Centre for Internet and Society

Guerrilla GLAMː An alternate way of doing GLAM in indie-way

subha — 2015-12-16T03:09:47Z

I have been working on a concept called the Guerrilla GLAM. Here is a very quick summary about the concept that was published in the GLAM-wiki newsletter for November.

GLAM stands for cultural institutions like Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. It is a globally acclaimed free knowledge movement for opening up cultural data using various free software platforms as a tool. GLAM activities include collaboration with cultural institutions, data mining, meta data and other documentation of institutional collections, digitization of published works, records and artifacts, and publishing the collected information in both human and machine readable forms with open standards. Building partnership with GLAM institutions is a great way of funneling the cultural content acquisition and bringing open access to such valuable data. But it is not that easy given the complications each country have in terms of formal agreement, organizational framework, and dissemination of information. "Guerrilla GLAM" techniques are based on the learning curve of institutional partnership building for large scale GLAM projects and leveraging personal contacts in small scale GLAM projects. It bring in several frugal strategies for cutting cost implication and operating in flexible modes. Guerrilla GLAM's range of work aims to accommodate people of different core expertise and it targets small to large orgaizations.

Guerrilla GLAM appeared first as a public presentation during Wikimania which I presented this year. It later interested many GLAM practitioners of New Zealand who organized a webinar which provided a great platform to add many interesting ideas to my existing set of ideas. Guerrilla GLAM is still a budding concept that aims for being implemented by many cultural enthusiasts especially those who would like to document much about the artifacts, digitize old text from archives and manuscripts, and create meta data for institutional collections. Guerrilla GLAM operates with zero or with some informal institutional partnership with the institution and carried on the shoulders of the Wikimedians. The Wikimedians seek out for support from local communities, leverage the permissible access to institutional property and to some extent the personal relations with the institutions keeping the legal restrictions in mind, and do their best to acquire as much data as possible. Often times, near to zero cost Guerrilla GLAM projects with detailed planning with right kind of people on-board could yield more or less the same like any conventional GLAM project.

Click to read the original published on Wikimedia Blog on November 25, 2015.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guerrilla-glam-an-alternate-way-of-doing-glam-in-indie-way

Google's Optical Character Recognition Software Now Works with All South Asian Languages

subha — 2015-09-26T14:31:15Z

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software by Google now works for more than 248 world languages, including all the major South Asian languages, and it's easy to use and works with over 90 percent accuracy for most languages.

This was published by Global Voices on August 29, 2015.

OCR software has been extremely beneficial for the study of language, helping to extract text from images of virtually any printed text—and sometimes even handwriting, which opens the door to old texts, manuscripts, and more.

Ketan Pratap at NDTV Gadgets writes:

Users can start using the OCR capabilities in Drive by uploading scanned document in PDF or image form after which they can right-click on the document in Drive to open with Google Docs. After choosing the option, a document with the original image alongside extracted text opens, which can be edited. Google notes that users will not be required to specify the language of the document as the OCR in Drive will automatically determine it. The OCR capability in Google Drive is also available in Drive for Android.

On Twitter, many users have welcomed and even celebrated this new feature from Google:

Optical Character Recognition #OCR in Google Drive recongnizes many indic languages including #Kannada give it a try http://t.co/99UkCJQ6gb

— Omshivaprakash (@omshivaprakash) August 28, 2015

@shylobisnett if you have access to a scanner, you can do OCR through google drive. works a bit faster.

— Whet Moser (@whet) August 27, 2015

Wow. Searching Google Drive for a keyword also returns results for images containing that keyword in the image. Didn't realise it did OCR.

— Mark Osborne (@mosborne01) August 25, 2015

Typically OCR software has difficulty reading the text on old documents or pages with blemishes and ink marks, spitting out gibberish instead of legible text.

Google's support page on this project shares additional details about character formatting, like its ability to preserve bold and italicized fonts in the output text:

When processing your document, we attempt to preserve basic text formatting such as bold and italic text, font size and type, and line breaks. However, detecting these elements is difficult and we may not always succeed. Other text formatting and structuring elements such as bulleted and numbered lists, tables, text columns, and footnotes or endnotes are likely to get lost.

For some of the languages, like Malayalam and Tamil, the OCR works with almost 100 percent accuracy, and includes support for formatting things like like auto-cropping, separating text by discarding images, and ignoring color backgrounds, explains Tamil user and Wikimedian Ravishankar Ayyakkannu on Facebook:

[…] Google Tamil OCR works with 100% accuracy ! Keep testing with various samples and comment here. Performance has been the same for many other Indic languages too. […] Auto crops, discards images and colored background. Recognizes different layouts. I could find only 1 mistake in whole page. Testing latest Vikatan – https://docs.google.com/…/1OXre4…/edit.. […]

(Bangla, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu-language users have commented in the same post with feedback after testing the updated OCR software. For a few scripts, like Gurmukhi (used to write Punjabi), it turns out that the output after OCR is quite poor, resulting largely in gibberish, when testing a screenshot image from Punjabi Wikipedia.)


