Centre for Internet and Society

WikipediansSpeak: Telugu Language Library Catalog Project Helps Wikipedia Grow

subha — 2015-12-15T08:06:52Z

In 2013, the interview project “WikipediansSpeak” was launched in response to observations that many noteworthy Wikimedians were being underrepresented both locally and globally. Not just them personally—their work, and the communities they represent, were also unknown to the Wikimedia community and the outside world.

This was published on Wikimedia blog in two languages English and Ukranian.

Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising campaigns were the biggest inspiration for the project. From video-only interviews, this is an attempt at different ways of interviews, and is the first interview showcasing a Telugu Wikimedian: Viswanadh B.K., who was an Individual Engagement (IEG) Grantee last year and has continued to be active in outreach.

Recently, you attended a Telugu Wikipedia workshop for the Botany-major undergraduate students at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. Would you like to talk a little bit about your participation, how the program was designed, the activities there and the output? How are you planning to mentor the students in the future?

The staff and students are quite enthusiastic, and the students are dedicating considerable time to learning, and reflecting their learning, while editing the Telugu Wikipedia. However, they need more training on basics of Wikipedia, as well as on policies and guidelines. Without that, they might end up creating low quality articles that the community will face problems cleaning up. Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), that has been organizing these sessions in the college, should seek out more support from the Telugu Wikimedia community so that the experienced editors could mentor these students. I feel it would be a good idea to award the students and faculty with certificates. These small little things often motivate many.

What part should the community and CIS-A2K be playing in the Wikimedia movement? What could and should we do for the Telugu community?

Many in our community do not know how programs like CIS-A2K work. Maybe there is a need to provide some kind of orientation for them which will help them to understand how they could approach CIS asking for support. This process could also help the community understand CIS’s activities and its programmatic implementation. More collaboration, and understanding of the program among the community, will improve involvement in CIS’s activities as well as CIS’s understanding of the community.

You were the second Telugu Wikipedian to be awarded with an Individual Engagement Grant (IEG). How did it go, and what did you achieve? Based on your own experience, how are you planning to groom this year’s applicants from Telugu and other Indian language Wikimedia communities?

This IEG was my dream come true! Back in 2009, I blogged about the potential of opening up library catalogs on the Internet for people to search for books. It took shape with my grant project: “Digitization of Important Libraries Book Catalog in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana”. I worked on an extensive project, digitizing the catalogs of five libraries—a total of 300,000 books—in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. I learned a lot, and documented part of my learning, which talks about the ways one should go about partnering with Indian institutions. I believe, my interaction with fellow Wikimedians must have helped them to better their grants applications this year. And I am hoping that I will continue to support more friend from my community and country in the future.

What drove you, over the years, to work on a project like this digitizing library catalogs? Were there any additional learning and benefits from this project?

In this digital age, people searching for books on the Internet might have developed the notion that if a book is not available online, it doesn’t exist. I have been experiencing this very issue while looking for evidence notability and citations on the Telugu Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia editors argue for citing at least the name of the book when the book is not available online. This pushed me to create a central catalog that will benefit Wikipedians, researchers, and readers. In the process of creating the catalog, I also managed to develop strong relations with several cultural organizations. These include Kathanilayam, a dedicated organization collecting every Telugu story; the Annamayya Library, which developed into a great cultural center in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh; and the Suryaraya Vidyananda Library, whose collection is enriched with rare manuscripts and important books. I touch based with them then, and they are slowly becoming household names for other Wikimedians for their library-related needs. We can see the potential of strong partnerships and synergy with these libraries.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-october-9-2015-subhashish-panigrahi-telugu-library-catalog-project-wikipedians-speak

WikipediansSpeak: Piotr Konieczny

subha — 2013-09-18T12:22:36Z

WikipediansSpeak is a video interview show hosted by Subhashish Panigrahi at the Centre of Internet and Society. It brings you series of posts about Wikipedians across the globe. Wikipedians are those voluntary contributors who write Wikipedia articles, correct mistakes made by other wikipedians and share knowledge for free to the world.

