Centre for Internet and Society

We are Wikipedia

subha — 2014-09-06T03:19:29Z

Wikimedia Deutchland has included a paragraph about WeAreWikipedia on their blog.

@WeAreWikipedia auf Global Voices

Subhashish Panigrahi hat einen Beitrag über das Twitter-Projekt „We Are Wikipedia“ auf der Bloggerplattform GlobalVoices veröffentlicht. Subhashish erklärt unter anderem wo die Idee für das Projekt herkommt und greift einiger der unterschiedlichste Beiträge auf, die über den Twitter-Account in den letzten Wochen liefen. Inzwischen gibt es auch schon eine deutschsprachige Version des Beitrags

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

Voices from Goa: Rusita Paryekar, a MA student writes articles on Konkani Wikipedia

subha — 2013-09-06T12:30:19Z

Rusita Paryekar is one of the 38 students from the MA Konkani department of Goa University gathered at the State Central Library to learn writing and editing articles on Konkani Wikipedia. Currently Konkani Wikipedia is in incubation and needs more voluntary participation from enthusiasts who want their language, Konkani to strengthen its base in the digital knowledge domain.


					Wikipedia editor Rusita Paryekar speaks about her editing experience on Konkani Wikipedia.

Thirty-eight M.A. students from the Konkani department of Goa came together for a four day long Konkani Wikipedia editing fun workshop and created history. Konkani Wikipedia is one of the Wikipedia projects that went into incubation (a phase every new Wikipedia project goes to allow the editor community to grow and take the project to a sustainable position) seven years back. Sadly it is still in incubation. One of the major reasons is the conflict for script. Konkani is written in 5 different scripts; Devanagari in Goa (as the official script of Goa) and Maharashtra, Roman (also known as Romi) and written by Goan Christian population, Kannada in Mangalore region of Karnataka, and Malayalam in Kochi region of Kerala. The Konkani speaking diaspora is now very much part of the the socio-ethnic groups of these neighbouring regions. The language of these states has naturally influenced Konkani spoken and written by the Konkani diaspora which has resulted in multiple writing standards and dialects. There are four standards of writing systems:

Writing standard that is officially approved by the Directorate of Official language, Government of Goa written in Devanagari script. Majority of the books (includes all Government of Goa publications) are written in this standard.
Writing standard that was influenced by the Portugese language during the Portuguese rule. Earliest available writings in Konkani including The Holy Bible are written in this standards.
Writing standard that Mangalorean Konkani diaspora use.
Writing standard that Keralite Konkani diaspora use.

Interestingly Konkani diaspora of all these regions have produced books in the writing standards mentioned above. The Konkani Wikipedia incubation project currently has 133 articles written in 3 different scripts; Devanagari, Roman and Kannada which has been a problem to get the approval. But this has not stopped the language enthusiasts to stop contributing. While meeting these students I felt that urge for bringing up Konkani in a digital domain and telling the Konkani diaspora about the untold story of Goa. This is the motivation that drives Rusita and many others to contribute to Wikipedia. Her first contribution was about Goan folk songs (गोंयची लोकगितां) which is the first Konkani article about this topic on the internet that is available for free. ‘If I would not write about my culture in my language who would do that?, says Rusita.

Further reading
Manohar L. Sardessai. Influence on Konkani. Journal of South Asian Literature. Vol. 18, No. 1, Goan Literature: A Modern Reader (Winter, Spring 1983), pp. 155-158.

Copyright note: The video and the content of this post are in CC-BY-SA 3.0. Feel free to use, share and remix the content and attribute me.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/voices-from-goa-wikipedia-editor-rusita-paryekar

Voices from Goa: Frania Pereira tells Why She Writes Articles on Konkani Wikipedia

subha — 2013-09-05T09:24:57Z

Konkani as a language has seen geographical, political and religious conflicts. Being the official language of Goa and spoken widely in the Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra it is still trying to strengthen its base. Recently the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) in collaboration with the Konkani department of Goa University organized a four-day Wikipedia workshop for MA, Konkani language students. This workshop involved 38 students creating 43 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia which is incubation. We’re hoping that these efforts will contribute towards bringing this 7 year old project out of incubation to a live Wikipedia project.

				Video by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Video by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Why do you [edit] Wikipedia?

Wikipedia editors are always volunteers which translates to “Anyone and everyone can contribute to Wikipedia”. What is that brings people in today’s date to write articles on Wikipedia. This is a question we are not sure at times. You get up late in the night and check how many times your article has been edited and feel excited. This happens to many of the wikipedians including myself. It has been a personal journey to ask Wikipedians about the same. While conducting this workshop along with my colleague Nitika, I spent some time with the students asking about their experience of Wikipedia editing. We found that many of them were shy enough to sound low and we could not take the videos. This particular video features Frania Pereira, an MA student from Konkani department of Goa University. She attended the Wikipedia workshop we organized at the Central Library at Panaji for two days and edited articles on Bebinca (Konkani article here) and Colvá fama (Konkani article here), a local festival celebrated by the Colvá Catholics. Frania is worried how people stereotype Goa to be the just land of enjoyment and not look at the diverse culture, its ethnic food and festivals. Even the Konkani speaking population in other regions (Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and abroad) don’t know much about this socio-language-cultural diversity. No other language than her mother-toungue Konkani could tell about these. And that is why she edits Wikipedia.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/voices-from-goa

Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature

subha — 2014-04-08T01:48:18Z

The blog post throws light on providing access to Vachana Sanchaya, a eleventh century Kannada literature.

The article was published in Open Access Week on April 3, 2014.

During early 11th century a form of spiritual Kannada language poetry in the Indian state of Karnataka called Vachana sahitya became quite popular. It started flourishing in the 12th century by a religious movement called Lingayatha movement. More than 259 Vachana writers, called Vachanakaru, compiled over 11,000 vachanas (verses). 21,000 of these verses in 15 volumes were published by the Government of Karnataka into an online portal called Samagra Vachana Samputa. Two Wikimedians along with two linguists brought these verses on a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya. Kannada Wikimedians, Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI along with Kannada linguist O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy converted the font to Unicode to make the verses searchable on this project. The entire collection is now ready to enrich the Kannada WikiSource.

