Centre for Internet and Society

Indo - French Perspectives on Digital Studies

praskrishna — 2017-03-29T05:17:33Z

Anubha Sinha was a speaker at the Indo-French workshop on Open Access at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on March 15, 2017. The event was organized by the Digital Studies Group.

Anubha Sinha broadly spoke on the state of open access in India, the features of the DBT-DST policy, ICAR policy, how to shape the future of open access movement in India and what are the obstacles in the same.

See the workshop schedule here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/indo-french-perspectives-on-digital-studies

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages

Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2013-04-22T13:37:08Z

In this blog post, we bring you a visualisation of the page views statistics and the project specific pages that we created last month. The page views indicate the number of unique visits the Wikipedia project concerned has received in one month.

Unlike the basic parameters that we discussed last month, we received the Page Views data only from January 2008 onwards. The project-specific pages allow the user to see all the different variables related to a Indic language Wikipedia project in one page, thus giving a general overview of the activities in that project and their inter-relationships. Instead of comparing multiple projectsn, as in the calendar charts and motion chart discussed in the last post, the project-specific pages focus on understanding one Wikipedia project in detail.

Page Views

The data came in a structure that is useful for human-readability of the data but not so much for visualisation. The first column contained the date value (01/01/2008, 01/02/2008, and so on), followed by a column for each Indic Wikipedia project (Assamese, Bhojpuri, and so on) and one for the total Page Views across projects for the month concerned. The original data file can be accessed here. We re-formatted this data to the following column structure: the first column gives the date value, the second column gives the language of the Wikipedia project, and the third column gives the Page Views value. Further, the Page Views file contained data for 2013 that are not available for any other variables (like Total Articles, Total Editors etc.). So we decided to remove the 2013 values from the Page Views file for easier comparison with other variables. The data file that we finally used for the visualisation can be accessed here.

Calendar (Heatmap) Chart

The first chart that we created was the calendar (heatmap) chart discussed in detail in the last post. For the Page View variable we only had data form 2008. We plotted it as calendar-like heatmap to allow quick cross-project comparisons of trends in readership. The chart can be accessed here.

Project Pages

So far, we have been visualising the data from an overall perspective, constantly asking the question: "How does project A compare to project B?". The Project pages sheds light from a different angle: "How did project A get to this point?". Each of the projects are visualised in isolation around the basic parameters to understand how they have changed/evolved over the years. We wanted to keep this as simple as possible and decided to use straight forward line charts. This also ensures that the patterns are clearly evident. On the right corner of the navigation bar is the project selector. You can search or pick a project and the page will load the charts specific to that project. Each project has a different page, this makes it easier for you to share the project that you are interested in. The chart employs filtering and dynamic scales. Dynamic scales are important because not all the projects have the same rate of growth.

Readership Dashboard

We were not satisfied with creating only the calendar heatmap chart for Page Views. Being a very important variable for anybody trying to understand activities on Indic Wikipedia projects, we wanted to create a more detailed visualisation for the variable. While the project-specific pages do allow for comparing Page Views for a certain Indic Wikipedia with its other variables (such as Total Articles), we wanted to make that comparison even easier. Hence we decided to make a chart combining a line graph showing the movement of Page View for a project across the years and bar graphs showing a separate variable for the same project. Thus we created the Readership Dashboard. The dashboard has two controls: project selector and the parameter selector buttons. Selecting a project from the dropdown will update the line chart showing the movement of page views. Hover over the line graph points to see the date of observation and the corresponding value. The bars behind the line represent the selected parameters. Click on the parameter buttons to load different parameters as the background bar graph. Hover over the bars to see the date and the value. The bar graph is carefully aligned to the line chart such that the visualisation reflects the relation in movement of both. However, please note that the vertical scale of the line graph and the bar graphs are not the same.

Sajjad Anwar is a programmer based in Bangalore. Sumandro Chattapadhyay is a researcher based in Delhi. They often work together.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indic-wikipedia-visualisation-project-visualising-page-views-and-project-pages

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #1: Visualising Basic Parameters

Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2013-03-26T10:04:43Z

Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay bring you a visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedia in this first post on Indic Wikipedia Visualisation project. In doing so, the authors look into the different aspects of the past and present activities of Indic Wikipedias, and divide the visualisation into three different focus areas.