Video production: Subhashish Panigrahi, Access To Knowledge Programme (Centre for Internet and Society), CC-BY-SA 3.0

This episode brings you a conversation with Piotr Konieczny, a veteran Wikipedian from Poland. He has contributed to over 514 DYK articles on Wikipedia. Being a sociologist and academician Piotr has always tried to divert attention more students, academicians, researchers, scholars to contribute to Wikipedia. I first met Piotr during WikiSym + OpenSym Conference at Hong Kong and again at Wikimania 2013. It was the beginning of my Wiki-experience of meeting more researchers and scholars who are also Wikipedians. Piotr is now based in Seoul and where he is teaching Informational Sociology at the Hanyang University (한양대학교). His keen interest in using Wikipedia as a teaching tool and Wikipedia’s impact in social movement brings the expanse of diversifying Wikipedia’s outreach to masses. In academia he proposes for Wikipedia Education Programs that converts the users of Wikipedia to contribute who elsewhere use it just as a tool to accessing knowledge. If a small portion of the subject experts start contributing to Wikipedia then there would be a big change in this world.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedians-speak-piotr-konieczny

Wikipedians after the workshop

subha — 2012-11-01T10:34:39Z

Odia Wikipedians socializing after the workshop.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/topic_images/1st_Pune_Odia_Workshop7.jpg

Wikipedia Introductory Session organized for Data and India portal consultants

subha — 2013-07-17T06:33:20Z

On May 13, 2013, the Access to Knowledge team led by Subhashish Panigrahi conducted a Wikipedia Introductory Session at the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi for the consultants working for Data and India portal. This session was aimed to emphasize how these portals and their useful data could be used on Wikipedia to create good quality articles.

Recently Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge team was invited to demonstrate the usefulness of Wikipedia for the consultants of National Informatics Centre (NIC) working for the Data.gov.in and the National Portal of India at NIC's New Delhi office. Data portal being one of the very important open data portal of the Government of India has worked immensely to populate over 2400 datasets from 32 departments participating in it.¹

Many of the data need to be transcribed in popular medias especially on web. Wikipedia being world's largest online encyclopedia could be one such primary platform to use these useful data. Subhashish from A2K team explained the usefulness of Wikipedia for the people associated with this project. The session went with discussing about policies, Manual of style and Five pillars of Wikipedia followed by a demonstration of editing articles on English Wikipedia. Post editing session there was a discussion session about the notability and how to check accuracy of articles by using valid references.

1 http://bit.ly/11DMH5w

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

Wikipedia Campus at Oxford College

subha — 2015-05-27T14:22:44Z

CIS-A2K collaborated with the Oxford College of Engineering, Bommanahalli, Bangalore on April 24, 2015 for introducing Wikimedia projects at their institution. Radhakrishna, a senior Wikimedian from Bangalore provided the crucial introduction and worked closely with the A2K team in conducting all the activities.

Team A2K learnt valuable lessons regarding committing resources and building short term partnerships with higher education institutions. It was noted that the students showed high level of interest but due to the extremely busy academic calendar, activities could not be conducted as per the original plan.

Selected students from Oxford College of Engineering were given hands on training for two weeks (April-May) on various Wikimedia projects and were initiated into Wikisource as an evaluative activity. The diverse group of students presented the A2K team an opportunity to discuss various language projects and prepare a plan for engaging the students after the intensive training comes to an end.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-campus-at-oxford-college

Wikimedia contributor shares his Linux story

subha — 2016-06-18T17:08:19Z

Computers have fascinated me since childhood, but my first encounter—like many others—was not with Linux. For me, it was with Microsoft Paint. Then, many years later in 2011, it was my Wikipedia mentor, Shiju Alex, who introduced me to Linux. Since then, it's been my life!

If I recall correctly, Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS (Lucid Lynx) was my first distro. It was different, light, and fun. And, I would often switch back to Windows for something, then back to Ubuntu. The smoothness—and having a virus-free environment—was wonderful and enticed me to continue on with Linux. Unlike today, Ubuntu was not a graphic-rich distro at the time. I was coding less than I am today, so I was working more with editing images using GIMP and Inkscape.

