Centre for Internet and Society

Digitize any Book in the Public Domain

subha — 2014-04-03T08:41:18Z

The article is about a mass scale digitization project for Kannada WikiSource by two Wikipedians.

This was originally published in Opensource.com on March 27, 2014.

A form of poetry in India called Vachana sahitya is part of the popular Indian language, Kannada. It evolved in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th as part of the religious Lingayatha movement. Since that time, more than 259 Vachana writers, called Vachanakaru, have compiled over 11,000 Vachanas (verses).

21,000 of these verses were digitally published into 15 volumes, called Samagra Vachana Samputa, by the government of Karnataka. These volumes were then turned into a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya; this project was taken on by two Kannada Wikimedians, a Kannada linguist, and the author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy—to enrich the Kannada WikiSource. This team used Unicode, a standard of consistency for converting text (and code) into a new format.

Swamy was trying to access these poems, and was having trouble because it was in ISCII, an Indian character encoding standard. We began writing scripts to make the Vachanas (poems) searchable by an index. But, in order to do that well, we had to build a platform for everyone to use: the linguistic researchers, students, and the public at large who are interested in reaching this literature.

Omshivaprakash, a Kannada Wikimedian, worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements, and chose the open source software tools to use. I was involved in providing critical hacks for digitization and valuable inputs through suggestions, feedback, and quality assurance.

At present, our repository, Vachana Sanchaya, has around 200,000 unique words that were derived from these poems. The public has been using our repository and accessing Vahanas (poems) from our 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 just meant for reading the poems, it is also meant for research. So, we have added a way for researchers to help us review the content and will be adding references from various research papers.


Above: A screenshot of the Vachana sahitya page

The most commonly searched words are:

ಕರ್ಮ(Karma: English: work/deed)
ಸತ್ಯ(SathyaEnglish: truthfulness )
ನದಿ(Nadī: English:river)

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

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.

We encourage other projects of this kind to follow our method and use any part of our process that is helpful.

Going foward, we would like to:

Initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researches help to tag words and grow the glossary
Continue work on subsequent, similar projects for Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya (work has begun) and Vyasa and Muddann (work not yet started)
Extend this platform to other the contemporary literature works available in the public domain.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opensource-march-27-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-digitize-any-book-in-public-domain

Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER

subha — 2016-02-27T06:00:20Z

My submission titled "Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER" under the theme of "Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education" has been selected for the OER16 conference to be held in Edinburg, Scotland from 19 to 20 April 2016.

GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) is a global initiative for making cultural data open targeting galleries, libraries, archives and museums in particular. GLAM projects are run in collaboration with these cultural institutions where the artifacts and other institutional collections get all sorts of digital treatment, from digitizing manuscripts and books to creating meta data and developing tools to automate and ease the life of contributors, building and 3D models of artifacts and creating multilingual virtual museum experience by using Wikipedia.

These institutions historically being the reservoir of knowledge need more attention with more digital innovation coming in day by day. There being a synergy between the fundamental focus of OER and GLAM initiative, it leaves scholars and GLAM and/or OER practitioners to explore this area that is currently not widely covered. GLAM projects are centered around data mining, digitizing and publishing the work in both machine and human readable forms. The output of all the GLAM projects could directly contribute to creating OERs classifying and customizing the OERs for different age groups and people with accessibility needs. This, in return will also benefit the GLAM projects and institutions for both expanding their reach and replicating these initiatives. The presentation will be around the best practices of several GLAM initiatives and how these projects could lead to create useful OERs. I will also shed some light on the methodology of creating OERs during the development of a GLAM project.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cultural-institution-aka-glam-for-more-oer

Creative Commons comes to India

subha — 2013-07-17T06:49:55Z

Creative Commons team visited four Indian cities to spread the word about CC free licenses and CC affiliate program. Wikimedia India chapter was approached to join hands with Creative Commons for research and community building.

Jessica Coates, Global Network Manager and Jane Hornibrook, Regional Coordinator, Asia-Pacific, Creative Commons recently visited India. The Access to Knowledge team from the Centre for Internet and Society got a chance to join them for three of their meetings: one in Pune and two in Bengaluru.

Ceative Commons is a not-for-profit organization and the base for the free licenses. More than 400 million work in the world are in Creative Commons license as of today. The foundation is looking to expand its wing of voluntary affiliates in India who would support for more outreach, community building and research. "We are excited to see the wikipedians in India and their passion to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Commons is the largest Creative Commons license use and we are looking for joining hands with the Indian wikipedians and the Wikimedia India chapter", says Jessica Coats.


Jessica Coates and Jane Hornibrook from Creative Commons at Centre of Internet and Society, Bengaluru

Jane Hornibook, who looks after Creative Common's operation in Asia-Pacific said, "Creative Commons has many users in India. It would be exciting for us to collaborate with more academicians, wikipedians and organizations like Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS for peer research and outreach and grow our affiliate network in India.

Video

Note: This blog post is a combination of events organized in Pune by Pune Linux/Unix User Group and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research, and CIS and the Wikimedia India Chapter in Bangalore.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons-comes-to-india

Community digest: Konkani language speakers are separated by scripts but unite by Wikipedia; news in brief

subha — 2016-08-07T03:11:06Z

Konkani-language Wikipedians on what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers who speak in different variations of the same language and write in different scripts.

This was published on Wikimedia Blog on August 4, 2016

I reached out to a few Goan Konkani Wikipedians to learn about their experience with the project, especially after it went live in 2015. In the interview they share what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers that are currently dispersed in many states, speak in different variations of the same language, and write in different scripts.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Hi The Discoverer [a long time contributor to Wikipedia who is actively contributing to the Goan Konkani Wikipedia], you have been actively contributing to the Goan Konkani Wikipedia since 2006 even before it went live in 2014. What potential do you see in the Goan Konkani Wikipedia bringing Konkani speakers from the states of Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala?
User:The Discoverer (TD): Even though my first contributions were in 2006, I have been moderately active on Wikipedia all these years.

I do agree with you that Konkani Wikipedia has the potential to bind people across borders. As you have rightly pointed out, Konkani is remarkable in that, for the small geographical area where it is a native language, it has developed a large number of dialects, in addition to being used in multiple scripts. Unfortunately, in the offline world, we see that there are disagreements over certain Konkani scripts being favored or not favored in terms of official recognition. Konkani Wikipedia can not only be a platform in bringing together Konkani speakers from many regions but can also be the unifying factor among the Konkani people.

SP: How do think Wikipedia could be a good platform to help unifying the Konkani people?
TD: For Konkani Wikipedia to succeed, it is not just a ‘good idea’ for Konkani speakers writing in various scripts to work together on one Wikipedia, but it’s also a necessity and a challenge at the same time. It’s a necessity, because as things stand, no one script has a strong enough community to run a Wikipedia by themselves. It’s a challenge because not everyone can read every script, and it’s important for all the users of a Wikipedia to be able to understand all the content on that site.