The text in Samagra Vachana Samputa were typed using fonts of ISCII, an Indian character encoding standard. Indic characters generally replace Latin ones inside the font that makes them completely useless when someone does not have the particular font installed in the computer. This is a typical problem with non-Latin fonts, especially Indic typefaces. In case of this particular publication, there were more than 5 ISCII standards which made searching and reusing content completely impossible. Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash started writing scripts to make the Vachanas searchable through an index. This demanded a user friendly platform for the linguistic researchers, students, and the public interested in accessing this literature.

Omshivaprakash worked on designing the architecture for this platform using open source software tools. Hanchagaiah was involved in providing critical hacks for digitization and valuable inputs through suggestions, feedback, and quality assurance.

At present, Vachana Sanchaya project has around 200,000 unique words that were derived from these verses. The public has been using the repository and accessing vachana from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles. There are thousands of people now who read a Vahana as part of their daily routine. Vachana Sanchaya is not only a gateway for reading the literature, but also a research platform for Kannada language and literature. It has options for researchers to help in reviewing content which in turn will help to add references from research papers.

All of the content is currently available to the public through the OpenData API, and once the reviewing the work is complete, it will be distributed in the public domain through WikiSource. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers, and anyone interested in building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. Users will be able to use our code to digitize any book available in the public domain. Early literature in any language is well-respected, so making it available via an open platform allows for reuse of the content for research, publication, and other documentation work.

Other similar projects could take help from this project and use any part of the processes.

Plans going foward:

To initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researches help to tag words and grow the glossary.
To continue work on subsequent, similar projects for Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya (work has begun) and Vyāsa and Muddann (work to be started)
To extend this platform to other the contemporary literature works available in the public domain.

Authored by Pavithra Hanchagaiah, Omshivaprakash HI and Subhashish Panigrahi. Draws inspiration from another article published on Opensource.com under CC-BY-SA 4.0

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/openaccessweek-april-3-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-vachana-sanchaya

Vachana Sanchaya: 11th century Kannada literature to enrich Wikisource

subha — 2014-03-20T11:13:22Z

Kannada Wikipedian Omshivaprakash, Pavithra and I co-authored this article on digitizing Vachana Sahitya, a 11th century Kannada literature on WikiSource.

Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI, Wikimedians from India are co-authors with Subhashish Panigrahi in this article. This was originally posted on Wikimedia blog and published by GlobalVoices on March 18, 2014.

In the poetry of Kannada (an Indic language), Vachana sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing that evolved in the 11th Century C.E. and flourished in the 12th century, as part of the “Lingayatha” movement. More than 259 Vachanakaras (Vachana writers) have compiled over 11,000 vachanas. 21,000 of these verses which were published in a 15 volume “Samagra Vachana Samputa” by the government of Karnataka have been digitized. Two Wikimedians along with a Kannada linguist and author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy are involved in the Unicode conversions, corrections and writing preface for these verses. The entire work is now available as a standalone project called “Vachana Sanchaya” and ready to enrich Kannada Wikisource.

This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O.L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had trouble using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII standard and searching text was a huge problem. I (Pavithra Hanchagaiah) started to help gather information about vachanas and document it in Unicode by writing scripts for open source software. Further discussions were had to get thousands of vachanas in the form of a database, so that they could be easily searchable with an index. This demanded us to build a platform supporting all these activities, which would help the linguistic researchers, students and members of the general public who have an interest in reading and studying Vachana literature. With this idea, Omshivaprakash started designing the model, and his colleague Devaraju started building it. In the meantime I was running various scripts to fix errors in conversion of ASCII text to Unicode, confirming that the data was ready to consume by the modules developed for concordance. We spent weekends & holidays executing this project from home. With the constant feedback and guidance from Mr. Swamy and Vasudendra, we learned how concordance of text is used by researchers and what would make it easier for them to research on Vachana Sahitya. Omshivaprakash worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements – free and open source software technologies were used to keep the platform active while managing the entire project. I provided critical hacks for digitization and gave feedback through suggestions.

Working System Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki’s jquery-ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!	Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Working System

Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki’s jquery-ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!

Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Public Response

We are glad to see people accessing vachanas from our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels. There have been approximately 500,000 pageviews to our site in the first few months of our platform’s public launch. Interestingly, commonly searched Kannada words like “ಕರ್ಮ”(Karma en:Work/Deed) , “ಸತ್ಯ” (Sathya -en:Truthfulness ) and “ನದಿ” (River) have resulted in quick and easy results.

Plans for the future

ಆಂಗೀರಸ, ಪುಲಸ್ತ್ಯ, ಪುಲಹ, ಶಾಂತ,ದಕ್ಷ, ವಸಿಷ್ಠ, ವಾಮದೇವ, ನವಬ್ರಹ್ಮ, ಕೌಶಿಕ, ಶೌನಕ, ಸ್ವಯಂಭು, ಸ್ವಾರೋಚಿಷ, ಉತ್ತಮ, ತಾಮಸ, ರೈವತ, ಚಾಕ್ಷಷ, ವೈವಸ್ವತ, ಸೂರ್ಯಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಚಂದ್ರಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಬ್ರಹ್ಮಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಇಂದ್ರ ಸಾವರ್ಣಿ ಇವರು ಇಪ್ಪತ್ತು ಮಂದಿ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ನಿರ್ಮಾಣ ಸಹಾಯ[ದ]ವರು. ಹತ್ತೊಂಬತ್ತು ಎಂದರೆ ಪುಣ್ಯನದಿಗಳು. ಅದು ಎಂತೆಂದಡೆ: ಗ್ರಂಥ

Our system is extensible with respect to adding new feature – we have a review desk for researchers to help us with the review of content. Later we will also be adding required references to Vachanas from various research works that have been done around this literature. The content is available to the public through OpenData API and will be distributed as public domain through Wikisource once the review work is complete. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers and anyone interested in working around building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. This system is meant to evolves around other works rather than having to change and re-invent the wheel for more such projects. Vachana Sahitya will further help us to initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researchers get together to tag the words, glossary etc in the coming days. We can also fulfill the need of various language tools like spelling and grammar checker for users through crowd-sourcing the development. The next projects under the “Kannada Sanchaya” are Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya which are in the pipeline with initial phases of work underway. Our idea is to extend this platform from Vyasa to Muddanna and possibly the contemporary literature work available in the public domain.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/vachana-sanchaya-11th-century-kannada-literature-to-enrich-wikisource

Typing in Indic Languages from Mobiles made Easy!

subha — 2013-07-17T09:02:46Z

A new app is up for typing in Indic languages from mobile phones. This is is available online at: http://bitly.com/indictyping and supports on iOS. Android version is to be released soon.