Later in 2011, I was in Mumbai for the Wiki Conference India hackathon and got stuck on some jQuery code. I asked someone to help, so he picked up my Windows-based office notebook to look at the code. That person was noted academician and Wikipedian Bob Cummings. After a minute, he looked at me and said, "You are in the wrong OS, boy." On my personal laptop, I was using Linux to create the logo for Odia Wikipedia v.2.0, which is used for Odia Wikipedia, so I defended myself saying, "This is my work computer." He quickly responded, "Well you're in the wrong job, my dear friend."

That conversation stuck with me, and is one I'll never forget because Bob shook me with a feeling that that there exists a better world outside mine. If I am not a part of that, then I am missing something big.

So, in 2012, I joined the Wikimedia Foundation's India Program and moved to New Delhi. That exposed me to more free software activists, and of course Linux advocates. My job demanded me to meet more people; both virtually and in real spaces. I would often bump into someone talking about free software and Linux or someone recommending a specific software program to better do a job without bothering much if a Mac or Windows version is available or not. And slowly, that black window with white text, of the Linux terminal, became home. I worked on fixing bugs with an input method, and I was already working under the guidance of fellow Wikimedian Junain PV, which helped me create a fresh new input method on MediaWiki. While designing manuals and handouts for new contributors, though Adobe tools were favorite because of the easiness in use, I enjoyed the perfect rendering of South Asian language scripts in Linux based tools.

My Wikipedia mentor, Shiju Alex, was part of my transformation. He is a great free software enthusiast and encouraged me to use Linux again when I had lost the desire! Then, I installed Virtual Box on my Macbook and a lot of free and open source software like LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, and my favorite, Audacity.

Today, I use Ubuntu 14.04.2. At work, my colleagues Sunil Abraham and Rahimanuddin Shaik are a resorvoir of inspiration. The difference with Linux is there is a feeling of contributing something back to the hand that feeds you.

This article is part of a series called My Linux Story. To participate and share your Linux story, contact us at: open@opensource.com. Read the original published by Opensource.com on September 3, 2015.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-source-september-3-2015-subhashish-panigrahi-wikimedia-contributor-shares-his-linux-story

Wikimania 2013: Wikipedians represent Indian Languages in Hong Kong

subha — 2013-09-13T06:03:03Z

The 7th, 8th and 9th of August 2013 saw over 600 Wikipedians across the world participating Wikimania at Hong Kong. The three day annual international conference for users and contributors of Wikipedia brought many debates about open educational research, open source technologies, gender gap, documenting the history of mankind in a free and open platform like Wikipedia and its sister sites in collaboration with Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums and all of these in 286 world languages. More and more volunteers are joining this movement and it is expanding the media of accessing and disseminating knowledge.

Here is a school teacher who lives in Salem, a small industrial town in Tamil Nadu. There lives a school teacher who was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Hong Kong long back. They have never met in real life but have been helping in correcting each others mistakes in Wikipedia articles. These two school teachers have taken their knowledge from the four walls of the classrooms to a larger audience of Tamil Wikipedia. I then realized how language brings people together. This is what I heard from my inner voice when I met S.Parvathi from Salem and H.K.Arun from Sri Lanka during Hong Kong Wikimania 2013, an annual gathering of Wikipedia contributors.

Many still are not aware the existence of Wikipedias in Indian languages. There are 20 South Asian language Wikipedias with more than 2 lakh articles contributed totally by about 1500 voluntary contributors in all these languages. There are hundred more contributors like Arun and Parvathi who create new articles in Tamil Wikipedia, and rectify mistakes by new contributors.

Wikipedians are all volunteers who devote their time for building the greatest repository of knowledge on the internet. Wikipedia articles are free from any copyright infringement so anyone can freely access, share, make modifications and redistribute them. Wikipedians have been able to create this ecosystem of nurturing new editors by teaching them the process of encyclopaedic content generation which not only polishes their writing abilities, but strengthens their communication skills.