SP: Very rightly spotted. And how do you think the Wikipedia community and the CIS-A2K program should work together to tackle this challenge?
TD: We need an automatic script converter (see the script converter resource page for Konkani on Meta and task on Phabricator) that could make the lives of the editors easier. Most people cannot read more than two scripts. Most users are currently depending on an external site for transliteration when the user cannot read the script used in a Wikipedia article. That’s painful and a user might also would not know about a third party converter. An automatic script converter on Wikipedia would enable people to read any page in the script of their choice in a single click. This is where CIS-A2K can really help Konkani Wikipedia, by helping to implement the script converter. In addition to the script converter, CIS-A2K could also study various multi-script Wikipedias in existence and prepare a list of such features that are used in these Wikipedias to deal with multiple scripts, so that Indian multi-script Wikipedias can consider implementing such a feature as well.

Konkani Wikipedia is facing another challenge right now in growing the community as there are only handful of active editors. And we need contributors from varied walks of life to add more diversity to the community. The boost that was needed initially to make Konkani Wikipedia live—thanks to institutions like Goa University (GU) and Nirmala Institute of Education (NIE) and CIS-A2K for bringing in many student-editors—needs more intensity now. Students from GU and NIE were mainly from the Konkani language and teaching disciplines. If you consider other larger Wikipedias, like the English Wikipedia, they owe their success to editing by people from a diverse backgrounds, and also to the fact that the people are comfortable with the basics of markup and coding and were able to build templates, etc. Today, there is almost no one who is working on templates and other similar technical stuff for Konkani Wikipedia. Here too, CIS-A2K can help by reaching out to Konkani speakers with a background in computing—for instance, students of Bachelor of Computer Application (BCA), Master in Computer Application, Computer Science and engineering. This will help build a community that is technically adept at creating templates and dealing with more advanced types of content for the Wikipedia.

The Konkani Wikipedia can also take advantage of software extensions like VisualEditor and Flow that the knowledge of markup and other technicalities that the user needs to have, so that users who are uncomfortable with editing markup can focus on just adding content with a much more simple and user-friendly interface.

In these ways, participation of people from different regional and vocational backgrounds can form a vibrant editing community leading to the growth of the Konkani Wikipedia.

In brief

WikiConference India 2016 to be held at Chandigarh during August 5–7: The second WikiConference India (WCI) will be held on August 5-7 in Chandigarh, India. After the first WCI in 2011, this will be the largest gathering of the Wikimedians from the Indian subcontinent. 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. Over 100 scholarships have been offered to noteworthy contributors from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Various talks, meetups and workshops are planned for the three-day event, and a needs assessment survey has been put in place for ensuring any hackathon needs are addressed.
Punjab edit-a-thon: A month-long edit-a-thon has been running in 12 Indic language Wikipedias and one European language Wikipedia (the Ukrainian) to enrich the content related to Punjab, the Punjabi people, and their language and culture. So far, more than 1000 articles have been created by about 100 Wikipedians. As we have already surpassed the dream target of 1000 articles, we are planning to extend the edit-a-thon through WikiConference India so many can participate during the event.
Campaign for relicensing copyrighted books under Creative Commons licenses: A campaign has been started to relicense Telugu-language books of several noted authors from “all rights reserved” to a Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) license. This campaign was started on June 19 and copyright migration process is complete for 17 books so far. Once the copyright migration is over the books—ranging from historical figures and popular personalities to regional history—are going to be digitized on Wikisource. “I don’t want these works to be in bookshelf and get wasted by termites. My wish as an author and researcher is to make these works available to future historians who can make use of it, so that our people get to know the local history” shares Kanuri Badarinadh, a historian, novelist and journalist who has donated some of his books.
Train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training program for capacity building of community leaders from Indian subcontinent: After two iterations of the Train the Trainer in 2013 and 2015, CIS-A2K organized the third program during June 15-17 at Bengaluru. The Mediawiki training was designed to help groom technical leadership skills of the technical contributors of the communities. A total of 45 participants, that were selected by a collaborative consultation with the community, took part in these events. The trainers for both the events consisted of subject experts from the Wikimedia community, the free knowledge movement, the free and open source software community and CIS-A2K program staff. A series of small Mediawiki trainings will follow soon that will be led by the trained participants.
Indian women in Science edit-a-thon: Organized by IndiaBioscience, a not-for-profit working for research and advocacy on the life sciences in India, this edit-a-thon began with an introduction to the series of Wikipedia edit-a-thons that have been running to expand Wikipedia’s reach on Indian women with contribution to Science. There was a Q&A session Professor Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan followed by introduction to Wikipedia editing, its policies and guidelines, and brief on copyright, and Creative Commons licensing. 11 new articles were created and 11 existing articles were expanded in English, Hindi and Odia-language Wikipedias.
Indigenous South-Asian language gets a new open Unicode font: A new font for the Ol chiki script (used to write the Santali language) along with input tools are getting ready to be released soon. Santali is spoken by over 6 million people in South Asia over Bangladesh and Nepal and six states in India. This project, supported by the Centre for Internet of India, will help native language speakers type in Unicode across platforms, and also using Universal Language System in all Wikimedia projects.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/community-digest-konkani-language-speakers-are-separated-by-scripts-but-unite-by-wikipedia-news-in-brief

Community Digest—Estonians working on a new feedback system for Wikipedia articles

subha — 2016-02-27T06:30:41Z

Community digest is a weekly publication on Wikimedia Blog. This week, I have authored a section on the Kannada Wikipedia's 13th anniversary that is being celebrated today. It includes a small section from a longer interview with Kannada Wikipedian Vasanth S.N. The two blogs on creating Odia-language character encoding converters I had written before in the Huffington Post and the DNA are also featured in the digest.

Read the original published on Wikimedia Blog here.

Sites that rely on the cooperation of people need to be able to easily exchange information. When there are some problems with an article, you could always add some templates to specific places or point to them on talk page—but that can sometimes be painful and time consuming.

The problem can grow even greater when articles are written inside a Wikipedia Education Program. You may need to follow up with hundreds of students and provide them feedback so that they can easily understand what should they fix. This can be a rather tricky job when dealing with people who have never before written to Wikipedia.

For example, in Estonia we have a course called “Estonian Composition and Conversation” in the University of Tartu, where there are on average more than 200 students per year writing articles on Wikipedia. We are keenly interested in providing good quality feedback, but with that number of students and with the use of the usual wikisystem, that is hard to achieve.

So we needed a solution.

When using the usual method (the talk page), you need to point out where are all of the mistakes located and then express your concerns about them. With a lot of comments, that does get rather messy and it’s hard to understand where are those comments directed to; it’s not an ideal medium for feedback in massive scale and not that useful for neither the students nor the person giving feedback. So the goal was simple: to ease the process of giving feedback to students who write wikiarticles as their coursework.

What we did was to create a system called WikiComment.

What does it do? Well, at first it allows to add comments to exact letters/sentences/paragraphs to speed up the commenting process and make it easier to locate the issues. In addition to adding comments, it also provides various highlighting options and a possibility to strike through text. Secondly, it allows for better monitoring of the articles of interest. That means the wikiComment user has information about which pages have been modified and he or she can easily check if the changes have solved the marked questions.

We hope that this will make it easier to focus on text and to the quality of writing.

Obviously WikiComment could be used outside the education initiative and in many other ways as well, but that is just how it all started. For example we’ll soon add support for sites like Meta-Wiki, Wikisource, Wikivoyage, Wikinews, and Wikiquote, among others. Having a discussion about some details in grant request or talking about local tourist sites may have just become easier. But to really optimize the system and to make it as good as possible we’ll need your feedback, so please go on and test that site—if you have any suggestions, just let us know.