"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."
Phil Karlton

Yuvi Panda smiles saying this. Yuvi Panda, a former Wikimedia Foundation contractor and developer was here in our Delhi office and I had an opportunity to spend some time discussing some of the technical problems that we have been facing.

One of the major setback most people have with their phones is the lack of language support and lack of typing support for Indic languages. Fortunately most of the new generation phones support Indic languages. Three of the major operating systems used currently by most phones are Android, Windows, Blackberry and iOS. Android being an open source operating system has extensive community support and developments which is something we were primarily hopeful while starting this project. Windows phones also have a good number of user base in India and support for Indic languages on Windows is really good. Though iOS has good support for Indic display there is no support for typing. IOS, Windows and Blackberry all being proprietary have really less community support and any tool available on these app market would be proprietary. So, our idea was to start a cross platform app which will use the available jQuery ime used for Indic typing for Indic Wikipedias and sister projects.

Currently, most of the Indic language Wikipedias use a typing tool called Narayam ( "Narayam" is a Malayalam word which refers to a metal stylus that was used for writing on palm leaves and papyrus in ancient days). By default the typing scheme for most of the language wikipedias is set to transliteration or phonetic. An Indian mobile user would normally type his own language using Roman letters from a mobile. "और दोस्त सब ठीक है?" in Hindi would be typed as "Aur dost sab thik hai?" when someone pings a friend on facebook or sends a text message. Now with the new typing tool you need to type "aur dosta saba thiika hai?" to get the same text in Devanagari script. This typing scheme is almost same like the phonetic typing most people use for regional languages on mobile which is why typing won’t be much of difference. In terms of usability most people would use the typed text either for web search in regional languages, Facebook posts, tweeting or even sending mails and text messages.

The detailed procedure for typing using this tool is documented at: http://goo.gl/HdVJW. Indic typing tool is available at: http://bitly.com/indictyping

Scan the QR code below using your QR code application to go "Indic typing tool".

Developer speaks:

This is a simple tool that lets you type in your native language on mobile phones. Currently only iOS devices are supported.

The tool is a simple wrapper around Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering's jquery.ime project. It simply adds a much easier to use (on a mobile device) language selector, and makes it available offline (on iOS devices).

Quick links:

Source code: https://github.com/yuvipanda/indic-typing-tool
Test the app and report the bugs directly on GitHub or on Meta.
Credits: YuviPanda, Subhashish Panigrahi, Santhosh Thottingal

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/typing-in-indic-languages-from-mobiles

Train The Trainer Programme for Wikipedians

subha — 2013-11-18T08:24:52Z

Twenty Wikimedians from 10 cities speaking 8 languages attended the 4-day Train-The-Trainer (TTT) programme conducted last month by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge programme (CIS-A2K) at Bangalore. The programme aimed to improve and enhance Wikipedians' skills for outreach and community-building activities.

The article by Subhashish Panigrahi was edited by Rohini Lakshane and published in DNA on November 14, 2013.

Twenty Wikimedians from 10 cities speaking 8 languages attended the 4-day Train The Trainer (TTT) programme conducted last month by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge programme (CIS-A2K) at Bangalore. Twenty active Indian language Wikimedia communities spread across the world are moving ahead the bandwagon of collaborating with each other and carving their mark on the world's largest encyclopaedia and its other sister projects. Apart from editing Wikipedia articles, some Wikimedians devote their time to bringing new blood into the community and fostering it, so that the community grows. Indian language Wikimedia communities need to empower Wikimedians who would lead the outreach activities locally in their vernacular communities. The idea of the TTT programme was born out of this need.

The TTT programme kicked off on October 3 with Wikimedians from Punjab, West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. They delivered presentations on various topics: Why the society needs Wikipedia; Wikipedia in Indian languages; How articles about diseases and other common medical science topics could be improved to help people; etc. Their presentation delivery skills were assessed by CIS-A2K's Director and Manager and they were offered individual assessment and feedback. Personal trainer Sachin Nagarajappa spent time with Wikimedians discussing mistakes that trainers do while conducting workshops and gradual improvement techniques for impactful outreach. Malayalam Wikimedian Viswanathan Prabhakaran held a session on "Crowd Sourcing from the Future" explaining various layers of crowdsourced projects.

On the next day, groups of Wikimedians were assigned the task of delivering a Wikipedia editing session to the audience as if the latter were new editors. Sachin conducted an advanced presentation skill improvement workshop based on inputs gathered from participants and the assessment of the group presentations. Veteran Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig shared lessons on "Challenges and Opportunities in building an Indian Language Community online". FOSS activist and CIS Executive Director Sunil Abraham conducted two sessions: "A spectrogram-based activity to simplify the criticality of Neutral Point of View" and an interactive session on offline and online outreach, "Speed Geeking". These were followed by one-on-one discussions on improving presentation skills.