Wikimania is fun, it brings wikipedians across the globe speaking diverse languages under one roof where they meet each other and share their ideas and collaborate.

Over 600 wikipedians from various countries participated in this year’s Wikimania including 16 from India. In the open world of Wikipedia collaboration always happen beyond borders; one Nepali and four Bangla Wikipedians from Bangladesh also joined the Indian Wikipedians to rejoice the triumph of the effort of all the volunteers from the subcontinent.

The fun was not just limited in creating a wall of their dreams, ambitions and action plans to take their own language Wikipedia to more people or discuss how they could write articles that are important to each others languages. It went upto helping each other to fix problems in typing Indian languages and discussing success stories of successful workshops that resulted bring more student contributors. Ganesh Paudel, a Wikipedian from Nepal says, "My hometown is very close to India and we share the same script with Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit and Konkani. India and Nepal both have sizable population speaking Nepali, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Sanskrit, Bangla and Hindi. I’m personally interested to collaborate with Indians speaking these languages." I could see the glow in his eyes when he wrote and explained the beautiful curvature of Ranjana script to me. Tinu Cherian, another long term Wikipedian who was attending Wikimania for the third time was excitedly live-tweeting the happening at Hong Kong. When I asked how he is feeling after a short break he unfolded his hands and proudly said, "Wikipedia is like religion to me, once a Wikipedian, you are always a Wikipedian!". Netha, a medical college student from Kerala spoke about bringing more women to contribute to Wikipedia. She calls Kavya, a college lecturer and Malayalam wikipedian who spoke about Women and non-conventional education as one of the gems she has discovered in her personal journey.

Wikimania also has Sengai Podhuvan, one of the oldest Indian Wikipedians. His appeal for Wikipedia fundraising brought a lot of donations to Wikimedia Foundation. Dr. Podhuvan shared his story of learning using computer, Tamil typing and writing articles about Wikimania this year brought many academicians, education researchers, policy change makers and open source and open knowledge activists across the world to share their ideas, activities going across the world even while enjoying dinner in the 100th floor.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikimania2013

WikiConference India 2016 Submission: How to better tell your Wikimedia Community Story using Media as a Tool

subha — 2016-08-17T02:24:19Z

The Wikimedia community has constantly struggled to a) reach out to masses and tell them about their contribution, and motivate people to contribute to the Wikimedia projects. Media plays a very important role in spreading the word about Wikimedia projects and the contributor community, and at times, encouraging the audience to contribute.

A presentation was made at the WikiConference India 2016. This was one of the submissions which was accepted.

This has not been a very successful trend in the movement so far that a large number of people have engaged on Wikimedia projects because of a media shoutout. But there is no doubt about media being a great tool to engage with a large number of people. Apart from the mainstream media, social media has also been a gamechanger in mobilizing masses. The audience in both these kinds of media demand a certain kind of content and storytelling. And it is not easy to create relevant content for an audience that is hungry for new stories. Also, dealing with mainstream media has a lot to do with interpersonal skills.

This workshop would cover a few best practices from lessons learned from several media-related exercises in the recent years. Some of these exercises come with success and some with failures with some specific learning. And these important takeaways will hopefully lead a path in creating some kind open education resources (OER) for the Wikimedia community. However, none of the methodologies that are going to be discussed here are going to be ready solutions to change the awareness about the Wikimedia movement overnight. But these will certainly help the participants map their own community stories. The interactive workshop will help the participants to make some roadmap for a regular and sustained engagement on media.

Those who are keen on learning about using different media tools and take their Wikimedia stories to a wider world should consider participating this. It would be beneficial if they come prepared with a list of challenges that they are facing in media outreach.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikiconference-india-2016-submission-how-to-better-tell-your-wikimedia-community-story-using-media-as-a-tool

Why It's Essential To Grow Indian-Language Wikipedias

subha — 2016-05-28T06:52:53Z

On 15 January, Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia celebrated its 15th birthday, meeting this milestone with 36 million articles in more than 290 languages (the English-language Wikipedia alone has crossed the 5-million article mark). But here I want to address some major questions that we need to ask as Indians.