Ivo Kruusamägi, Estonian Wikipedian

In brief

Kannada Wikipedia anniversary: The Kannada Wikipedia is all set to celebrate its 13th anniversary. The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on 12 June 2003 with a message “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia in Kannada). However, it took over a year—on July 12, 2004 the first article about a city Shimoga was created. Over the last decade Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for the Kannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name—there were about 700,000 pageviews in December 2015. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (February) being the highest and 22 (May) the lowest and 80 being the count in last December. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. Since its inception, the project has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles.

The biggest hurdle, as explained by Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig, has been cleaning up the articles created by paid translations of Google when Kannada Wikipedia along with many other Indian language Wikipedias were used as testing grounds for improving Google Translate, a multilingual machine translation tool. Vasanth S.N., a Kannada Wikipedian who has cleaned up over 60 such articles prefers to use an existing good quality encyclopedia like the 16 volume Kannada Vishwakosha, published by Mysore University and relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the university, as a resource to create and improve articles. To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians are gathering at Saint Aloysius College Mangalore, Karnataka this 14th. The larger community, including long time Wikipedians and new members like the students faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs, will gather and participate in a day-long edit-a-thon and chalk out plans for the future.

Innovation and revolution in the Odia language: Wikimedian Subhashish Panigrahi has written two pieces recently. In dnaindia.com, he described a Unicode converter that in revolutionizing Internet access in the Odia language; in the Huffington Post, he wrote about why contributing and adding to Wikipedias in Indian language is so important.

Coming together across the divide: Saanjh (ਸਾਂਝ سانجھ), a Punjabi word which means collaboration, was an online edit-a-thon between the Gurmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia and Shahmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia in January 2016. The plan came together after two editors, one from each side, met at Wikimania 2015. Organized by the Punjabi Wikimedians User Group, 23 editors participated; you can read more about their story on Meta.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate, Wikimedia Foundation

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-community-digest-estonians-working-on-new-feedback-system-for-wikipedia-articles

Community celebrates birthday of Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wiktionary

subha — 2016-07-09T03:25:02Z

This June, Odia Wikipedia turned 14 and Odia Wiktionary turned 11. Odia Wikimedia community member Chinmayee Mishra, CIS-A2K Programme Associate Sailesh Patnaik and I co-authored this blog in the Wikimedia Blog. The blog chronicles several major activities of the community and features quotes from many old and new community members.

This was published on Wikimedia Blog on June 23, 2016.

With the Odia Wikipedia and its sister projects, a handful of dedicated volunteer editors are taking the Odia language to the world outside. The editor community that has recently celebrated Odia Wikipedia’s 14th anniversary in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India is collectively growing two more projects; Odia Wikisource, an online library that already has over 300 volumes of text, and Odia Wiktionary, an online dictionary that has over 100,000 entries. With these live projects and more projects in the pipeline, this community is bringing a digital revolution in Odia by sharing valuable content online and creating many language tools inside and outside the Wikimedia projects.

The Odia Wikipedia community had gathered in the city for a two-day long event to celebrate the anniversary. These two days were spent in intensive capacity building activities as the community is quite dispersed in many places in Odisha and outside, and are all volunteers. Odia Wikipedia, the flagship project was started as one of the first four Indian language Wikipedias along with Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedia in 2002, a year after the English Wikipedia was made live. The project was quite dormant for more than nine years and got revived by a group of editors in Bangalore during 2011. Then the project became much of a household name when more Odia speakers living in Odisha and outside joined contributed in writing and editing articles of several different subject areas. Odia Wikipedia is part of the 292 language Wikipedia family and a larger global family of hundreds of other free knowledge projects that are collectively known as Wikimedia projects. “Odia Wikipedia is officially available online at https://or.wikipedia.org and is free for anyone to create articles on notable topics, and edit and enhance those articles”, says Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the administrators of the project. Aliva Sahoo, one of the active editors, shares, “being a student of Odia-language I was seeking information on musical instruments and could not find much. So I started translating from English and now it is one of the longest articles on Odia Wikipedia.” As part of the WikipediansSpeak project, we have tried to capture the voice of the community of Aliva and a few other contributors.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): How did the two-day long capacity building activity go? What was the outcome of the different sessions?
Jnanaranjan Sahu: This event was useful in bringing most of the active contributors under one roof as we are working online. This event helped us learn from each other and impart knowledge so that everyone can go back and use them.

SP: What are the problems you faced before coming to this event and how these sessions are going to help you in future?
Abha Pradhan: I was not sure of the copyright part while uploading images on Wikimedia Commons. A lot many pictures got deleted because of my own ignorance. Similarly, I got to learn a lot about linking multiple language entries using Wikidata. These two are my biggest lessons of all that I learned from the sessions taken by other experienced Wikipedians.

SP: What did you learn from these sessions?
Rajalaxmi Mishra: I got to learn about basics of Wikipedia editing, rules and guidelines, several technical aspects like using templates, uploading and adding images to articles and dealing with copyright issues on Wikipedia.

Subas Chandra Rout, one of the long time active Wikimedians has been the single most contributor to grow the medical science-related articles on Odia Wikipedia. Subas is the only Wikimedian who has translated all the medical science-related article from Wikimedia Medical Project run by the Wiki Project Med.

“We have several subject areas covered on Odia Wikipedia – from the elaborate rituals of Jagannatha temple to medical science. Interestingly, almost all the articles on medical science are written by a retired assistant professor Dr. Subas Chandra Rout and needless to say those articles are of really high quality”, explains Pritiranjan Tripathy, an editor who is based in the Indian city of Kolkata.

It was like a “Catch me if you can” challenge when I started to translate medical topics into the Odia language as part of Wiki Project Med on March 5, 2015 with my first article on African trypanosomiasis. There were more than 150 articles in the project. Gradually the number of topics in the project increased and so did my translated article on Odia Wikipedia. After completion of the 345th article (Marfan syndrome, on May 6, 2016), I looked at the Wikipedia project dashboard, and I saw that I was the only person to complete all the articles in the project among all the world’s contributors.

“The next big goal is to enhance the quality of the existing articles by adding more images, references from external sources and expanding small articles by adding more information”, said long-time contributor Shitikantha Dash. Shitikantha, who is also an administrator of Odia Wiktionary, says, “it is important that more people contribute to the Odia Wiktionary so that words of all times and all genres, especially the technical and loan words make their way to this free multilingual dictionary. A 10 day-long campaign is going to be organised to celebrate the 11th anniversary of Odia Wiktionary so that every Wikipedia editor adds at least one word. And we are also using these words to create a spell check that will be freely available for anyone to use”.

The contributor community that is collaboratively building these projects has been also creating many tools and technical resources like editor manuals. The script encoding converters that the community has built is helping a lot of online users to be able to share their writings on blogs and social media. “Before the onset of these converters, a vast majority of the people working in press and media were stuck with outdated encoding systems like Shreelipi and Akruti. Mrutyunjaya Kar, a long time contributor and administrator of two projects; Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource explains, “Odia Wikipedia is available at https://or.wikipedia.org and we encourage more people to join us in this movement.”

“This is a way to bring digital freedom for everyone and share the world’s knowledge in our own language.”

