Centre for Internet and Society

14 Odia books re-released under Creative Commons license

subha — 2014-05-06T06:26:29Z

This blog entry by Subhashish Panigrahi (originally published in Wikimedia Foundation's Blog) was edited and re-published by Rohini Lakshane in DNA on April 26, 2014.

Read the article published in DNA on April 26, 2014.

Odisha became a separate state in British India on April 1, 1936. Odia, a 2,500 year old language recently gained the status of an Indian classical language. The Odia Wikimedia community celebrated these two occasions on March 29 in Bhubaneswar with a gathering of 70 people. Linguists, scholars and journalists discussed the state of the Odia language in the digital era, initiatives for its development and steps that can be taken to increase accessibility to books and other educational resources. 14 copyrighted books have been re-licensed under the Creative Commons license and the digitization project on Odia WikiSource was formally initiated by an indigenous educational institute, the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS). Professor Udayanath Sahu from Utkal University, The Odisha Review’s editor Dr. Lenin Mohanty, Odisha Bhaskar’s editor Pradosh Pattnaik, Odia language researcher Subrat Prusty, Dr. Madan Mohan Sahu, Allhadmohini Mohanty, Chairman Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa and trust’s secretary Brajamohan Patnaik along with senior members Sarojkanta Choudhury and Shisira Ranjan Dash spoke at the event.

Eleven books from Odia writer Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were re-released under Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license by the “Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa” trust, a trust founded by Dr. Mohanty for the development of the Odia language. Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to Odia Wikimedia to release and digitize these books. The community will be training students and a group of six faculty members at KISS who will coordinate the digitization of these books.	Group photo of Odia wikimedians participating in the advanced Wikimedia workshop at KIIT University.

Eleven books from Odia writer Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were re-released under Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license by the “Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa” trust, a trust founded by Dr. Mohanty for the development of the Odia language. Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to Odia Wikimedia to release and digitize these books.

The community will be training students and a group of six faculty members at KISS who will coordinate the digitization of these books.

Group photo of Odia wikimedians participating in the advanced Wikimedia workshop at KIIT University.

“Collaborative efforts and open access to knowledge repositories will enrich our language and culture,” said linguist Padmashree Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak as he inagurated the event. Dr. Pattanayak and Odia language researcher Subrat Prusty from the Institute of Odia Studies and Research also re-licensed three books (Two Odia books; “Bhasa O Jatiyata“, “Jati, Jagruti O Pragati” and an English book “Classical Odia”) based on their research on Odia language and cultural influence of the language on other societies under the same license. KISS is going to digitize some of these books and make them available on Odia Wikisource.

An OpenType Odia Unicode font, “Odia OT Jagannatha” designed by Sujata Patel from Odialanguage.com was released under the OFL license. This is the first Odia OpenType font that the community actively tested. A new Odia offline input tool called “TypeOdia” by Wikipedian Manoj Sahukar was also released for public distribution. DVDs containing the font, the input tool, Odia language dictionaries, offline Odia Wikipedia in Kiwix, Wikipedia editing guide, ISCII to Unicode font converter, various free and open source software packages and Ubuntu operating system.

Active Odia Wikipedian and Admin Mrutyunjaya Kar gave the inaugural speech. Subhashish Panigrahi from the Center for Internet and Society read the annual report and vision of Odia Wikipedia. Chief guest Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak discussed about the efforts put forth that brought the Odia language as the sixth Indian classical language. A large majority of Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easy accessibility. He further discussed the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm leaf manuscripts. Professor Udayanath Sahu presented on the process, progress and implementation of machine translation project in Utkal University.

Experienced Wikimedians conducted an advanced Wikipedia workshop on the second day of event at KIIT University, Bhubaneswar. It was attended by a majority of the existing Wikimedians from the community including new Wikipedians who signed up for the Odia Wikipedia Education Program at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal. Mrutyunjaya Kar presented on WikiData and various tools for linking and accessing information in multiple languages on various Wikimedia projects.

	Experienced Wikimedians conducted an advanced Wikipedia workshop on the second day of event at KIIT University, Bhubaneswar. It was attended by a majority of the existing Wikimedians from the community including new Wikipedians who signed up for the Odia Wikipedia Education Program at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal. Mrutyunjaya Kar presented on WikiData and various tools for linking and accessing information in multiple languages on various Wikimedia projects.

Ansuman Giri discussed advanced technical aspects such as the use of various gadgets, proper categorization, how to use subpages, how to auto-list archive pages, customizing WikiLove feature, user rights modification, including how important it is to cite biographies of living persons with secondary sources, etc. Shitikantha Dash discussed copyright and issues regarding uploading images and other media files on Wikimedia Commons.