This was published by Huffington Post on January 25, 2016. Also mirrored on Global Voices on February 26, 2016. The post was translated into Greek by Maria Souli. It was translated into Spanish by Daniela Diaz and into Russian by GV Russian

First, what is the state of Indian-language Wikipedia projects? What does India have to take from and give to Wikipedia?

With the growth of free and open source software in India, people are equipped with more freedom than ever. Especially with the recent federal policy-level changes, the nation is enjoying better collaboration with people of different cultures speaking different languages.

According to UNESCO, 197 of the total of 1652 Indian languages are dying despite having a long literary and linguistic heritage.

However, there is a huge gap in the access to knowledge on the internet domain. Of a population of about 1.26 billion only about 15-18% people are connected online, largely from mobile devices. A tiny fraction of this population comprises the technical community. It would be useful to have a metric on the percentage of this community's contribution to grow the languages of this country and its cultural heritage.

Wikipedia as a family

Wikipedia is not just an encyclopaedia. It is also a "family" of several other Open Knowledge members. Wikipedia itself is available in over 290 languages, but it also has other multilingual sister projects such as Wikisource (an online library of many public domain and other important texts), Wikimedia Commons (the world's largest repository of media files and documents), Wikibooks (a free library of educational textbooks), Wikivoyage (a free and open travel guide) and Wiktionary (a database of various languages).

These projects don't just house millions of images, videos, documents and texts, but allow anyone to contribute their knowledge to this ever deepening pool of information. Four Indian languages made an early entry to the Wiki-world back in 2002 -- Assamese, Malayalam, Odia and Punjabi.

Language neutrality

According to UNESCO, 197 of the total of 1652 Indian languages are dying despite having a long literary and linguistic heritage. It's quite shocking. In a blog post on content localisation, social entrepreneur Rajesh Ranjan asks if free and open source software can help save these dying languages. In the context of Wikipedia, there are already 23 South Asian-language projects. Out of these 20 are languages listed in the 8th schedule of the Constitution of India. Many might not have noticed that the "en" in the URL of Wikipedia that denotes the language code of English could be altered with "or" for Odia Wikipedia or "pa" for Punjabi Wikipedia.

Most Wikipedia projects in Indian language projects are relatively small compared to their counterparts. But the Wikimedia communities are thriving.

There are a fairly large number of native speakers waiting out there to access knowledge in their own languages.

When only parts of government websites are available in Hindi, the Hindi Wikipedia has crossed 10 million articles already. The Tamil and Malayalam Wikipedia communities have played a central part in implementing Wikipedia basics learning in the state-run school syllabus. Needless to say that these communities have played a significant role in implementing several free and open source software by pushing for policy-level change. Many Indian languages are in the pipeline to become active Wikipedia projects under the scope of the Wikimedia Incubator.

Maithili Wikipedia and Goan Konkani Wikipedia are the two Indian-language Wikipedias that have gone live in recent years. The world has seen how digital activism has brought a new life to the Hebrew language. There are a fairly large number of native speakers waiting out there to access knowledge in their own languages. Wikipedia could be a great tool for digital activism with openness and sharing.

Addressing gender bias in Wikipedia: Implications for India

India tops South Asia in the gender inequality index in the entire South Asia. The female literacy rate is an alarmingly low 65.46% as compared to 82.14% for men. This disparity is evident in many other sectors as well as in politics.

Digital India aims at digital literacy and availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages. This is closely aligned with the Wikimedia movement's goal....

But gender bias is not just a problem in India. The global free and open source software (FOSS) community has always been worried about the low presence of women contributors -- in the range of 2-5% range. Wikimedia Foundation's former executive director admitted that Wikipedia, like many other collaborative and open projects, does not have a conducive environment for women. But the Wikimedia community and Wikimedia Foundation are both working on improving this state of affairs. Indian-language Wikipedia projects are directly impacted by this global drive, be it the Women's History Month edit-a-thon where Wikipedia content largely related to women are improved every year or the Lilavati's Daughters project where biographies of Indian women scientists were created and enriched in Wikipedia projects.