Issues with Gurmukhi script after OCR using Google's OCR. Screenshot from Punjabi Wikipedia.

This is quite a large leap for the languages with lots of old texts that are not yet digitized. Old and valuable texts in many languages could now be digitized and shared over the internet using platforms like Wikisource and could be preserved and made available for sharing knowledge.

Google's OCR partly uses Tesseract—an OCR engine released as freeware. Developed as a community project between 1995 and 2006 (and later taken over by Google), Tesseract is considered to be one of the world's most accurate OCR engines and works for over 60 languages. The source code is now hosted at https://github.com/tesseract-ocr. Check this link for the OCR outputs in various South Asian scripts.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/googles-optical-character-recognition-software-now-works-with-all-south-asian-languages

GLAM in India: 10 tips for successful GLAM projects

subha — 2014-05-27T09:13:42Z

GLAM initiatives work as a gateway to unleash knowledge, decode archived documentation to build modern wonders and also educate people about their past cultural and scientific journey.

This was published in OpenGLAM on May 22, 2014.

In 2012, India celebrated its first GLAM project on Hindi Wikipedia at the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum, New Delhi. This museum houses a vast majority of Indian crafts - Pattachitra from Odisha, Bidri from Karnataka, colorful and intricate Banarasi sari from northern India and Saura art from indigenous tribes of Eastern India to name a few. It is also a workshop and home to many artisans and folk artists who live, paint, carve, sell, sing, perform and make a living being based in the museum as resident artisans.


A weaver weaving a shawl using handloom (Anil Bhardwaj / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

For this project, Wikimedia India and the India Program were roped in to plan, design and have the Wikimedia community train staffers on how to document Indian crafts, from royal lineage to folk. This resulted in the creation of many Indian craft-related articles in the Hindi Wikipedia and English Wikipedia as well as images on Wikimedia Commons.

Based upon my first hand experience of working closely with the staffers and the Wikimedia community during this project, I would like to share a few tips that might help you while planning and implementing a GLAM project:

1. Show what is it in for them

Large, public entities like museums, archives and libraries can be hesitant to open their doors for free public access. While discussing the potential of a GLAM project, it is wise to explain how the project will bring popularity, highlight the work that institutes are doing and will in turn benefit the government in preserving the state’s culture. Give examples of other such GLAM institutions which have gained public attention by adopting open strategies or by holding public events.

2. Show the institutions the big picture

Institutions often see their success in terms of number of visitors, number of media mentions or the number of sales (if they have some publications or a sales desk selling handicrafts or postcards for example). Tell them how an online presence could bring them local, national as well as international visitors, especially when they have an online presence in popular sites like Wikipedia or Wikitravel.

3. Push beyond your limits

Institutions operate in their own ways and often you might feel like you get stuck. Working with new staffers in a new institution is a big challenge and the pace of work cannot be smooth. What really matters is how much you impart your knowledge among the staffers and educate them about things that will be beneficial for the institution for continuing more GLAM projects in the future.

4. Track work-in-progress

It is always crucial to have smart trackers. These could be as simple as a spreadsheet (Excel, Google, …) or a wiki table for a team’s online tracking. You can of course always design your own. A database containing participant details with different colours for indicating progress in a project is a great way for assigning work, knowing strengths and learning about areas for improvement. Evaluating work internally by making use of smart charts and keeping deadlines is a must when there is a set of activities to be done.

5. Start with claps, swags in the middle, award at the end

Mobilizing volunteer contributors, especially government staffers, is always challenging. Outreach coordinators play a key role in keeping a group motivated enough to work collaboratively for a GLAM project. Participating staff members need to be given special attention during In real life meetups and gatherings, as well as specific guidance during training sessions. Fun games and activities that engage people help breaking communication barriers and build friendship. Swags also excite people to join. When a project starts rolling, keep different levels of excitement by giving different kinds of customized swags like caps, pens, stickers and buttons etc. Printed handouts that work like cheat-sheets are also useful. Creating levels to achieve and awarding the best achievers is another way of keeping people excited. Recognition drives!


Staff being trained by GLAM coordinators (Anil Bhardwaj / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

6. Bring media attention towards the middle of the project

When a significant amount of work is done, break it to the media. Regional and national media coverage and few blog posts covering a project gives a lot of visibility to the institution and the people involved. This is in fact the best way to get internal administration level support for implementing a project. Interview some of the achievers, put them up on the project page and blogs and show those posts to them. Many people love to see audio-visual and printed news, and showing the participants their video interviews and published blogs is another way of letting them know about their great contribution.

7. Fail fast, think long term

If a GLAM project does not result in substantial success or sustains for long, it is essential to realize the fact that it is not an easy task to make changes to the system that is set over centuries. It takes time to mobilize and be brave to admit the failure. But it is also never really a failure when there is plenty of learning which others could benefit from before starting similar projects. Starting a new GLAM project is always an investment for the future. Milestones and even scars caused during the course of mobilizing an institution to open up its treasures for the public count and they, over time become parameters others consider.