	Typing in Indian languages is not easy, especially with the many typing layout standards used in the public and private sectors in India. CIS-A2K's Programme Officer Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted a session on the Unicode standard for Indian languages, its use and fonts in different operating systems. Social media expert and Wikimedian Tinu Cherian shared the secrets of popularising Indian language Wikipedias and bringing outstanding contributors to the limelight. He also spoke about how the media played an important role in showcasing initiatives for free encyclopaedic content contribution in India, and shared tips on using the social media. CIS-A2K's Programme Director Vishnu Vardhan shared case studies of making Wikipedia workshops interesting, interactive and fun. Viswanathan and CIS-A2K's Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi demonstrated how to set up a handheld digital camera-based prop to easily digitise books without using a scanner.

Typing in Indian languages is not easy, especially with the many typing layout standards used in the public and private sectors in India. CIS-A2K's Programme Officer Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted a session on the Unicode standard for Indian languages, its use and fonts in different operating systems. Social media expert and Wikimedian Tinu Cherian shared the secrets of popularising Indian language Wikipedias and bringing outstanding contributors to the limelight. He also spoke about how the media played an important role in showcasing initiatives for free encyclopaedic content contribution in India, and shared tips on using the social media. CIS-A2K's Programme Director Vishnu Vardhan shared case studies of making Wikipedia workshops interesting, interactive and fun. Viswanathan and CIS-A2K's Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi demonstrated how to set up a handheld digital camera-based prop to easily digitise books without using a scanner.

The most vital part of Wikipedia articles is citing references. Wikimedian Shyamal Lakshminarayan demonstrated how finding sources of references and citing them on Wikipedia could be made easier using various tools. Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation and writer Achal Prabhala shared stories of documenting orally continued traditions in Kerala and South Africa for building references on Wikipedia. He also shed light on how copyright laws evolved in the context of copyright issues that Wikipedia contributors face, and on content donation on WikiSource and other platforms.

Wikimedia India's founding member and veteran Telugu Wikimedian Arjuna Rao Chavala spoke about the history and future plans of Wikimedia India.

The participants then went to M.G. Road Boulevard to see the weaving work by Gandhians, a philately exhibition on Gandhi, and spent some time with Namma Metro's staff to learn about the operations of the Metro. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja and Kannada Wikimedian Om Shivaprakash guided the Wikimedians to the office of Deccan Herald-Prajavani where they observed the newspaper production process and learnt about the use of Kannada Unicode fonts in newspaper printing. The editor and staff of Prajavani learnt about the use of the Wikimedia Commons as a free media repository. The Wikimedians left Bangalore with happy faces with the hope of cultivating more editors in their communities.

Link to the meta page here

More pictures here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dnaindia-november-14-2013-subhashish-panigrahi-train-the-trainer-programme-for-wikipedians

Train the Trainer Program

subha — 2013-11-18T07:52:26Z

Wikipedians, about 20 of them, from 10 different cities, speaking 8 different languages, joined together for the first ever four days "Train the Trainer Program" organised by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team in Bangalore from October 3 to 6, 2013.

Read the original published on the Wikipedia meta page

CIS-A2K organised the residency training program to build capacities amongst different language Wikimedia communities. A good diversity of Wikipedians from various language communities such as Bengali, Gujarati, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Odia, came over for the event.

CIS-A2K identified two prominent reasons for organizing the event: (1) Limitations of a virtual sphere, and (2) Limited number of Wikipedians leading outreach activities.

Limitations of a virtual sphere
Most open source communities face problem of a lack of time and space for sharing ideas in a non-virtual sphere. Similary Wikipedians, who are voluntary contributors and authors of the articles posted on Wikipedia merely get time and opportunity to meet fellow editors because of the limitations of a virtual platform on which Wikipedia is built. There are twelve active Indian language Wikimedia communities that are spread across the world and moving the bandwagon of collaborating with each other and carving their historic mark of compiling the world's largest encyclopaedia and its other sister projects. To keep this movement alive there is a need of cross-sharing ideas of working together for a common goal and strengthening the leaders of these communities.

Limited number of Wikipedians leading outreach activities
Only a handful of Wikipedians devote their time in leading outreach activities and bringing new blood to the community. Indian language Wikimedia communities are in need of empowering Wikipedians who would lead outreach sessions in order to expand their editor community and strengthen their language projects.

The inception of this program began with the discussion of organizing a training program for the Wikipedians who are willing to conduct more activities in their home cities. Finally on October 3, 2013, Bangalore heard the voices of prominent Wikipedians from Punjab, West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. The Wikipedians delivered presentations on various topics such as — why Wikipedia is needed for the society, why Wikipedia in Indian languages, importance of starting new Wiki projects and so on.

Their presentation delivery skills were judged by Vishnu Vardhan and Nitika Tandon and all other community members present. They gave individual assessments and feedback for improvement towards the end of the day. Personal trainer Sachin Nagarajappa spent time with Wikipedians discussing mistakes that trainers do while conducting workshops and gradual improvement techniques for impactful outreach. Wikipedia is built on the concept of crowdsourcing and Malayalam Wikimedian Viswanathan Prabhakaran carried out a session about “Crowd Sourcing from the Future” explaining the various layers of crowdsourced projects.

The first day ended with a task where different language Wikipedians formed groups to prepare presentations for the following day.


Above: Wikipedians Satdeep Gill, Shyamal Lakshminarayan and Shubha during at the CIS-A2K Train-the-Trainer Program (by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Groups were given a challenge of imagining the audience as new wikipedians. Five groups presented on the second day. Sachin conducted an advanced presentation skill improvement workshop based on the inputs from the participants and the assessment of the group presentations. Veteran Wikipedian Hari Prasad Nadig shared learnings from Challenges & Opportunities in building an Indian Language Community online. Open source activist and CIS's Executive Director Sunil Abraham conducted two sessions — a spectrogram based activity to simplify the "Criticality of Neutral Point of View" and an interactive session called “Speed Geeking” on offline and online outreach followed by a one-on-one discussion on the presentation skill improvement.