Chinmayee Mishra, Odia Wikimedian
Subhashish Panigrahi, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Sailesh Patnaik, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Associate, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-july-7-2016-community-celebrates-birthday-of-odia-wikipedia-and-odia-wiktionary

Classical Odia Language in the Digital Age

subha — 2014-07-28T07:41:51Z

The essay was published in the June edition of Odisha Review, a magazine published by Government of Odisha's Department of Information and Public Relations.

Click to read the original article published in Odisha Review here.

Odisha’s documentation and archival history dates back to the pre-Kalinga civilization that existed more than 5,000 years back in which today’s Odisha was a major part of it. It, later was more vibrant when Kalinga kingdom and was widespread from Ganga to Godavari, geographically consisting of modern day Odisha entirely and partly Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chattishgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telengana and part of Tamilnadu and Kerala. The epigraphs of cave painting in Gudahandi and stone inscriptions of Hatigumpha in Udayagiri complex are a few examples of the early documentations that the ancestral Kalingan tribes had made. Furthermore, the early Buddhist poets of Kalinga (popularly known as 64 Sidhapada) wrote “ doha ” (spiritual verses) in Pali language. Pali is the language of all of the Buddhist literature and predecessor of modern Odia, Maithili, Bangla and Assamese language and has deep impact on many other Indic languages. Odia has travelled through a long journey of “Tambapata ” (bronze plate inscription), “Talapatra” (palm leaf manuscripts), printed books since early 18th century and e-books in the modern days. Years of history that have perished during invasions by foreign invaders could have told more about this civilization. Modern Odisha state, so far has been able to uphold the pride of having the largest number of palm leaf manuscripts (over 20,000 manuscripts) in the world. Odia printing and publication industry is spread across all the 30 administrative districts of Odisha and other Indian cities like Kolkata and New Delhi and to some extent in some parts of Surat. A few million books would have been printed starting from the first book “New Testament ” that got printed in 1809.[1]

In this chronology there comes the new age reading tools “e-books” or electronic books less formally initiated in the eighties by students of Regional Engineering College, Rourkela (Now National Institute of Rourkela) and now crossed a decade.[2]

Odia got classical status on 20 February this year after 5 other Indian languages on the basis of its literary heritage of over three millennia. Interestingly, it is older than most of the most spoken languages in the world. Like many other mighty civilizations, traders of this region conquered places and took their language and culture to their occupied colonies. Early traders of Kalingan Sadhabas were trading silk and spices with South Asian countries. With them travelled Kalinga’s language and culture. When all of the other language’s have been able to have a strong presence on the Internet, online content available in Odia is way limited compared to even other Indic languages. It has been almost a decade since Odia support is available in most computers across operating systems. But, the digital desktop publishing (DTP) published resources are still not available in a searchable manner – not on internet or in a computer locally. Currently, the Odia publication industry uses proprietary standard fonts for Odia typing. Akruti, LEAP office, Shreelipi are name to few. All of these were the only means for printing books using desktop publishing at one point of time. But, these encoding systems are out-of-date. The major drawback of these fonts is, they have regular Latin characters replaced by Odia characters. If a document is typed using one such fonts is sent to someone it is difficult to even read or reuse if the person in the receiving end does not have the exact font used for typing. As already mentioned the fonts are commercial and proprietary and it is mandatory to buy them to use. In reality most of the users do not buy and use pirated versions of the software for work.

The printed documents typed in one standard is not compatible with the other one. To avoid this problems, an advanced universal standard called “Unicode” was released in early 2000. Unicode has both Odia and Latin characters in a font that allows both the scripts to be displayed correctly at the same time. It is universally compatible and all the operating systems have Unicode fonts installed in the computers. This takes the pain of installing multiple fonts to access any typed text. Searching any text typed in Unicode is as simple as googling something in English. Moreover, documents typed using one Unicode font could be read using another Unicode font. Unfortunately, none of the Odia newspapers have their publications in Unicode at this moment.

This, practically does not allow any reader to search, access, reuse and quote any content. Same is the case for all other published resources like books and magazines. More than 80 per cent of the published content are not even released online and also not archived.

Many publishers, intimidated of online content plagiarism have been protecting their publications. Unfortunately, copyright laws in India are not stringently practiced unlike the west. This has given rise to a parallel piracy market for the movies and music over the years. Interestingly, books are not of that much demand as music and movies are. As a result of the lingua-cultural shift to English from native languages regional language publications are not widely sold in the post-colonial Indian book market as compared to the English publications. The case of the use of Odia language as a language of governance is still not put in place. Odia is still to be used as a medium for official communication in all of the government offices. English medium educational Boards have been domineering over the Odisha state Board. Despite of these challenges, number of Odia dailies is slowly growing. There are around 100 newspapers published daily from various regions of Odisha. It is essential to note that news archives, unlike literary writings have much of any kind of high commercial value. So is in the case of scholarly and research publications. If all of these publications could be made available online in digital form that will take Odia literature to the global audience. This triggers the need of A) making sure the forthcoming publications are not just typed in Unicode but made available online, B) digitization of published books and making them available free on internet.

It is essential to take measures to ascertain the forthcoming publications use Unicode standard and digitizing published matter and publishing them online. Online content could be made available in Unicode and has trillion times reach than printed matter. As a vast number of the users use Microsoft’s Windows XP they could either upgrade their operating system or move to completely free and open source and Linux based operating systems like Ubuntu. At this moment, Odia has far less content on internet.

Odia Wikipedia tops the list of Odia Unicode content websites and is the largest Odia online encyclopaedia with over 8,000 articles. Available for free on or.wikipedia.org, Odia Wikipedia is a community project where any user could create, edit and modify content. The articles being encyclopaedic and referenced from other reliable sources has some level of authenticity. As this is a small project and is developing it needs more voluntary contribution to grow to a larger project that could serve the purpose of an Open Educational Resources (OER) for students. There are a handful of web and news portals maintained by individuals and organizations that have Odia content in Unicode. The other upcoming project is Odia Wikisource which is an online library. Odia books that are useful for the Odia speaking community like classical literature, religious scriptures, dictionaries and lexicons, journals and research papers and manuscripts could go online on this platform. The most important thing about these two projects is that they both have only volunteers as contributors and anyone and everyone could contribute. Any individual or organization who is interested could add a lot of value to Odia language by contributing the process of digitizing content and making them available for free. These projects, additionally are released under Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses that allows free reuse, modification and commercial reproduction of content. Many valuable books could also be part of Odia Wikisource.

Srujanika, a Bhubaneswar based organization in collaboration with National Institute of Technology, Rourkela and Pragati Utkal Sangh, Rourkela has scanned over 760 Odia books. Out of these, over 200 books are hosted in a non-profit project “Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB)” and hosted at: oaob.nitrkl.ac.in. Organizations like Manik-Smrutinyas and Institute of Odia Studies and Research have re-licensed books of noted author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty and Dr. Debi Prasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty respectively to Creative Commons licenses for free, commercial distribution. Majority of the resourceful magazines like The Utkal Prasanga could be also made available in Unicode standard by changing its copyright terms to Creative Commons licenses. Larger debates are also needed to convince authors and knowledge and information producing organizations/departments like universities and government’s departments (e.g.Information and Public Relations, Department of Mass Education and Department of Statistics.) to migrate from proprietary copyright restrictions to reusable licenses like Creative Commons licenses. This will not only will help for more public-private collaboration and knowledge production but also taking language resources to masses which is discontinued because of lack of updated technological advancement like use of Unicode font and digitizing valuable content. Government portals need Odia localization in Unicode standard so public get access to information in Odia language and this could make e-governance much more easier. Government notifications that often are released publicly are found to be released in image formats. Many such public and private information could just be released in plain text that will increase the searchability, accessibility and reusability million times.