8. Exit with a few leaders and chuck out way forwards

While working with a group of people, seek out for people who could lead a group and do specific work. This will not just reduce your workload, but will help to have a more decentralized focused work.

9. Document the flow

It is really really essential to document the work in a human manner. If resources permit, bring a professional to take candid shots, shoot a few interviews and B-rolls. You can also be frugal or hire a professional from the open source community for free and do the same. Documentation of learning, challenges and tips for others are essential things that you, as a good samaritan-community member could bring other GLAMers.

10. Empathy is the key

Over and above, empathy is the only key while dealing with real people in a real space. Connect to every person in a group, put yourself in their shoes and try being one of them: nothing works better in implementing a huge project. Knowledge transfer is a subset of the process of building a cordial relationship. Not all GLAM institutions have a system in place to educate their staff about technical aspects of archiving or renovating or developing skill-sets in general. Your presence should leverage the learning and knowledge that you would acquire from multiple levels.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-glam-may-22-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-glam-in-india-10-tips-for-successful-glam-projects

FOSS, Wikimedia and Mozilla Under One Roof at GNUnify 2013, Pune

subha — 2013-07-17T06:55:43Z

GNUnify 2013 organized in the campus in Pune from February 15 to 17, 2013. The event was organized by Pune Linux/Unix User Group (PLUG) and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research (SICSR). Subhashish Panigrahi reports the outcomes in this blog post.

GNUnify is an annual gathering consisting of Free and Open Source software workshops, talks, seminars and BOFs (Birds of a feather). This was hosted by the Pune Linux User Group and the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research in Pune, India.

Day 1: February 15, 2013
The first day of the event had many parallel tracks including talks on KDE, Firefox OS, FUEL Project, Wikimedia Localization, OpenSSL, Discussions on Creative Commons, OpenStack and few technical workshops.

Day 2: February 16, 2013
Few of the full day events includes several talks and discussions about Mozilla and Firefox, Internationalization, Localization and Indic language input method related talks and workshops by the Wikimedia Foundation Engineering team (More details on mediawiki.org), Drupal and workshop and talks on Python. Wikipedians, translators from various languages, A2K team members Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish had an open conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation Engineering team.

Day 3: February 17, 2013
The final day of GNUnify had 3 major parallel day long events; Mozilla India community meetup, Wikipedia translation sprint and Wikipedia gadget workshop. At the end of all the events participants gathered for a group photo and socialized.

Videos

Podcasts

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/foss-wikimedia-under-one-roof-gnunify

First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized!

subha — 2012-11-30T12:44:44Z

The first Pune Odia Wikipedia workshop was organized in Pune on October 27, 2012. Subhashish Panigrahi recollects his experience about the events through this report.

Recently Odia Wikipedia (http://or.wikipedia.org) crossed 3000 articles. After being dormant for 8 long years, Odia Wikipedia emerged as one of the active South Asian wikipedias. I visited Pune on October 27, 2012 to participate in an Odia Wikipedia workshop celebrating this success with the wikipedians and also attend the WikiWomenDay 2012.

Over the last few months Odia Wikipedia has seen many active faces. One of them is Suratha Parhi, a very active Odia wikipedian. Suratha reached out to his friends, colleagues and existing wikipedians staying in Pune to celebrate the success with an Odia Wikipedia workshop. As it was after Durga Puja only a few Odia people in the city were there to attend. We saw a gathering of 10 people at PAI International Learning Center for this workshop. Abhishek Suryavanshi from Wikipedia Club Pune extended his support for organizing the venue for us.

Prior to the workshop I interacted with the participants to understand their interests and efficiency with Odia typing. To my surprise two of the participants were good in typing in phonetic and Inscript. Suratha took the audience through a presentation about Odia Wikipedia explaining the history of Odia language, importance of Wikipedia, how to contribute to Wikipedia, manual of style for writing articles, dos and do nots, rules and regulations and validating articles by adding sources. After the preliminary sessions participants started asking questions about numbers of readers, how to type in Odia, use of Odia Wikipedia and various such questions. Suratha answered their questions with examples and illustrations.

To demonstrate editing on Odia Wikipedia we invited one of the participants. We helped her to create her user account and others also created their user accounts on Odia Wikipedia. Then we invited Sudhir Patel, a type designer and technologist working with CDAC, Pune to introduce Odia typing and how to type easily in Odia. After a small hands-on training for typing, all of the participants were able to start searching for articles they wanted to edit. Some of them created new articles and some edited existing articles. At the end of the session we shared our contacts to stay in touch. We also showed them Chatasabha, a friendly desk on Odia Wikipedia and demonstrated how they can ask questions and see the answered questions. New wikipedians will be also connected to the facebook group to be updated about events and activities. New Wikipedians have decided to meet once again in November for a Odia Wikipedia meetup. Sudhir and Suratha are also planning to organize a introductory session on Odia Wikipedia during the cultural gathering organized by Odia communities.