Dr. Subas Chandra Rout presented on “notability, referencing and creating citations for the notable topics.” Subhashish Panigrahi discussed the work plan for the year, failure of program projects, collective learning and the dos and don’ts of community building.


“	We hope that more authors will come forward and re-release their books under CC-BY-SA license. The Odia community is excited to see or.wikisource.org go live. A few Wikipedians are even interested in typing their favorite free licensed books to make them available on Wikisource. I believe it’ll be challenging to train the KISS students to type and proof-read the written texts. In the CISA2K’s draft plan, the goal to have the number of editors seems overestimated. The students need to have some knowledge about Wikimedia and how it works in general before they start working. We hope that the books will be digitized properly and in coming days more users will join us in the process as we will have more free books in Odia Wikisource. I appeal to the Odia people to be a part of the Odia Wikimedia community and make Odia Wikisource a successful project, we need all the time you can devote. :-)	”
Ansuman Giri, Odia Wikipedian

Copyright notes: "A group photo of Odia wikipedians at kiit conference hall on 30th march 2014.jpg", "Odia wikipedian mrutyunjaya kar and ansuman giri on 30the march 2014.jpg" by Jnanaranjan Sahu , under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons, "Release of DVD containing Odia font, open source tools and Offline Odia Wikipedia.jpg" by Ahemadullah Shaikh , under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dna-rohini-lakshane-april-26-2014-14-books-re-released-under-creative-commons-license

11th Century Kannada Literature Now on Wikisource

subha — 2014-04-06T05:01:14Z

This blog post by Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI was edited by Rohini Lakshane for DNA. It was first edited by Subhashish Panigrahi, CIS-A2K on the Wikimedia Foundation blog where it was first published.

Click to read the post republished on DNA on March 30, 2014. The original posted on Wikimedia Blog can be seen here.

In Kannada poetry, Vachana Sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing that evolved in the eleventh century and flourished in the twelevth, as a 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 the 15-volume “Samagra Vachana Samputa” by the government of Karnataka have been digitised. 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 the 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 made to get thousands of vachanas in the form of a database, so that they could be made easily searchable with an index. This demanded that we 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 and holidays executing this project from home. With the constant feedback and guidance from Mr Swamy and Vasudendra, we learnt 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!

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

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/dna-march-30-2014-rohini-lakshane-11th-century-kannada-literature-now-on-wikisource

8 Challenges for Improving Indian Language Wikipedias

subha — 2016-03-29T17:05:15Z

After more than 10 years in existence, the Indian-language Wikipedias still are not known to many Indian language speakers. Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia in history as a result of thousands of volunteer editors.

The article was originally published in the Wire on March 17, 2016 and later mirrored on Opensource.com on March 28, 2016.

Whereas native-language Wikipedias are becoming game changers in other corners of the world, the scenario in India is skewed. While speaking at the "BHASHA: Indian Languages Digital Festival," a day-long discourse at New Delhi on Indian languages and their state in the new media (especially on the digital platforms), I shared challenges that Indian language Wikipedias are facing.

1. Language communities

Many native Indian language speakers do not know how to search online using language typed in their script. Because Google's home page does not display their language script as an option, people often think that their language does not exist on the Internet. Google now has nine Indian languages. But this does not stop a Santali or Manipuri speaker from searching in Unicode Ol chiki (script for Santali) or in Unicode Meithei (script for Manipuri). Google and other search engines will display content in any script on the Internet, but not knowing this keeps many people off the Internet, which also means off of Wikipedia.

2. Wikipedia's editor community

Wikipedia is created by people like you and me. From writing to editing, everything happens voluntarily. Many people do not understand that they can correct mistakes and help improve Wikipedia articles. The Wikipedia editor communities for several Indian languages are really small. Although these languages are spoken by millions of people, only a handful of editors contribute in editing the Wikipedia in these languages. As of January 2016, the Hindi Wikipedia had only 89 editors, whereas Hindi falls right behind English on the list of top languages by number of native speakers.

3. Language input in computer

A majority of people in India do not know how to type in their own language. Also, there is little documentation for users to learn about language input. Even though many government-run schools in India are seeing more computers and have Internet access, native language input and several other basic computer training are not widely taught in schools in all states. Free software for language input is available, and the challenges of typing in Indian languages (PDF) that existed in the past are mostly resolved.