Introduction

Understanding how the Indic or the Indian language Wikipedia projects are growing is something that we have been interested in for quite sometime. We were delighted to come across this opportunity from the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Wikimedia Foundation. We divided our analyses into three focus areas: (1) basic parameters, (2) geographic patterns of edits, and (3) exploring the topics that receives the greatest number of edits. The existing infographics and data visualisations that we found about Indic Wikipedias mostly engaged on the first area, and also emphasised on yearly aggregates. We thought a more granular, that is monthly, understanding and a focus on the geographic and thematic spread of the edits would be very helpful to further appreciate the activities.

We began by collecting data about the following basic parameters:

Number of Editors
Number of Articles
Page Views
Number of Active Editors
Number of New Articles
Number of New Editors
Edit Size

Acquiring the data

We explored the MediaWiki API, ToolServer and the Wikimedia Statistics Portal. These are several ways of obtaining data about Wikipedia in general. Depending on the use case, such as the quantity of data required or the need for customised/selective data scraping, any one or more of these methods of data gathering can be chosen. The API had limitations in terms of how much data you can access, and it is meant to be used to access actual Wikipedia entries. We, however, were looking for metadata about the entries/articles (such as when it was first created, when and how many times it was edited, etc.) and not the actual entries/articles, that is the actual contents of Indic Wikipedias. ToolServer is an excellent way of running custom scripts. Although, this takes for granted that user (of ToolServer) has substantial command over the back-end infrastructures and processes that Wikipedia runs on. We wrote a few scrapers to extract metadata about Indic Wikipedia projects from the ToolServer but not exactly being experts in the Wikipedia back-end systems, we found scraping from ToolServer rather time-and effort-intensive. The statistics portal is a well organised and an accessible place for collecting data for analyses. However, we came across several missing parameters and projects, that is the statistic portal did not have all the parameters and Wikipedia projects we were interested in. In our search for Indic Wikipedia datasets so far, we realised that the Wikimedia Analytics Team (WAT) puts a lot of effort in writing scripts and collecting various data at different levels. Wikimedia developer Yuvi Panda and the Access to Knowledge team at CIS, aware of our difficulty in obtaining the data, also pointed us towards the WAT. While we were already scraping data on some of the parameters, we approached the WAT whose prompt and very supportive response much accelerated our work process. The fantastic Wikimedia developers, especially Evan Rosen (a big ‘thank you’ for him) shared the needed data, which we cleaned up and archived at the Github repository for the project.

We obtained data for the period from January 2001 to December 2012. It appears that the Indic Wikipedia projects began their activities around 2005. A big part of cleaning the data involved identifying when each of the projects started and dropping data. There are 20 Indic Wikipedia projects with 4,98,964 articles, 5,689 editors and over 3,35,49,102 readers.

Deciding upon chart types

We spent quite some time discussing different methods of visualising the data. The major difficulty is that there are too many entities to be plotted. As each language must be plotted as a separate entity — point, line, circle, etc. — the chart has a tendency to become cluttered and illegible. Even if we take only one variable — say New Editors — there will still be 20 points or lines to be plotted. Hence, using any of the conventional charts becomes difficult. For example, if we chose a line chart with New Editors on the Y-axis and months on the X-axis, there will be 20 lines each of a different colour, representing different languages. Also, the five-six year monthly timeline translates into 60-72 temporal data points.

We have adopted two strategies, and related chart types, to address this difficulty.

Firstly, we used a monthly calendar-like heatmap chart that limits the temporal spread of data to one year for each section of the chart and uses a positionally uniform set of columns for each language so as to make reading the chart easier. Limiting each chart section to 12 months allow the user to focus on more granular movements of the variable concerned, say the number of New Editors per month. By representing each languages on an unique column, and not by an upwards-and-downwards moving line as in a line chart, makes it easier for the user to follow movements in each language (where movement is shown by the intensity of colour, as characteristic of heatmaps) without the need to have a separate coloured entity — point, line, circle — for each language.