Above is a picture of participants from the Orissa Wikipedia workshop held on October 27, 2012

More pictures on WikiCommons.

Press Coverage:
OdishaDiary.com, Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language (October 31, 2012)

Videos

Suratha Parhi explaining about Odia Wikipedia

Sudhir Patel explaining about Odia Typing

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-pune-odia-wikipedia-organized

First Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out

subha — 2012-12-14T12:17:04Z

Odia Wikipedians gathered at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal on November 8, 2012 to start the first Odia Wikipedia Education Program. This program aims to bring students edit articles on Odia Wikipedia through a series of assessments by professors. The local community members from Nalconagar would be supporting the four month program.

Since March 2011, Odia Wikipedia has started growing in terms of readers, editors and content. Last few months have seen many new faces added to the community who are willing to take part in both offline and online outreach. Though many of the community members are staying out of state, there are community clusters in three different places: Cuttack, Nalconagar and Bhubaneswar. We approached many institutions from these three places and some of them showed interest for an Odia Wikipedia workshop to assess and evaluate students for the education program. We conducted workshops in some of those institutions in the initial level. After successive workshops and meeting with the faculty members, some of the potential institutions were chosen for the education program. One of those colleges was the IIMC in Dhenkanal. We had a meeting with the professor of this organization along with teaching associates and a visiting professor and a full day workshop on editing wikipedia. Odia wikipedians, Mrutyunjaya Kar, Manoranjan Mallick, Srikant Kedia and Kamalakanta Nayak supported for organizing the event.

IIMC, Dhenkanal is one of the six IIMCs of India and a pioneer in the field of Mass Communication. We met Professor Mrinal Chaterjee along with teaching associates, Sucharita and Bhagaban Sahu, retired professor of Revenshaw University and visiting professor of IIMC. The college is home to 83 students across India. Students enroll for a one year diploma program for Journalism and Mass communication in Odia and English.

The full day session was made to two separate sessions: an introductory session and one hands-on training on editing. Prof. Chaterjee introduced the agenda of the session and why it is needed for the students from a student's point of view. I continued the discussion and presented the key points of wikipedia editing and details of the education program, why and how we are going to start it focussing on the key roles of students and the institution and how it will help them. We announced about the hands on training session post lunch for the interested students. Twenty one students gathered for the second session. Interestingly all of the Odia department students were present and there was one student from English department. Students were briefed about editing. During the workshop we found that majority of them knew a typing layout called "Modular layout" which is used by non-unicode ISCII/ASCII typing softwares like Leap office, I-Lipi, Shreelipi, etc. As this layout is yet to be enabled for Odia we continued explaining about typing using the default typing scheme.

"The Reporter", a bilingual daily published by students on college notice board	Odia education program proposal IIMC on Slideshare

"The Reporter", a bilingual daily published by students on college notice board

Odia education program proposal IIMC on Slideshare

After the end of the workshop we had another meeting with the professor and other faculty members to assess and discuss about the further steps. IIMC has a very close student-teacher relation which we observed from the beginning of the workshop. Students were really keen and patient to learn and all of the students who attended the hands-on training session stayed back till the end of the session. Apart from their regular assignments and projects, students also publish a daily bilingual newspaper, "The Reporter".

"Writing is a part of their their study and we emphasize much on getting the most of their short program. If Wikipedia could give them a global platform to and larger audience for their work to be read, reviewed and enhanced then why not adding it to their task list?", expresses Prof. Chatterjee. The only hurdle which students are going to face in the initial phase is typing in Odia. So, modular layout needs to be added in "Narayam", the typing tool integrated in Odia Wikipedia. To begin with this program an Odia Wikipedia club was formed at Nalconagar which would primarily support this program at the ground level.

Video

Read a detailed four month work plan for this program on Odia Wikipedia: Read in English | Read in Odia

Presentation for Odia Education Program: On Commons | Source file

Commons picture gallery: See here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-odia-wikipedia-education-program-to-be-rolled-out-at-iimc-dhenkanal

Eight Challenges That Indian-Language Wikipedias Need to Overcome

subha — 2016-03-29T17:05:36Z

Even after a decade of existence, Indian language Wikipedias are not yet known to many Indian language speakers. Wikipedia, being the largest available encyclopedia made in the human history, it what it is today because of the hundreds and thousands of volunteer-editors. But while native-language Wikipedias are becoming game-changers in other corners of the world, the scenario in India is skewed. In my experience, here are a number of challenges that Indian-language Wikipedias are currently facing.

The article was published in the Wire on March 17, 2016. A version of the article was also mirrored by Opensource.com on March 28, 2016.