4. Language input in mobile devices

With more than 1 billion people in India (PDF) with mobile phones, the 15% Internet penetration rate will soon grow at a faster pace. This growth and tough competition is compelling telecom service providers to drop data charges, which will help more Indians get access to the Internet. If these people are not educated about native language input, then they will be stuck inside an English-centric Internet rather than being able to navigate in their own languages. Many Indians who have smartphones need full Indian language support—and especially built-in input methods—to contribute in their own language Wikipedia.

5. Low availability of Indian-language content on the Internet

Lack of native language content on the Internet is a barrier to accessing knowledge. For example, let's look at my state Odisha. The Kerala (Indian state) government's official tourism portal is available in Odia and other Indian languages, but the Odisha government's tourism portal has no information in the Odia language today. Our languages are largely neglected in our own states.

6. Mismatch of conventional and new media

Many conventional media houses still use non-standard variants of ASCII/ISCII script encoding systems instead of adopting the Unicode standard. As a global standard, Unicode can help unify the world and has been available for Indian languages for almost 25 years. But many of our print media have failed to adopt this, and many popular Indian-language newspapers still aren't available in Unicode.

7. Lack of open access

Much information online, including content created by the government, is under copyright licensing. The pay-wall gardens and copyright restrictions keep information closed and prevents people from sharing content. Wikipedia content, on the other hand, is available under Creative Commons Share-Alike licensing, which allows anyone to use the content (and even distribute commercial copies of it). The idea of opening up content under free licenses can help information reach countless additional people.

8. Accessibility

India has more than 60-million people with hearing impairments. Many people with physical disabilities need good text-to-speech and speech-to-text engines. And these software solutions must be free, so that anyone, regardless of their finances, can contribute to Wikipedia in their own languages.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-source-march-28-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-8-challenges-for-improving-indian-language-wikipedias

4 tips for DIY makers

subha — 2016-11-22T02:36:39Z

I started learning stencil printing and hand lettering this year, and became quite enthralled with it. These age old techniques really add something special to postcards, which I usually send to myself, my wife, and my friends while traveling.

The article was published in Opensource.com on November 18, 2016

Of course, I started considering how I could make the artwork from these postcards open to others.

First, I take a picture of the postcard and upload it to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, usually Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 International. These two licenses allow anyone to use the image of my artwork for both non-commercial and commercial purposes, modify and remix them. And uploading to Wikimedia Commons puts my artwork in a place where many people will see it.

Sometimes, I capture the postcard-making process as well, and upload those images to Wikimedia Commons.

If you're considering making your DIY project open, here are four main considerations:

1. To share or not to share?

Deciding whether to share your craft project or image might be an easy "sure, why not?" but you may be wondering "but, is it useful to others?"

My opinion is that yes, everything you make could be interesting to others, so why not make it open? There is certainly something in every maker activity that is worth sharing publicly. When I was making a stamp that was quite special and personal, and I did not want the whole world to see it because it was personal, but I did capture the stamp carving process for others to see. You might want to ask around friends and other people in any maker community you are part of. Also, try asking yourself what really would matter to other people so that you can share only useful outcomes and tips rather than sharing everything.

2. Choosing a license

I wrote about three tips for sharing your work online. And there are many other resources out there, including Creative Commons and GitHub.

A simple rule of thumb is: Except content that clearly indicates the work is released under a free license, or that the copyright has lapsed and the work is in the Public Domain, you can assume content is not freely/liberally licensed.

3. Where to share

There is almost a platform to share anything these days. Most popular multimedia platforms support Creative Commons-licensed works, like YouTube and Vimeo for video, Flickr for images, Medium for writing, Jamendo for music, and many more. Wikimedia Commons, mentioned above, is a sister project of Wikipedia and the world's largest multimedia repository; it allows original works to be uploaded and shared by Copyright holders and others of works like images (.jpg, .png, .gif), presentations (.pdf), videos (.webm and .ogv), and audio files (.ogg).

Know of more places to share works? Let us know in the comments.

4. Meet birds of feather and exchange ideas

There are tons of global and local events that bring people of all maker interests under a single roof.

An event that I love is Mozilla's Maker Party. I have been to one in my city of Bengaluru, India and can guarantee it is lots of fun!

Events like this help connect you with other makers who live nearby.