Secondly, we used a motion chart, as made famous by Dr. Hans Rosling, that removes the temporal axis from X- and Y-axes of the chart and uses animated transition to represent temporal change. Motion chart has the unique ability to handle as many as five variables in an organised manner, using the following visual elements: X-axis, Y-axis, Z-axis (animated temporal transitions), size of bubbles, and colour of bubbles. It is, however, recommended that represented variables be limited to a maximum of four for easier legibility. In our case, we have used the X- and Y-axes to plot various related variables (which can be selected by the user) such as New Editors and New Articles, the Z-axis to represent time, and the colour of the bubbles to represent a third optional variable (also can be selected by the user). Since different Indian language Wikipedia projects often take a wide range of values for most variables, using the size of the bubble to represent any of those variables is avoidable. Further, the motion chart gives the user a lot of controls to explore the various projects and variables according to their interest and especially to compare particular projects and variables to each other.

Discussing the chart types with the Access to Knowledge team, we decided to use simpler line charts — emphasising upon single Indic Wikipedia projects — on the language-specific pages that we will be creating next.

Calendar charts


Calendar heatmap chart of New Editors across Indic Wikipedia projects, 2008-2011. Source: http://bit.ly/XDb3fa

We visualised three parameters using the calendar heatmap strategy: (1) New Articles, (2) New Editors, (3) Active Editors.

The New Articles Calendar shows new articles posted on every Indic Wikipedias for every month since 2004. It was interesting to note the few number of articles in 2012 for all the languages. The first language to have the most number of new articles is Bengali. Hindi picks up around same time with fewer number of articles. Except Urdu and Nepali, every other language dropped in the number of new articles. However, we should remember that a lower number of new articles does not necessarily indicate at low overall activity in the project concerned.

Like the new articles, we wanted to explore the patterns in the number of new editors across all of the Indic Wikipedia projects. As you run through the new editors calendar chart, it is evident that there is consistent growth in the editor base for few projects like Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. If one takes a step back and compares this with the number of new articles chart, something is not very clear -- in some of the projects, there is a growth in the number of editors but not many new articles are posted. We are very keen to understand why this has happened.

If we look at the active editors calendar, Tamil started with 2 active editors in January 2004 and with few ups and downs grew to about 115 active editors in December 2012. Malayalam started slow in late 2004 with 2 editors and grew to 155 active editors in December 2012. We are sure the viewers should be able to find out more patterns by studying the charts closely and comparatively.

Motion chart

We developed a motion chart comparing five variables: (1) Active Editors (> 5 edits per month), (2) New Editors, (3) Total Editors, (4) New Articles, and (5) Total Articles. When the visualisation is opened, Total Editors is plotted on the X-axis, Total Articles is plotted on the Y-axis, the colour of the bubbles indicate the Active Editors (Blue is low and Red is high) and the sizes of the bubbles are kept the same for easier comparison.

The user can click on the drop down menus at the X- and Y-axes, and next to the size and colour variables, and make them represent different variables.

We chose to configure the X- and Y-axes to show the data in logarithmic scales and not in linear scales. Since most projects experience small increments over time and there exists a wide difference between the most and the least popular/active projects, the logarithmic scale is better suited to represent the changes in the given data. The user has the option to select linear scale at the end of both X- and Y-axes (click on "Log").

As evident in the visualisation, the Newari project and the Hindi-Malayalam project cluster show very interesting contrasting dynamics — while both achieve similar Total Articles numbers, the latter is much more editor-heavy. This suggests a smaller but more active editor community for the Newari project.

Please click on the image of the motion chart below to open the interactive version in a separate window. The code can be accessed at the project repository on Github.


Motion chart comparing multiple variables across Indic Wikipedia projects, 2001-2011. Source: http://bit.ly/Yw4Wzq

Sajjad Anwar is a programmer based in Bangalore. Sumandro Chattapdhyay is a researcher based in Delhi. They often work together.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indic-wikipedia-visualisation-project-visualising-basic-parameters

Indic Language Wikipedias as Open Educational Resources

subha — 2014-06-04T03:32:57Z

The Open Education Working Group sees supporting multilingual activities such as translation to and from languages which are not often used as one of its key future roles. Subhashish Panigrahi’s post while dwelling upon the growth of Indic Wikimedia communities critically examines Wikipedia as an educational resource.

The article by Subhashish Panigrahi was published in Open Education Working Group website on May 27, 2014.