1. Language communities:

The language communities of many of the Indian languages are such that many of them do not know how to search for information online, in their language typed in their script. Some of these communities even believe that because Google’s home page does not have their script, their language does not exist on the Internet. Starting with five Indian languages as the language of its interface, Google now has has nine Indian languages. But this does not stop a Santali or Manipuri user to search in Unicode Ol chiki (script for Santali) or in Unicode Meithei (script for Manipuri). Google or any search engine for that matter will display anything available in any script on the Internet. But the lack of this very thing is keeping many people away from being connected to the Internet in general and Wikipedia in particular.\

2. Wikipedia’s editor community:

Wikipedia is written by people like you and me. And from writing to editing everything happens voluntarily. As many people do not probably know, or do not try to learn, anybody can correct the mistakes and inaccuracies that exist in many Wikipedia articles. The Wikipedia editor communities for several Indian languages are really small. While these languages are spoken by millions of people, only a handful editors contribute in editing the Wikipedia in these languages. In January this year, the Hindi Wikipedia, for instance, had only 89 editors while the total number of Hindi speakers would be over 550 million.

3. Language input in computers:

A vast majority of people in this country do not know how to type in their own language.. There is also little documentation for users to learn about language input. Even though many government-run schools in India are seeing a proliferation of more computers and Internet access, native language input and several other essential training of basic computing are not widely taught in schools in all states. What is sad is that there is a wide variety of free software for native-language input and the challenges of typing in Indian languages that existed a few years back has almost gone.

4. Language input in mobile devices:

With over 1 billion people with mobile phones, the 15% internet penetration rate will soon grow at a faster pace. This in turn — and also tough competition that compel TSPs to drop data charges — will help many Indians get access to the Internet . If these people are not educated about native language input then they will be victims of the English-centric Internet rather than being able to enjoy the virtue of the same. Many Indians that have smartphones need full Indian language support and especially inbuilt input methods to be able 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 another major factor in the low adoption of Indian language Wikpedias. As per an Internet and Mobile Association of India survey conducted in 2012, over 6% of the population is left behind from joining the online sphere simply because of lack of content in their languages. Take, for instance, my state odisha.While the Kerala government’s official tourism portal is available in Odia and other Indian languages, the Odisha government’s tourism portal itself has no information in Odia-language today. Our languages are neglected largely in our own states.

6. Mismatch of conventional and new media:

Many conventional media houses still continue to use non-standard variants of the ASCII/ISCII script encoding systems, instead of adopting the Unicode standard. Unicode being a global standard, and having the advantage of unifying the world, has been available for Indian languages for almost 25 years now. But much of our vernacular print media has failed to adopt this. Consequently, many popular Indian-language newspapers are yet to become available in Unicode on the open Internet.

7. Lack of Open Access:

Majority of the information produced on the Internet in general and by the government, in particular, are mostly copyrighted. The paywalled garden of copyright restrictions keeps the information closed and stop people from sharing and learning more. On the contrary, Wikipedia is available under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license which allows anyone to make use of the content and even distribute commercial copies of its content. The idea of opening up information for masses in a free license could make information reach millions of people.

8. People with disabilities:

Many people cannot read, speak and write. India has over 60 million people with some form of hearing impairment. There is a desperate need for a high-quality text-to-speech and speech-to-text engine for people with physical disabilities. Also, these software products have to be free software so that common people, that cannot afford to buy expensive proprietary software like JAWS, can contribute to Wikipedia in their language. Many text-to-speech engines that are available today for Indian languages sound so mechanical that it is difficult for common speakers to use them.

Subhashish Panigrahi is an educator and free knowledge evangelist, and currently works for Communications, Program Capacity & Learning at Wikimedia Foundation, and Access to Knowledge at the Centre for Internet and Society. Portions of this article came from a speech that Panigrahi gave at BHASHA: Indian Languages Digital Festival in New Delhi.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-wire-march-17-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-eight-challenges-that-indian-language-wikipedias-need-to-overcome

Eight Challenges Indian-Language Wikipedias Need to Overcome

subha — 2016-06-18T17:09:38Z

Even after a decade of existence, Indian language Wikipedias are not yet known to many Indian language speakers. Wikipedia, the largest available encyclopedia made in the human history, is what it is today because of the hundreds and thousands of volunteer editors.

The article was published in Global Voices on April 27, 2016. A version of this post was previously published on The Wire.

But while native-language Wikipedias are becoming game-changers in other corners of the world, the scenario in India is skewed. Here, from my point of view, are some of the challenges that Indian-language Wikipedias are currently facing.

1. Language communities

The language communities of many of the Indian languages are such that many of them do not know how to search for information online, in language typed in their script. Some of these communities even believe that because Google’s home page does not display their script, their language does not exist on the Internet. Google, which starting with five Indian languages as options in its interface, now has has nine Indian languages. But this does not stop a Santali or Manipuri user from searching in Unicode Ol chiki (the script for Santali) or in Unicode Meithei (the script for Manipuri). Google, or any search engine, for that matter, will display anything available in any script on the Internet. But the perceived lack of this very function is keeping many people from connecting to the Internet, and to Wikipedia in particular.