Tell us about your experience

I hope these tips have helped. Do you have other tips to share? Leave us a comment.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/opensource-november-18-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-4-tips-for-diy-makers

3 Copyright Tips for Students and Educators

subha — 2016-10-07T00:42:06Z

Copyright is a really complicated topic, and when it comes to online use of creative works, accidentally crossing the line between fair use and a copyright violation is easy. How do you know what is copyrighted? Recently Frederico Morando (Creative Commons, Italy) and I presented a training session on understanding copyright policies at Wikimania 2016, which was originally proposed by Wikipedian User:Jim Carter. We covered topics such as fundamentals of copyright, exclusive rights, Berne convention, copyleft, Creative Commons licenses, Public Domain, fair use, and copyfraud.

The blog post was published by Opensource.com on August 16, 2016. This got mentioned in Wikipedia's newsletter "The Signpost". This was mirrored by Wiki Edu on October 5, 2016. The post republished can be read here.

In this article, I'll look at three copyright tips to keep in mind when you're thinking about using content—even for academic purposes— you find online.

1. Most of what you find on the Internet is copyrighted.

Except content that clearly indicates the work is released under a free license, or that the copyright has lapsed and the work is in the Public Domain, you can assume content is not freely/liberally licensed. A few popular free and open licenses include GNU General Public License (GPL), BSD licenses, Apache License, Mozilla Public License, and SIL Open Font License. If a work mentions the license, usually the license is explained or links to terms for using the work. Spending a little time to find out what license the work is under beats spending time and money on a copyright infringement case later.

2. Fair use can be your friend, but not always.

Fair use means you might be permitted to make limited use of a copyrighted work without prior permission from the copyright holder. The fair use policy varies from country to country. As explained in the Stanford University Libraries site, commentary/quotes and criticism, and parody are cases that often fall under fair use.

Wikipedia article images related to recent music albums, movies, and even people who are deceased are used under fair use policy. Click on a recent movie poster appearing in a Wikipedia article and check the copyright section for an example explanation of why the use on Wikipedia qualifies as fair use.

^{Example Wikipedia explanation for fair use of an image.}

Fair use also gives some freedom to scholars to use copyrighted work for academic research. To be in a safe side if you are not sure your use falls under "fair use," reach out to the copyright holder and get formal permission before using their work.

3. search.creativecommons.org helps streamline Creative Commons content searches.

Where do you go to search for images, illustrations, and other content with Creative Commons licensing? Most images turned up using a search engine are copyrighted and not licensed liberally, for example. A better way to search is using search.creativecommons.org.

You can choose Creative Commons-licensed content from several sites, such as Flickr, Google Images, Wikimedia Commons, and Europeana. You can also specify whether you want to use the content for commercial purposes, or to modify, adapt, and build upon work.

^{Image credit likeaduck. CC BY 2.0}

Note that you still will need to check which Creative Commons license the content uses. As explained in an article by Richard Fontana:

The Creative Commons suite includes licenses that implement various policies. Some, like CC BY and CC BY-SA, are normatively consistent with corresponding permissive and copyleft families of free software licenses. Others, however, particularly its “NC” (no commercial use) and “ND” (no derivative works) licenses, are in conflict with basic principles of free software and free culture. I am not alone in lamenting the application of the Creative Commons umbrella brand to cover licenses with such disparate qualities. One consequence has been a general confusing dilution of the meaning of “openness” in the context of cultural works. A more specific problem is the evidence of confusion on the part of content authors interested in applying Creative Commons licenses to their works, and resulting confusion by those interested in making use of such works. Too often a work is labeled as being licensed under “a Creative Commons license”, without specifying accurately, or specifying at all, which free or nonfree policy the author sought to apply.

If you still cannot find content—images, for example—with free licenses, but you find copyrighted content that fits your academic need, you can reach out to the content creator or copyright holder for permission. Often copyright holders allow usage of their work for non-commercial purposes, such as academic research and publication.

Do you have other sources you recommend for finding Creative Commons or Public Domain content? Let us know about your favorite resources in the comments.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/3-copyright-tips-for-students-and-educators

2nd National Language Conference, Bhubaneswar

subha — 2015-04-10T15:23:02Z

Institute of Odia Studies and Research organised 2nd National Language Conference beginning on Monday, March 30, 2015 and ending on April 2, 2015 at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar. This conference was organised in collaboration with the Department of Tourism and Culture. I presented a paper in Odia language in this conference as part of a panel discussion related to Odia language computing.

I spoke briefly about the issues with Odia being used massively on the Internet and gaining popular with Odia speaking netizens. Odia Wikimedia community and CIS-A2K's efforts has resulted growth in online Odia content. I also shared the potential projects that people could get involved and how collective effort will yield more diversification of the language and its use by today's generation.

The talk is available on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 license.

Video

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/second-national-language-conference-bhubaneswar