have undertaken the project for developing Odia lexicon,with inclusion of typical odia version of technical words ,so as to avoid dependence on English language.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/rising-voices-april-10-2014-odia-loves-wikipedia

Odia Language Development

praskrishna — 2014-07-23T08:28:11Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/article-sambad-odia-language.pdf

Odia Language Classics could Now be Read from Phones, Tablets and of course from Computers!

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:12:54Z

Odia Wikisource, a sister project of Odia Wikipedia and a free online Odia-language library is celebrating its first anniversary in Bhubaneswar tomorrow. Available online at or.wikisource.org, the project finally went live in last year on October 20 after being incubated over two years. In a nutshell, it not just provides free and open access to readers to access text that are out of copyright or available under free license, but also allows them to contribute in either digitizing copyright-free text or correcting mistakes made by others.

The article published by Orissadairy on October 25, 2015 quotes Subhashish Panigrahi.

All the contributors to the project are volunteers and are fondly called “uikiali” in Odia. These volunteers follow certain guidelines to check through the content digitized by others to make sure there is no copyrighted text posing copyright violation, correct typos and other grammatical mistakes and incorrect attribution.

Authors and copyright holders are also encouraged to provide permission in re-licensing their work under free licenses like CC-BY/CC-by-SA licenses so that some of their content becomes available online and fill the large gap of the Odia books online to some extent. “Last year, the Wikimedia community in Odisha did a remarkable job in bringing as many as 141 books from multiple authors relicensed under the above mentioned licenses” said the Centre for Internet and Society's Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi. “Where we, as an institution, could play a role in reaching out to many authors and convincing them for a small contribution to the society” added Panigrahi.

Pankajmala Sarangi, the most active contributor to the project elaborated saying, there is a great dearth of Odia books online. I try to buy some time from personal and office time to continue my contribution. Afterall, I started from an all time Odia classic “Cha'mana Athaguntha” by Fakir Mohan Senapati”. Many important books that are out of copyright are making their appearance on the Odia Wikisource. “Wikisource is different than Wikipedia as the former is published writing reublished online where on Wikipedia it is more of aggregating information published elsewhere in an encyclopaedic manner”, says Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, a long time Wikimedian.

Odia Wikisource's administrator Mrutyunjaya Kar welcomes everyone taking interest in Odia library movement in particular and Odia language in general to join this event that is being held at the Institute on Management of Agricultural Extension (IMAGE), Siripura, Bhubaneswar at 5 pm tomorrow.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/orissadiary-october-25-2015-odia-language-classics-could-now-be-read-from-phones-tablets-and-computers