Typing in Indian languages is not easy especially when it comes to multiple typing layout standards followed in the public and private sectors in India. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted a session on Unicode standard for Indian languages and its usefulness with a brief context on the fonts and their different operating systems. Social media expert and Wikimedian Tinu Cherian shared the secrets of popularizing Indian language Wikipedias and bringing outstanding contributors to the limelight, how media played an important role in showcasing initiatives for free encyclopaedic content contribution in India and tips of social media. With fun activities Vishnu Vardhan shared case studies of making Wikipedia workshops interesting. Wikimedia Foundation board member and writer Achal Prabhala shared stories of documenting Oral traditions in Kerala and South Africa for Wikipedia referencing and how copyright laws evolved in the context of copyright issues that Wikipedia contributors face. Achal also threw light on content donation on WikiSource and other platforms that would be useful for people to consume for knowledge production on diverse platforms where Wikipedia could play a central role. Viswanathan and Subhashish Panigrahi demonstrated how to set up a handheld digital camera based prop to easily digitize books without using any scanner and then create electronic books.

The most vital part of Wikipedia articles is referencing. Wikimedian Shyamal Lakshminarayan demonstrated how finding sources of references and citing them for the facts on Wikipedia could be made easier through detailed research and by using several tools available. Wikimedia India's founding member and veteran Telugu Wikipedian Arjuna Rao Chavala gave a talk about the history and future plans of Wikimedia India. Wikipedians then went to M.G. Road boulevard to see the weaving work by Gandhians, Philately exhibition on Gandhi and spent some time with Namma Metro's staff to know about the metro operation. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja and Kannada Wikipedian Om Shivaprakash guided Wikipedians to the office of Deccan Herald Prajavani where they got to see the entire newspaper production and spent time with the technical staff to learn about the use of Kannada Unicode fonts for newspaper printing. Editors and staff at Prajavani got to know about the use of WikiCommons as a free image repository.

The four action filled days involved learning new concepts, training on presentation skills, collaborating to create outreach documents, sharing stories from different language communities, understanding new mediums of outreach, meeting Wikipedians from different cities and also having lots of fun. Wikipedians left Bangalore city with happy faces and we hope to cultivate new editors in their communities.

List of Participants

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/train-the-trainer-program

This Twitter Account Puts a Face to the Unsung Volunteer Editors Behind Wikipedia

subha — 2014-07-03T06:17:56Z

The life of a Wikipedia editor is an interesting one. Globally, about 100,000 editors edit the collaborative online encyclopedia's 30 million articles in 287 languages, including over 4.5 million in the English Wikipedia.

Click to read the post published on Global Voices here.

They dedicate a tremendous amount of their time to contribute and edit articles, but for no pay (editors work as volunteers) and for little public recognition – their work is credited via their usernames tucked away in the entry's edit history.

Now, one initiative is trying to shine the spotlight on these hard-working “Wikipedians.” WeAreWikipedia is an unofficial project that brings on a different editor each week to curate information regarding their favorite Wikipedia pages and tweet them using the handle @WeAreWikipedia. So far, 19 people representing 17 different language Wikipedias have curated the account.

WeAreWikipedia explains on its blog that it was inspired by a weekly rotation curation handle @WeAreBangalore created by social media strategists from the Indian city of Bangalore in October 2013 to create a space for Bangaloreans to tell their stories, give their opinions or simple connect with other active social media users in the area.

Admin: Most of u r not aware that, one of our previous curators @psubhashish was inspired by us and started global #RoCur @WeAreWikipedia :)
— Bangalore/Rajeev (@WeAreBangalore) June 17, 2014

@WeAreBangalore in turn took its cue from the highly successful @sweden, which turns over the Twitter handle to a different Swede every week as a sort of citizen ambassador program.

The WeAreWikipedia curators also tell personal stories and explain the technicalities of publishing and editing Wikipedia to any readers who ask.

Wherever I go, local Wikipedians are so welcoming and so open to collaboration. I have made friends all around the globe.
— WeAreWikipedia (@WeAreWikipedia) junio 17, 2014

Curators often focus tweets on their Wikipedia language community and country. Two women editors from India, Noopur Raval and Netha Hussain, dedicated many of their publications to facts about women’s rights, issues and development in India while curating the handle during Women’s History Month in March. They also drew attention to an edit-a-thon held in Bangalore that brought 90 women to write about 77 articles related to women in India.

Mariona Aragay, an editor for the Catalan Wikipedia, made a related call for more women editors while she was at the helm of @WeAreWikipedia:

As a wikipedian, it concernes me the low ratio of #woman editors: if you’re a wiki-girl, let us know your experience! #gendergap @wikiwomen

— WeAreWikipedia (@WeAreWikipedia) June 4, 2014

Curators also highlight community events, such as Odisha Dibasa 2014, a gathering at the end of March 2014 of the Odia-language Wikipedia community in the capital of the Indian state of Odisha, where the language is predominantly spoken.

Diptiman Panigrahi, an Odia editor who curated @WeAreWikipedia during the event, talked about his week in a blog post for The Centre for Internet and Society in India:

It was a wonderful experience curating WeAreWikipedia without even much time. Meeting the entire Wikimedia global community was even more fun when I was telling happenings of my own community. I hope to take part in more of such collaborative global issues like this.

You can follow WeAreWikipedia on Twitter, Facebook and on their blog.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/global-voices-online-june-18-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-twitter-account-puts-a-face-to-unsung-volunteer-editors-behind-wikipedia

This Multilingual Edit-a-thon wants to Improve Indian Content on Wikipedia

subha — 2016-01-28T07:23:09Z

Ever wondered how many articles the Kannada Wikipedia or the Hindi Wikipedia have relating to India, its social history, literary and cultural heritage and the journey of over 1600 languages?

The article was published in DNA on January 26, 2016.

India has over 235 Geographical Indications (GI) spread over the length and breadth of the 29 states and 7 union territories. GI identifies goods or products as originating in a region or locality and indicates the unique characteristic or particular qualities it has as a result of being made in that area. Out of India's 235 GI, as identified by the Geographical Indications Registry of the Government of India, there exist only about 70 English Wikipedia entries. The state of many Indian language Wikipedias is even worse where a vast majority of the identified GIs and other important topics related to art, craft, cuisine, culture, attire and tradition are missing from Wikipedia. Even Karnataka, which has the maximum number of GIs at 30, has only a handful of articles and a few images on Wikipedia.