Footnotes:

[1].Pattnaik, Pushpashree. Presentation on digitization of Odia books in Utkal University (21 February 2014).

[2].Mohanty, Jagadish, eSabada. eOdissa.com (2009 - 2010).

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odisha-review-june-2014-classical-odia-language-in-digital-age

CIS-A2K, KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences sign MoUs

subha — 2014-02-03T06:24:18Z

KIIT University, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoUs) for furthering Odia Wikipedia.

Dr.Achyuta Samanta, Founder-Chairman of KIIT and KISS inaugurated both the collaborations formally. Dr. Sasmitarani Samanta, Registrar, KIIT and Surjya Kanta Mohanty, Chief Operating Officer, KISS signed the MoUs of KIIT and KISS respectively whereas T. Vishnuvardhan, Programme Director, CIS-A2K was there to sign in both the MoUs on behalf of CIS along with Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, CIS-A2K. Odia Wikipedians Dr. Subas Chandra Rout, Shitikantha Dash, Jnanaranjan Sahu and Sailesh Patnaik, senior faculty and management members; Prof. Parthosen Gupta, Professor-KIIT School of Management, Sucheta Priyabadini, Joint Registrar, KIIT Santosh K. Pani, Dean-KIIT School of Electrical Engineering and other staff members from KISS were there for this event.

The event was held on January 11, 2014 from 10.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/cis-a2k-kiit-university-kaling-institute-of-social-sciences-mou

Celebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013

subha — 2013-04-16T12:48:40Z

Wikipedia Club Pune, a local community based outreach user group in Pune has recently organized Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 to spread words about “Spoken Wikipedia”, a project to add recorded audio for Indic language Wikipedia articles which will help the disabled to access Wikipedia and “Bridging Editor Gender Gap.”

On January 12 and 13, 2013, I was in Pune to participate in the Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013, a two day event organized by Wikipedia Club Pune to promote Wikipedia as an effective means of education, to empower and reach out to India, to bring the country under a spotlight through Spoken Wikipedia, and to bridge the gender gap of Wikipedia editors. Here is a summary of the activities.

Day 1

On the first day, January 12, more than 100 people including students from almost 10 different schools, housewives, working professionals and free and open source activists participated. The opening ceremony began with talks from Abhishek Suryawanshi, founder member of Wikipedia Club Pune, Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, Rishi Aacharya, Principal, PAI International Learning Solutions, and social activist Ms. Vibha.

Before the formal opening Abhishek spoke for a while about the Spoken Wikipedia project which is one main agenda of the two days event. He explained about the need of spoken wikipedia, especially for people with disabilities and how effective it would be when it spreads in 20 Indic languages. In the past wikipedians in Pune gathered and recorded articles in various Indian and international languages.

Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President, Wikimedia India Chapter introduced the chapter's role for Wikimedia movement to the audience. He spoke about the chapters' in few of the national events/projects like Wiki Loves Monument, GLAM project in Crafts Museum, Delhi and many other outreach events. There were few announcements about the chapter on the MoU to be signed from the chapter with district collector of Kanyakumari, the India Chapter being partner to Springfest, IIT, Kharagpur, Commons day celebration in February and GNUnify 2013, Pune.

Vibha, a social activist based in Delhi spoke about gender discrimination in many aspects of our social and professional life. Access to knowledge for free could bridge this and Wikipedia, being so known universally and accessed by millions of people every day could be the best platform for this.' says Vibha.

Rishi Aacharya, Principal of PAI International brought the vedic saying "Ya vidya sa vimuktaye" to explain the real meaning of knowledge which is free of its existence in an Indian context. He spoke about open source movement and Wikipedia's part in it.

After the formal opening there was a Q&A session for the participants to clarify various questions they had about Wikipedia. Then they were explained about the three parallel sessions: An Open Discussion about Gender Gap, Workshop for Indic Languages, and Spoken Wikipedia. The session on gender gap was attended by many school students. Vibha and some activists coordinated this event. In the Workshop for Indic languages and Spoken Wikipedia, wikipedians helped participants for the workshop with basic editing and the participants edited Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia. Articles from various medical subjects of common interest were chosen. There were three medical professionals to support with the medical terminologies for editors contributing to Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia.

At the end of the day there were separate wrap up tracks to summarize the learning of whole session. All of the participants gathered together to educate each other about the work they have done. Many of the participants spoke about their experience and learnings. Plans for the next day was announced. Wikipedians gathered for a group photo and socialized after the closing talks.

Day 2

The second day, January 13, of the Wikipedia Summit in Pune was a sequel of the activities which happened on the first day. More than 40 students took part in this session. Vibha, Srishti and team were coordinating the gender gap track. Many topics related to Gender Gap, gender based discrimination, Role of gender gap in occupation, Gender gap in Wikipedia, Participation of Woman editors on Wikipedia were discussed.

One of the participating Wikipedians recording his voice for a Marathi article	Spoken Wikipedia is a project to bring out editors who are willing to contribute to Wikipedia by reading the Wikipedia articles, recording them and the uploading them to WikiCommons. These recorded audio could be used for articles on various Indic Wikipedias and would be really useful for users with disabilities. The first workshop was aimed for contribution for articles related to common diseases. "Those who are blind and unable to read can listen to the articles and get information. This will be beneficial to a lot of people", says Atharva, a school student who has contributed to an article about Rabies on Marathi Wikipedia.

Participants of the Spoken Wikipedia session worked on the articles on Hindi and Marathi Wikipedia and moved them from sandboxes to article namespaces. After all of the articles were created they recorded them. They formed groups of 3-4 members and worked together. One of them would search information mainly from the English Wikipedia articles and some of the available Marathi (or Hindi), some others would translate and the other member would record it using a mobile phone. That was a great team effort.

Over 25 voluntary organizers joined hands for making this a success. There were about 120 participants. At the end of the day participants from both the sessions gathered. Many of the participants and organizers shared their experiences and learnings. The program was concluded with socializing, taking group pictures, promises to stay in touch and taking active part in more Wikipedia activities.

This event was co-hosted by Centre for Internet and Society with a financial support of ₹ 21,600 granted by Kusuma Foundation.

Also see:

Wikipedia Summit Pune: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune
Wikipedia Club Pune: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune
Pictures: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune
Spoken Wikipedia Project: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India
Pune Club facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune

Video

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013

Celebrating the 13th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia

subha — 2016-05-23T09:08:23Z

The Kannada-language Wikipedia, arguably the largest online encyclopedia in Kannada language, celebrated its 13th anniversary on February 14, 2016 in Mangalore.