Complementing Digital India

With a population of over 354 million netizens India still has a long way to go in increasing Indian language content on the web. The Government of India's new campaign Digital India aims at digital literacy and availability of digital resources/services in Indian languages. This is closely aligned with the Wikimedia movement's goal to provide free access to the sum of all human knowledge. In addition to Wikipedia, many other open educational resources and free knowledge projects that are not already a part of the Digital India campaign signal the need for the federal-run campaign to be more collaborative and open. Community-government collaborations like the NROER project to make NCERT books under Creative Commons licenses and IT@School project in the state of Kerala to provide education using free and open tools have gained massive traction and helped more Indian language content come online.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/huffington-post-subhashish-panigrahi-january-25-2016-why-its-essential-to-grow-indian-language-wikipedias

What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India

subha — 2016-10-22T04:12:40Z

The number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.

This was published by Your Story on October 20, 2016.

State of Indian languages on the internet

Based on a study, Internet activist Anivar Aravind mentioned that in 2014, although 89 percent of Indian population used mobile phones, only 10 percent of the population used smartphones (contributing to 13 percent of total mobile users). This means we can safely assume that a large section of online activity in India is through mobile devices ‑ thanks to the declining data charges because of high competition. That said the mobile internet connectivity in rural India is growing at a fast pace and vernacular content plays an important role in this great journey. With over 90 percent of the users being comfortable in their own native languages, websites that are producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this bandwagon.

Why open access is important for Indian languages?

Open access, in a nutshell, would mean research outputs and other educational resources that are free from restriction of access and use. The former includes resources like journals that are not paywalled, and the latter is freedom from copyright restriction. Open access as a movement encourages license migration ‑ a process of migrating from several copyrighted license terms to Creative Commons licenses and several other licenses that provide freedom to use, share and remix. In a country like India where there are only a handful of research journals available in vernacular languages, the need for open content becomes much more important. The more the restricted content, the less will be the access to knowledge. Creating more vernacular content with open licenses is like digging a well in a dessert.

Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals

It’s been almost a decade since most largely spoken Indian languages started having a Wikipedia project of their own. Presently, there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias, including newest entrants like Konkani and Tulu. That said, these projects are growing with more and more encyclopedic content written with a neutral point of view, which any internet user will find useful. Wikipedia is considered as the people’s encyclopedia and hence can have quite contrasting content ‑ some being poor because some volunteer editors lack expertise in high quality articles written by professionals. A great example of creating very high quality content in one particular subject area is Open Textbook of Medicine ‑ an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine that was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happened to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high quality content.

How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool

The list of challenges to grow Wikipedia-like projects with volunteer effort could be endless. And one of the biggest challenges is bringing self-motivated people who are willing to contribute as volunteers. Also, there are many such people who are not aware that they can contribute to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem by having several Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates that are run by both volunteers and paid staff ‑ the Wikimedia Foundation, a paid staff-run organisation that is responsible for fundraising, major technological and some community support. In India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K) and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates that are working on catalysing the growth of the content and the communities. Where the affiliate Punjabi Wikimedians focuses on Punjabi language (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), both Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K focus on all the Indian languages. CIS-A2K also specially focuses on five languages; Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu. Indian language Wikipedia projects can only grow if people can edit their own language Wikipedias.

With the Open Access Week—a week dedicated for promoting Open Access globally—around the corner with “Open in Action” as the theme of the year, there is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india

We are Wikipedia

subha — 2014-09-06T03:19:29Z

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

@WeAreWikipedia auf Global Voices

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

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

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

subha — 2013-09-06T12:30:19Z

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

subha — 2013-09-05T09:24:57Z

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

				Video by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Video by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Why do you [edit] Wikipedia?

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

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

Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature

subha — 2014-04-08T01:48:18Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plans going foward:

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

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

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

Vachana Sanchaya: 11th century Kannada literature to enrich Wikisource

subha — 2014-03-20T11:13:22Z

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

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

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

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

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

Working System

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

Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Public Response

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

Plans for the future

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

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

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