This Republic Day, 75 Wikipedia editors who are volunteers and represent 18 Indic languages are coming together online to show their patriotism in a unique way. It is not by hoisting the tri-colour and talking about India's glorious past, but by enhancing Wikipedia content related to the GIs of India in their own languages. Those who are multilingual are even going to create Wikipedia articles in two or three different languages. The multilingual edit-a-thon started on January 25 and will go on until January 31. The event is focused on improving existing Wikipedia content related to GIs of India, translating them into Indic languages and also creating new articles. Being an online event, it has also opened up the door to many contributors outside India. A few participants from Nepal and Bangladesh have signed up for the event.

So little of the great journey of our products with unique quality is available in the public domain. The saddest part is that there is literally a bottom level existence for content related to Indian GIs on Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia, which is often the first link a web search throws up. This sort of lack of access to knowledge related to India is not new. Even outside of Wikipedia, there is very less that exists about the many stories worth telling from our country. However, crying over the low access to knowledge would never solve the real problem.

This edit-a-thon is just a digital experiment but can be a great way of doing digital activism for the preservation of languages and taking the uniqueness of India to millions of people in their own languages.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/this-multilingual-edit-a-thon-wants-to-improve-indian-content-on-wikipedia

This little innovation is bringing a revolution in the Odia language

subha — 2016-02-27T07:33:06Z

Depicting human language within computing environments has always been a challenge: a given language's script and alphabet needs to be mapped to a coding system that a computer can process digitally. This is done by way of an encoding system that basically maps each character to a unique numeric code.

The article was published by DNA on February 3, 2016.

This was a standard approach for dealing with languages in the computing context. However, over time, many such encoding systems mushroomed. In 2012, Odisha-based non-profit Srujanika, with help from colleagues, created two text encoding converters that could convert two different legacy non-Unicode based script encoding systems to the universally accepted Unicode. I personally tested and found a lot of typos. It seemed to me that one would take more time to convert and proofread than just typing the text.

Unicode is a computing industry standard that provides a unique number for every character of the alphabet irrespective of the platform, program or script. Before the onset of Unicode there existed several other standards—such as American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII)—that defined the manner in which letters of a particular language were depicted on a computer. The text encoding converters generally are used to convert them from one encoding systems to another.

However, as proprietary and legacy encoding systems were so popular among the desktop publishing (DTP) operators, most Indian language media houses remained tied to their existing encoding systems even after Unicode was introduced. This led to editors, journalists, writers and many native language users having to reliable and intuitive way to input in their own language. For example, Unicode Odia resulted in a huge gap of Odia-language content online with users that depended on earlier, disjointed standards.

The converters I explained before could solve this problem partially as they could convert only two encoding systems with about 80% linguistic accuracy. While seeking help to enhance and scale up these existing converters, three Wikimedian-developers came forward to work on the available converters and create more foolproof ones. We worked together for hours spanning over a few months to make the converters better. When I asked my writer and journalist friends to test it, the result literally thrilled me as they all had started writing in Odia on Facebook the very next day.

More blogs started coming in Odia and more social media interaction in Odia. Interestingly, popular newspaper Sarbasadharana.com and an online portal Odisha.com used it. Many even started contributing to blogs and online portals. It became much easier for Wikimedians to use existing resources from portals, newspapers and magazines to enrich Wikipedia. Some of the available soft copies of public domain books acquired and books that were relicensed to CC licenses could easily be used on Wikisource.

Though it is difficult to measure the exact percentage of growth for online Odia-language content on the Internet, a significant change is seen today as compared to the state of the Odia language on the internet six months ago. Almost all the federal entities that were stuck with two non-Unicode encoding systems finally moved to Unicode, with official portal odia.odisha.gov.in including adoption of Unicode in their core policy. As a gesture of support to the development, the federal department has included Odia Wikipedia on the top of their resources page.

Recently, Jnanaranjan Sahu, one of core contributors to the project combined all the converters into a standalone on-wiki converter that is available both on Wikipedia and Wikisource. Many of the larger Odia language community have contributed in finding errors which were fixed. Jyanaranjan has made available a free online responsive converter that not just works from a computer but also seamlessly work from any smartphone. The converter has indeed helped to widely use Odia on the Internet. The bigger dream of an Odia version of Google is closer to becoming real.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dna-february-3-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-little-innovation-is-bringing-revolution-in-odia-language

There is No Such Thing as Free Basics

subha — 2016-02-14T11:37:50Z

India would not see the rain of Free Basics advertisements on billboards with images of farmers and common people explaining how much they could benefit from this Firefox project. Because the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has taken a historical step by banning the differential pricing without discriminating services.

The article was published in Bangalore Mirror on February 9, 2016.

In their notes, TRAI has explained, "In India, given that a majority of the population are yet to be connected to the Internet, allowing service providers to define the nature of access would be equivalent of letting TSPs shape the users' Internet experience." Not just that, violation of this ban would cost Rs 50,000 every day.

Facebook's earlier plan was to launch Free Basics in India by making a few websites—that are mostly partners with Facebook—available for free. The company not just advertised heavily on billboards and commercials across the nation, it also embedded a campaign inside Facebook asking users to vote in support of Free Basics.

TRAI criticised Facebook's attempt for such a manipulative public provocation. However, Facebook was heavily criticised by many policy and Internet advocates, including non-profits groups like Free Software Movement of India and Savetheinternet.in campaign.

The latter two collectives were strongly discouraging Free Basics by bringing public opinion wherein Savetheinternet.org was used to send over 10 lakh emails to TRAI to disallow Free Basics.

Furthermore 500 start ups including major ones like Cleartrip, Zomato, Practo, Paytm and Cleartax also wrote to prime minister Narendra Modi requesting continued support for Net Neutrality — a concept that advocates equal treating of websites — on the Republic Day.

Stand-up comedy groups like AIB and East India Comedy had created humorous but informative videos explaining the regulatory debate and supporting net neutrality which went viral.