To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians gathered at St. Aloysius College Mangalore, Karnataka. The larger Kannada Wikimedia community including long time Wikipedians and new members like the students, faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs gathered, participated in a day long edit-a-thon and chalked out plans for the future. The event is organised by the Kannada Wikimedia community and Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, Wikipedian and Assistant Professor of Kannada department at St. Aloysius College coordinated the event locally.

117 people gathered in the event out of which 96 were active editors of the Kannada Wikipedia community. Noted Kannada-computing researcher Kinnikambla Padmanabha Rao (widely known as KP Rao) addressed the public event and engaged with the audience about defining Kannada Wikipedia’s role a large role in widening Kannada’s presence on the Internet. The local organisers also took the event participants through a heritage walk in the heritage village of Pilikula Nisarga Dhama, an open library of the rich cultural heritage of Karnataka. The heritage walk resulted in over 300 image uploads on Wikimedia Commons ranging from the life and culture of coastal Karnataka to select rich heritage of the state. 20 new editors also participated in the event and they were oriented on basics of Wikipedia editing and Creative Commons licenses.

Triveni.K, one of the participants who is now pursuing her MSc. at Christ University, explains this event as a great learning platform for even core Wikipedia policies in details apart from many other Wikipedia policies she learnt here. “I’m little occupied for my exams but when it is over, I will be back on Wikipedia”, shares Triveni.

Prior to the event, four edit-a-thons were organised in four different cities of Karnataka. Themes chosen for the cities were Kannada literature in Mysore, Mechanical Engineering in Sagara, Science-related articles in Bangalore and article on notable female of the coastal Karnataka region in Mangalore. Follow up edit-a-thons were organised after the anniversary celebration with the same themes that were there in the previous session for the first three places where the follow up edit-a-thons in St. Aloysius College and St. Agnes College were both on medicinal plants.

The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on 12 June 2003 with a message “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning “Welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia” in Kannada). However it took over a year -- on July 12, 2004 the first article about a city Shimoga was created. Over the last decade Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for the Kannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name -- needless to say that 705,199 unique visitors read the articles every month as per the December 2015 statistics. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (February) being the highest and 22 (May) the lowest and 80 being the count in last December. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. The project since its inception has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles. The biggest hurdle, as explained by Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig, has been cleaning up the articles created by paid translations of Google when Kannada Wikipedia along with many other Indian language Wikipedias were used as testing grounds for improving Google Translate, a multilingual machine translation tool. Vasanth S.N., a Kannada Wikipedian who has cleaned up over 60 such articles prefers to use an existing good quality encyclopedia like the 14 volume Kannada Vishwakosha, published by Mysore University and relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the university, as a resource to create and improve articles.

The 14th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia was another milestone in the long journey of Kannada language and there are many more to come. More about the event could be read on the event page on Kannada Wikipedia.

Ananth Subray, Programme Associate, CIS-A2K contributed to this blog.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kannada-wikipedias-13-year-old-journey-of-knowledge-sharing

Celebrating Odia Wikipedia's Ninth Anniversary

subha — 2013-02-28T04:32:29Z

Odia Wikipedia saw its first edit on January 29, 2004. After a dormancy of many years it got revived in 2011. To commemorate the effort of many volunteer wikipedians, a celebratory event was organized on January 29, 2013 in Bhubaneswar. Subhashish Panigrahi participated in this event.

Odia Wikipedia recently has celebrated its 9 ^th anniversary. January 29 is considered to be that day when someone made a first edit on it. Communities from Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Nalconagar joined hands to celebrate this event with a panel discussion on "Application of Odia language in e-media". The discussion was coordinated by Nilambar Rath, Director of Academy for Media Learning. The event was organized by the Odia Wiki Community with support from The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with Academy for Media Learning. Panelists who took part in the discussion were Prasanna Kumar Mohanty, Director of "Odia Bhasa Pratisthan", Dr. Prafulla Tripathy, Odia linguist and writer, Dr. Dhanada Mishra, Academician and Director-Academics, KMBB College of Engineering, Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society, Jatindra Das, Senior journalist and founder, Odisha.com and Subhransu Panda, Senior journalist, Sambad. Wikipedians, students and journalists took active part in the discussion.

To celebrate the success of Odia Wikipedia, wikipedians joined the guest to cut a “Chhenapoda” and light Deepam as an integral part of the Odia culture.

The discussion began with Nilambar Rath speaking briefly about the agenda of the meeting and about the current scenario of the use of Odia language in media especially in the web. Prasanna Kumar Mohanty spoke about how the true form of the language should be taken to public via media. He also emphasized about the need to sacrifice our conventional way of approach and adopt new technologies like Wikipedia. Many such efforts are not rewarded because of the lack of support from the government even though funding is available for such development. Odia linguist Prafulla Tripathy explained about the lack of public interest to pledge for declaring Odia as a classical language even though Odia holds the 31^st position among 6500 world languages. "The language of our personal lives, social interaction and verbal communication never gets documented. The confusion among various linguists is another obstacle to take Odia to a global level. If the script grammar is kept in focus and script and eventually the fonts are simplified then they would be easier to be used online", he expressed. Dr. Tripathy also shared his experience of his interaction with other Indian language experts at places where he worked such as on OCR (Optical character reading) software which could be a great tool to digitize many precious resources. He offered his support for helping with OCR in Odia. Few other aspects of simpler approaches of scripts discussed were glossary, Odia-English and English-Odia lexicon, spell check feature for typing and interactive e-learning which could boost the effort of the wikipedians.

Prof. Dhanada Mishra took the audience through the free and open source culture and Linux and future role of Odia Wikipedia to tackle the problems of primary education. He thanked the wikipedians for their noble effort and showed his interest in promoting it more in academics. Subhashish Panigrahi discussed about the role of Odia Wikipedia in documenting various resources in Odia Wikipedia. He brought various technical problems that common men face while typing, contributing to Wikipedia and how they could be handled. He also proposed a plan for bringing more language experts and museum curators to the community which would increase the spectrum of resource and capacity for the Odia Wikimedia community.

Jatindra Das, founder of the first online Odia newspaper Odisha.com discussed about the hurdles of using Odia Unicode and acceptance level in the society for it. Senior journalist Subhransu Panda discussed about the usage of various fonts and how adopting Unicode could bring a lot of information to the public.

Nilambar Rath, Director, Academy for Media Learning talked about the future efforts of Odia Wikipedia community. He elaborated how media could be used as an essential tool for taking Wikipedia to more people. Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the very active Wikipedians closed the ceremony with a brief talk about the achievements, education program and impact of Odia Wikipedia in the recent past and community building plans.

There was a press meet in the afternoon. Wikipedians interacted with the media about future prospects of Odia Wikipedia and its current state.


Odia wikipedians being felicitated by the guests

Few glimpses of the event Audio Podcast

Press coverage:

ଓଡ଼ିଶାନ୍: ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆର ନବମ ଜନ୍ମତିଥି ଅବସରରେ କର୍ମଶାଳା : ଇମିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ର‌ୟୋଗ.
ସମ୍ବାଦ: ଲିପି ବ୍ୟାକରଣ ଓ ମାନକ ଭାଷାର ପ୍ରୟୋଗ ଜରୁରୀ.
eindiadiary.com:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Fullorissa.com: Odia Wikipedia’s 9th anniversary. Fullorissa.com
orissadiary.com:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Indiaeducationdiary.in:Odisha: Workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia language: Application of Odia language in e-media.
Odishaviews.com:Odia language workshop organized on 9th Anniversary of Odia Wikipedia: Application of Odia language in e-media. Subhashish Panigrahi is quoted.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-odia-wikipedias-ninth-anniversary

Celebrating 13 Years of the Kannada-language Wikipedia

subha — 2016-06-18T16:20:37Z

The Kannada-language Wikipedia celebrated its 13th anniversary on February 14 in Mangalore. To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians gathered at Saint Aloysius College, Mangaluru on May 14.