2. Wikipedia’s editor community

Wikipedia is written by people like you and me. And everything, from writing to editing, is done by volunteers. And anybody can correct the mistakes and inaccuracies that exist in many Wikipedia articles. While several Indian languages are spoken by millions of people, the Wikipedia editor communities for these languages are very small, with only a handful editors contributing to editing those language versions of Wikipedia. In January this year, Hindi Wikipedia, for instance, had only 89 editors, while the total number of Hindi speakers is over 550 million.

3. Language input on computers

A vast majority of people in India do not know how to type in their own language. There is also little documentation instructing users about language input. Even though many government-run schools in India are seeing a proliferation in computer use and Internet access, native language input and other essential training of basic computing are not widely taught in schools in all states. This is unfortunate, as there is a wide variety of free software for native-language input, and the challenges of typing in Indian languages that existed a few years back are now almost non-existent.

4. Language input on mobile devices

With over 1 billion mobile phone users, India's 15% internet penetration rate will soon start growing at a faster pace. This in turn—along with the tough competition that will compel TSPs to lower data charges—will help many Indians get access to the Internet. If these people are not educated about native language input they will be victims of the English-centric Internet and fail to enjoy the virtues of the former. Many Indians who have smartphones need full Indian language support, and especially built-in input methods, to be able to contribute to Wikipedia in their own languages.

5. Scarcity of Indian-language content on the Internet

The relative lack of native language content on the Internet is another major factor in the low adoption of Indian language Wikpedias. According to an Internet and Mobile Association of India survey conducted in 2012, over 6% of the population is left behind with regard to joining the online sphere simply because of a scarcity of content in their languages. Take my home state of Odisha, for instance: while the Kerala state government’s official tourism portal is available in Odia and other Indian languages, at the time of writing the Odisha government’s tourism portal had no information in Odia. It is unfortunate that our languages are neglected largely within our own states.

6. Incompatibility between new and traditional media standards

Instead of adopting the Unicode standard, many traditional media outlets continue to use non-standard variants of the ASCII/ISCII script encoding systems Unicode, a global standard, has been available for Indian languages for almost 25 years now, but most of India's vernacular print media has failed to adopt it. As a result, many popular Indian-language newspapers are unavailable in Unicode on the open Internet.

7. Lack of Open Access

The majority of the information published on the Internet, and by the Indian government, in particular, is copyrighted. This paywalled garden of copyright restrictions restricts access of this information and prevents people from sharing and learning more. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is distributed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license that allows anyone to make use of the content, and even distribute it commercially. Opening up information for the masses under free license regime could make it easily accessible to millions of people.

8. Failure to cater for people with disabilities

Many people in India cannot read, speak or write, and the country has over 60 million people with some form of hearing impairment. There is a desperate need for a high-quality text-to-speech and speech-to-text engines for people with physical disabilities. These products also be freely available so that those who cannot afford to buy expensive proprietary software like JAWS can contribute to Wikipedia in their languages. Many of the text-to-speech engines available today for Indian languages sound so mechanical that it is difficult for the average speaker to use them.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/global-voices-april-27-2016-subhashish-panigrahi-eight-challenges-indian-language-wikipedias-need-to-overcome

Draft Law Would Prohibit Showing ‘Disputed Areas’ on Maps of India

subha — 2016-05-15T13:05:41Z

Maps that label geographic areas of conflict as “disputed” territories in India could put one behind bars for seven years with 1B Indian Rupees (US$15M) penalty if a recently proposed bill becomes law.

The article was published in Global Voices on May 11, 2016.

The controversial bill, also known as Geospatial Information Regulation Bill 2016 would make it illegal to “depict, disseminate, publish or distribute any wrong or false topographic information of India including international boundaries through internet platforms or online services or in any electronic or physical form.”

If approved, it could put large corporations like Google (with its Google map), free and open source projects like Wikipedia and Open Street Map, and several other organizations in trouble for showing areas of conflict as disputed. Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Arunachal Pradesh near the China border are two well-known examples of such areas.

The Indian government ruled by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been quite critical of the depiction of the PoK and China border in Arunachal Pradesh.

If passed in the parliament as law, it could prevent Indians and foreigners, government employees and people traveling in ships and aircrafts that are registered in India, to acquire geospatial imagery or data. To acquire such data, one needs to obtain permissions from the security vetting authority.

In recent years, the Indian government has targeted numerous foreign publications including Al Jazeera for showing distorted maps of India that excluded parts of the state of Jammu and Kashmir and even another state Arunachal Pradesh. While the bill does not explicitly mention these efforts, it seems to fall in line with these previous attempts to control the free flow of geospatial information.