Technology critic and Quartz writer Alice Truong reacted saying: "Zuckerberg almost portrays net neutrality as a first-world problem that doesn't apply to India because having some service is better than no service."

In the light of differential pricing, news portal Medianama's founder Nikhil Pawa, in his opinion piece in Times of India, emphasised the way Aircel in India, Grameenphone in Bangladesh and Orange in Africa were providing free access to Internet with a sole motif of access to Internet, and criticised the walled Internet of Facebook that confines users inside Facebook only.

Had the differential pricing been allowed, it would have affected start ups and content-based smaller companies adversely, as they could never have managed to pay the high price to a partner service provider to make their service available for free.

On the other hand, tech-giants like Facebook could have easily managed to capture the entire market. Since the inception of the Facebook-run non-profit Internet.org has run into a lot of controversies because of the hidden motive behind the claimed support for social cause.

The decision by the government has been welcomed largely in the country and outside.

In support of the move, Web We Want programme manager at the World Wide Web Foundation, Renata Avila, has shared saying,

"As the country with the second largest number of Internet users worldwide, this decision will resonate around the world.

"It follows a precedent set by Chile, the United States, and others which have adopted similar net neutrality safeguards. The message is clear: We can't create a two-tier Internet — one for the haves, and one for the have-nots. We must connect everyone to the full potential of the open Web."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/bangalore-mirror-subhashish-panigrahi-february-9-2016-there-is-no-such-thing-as-free-basics

The Newly Updated Indic Keyboard App Now Supports 22 Asian Languages

subha — 2016-06-18T18:21:03Z

This blog post was written in my personal capacity.

The blog post was published by Global Voices on June 12, 2015.

The Indic Project, which belongs to the Indian non-profit Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC), has released a new and significantly upgraded version of its input app “Indic Keyboard” for the Android mobile operating system. This major update comes roughly one year after the app's initial release in March 2014.

Indic Keyboard now supports 22 Asian languages, including 18 Indian languages apart from English, and 54 input layouts. The 23 supported languages are Assamese, Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Manipuri, Maithili, Marathi, Mon, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. On its company blog, SMC lists the various features included in the new update:

Addition of 7 new languages and several new layouts.
We now support 23 languages and 54 layouts in total.
All new Setup wizard makes it simpler for you to get started.
Material design, ability to changes themes.
Material white, Material dark, Holo blue and Holo white themes are available.
Intelligent word suggestion for transliteration – type faster with fewer keystrokes.
For languages with complex letters we now have the ability to type ZWJ and ZWNJ characters directly.
Arabic keyboard – by popular demand.
Code base is updated to support Android Lollipop edition.
A number of bug fixes (e.g. 1 and 2).

So far, the updated keyboard is enjoying a warm response from users:

20,000 people upgraded Indic Keyboard in first 2 days after its new release.

— Jishnu (@jishnu7) May 30, 2015

Brilliant for #Android users interested in writing in their mother tongue. Indic Keyboard v 2.0 supports 23 languages http://t.co/ZVoWuMPFai

— Karthik Subramanian (@chennaikat) May 29, 2015

One commenter writes:

Vernacular computing is a blocker for the complete roll out of computers and Internet to the world. Projects like these are welcome patches to fix that issue.

Typing on touch-screens can be rethought. Especially when it comes to Indic languages which have about double the number of characters compared to English. We shouldn’t constrain our minds to think in traditional layouts. Transliteration is a very good idea. But it puts the dependency back on English. We need radicalize the input methods for non-English languages and avoid the dependence of English altogether.

Anivar Aravind, Executive Director of Indic Project at SMC, and Jishnu Mohan, a Project Administrator at SMC, recently sat down with Rising Voices to discuss the updated app.

Rising Voices (RV): What was the objective behind bringing this mobile app for Indian languages? What has been Indic Project's core motivation?

Anivar Aravind (AA): Indic project focuses on community powered Research and Development of free and open source Indian language information infrastructure for majority of India that does not speak English. “It is pretty clear that unlike most other countries, India will be a “mobile-first” country because the first computing device for most Indians will be the mobile and not the PC.

RV: Why you think language display and input are important for Indian users?

AA: Unavailability of Indian Language interfaces, keyboards and fonts limits freedom of expression of people in their native languages and prevents them from tapping the full potential offered by smart phones and Internet. We believe all mobile users must able to read and write in their native language using their choice of layout. Indic Keyboard is coming as a part of our effort for digital inclusion on the mobile frontier.

RV: What is the reach of the app at this moment?

AA: Indic Keyboard received good user base of 168K+ downloads so far, primarily based on user reviews, without any advertisements and promotions.

RV: Can you share how Indic Keyboard was conceived and has grown?

AA: Indic Keyboard was started as a personal project by Malayalam-language computing advocate and developer Jishnu Mohan in 2013, is later upscaled into a community project collecting Indian language layouts suitable for mobile devices, updated and maintained by the free and open source community.

RV: Jishnu, as the core developer on this project, can you tell us how you overcame major roadblocks while designing Indic Keyboard?

Jishnu Mohan (JM): Absence of fonts in Android operating system was the major roadblock in increasing the language coverage. Android 4.4 supported only few Indian scripts, but some vendors like Samsung included more Indian language scripts. So we decided to go with 16 language support in Indic Keyboard 1.0 version last year. Since Android 5.1 has increased script coverage, we were able to support more languages in this 2.0 release.

RV: What were the other major challenges you faced, Anivar?

AA: The initial challenges of bringing a mobile input layout were many; from building dictionaries to the user interface. Google's Android Open Source Project (AOS) was used as a base for building this app where the keyboards that were integrated came from various sources. Keyboard layouts are not copyrighted and this was very useful for us to use a popular layout like Tamil99 for Tamil or another popular layout like Lekhani that was developed by the Odia Wikimedia community.

Happy to see Script support for Odiya , Saurashtra , Meetri Mayek, Lepcha, Limbu, Ol chikki (Santhali), Sylheti Nagari In Android 5.1

— indicproject (@indicproject) March 15, 2015

RV: How was Indic Project started and what have been its major accomplishments, so far?