The article was published in DNA on May 22, 2016.

The larger community including long-time Wikipedians and new members like the students faculty involved in Wikipedia Education Programs gathered to participate in a day long edit-a-thon and chalk out plans for the future. The event was organised by the Kannada Wikimedia community and Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, Wikipedian and Assistant Professor of Kannada department at St. Aloysius College, who coordinated the event locally.

Prior to the event, four edit-a-thons were organised in four different cities of Karnataka. The local organisers also took the participants through a heritage walk in the village of Pilikula Nisarga Dhama, an open library of the rich cultural heritage of Karnataka. Prior to the event, four edit-a-thons were organised in four different cities of Karnataka. The local organisers also took the participants through a heritage walk in the village of Pilikula Nisarga Dhama, an open library of the rich cultural heritage of Karnataka.

117 people gathered at the event out of which 96 were active editors of the Kannada Wikipedia to celebrate thirteen years of Kannada Wikipedia, arguably the largest online encyclopedia in Kannada language. Noted Kannada-computing researcher Kinnikambla Padmanabha Rao (widely known as KP Rao) addressed the public event and engaged with the audience about defining Kannada Wikipedia’s large role in widening the language’s presence on the internet. The heritage walk resulted in over 300 image uploads on Wikimedia Commons ranging from the life and culture of coastal Karnataka to select rich heritage of the state. 20 new editors also participated in the event and they were oriented on basics of Wikipedia editing and Creative Commons licenses.

Much before the event, preparation was begun to organise four different thematic edit-a-thons; Kannada literature in Mysore, Mechanical Engineering in Sagara, Science-related articles in Bengaluru and article on notable women of the coastal Karnataka region in Mangaluru. Follow up edit-a-thons were organised after the anniversary celebration, based on the same themes in the first three places.

Triveni K, one of the participants who is now pursuing her M.Sc at Christ University, called this event a great learning platform for learning core Wikipedia policies in detail. “I’m little occupied for my exams but when it is over, I will be back on Wikipedia”, shares Triveni.

The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on June 12, 2003 with a message saying “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning ‘Welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia’). However it took over a year, July 12, 2004, before the first article, about a city Shimoga, was created. Over the last decade, Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for theKannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name. 7,05,199 unique visitors read the articles every month as per the December 2015 statistics. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (in February) being the highest, 22 (in May) the lowest and 80 being the count in December 2015. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University, Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. The project since its inception has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles. The biggest hurdle, as explained by Wikimedian Hari Prasad Nadig, has been cleaning up the articles created by paid translations of Google when Kannada Wikipedia along with many other Indian language Wikipedias was used as testing ground for improving Google Translate, a multilingual machine translation tool. Vasanth SN, a Kannada Wikipedian who has cleaned up over 60 such articles, prefers to use an existing good quality encyclopedia like the 14 volume Kannada Vishwakosha published by Mysore University and relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the university, as a resource to create and improve articles.

The 14th anniversary was another milestone in the journey and there are many more to come. You can read more about it here on Kannada Wikipedia.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/dna-may-22-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-celebrating-13-years-of-kannada-language-wikipedia

Can Wikipedia revive dying Indian languages?

subha — 2016-02-29T14:54:10Z

Yes, by encouraging content and involvement, Wikipedia language communities keep languages relevant.

The article originally published in the Hoot on February 19, 2016 was also mirrored by Pratham Books on February 22, 2016

As the world gets ready to celebrate International Mother Language Day on Feb 21, it is important ask whether Wikipedia, the free, multi-lingual online encyclopaedia that turned 15 last month, can play a role in helping not just to save some Indian languages from irrelevance but to inject new energy into them.

Indian languages that made an early entry to the Wiki-world back in 2002 - Assamese, Malayalam, Odia and Punjabi - are helping scale up the representation of Indian languages on the Internet. More languages started being added after these initial ones. Today, there are 23 South Asian language Wikipedia projects including the 20 languages listed in the 8^th schedule of the Constitution of India.

Many might not have noticed that the “en” in Wikipedia's URL en.wikipedia.org denotes that the language code of English can be replaced with “or” to visit Odia Wikipedia or “kn” for Kannada Wikipedia.

But the Indian language Wikipedias have a long way to go as compared to many other world languages. There lies a huge gap in the access to knowledge on the Internet. Of 1.26 billion people, only about 15-18% are connected online and that too largely from mobile devices.

Most Wikipedia projects in Indian languages are fairly small but are active and playing an important role. For example, the Tamil and Malayalam Wikipedia communities have played a central part in implementing Wikipedia basics learning in the state-run school syllabus along with many other free software and free knowledge projects to help students learn.

Many Indian languages are in the pipeline to become active Wikipedia projects under the scope of Incubator Wikipedia. Maithili Wikipedia and Goan Konkani Wikipedia are two that have gone live in recent years. There are many more to come and it is certain they will help to ensure that languages do not fade or become irrelevant.

Dying Indian languages mapped over map. Source: UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger

According to UNESCO, 197 of a total of 1652 Indian languages are dying. Given that there is more and more encyclopedic content in Indian languages, Wikipedia will definitely save some from extinction by bringing more content in varied subject areas, bringing readers to Wikipedia, and attracting more contributors to bring information online in the respective language.

Two other ways that it help keep them alive is, first, the fact that the media uses freely-licensed content from Wikipedia and refers to citations on Wikipedia and secondly, the fact that more Wikipedia content also means more digital activism. Often languages become extinct because of verbal-only usage. That’s where language digital activism can help to keep going. Hebrew, for instance, has risen like a phoenix for this reason.

Apart from Wikipedia, there are many other sister projects (also known as Wikimedia projects) such as Wiktionary, a multilingual dictionary, Wikisource, a free library, Wikimedia Commons, the world’s largest media repository of freely-licensed multimedia files, and Wikidata, a big data project that connects all the Wikimedia projects.

The English Wikipedia has crossed the 5 million article mark. With a population of over 354 million online users, India still has a long way to go in increasing Indian language content on the web. The Government of India's new campaign Digital India aims at digital literacy and the availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages. This is closely aligned with the Wikimedia movement's goal to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

In addition to Wikipedia, many other open educational resources and free knowledge projects that are not already a part of the Digital India campaign signal the need for the government campaign to be more collaborative and open.

Community-government collaborations like the NROER project to make NCERT books under Creative Commons licences and the IT@School project in Kerala to provide education using free and open tools, have gained massive traction and helped more Indian language content come online.