A news article about the proposed bill published on the portal MediaNama explains how the potential law could affect map portals like Open Street Map and Google Maps, taxi, e-commerce and public safety sites and many other services that allow marking and sharing coordinates. “Most digital photographs contain location meta-data, and by sharing your photos online, you’re adding to a repository of data related to man-made phenomenon,” suggests the same article. Open data advocates also have published list of 25 different services, seven major news portals, and 14 nonprofits that would be affected if the bill is approved.

The Open Data community of India also has come up with a campaign “SaveTheMap” to draft a request to the government to not pass the bill. The draft request states:

Request for comments / suggestions on draft “The Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, 2016” To regulate the acquisition, dissemination, publication and distribution of geospatial information of India which is likely to affect the security, sovereignty and integrity of India, a draft “The Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, 2016” has been prepared. Copy of the draft “The Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, 2016” is attached herewith for comments/suggestions. The comments/suggestions on the draft Bill may be forwarded to the Joint Secretary (Internal Security-I), Ministry of Home Affairs, North Block, New Delhi at email id: jsis@nic.in within 30 days.

There has been a lot of discussion with hashtag #GeoSpatialBill and humorous comments on social media:

Many have already started tweeting with the hashtag #savethemap:

Twitter user Prasanto Roy explained the implications of geospatial bill for various companies including Google, Uber and Open street maps:

Here's what other experts have to say:

Arup. R writes in Geospatial World:

This Act needs to be dropped. In its attempt to cover all bases it has been made so broadband and all encompassing that it may actually impede the progress of work on Geospatial systems and therefore on key Government programmes and projects. The Act does not take into account the fact that with the advent of the Cloud, Data as a Service, Software as a Service and Platform as a Service there is no need for ‘persons’ to possess data. They can just access data, do their work and retain only the final results. This Act does not, in fact cannot, even begin to comprehend the paradigm shift in geospatial technologies which makes it a non-starter.

India does need a Geospatial Information Act, but it has to be an enabling and encouraging Act that makes for faster and better implementation of programmes, not a regressive and punitive Act as the proposed one.

Devdutta Tengshe writes about the overreaching ambit of Geospatial bill on Medium:

Worst of all, it (the bill) is trying to implement Security by Obscurity, which is expecting the country to become secure by hiding information from its citizens. This is dangerous, because the real mischief creators, be they terrorists, Foreign government agencies, or domestic criminals, will most likely have access to kind of data from foreign sources, and will not even think about getting permits and licenses from these Indian Authorities.

Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal told The Wire:

The draft legislation has the intrinsic problem that it has been given extra-territorial applicability in terms of jurisdiction. It is applicable to any person anywhere in the world. We have historically seen that such jurisdiction does not work well in practical terms. What if global players do not want to take your licence or subject themselves to your jurisdiction?

Duggal further spoke about how the law could impact the growth of e-commerce and m-commerce in India.

Under this law, Google Maps will be illegal without a licence, which means that all mobile or e-commerce applications working on Google Maps will also become illegal. The licence will also only be applicable to the concerned person. So if I am a taxi aggregator like Ola or Uber, I will have to get a separate licence over and above what Google Map has.

Indian Express calls the Geospatial bill a death note for Cartography:

The draft Geospatial Information Regulation Bill of 2016 is so perfectly ridiculous that one can only hope that it falls off the map before it can be tabled in the House. Publishers the world over have learned, to their bewildered amusement, that India censors maps of itself. Now, to strike fear into their anti-national gizzards, the government has invoked an official map censor, a babu-led organisation whose prior permission will be required to publish geospatial information, which is newspeak for maps. Failure to correctly depict the borders of India could attract a fine of up to Rs 100 crore, before the poor offending bozo is dragged away to the cooler for seven years. With this draft, the government has embarked on a journey without maps, which must rapidly become directionless.

Not the first time around?

Meanwhile, this clearly isn't the first time that services such as Google Maps have come under the federal scanner in India. In 2014, India's prime investigation agency Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had launched a probe into Google Maps’ irregularities in Mapathon 2013 and had accused the company of running the competition without procuring proper governmental permissions. But the agency had called off the case citing lack of ‘adequate evidence to corroborate the allegations’.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/draft-law-would-prohibit-showing-2018disputed-areas2019-on-maps-of-india

Doctors and Translators Are Working Together to Bridge Wikipedia's Medical Language Gap

subha — 2014-08-04T03:29:44Z

I interviewed Wikimedian User:CFCF who is managing the entire project to understand how it is going to work and wrote on Global Voices' Rising Voices about it.

The article was published in GlobalVoices on July 27, 2014. It can be accessed here. It was republished in the Wikimedia Blog on July 30, 2014.

Internet users from around the world often turn to Wikipedia to answer questions of all kinds. The information offered there includes medical subjects, especially important in parts of the world where access to medical professionals may be limited.

However, much of this information can be unreliable and is available only in the most oft-spoken languages.

A group of experienced Wikipedia editors and medical professionals is trying to change that with the Medicine Translation Project, an effort to improve health care-related topics in English Wikipedia and translate them into other languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Persian, Tagalog, Indonesian and Macedonian.

Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grant (IEG), a microgrant supporting work on Wikipedia-related activities, granted 10,000 US dollars to the Medicine Translation Project Community Organizing project, which aims to enhance communication and coordination among the team.

Medical student and Wikipedian User:CFCF along with two advisors, Dr. James Heilman (User:Doc James) and Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi) lead the group. We spoke to founder CFCF over email.

Rising Voices (RV): How did the project get started? What inspired it and how did you identify the needs it would fulfill?

CFCF: [...] The project itself started off in 2011 when Dr. James Heilman and a number of translators from Translators Without Borders: Enrique Cavalitto and Ildiko Santana teamed up in an effort to translate medical articles. Since then, the project has exploded into a larger translation forum with hundreds of translators translating articles into almost a hundred different languages. [...]

For Wikimedia projects with a large pool of editors, we have been taking help from editors to assess what is needed, and what should be translated. On smaller projects we have simply set the goal to get anything on World Health Organization (WHO)’s list of essential medicines, as well as anything about neglected tropical diseases, also from a list by the WHO. As for these articles the project is still in an early phase, but we want to cover basically anything that might be relevant to readers, from cancer to emergency medicine.

RV: How is the process of translation going?

CFCF: [...] The problem is that there are so many layers of complications in the translation process. After an article has been written and been subject to review to ensure its quality, the article needs to be prepared and proofed for translation, after which translators need to be found. [...] Many of our translators are medical professionals and have in-depth knowledge in their native languages. On the top of it, they dedicate plenty of time on the content creation and translation. This helps to get good quality translations. What this also means is they they seldom have any knowledge of Wiki markup or Wikipedia. Someone else who knows the language in question has to go through links, templates etc. and fix them, proofread the translated content so it is up to scratch and readable.

CFCF: [...] The problem is that there are so many layers of complications in the translation process. After an article has been written and been subject to review to ensure its quality, the article needs to be prepared and proofed for translation, after which translators need to be found. [...] Many of our translators are medical professionals and have in-depth knowledge in their native languages. On the top of it, they dedicate plenty of time on the content creation and translation. This helps to get good quality translations. What this also means is they they seldom have any knowledge of Wiki markup or Wikipedia. Someone else who knows the language in question has to go through links, templates etc. and fix them, proofread the translated content so it is up to scratch and readable.

RV: How do you address this?

CFCF: To fix all this, it is best to have a local Wikipedian who can integrate the text. Most of the work has already been done. But, getting these things right is very crucial, especially on Wikipedias with vast content, where there already is a lot of content to link in.

I think the resistance we met early in the project's life was not against translation of content. But, because we did not spend enough time getting the translated articles up to shape before sending them live on the target Wikipedia.

What we saw on the Polish Wikipedia was that much of the issues were down to how they used different templates, and after I commissioned a bot to fix this, the articles started going live very quickly. After this, more and more editors became interested in helping out [...]

RV: Are you in conversation with the Wikipedia Zero team — a mobile data project focused on Wikipedia access in the developing world — about popularising this with their partners in the developing nations?

CFCF: Currently we are not in touch with the Wikipedia Zero team specifically, even though our works target the same communities. The difference between us and them is that we target developed countries as well as countries where there barely is any mobile connectivity at all, such as Burma where I do not know if we will be seeing Wikipedia Zero in the foreseeable future [...]

RV: What are your plans to engage with the larger Wikimedia communities that are multilingual and totally diverse?

CFCF: We aim to get high quality content in as many languages as we can. It is difficult to translate such deeply technical content, so we are really looking for professional translators, or individuals with some form of medical background so that information loss and corruption of content in translation is minimal.We recruit translators either off-wiki, or on the medical WikiProjects. We are still looking for translators who feel they are comfortable with such topics, and we especially need them in smaller languages. We are also searching them at Babylon on Meta Wiki.

WikiProject Med Foundation was the first attempt to get a truly global organization of medical Wikipedia editors. Most medical professionals are fluent in English, and we really try to engage in discussion in other languages when we can, so I think there is a real benefit in creating a global community for medical editors.

We are not large enough yet that we have all the relevant people on English Wikipedia, and we will probably never be because there are always specialists in other countries with very specific knowledge that we can leverage. That makes international collaboration really great.

As for the local language integrators, the idea is to have editors who are willing help out and be an intermediary between that community and our translator community. We have a page where all our finished translations are added. An integrator would patrol that page on a regular basis, inform the respective language Wikipedia that the new translation is ready. The language Wikipedia’s reader community share feedback on the translation quality and suggest for improvement. For us, it is really easy to just add articles without going through them thoroughly. But, that would not work at all. For things to work, we need someone who both knows Wiki markup and the target language so that the integration can go smoothly.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/global-voices-subhashish-panigrahi-july-27-2014-doctors-and-translators-are-working-together-to-bridge-wikipedias-medical-language-gap

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