AA: During 2005-2008 major ground work was done for localization support in Indic languages and overall improvement of communication using Indian languages. By 2009 web based technology were became our focus which oriented towards building and improving mobile applications for more users reading and writing in their native Indian languages. The project upscaling and 1.0 release of project was part of with the SMC-ICFOSS collaboration as a part of Department of Telecommunications (DIT) Android R & D Project of the Government of India. The project also received another grant from ICFOSS via Government of Kerala's Malayalam Computing project.

RV: What can you tell us about your work in policy-level lobbying and negotiations?

AA: We have done some work in policy front and recently submitted a policy brief requesting the government to mandate the inclusion of at least one Indian language font and one keyboard layout of all 22 official languages recognized as per 8th schedule of the Indian constitution in all smart phones and tablets selling in India.

RV: How did you reach so many users? What are your future promotion plans?

AA: The most important reason why Indic Keyboard reached out to 200k users with over 100k downloads is because of it not bringing up new keyboard layouts where as almost all other mobile input apps have their own proprietary layouts that users take time to learn and use.

RV: What are the difficulties of reaching out to masses of people?

AA: Many of the layouts were already popular and it was an added benefit for the primarily targeting people who know about inputting in their languages. Partnerships with mobile manufacturers and integrators this year for adoption of these keyboards. So users can get Indian language experience via vendor firmware itself without any extra download. Indic Keyboard liberated Indian language input in mobile devices and we want to port the same experience to all emerging mobile platforms.

RV: Are there any final comments or bit of information you'd like to share?

AA: Continuing research and development in this domain including ability to download of dictionaries for user preferred languages, increasing coverage to all 22 official languages in India, developing an free software library for gesture typing and building support for predictive input will be our main focus in the future.

As a promoter and developer of free and open source language technology, SMC plans to focus more on cross-platform mobile input-library-building and policy-level adoption for language input and other language technology advancements in the near future. SMC says it's currently in talks with the Indian government about mandating native keyboards on smart phones.

The keyboard can be downloaded from the Google Play store at http://j.mp/indicmal and also from the software repository at Gitlab at https://gitlab.com/smc/indic-keyboard.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/the-newly-updated-indic-keyboard-app-now-supports-22-asian-languages

The largest Wikipedia gathering in South Asia kicks off

subha — 2016-08-06T17:11:39Z

Wikimedia Conference 2016Wiki Conference India 2016 (WCI), the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia, will be held during August 5-7 this year in Chandigarh, India.

This was published Opensource.com on August 5, 2016

The first iteration of this event was five years ago in 2011. The event is focused around South Asian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. Hundreds of participants, including over 100 scholarship holders from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, will participate in this three-day event. A team of volunteers representing several Wikimedia communities across the country and three Wikimedia affiliates—Wikimedia India, Punjabi Wikimedians and Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge program—are working together to make this event a success.

Several Wikimedia project and program-related talks, meetups and thematic workshops, focused on technology, program design, volunteer leadership building and engagement, gender gap in Wikipedia, global reach, and education, will keep the participants occupied. There will be separate technical tracks, which were chosen from the results of a pre-event needs assessment survey to ensure that community needs are met. Prior to the conference, a month-long edit-a-thon has been running in twelve South Asian language Wikipedias, and one European language Wikipedia (Ukrainian Wikipedia). The focus of this sprint was to expand the content reach of Wikipedia on Punjab, Punjabi people, and their language and culture as the event is happening in Punjab. So far, more than 1900 articles have been created by about 150 Wikipedians, and the edit-a-thon will be also running during the conference to keep the option of creating more articles open to the participants. Some of the guests includes Wikimedia Foundation's board member Nataliia Tymkiv, the organization's newly promoted executive director Catherine Maher, Punjabi-language poet Surjit Patar and Internet freedom advocate and Centre for Internet and Society's Executive Director Sunil Abraham.

As compared to the last WikiConference India, this conference has more thematic focus, especially on challenges like the gender bias on Wikipedia, and emerging projects like the Wikipedia Education Program. There are as many as six presentations related to gender gap, and six more related to education program.

There has been constant engagement on both on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #WCI2016. Some of the most-used basic phrases in the Punjabi language have been recorded and shared to the participants from outside the region to communicate with the locals.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-august-5-2016-largest-wikipedia-gathering-in-south-asia-kicks-off

Talk on bringing 1000 books about the culture of Maharashtra on Marathi Wikipedia

subha — 2020-05-02T16:39:00Z

Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha, a Pune based non-profit that was founded in Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade and colleagues in 1894, has recently announced to digitise their 1000 volumes of books centred around Peshwa culture. A discussion about digitising these books and making them available online on Marathi Wikisource is being organised on December 1 at the Energy Resources Institute(TERI), Bengaluru. Avinash Chaphekar, Joint Secretary of MGS will be addressing this talk.

Books published by Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) vastly cover the Peshwa culture of Maharashtra apart from many other significant aspects of the history of Maharashtra. The books will be digitised on the Marathi-language Wikisource (mr.wikisource.org) by the Marathi Wikimedia community. Marathi Wikisource is a sister project of Marathi Wikipedia and is a free online Marathi-language library. Started in 2012, it currently houses about 800 volumes of Marathi books.

MGS was founded in Pune by Justice M. G. Ranade, Dr. Ramkrishna Bhandarkar and Lokamanya Tilak in 1894. Earlier known Deccan Vernacular Translation Society, it was renamed as Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha in 1948. The Society has a collection of invaluable literary treasure like 100 yrs old rare literary work and manuscripts, Peshwa diaries and records, Justice Ranade's correspondence, 30 thesis on various subjects and many different domains. These collections make the institution a great place for study and research. Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently at Pune, MGS donated 1000 books for Marathi Wikisource so that the books could be digitised and be made available for millions of Marathi readers. Avinash Chaphekar, Joint Secretary of the organisation who will be addressing the talk that is being organised by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/discussion-on-bringing-peshwa-culture-on-marathi-wikipedia