Many of the Malayalam Wikipedia editors in Kerala have worked with the IT@School project to help school children edit and enhance Wikipedia articles and digitise old public domain text. The Wikipedia Education Programme, a global pedagogic programme running in over 87 countries to use Wikipedia as a tool for academic assignment and assessment, has been able to bring a paradigm shift in several languages such as Arabic and Spanish.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-hoot-feburay-19-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-can-wikipedia-revive-dying-indian-languages

Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success!

subha — 2012-11-10T08:30:09Z

A2K team members Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval participated in the "WikiWomenDay" organized by Wikipedia Club Pune at PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus on October 28, 2012. Subhashish unfolds the happenings of this full day free fun workshop.

Globally participation of women on Wikipedia is less than 10 per cent. Women wikipedians across the world have joined hands to boost women's contribution to Wikipedia. Recently the A2K team was in Pune for the WikiWomenDay 2012. Wikipedia Club Pune, the first Wikipedia club in India, to encourage women's participation on Wikipedia, had organized a full day fun event on October 28, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions.

Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of Wikipedia Club Pune briefed about the agenda of the event. Noopur spoke about the global contribution on Wikipedia in terms of various topics and how male-centered topics were well covered. Few of the male centric articles were taken up for comparison with those of women to make the audience understand the gap of contribution. A good majority of articles which were of interest to men were well written whereas women centric articles were of bad shape due to lack of contribution from women. A visual representation was shown to the participants to explain the statistical information about gender gap on Wikipedia. Apart from article contribution, male editors were found to be more social and discussed more on talk pages which also bring more male editors on Wikipedia.

Participants were introduced to the basics of Wikipedia editing (five pillars, notability, importance of source of references, vandalism) before they were explained about actual editing. Each of the participants were provided with a computer and one of them was invited to create her user account.

Thereafter Abhishek demonstrated searching an article on Wikipedia and how logging in to Wikipedia allows editors to edit articles which are protected from editing by anyone. One of the logged in editors was asked to make a small edit on an article which surprised many of the participants. They realized that even they can make changes to the articles, for the first time in their life. Then there was a buzz about the credibility of the articles as they all saw that anyone can edit the articles. So the Wikipedia article on Pune was vandalized and Pune was made the capital of India for a few minutes! The page was refreshed after a while and reverted. This was clear enough to demonstrate how active the editor community is on Wikipedia.

Abhishek Suryavanshi demonstrates wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012

Most of the errors and typos get corrected quickly as someone or the other notices that there is a mistake and correct it. However, there are many articles, especially articles of Indian context which still have wrong information because the number of Indian editors are less. A series of editing for various favourite articles chosen by new wikipedians opened up the window for them to understand how important their participation could be. Abhishek, Nikita, Noopur and Subhashish helped the editors with editing.

After engaging the editors for quite sometime with editing there was a fun quiz session to brush up what was taught. The participants were asked questions based on the previous session.

Winners of the quiz were awarded with Wikipedia stickers and badges.

A picture of participants learning wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012 in Pune

Some of the participants left after the lunch break. Those who came back then gathered for a Indian language Wikipedia session. Out of the whole audience there were Bengali, Hindi, Marathi and Odia speakers. They all were showed their respective language wikipedias. A demonstration was given to show the typing tool. As the editors were completely new to the Indian language typing, some of them started typing using default Narayam transliteration tool and some took the help of Microsoft ILIT and Google Transliterate as well. During this session new wikipedians edited many articles on Marathi, Hindi and Bengali Wikiepdia. After the whole day session there was still some time left for acclaim and fun. The participants were awarded with participation and contribution certificate by the Wikipedia Club Pune. All the new wikipedians registered on Wikipedia Club Pune.

There was a special announcement for Wikipedia Summit India, Anniversary Celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune. Club members celebrated with cutting a special Wikipedia cake. Rishi Aacharya and Ketaki Pole from PAI International Learning Solutions extended their support for this event.

Meeting with Wikipedia Club Pune members

There was a meeting with some of the Wikipedia Club Pune members on October 27, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions. It was attended by Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval. Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of the club brought a proposal about the Wikipedia India Summit, anniversary celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune which is planned in the first quarter of 2013. Importance of a India level summit, plans and agenda, logistics and partnership and sponsorship options were discussed during this meeting. There will be public announcement regarding this summit.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-women-day-2012-pune

Books and More are Relicensed to Creative Commons

subha — 2014-05-28T06:29:57Z

This blog post is cross-posted from Opensource.com. It was published on May 2, 2014.

Image by opensource.com

I began working with the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2012 for program and community support in India. With the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge program, we focus on open access for scholarly publications to help communities enrich Wikipedia entries for Indic languages.

While I was negotiating with a few authors to relicense their copyrighted books to a Creative Commons license (a license that allows anyone to reuse, modify and use content), I began identifying certain areas of motivation for an author to donate their work as free content.

We worked closely with Goa University, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa Trust, and the Institute of Odia Studies and Research.

Increasing open access for publications gained a lot when the government of India launched the National Repository of Open Educational Resources in August 2013 by the request of Wikimedia India. It generally takes a long time and much effort to negotiate with copyright holders for relicensing material as Creative Commons. But, when we do negotiate it, and win, the content is a permanent and valuable addition to open knowledge and the movement.

So far, authors might be avoiding open licensing because:

They think it might put them out of business because others could plagiarize and republish their work without attribution.
They think if they will lose ownership of the content due to the nature of open licenses, which allow reuse.

Open licensing should be important to authors because as more readers and reviewers get access to their books and other online content, the visibility of their work increases, allowing them to gain more respect and popularity. This can, in turn, help authors sell more of the reprints.

The "one book in every child's hand" campaign by Pratham Books was an initiative by a large publisher to license Indian langage books with a CC BY-SA license. The campaign's mission was to provide access to knowledge and good quality education of native Indian languages to students whose families cannot bear educational costs. Pratham Books gained a lot of attention globally and the campaign proved to be a sustainable model for publishers and free licenses.

Scholarly research publications are less prone to plagiarism because of their low retail value compared to mainstream fiction, self-help books, or travel and lifestyle books. Encyclopedic books have even less retail value. Thus, releasing content online under free licenses would not affect such scholarly works or encyclopedic print publications to a large extent.

Photo by Veethika Mishra, CC-BY-SA 4.0

Relicensing projects

Last year, Goa University applied a CC BY-SA 3.0 license to their four-volume encyclopedia, Konkani Vishwakosh. It is the largest encyclopedia compiled in the language. The book is being digitized on Konkani WikiSource, attracting new volunteers.
Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa relicensed eleven of the noted author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty's Odia books under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
Classical Odia is a 600+ page book of historical documents and manuscripts on Odia language and literary heritage of more than 2,500 years. The researchers Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty moved from copyright to a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
Two Odia language books by linguist Subrat Prusty have been relicensed to CC BY-SA 3.0. They are Jati, Jagruti O Pragati, and Bhasa O Jatiyata and have been digitized as well using ISCII standard fonts (not Unicode). ISCII standard fonts have glyphs with Indic characters that are actually replacements of the Latin characters by Indic characters.
A recent addition is the relicensing of the Kannada language encyclopedia published and copyrighted by Mysore University to a Creative Commons license.

The community and the publishers of books gain mutual benefits when more Indic language books are digitized, put online, and made freely available. By expanding online content and readership, a new life is given to many South Asian and non-Latin works, creating a revival for these languages and cultures.

Read the original post here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opensource-education-may-2-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-books-and-more-are-relicensed-to-creative-commons