Subhashish Panigrahi is an an educator and open source activist based in Bangalore, India. He is a long time Wikimedian and is involved in many activism and policy level debates around open education. Currently he is working at the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program where he is working on designing implementation projects for catalyzing growth of Indic Wikimedia communities and content acquisition.

In the past, he has worked on building partnership with universities, language research organizations, government departments, GLAM institutions and individuals for bringing more scholarly and encyclopedic content on language, culture and history under free licenses. He is excited about experimenting on new methodologies in education, building interactive educational resources and bringing knowledge producing institutions, resourceful experts and scholars under one roof. He has been involved in various language related conferences and spoken in both policy and implementation discourses around open knowledge and open source.

Since the inception of four Indic language Wikipedias: Assamese, Malayalam, Odia and Punjab in 2002, the focus of Wikimedia Foundation has been diverse in many aspects.

Wikipedia’s focus oriented from Latin to non-Latin projects which was high-risk but revolutionary specifically in four of the aforementioned languages besides the other language Wikipedias that came a little later. It is quite obvious that the number of contributors to the Indic language Wikimedia projects were very few. Indic input in Unicode standard was less popular. Wikipedia struggled back then and still continues to struggle in terms of getting voluntary contributions and quality content because of these reasons.


Above: A screen shot of Assamese Wikipedia page

In its initial phase of community building the language projects faced difficulties in teaching people about typing in their own scripts. It was a painful exercise – starting from scratch to building language input tools and tutorials, conducting outreach for mass-awareness and educating them of the importance of building content for their future generation and other such activities. Today, about 12 out of the 20 Indic language Wikipedias are active in terms of growth in the size of the contributor community and quality content. However, since the available resources are more or less limited in general and also lacking more in regional languages, there has been dependence on text books as useful educational resources. There is a complete dearth of peer reviewed journals and research documents in Indic languages. If there are some, they have not been digitized and some of the digitized resources are not available in accessible formats. With this there is a need to rethink about the potential to open Wikipedia up for more contribution from the academia and researcher communities.


Odia Wikipedia workshop, IIMC, Dhenkanal 18-19 November 2013 [Source Wikmedia Commons]

Conventionally educational resources are created by subject experts in a limited time frame and reviewed for factual accuracy. Wikipedia, on the contrary could be edited by anyone at any point of time and the content is ever changing. Many-a-times stub class articles get created. Not all of the articles are also of good quality. All of these result in a mixed spectrum of articles of varied quality. So, the entire Wikipedia, per se cannot be taken as OER.. It is quite challenging to get dedicated volunteers to devote their time to enhance the quality and keep the articles updated.

The ever changing nature of Wikipedia could be a potential opportunity to look at it as an educational resource that is more dynamic and upgradable in nature. Some of the subjects such as science or humanities in our education syllabi have content that is perpetually true in nature. If well written, then these kind of articles could be taken as OER as these do not need constant change. However, many other study programs including the applied disciplines are not up to date because of the conventional mode of education. There is a need to revamp the educational system and bring a more dynamic and informative system. Wikipedia, for sure will be a good platform for specific areas of education like these. However, this could be attained only if there are a group of contributors while implementing mass-scale WikipediaEducation Programs.

While working with two different batches of masters students of journalism at Indian Institute of MassCommunication at Dhenkanal in Odisha, I experienced the multitude of such fast pace of information flow that does not exist in many other disciplines. In general, people working on current issues of the world remain in a high information zone. If such talents could be tapped by bringing Wikipedia into their zone of action, then something great could be leveraged. Similarly, many researchers and people that are involved in work related documentation could be tapped when looking at specific subject areas for creating a subset of educational resource building exercise from Wikipedia.


Screenshot of the Chatasabha which is a help desk on Odia Wikipedia

The drawback in the existing text book compilation process is that a fixed number of people might make it a monotonous process. Things like visual appeal and user experience, the layers of reuse, remix and reproduction that Wikipedia offers will be lacking. The process of bringing Indic language Wikipedias into the curricula also unleashes the opportunity of creating an inclusive community of experts and passively absorbing information from the existing resources including books that are currently the only educational resources. The constant discourse that a language or academic community that are subsets of a Wikipedia community, cross-pollination of ideas, information, experiments from inter-related and interdisciplinary collectives adds many additional layers of complexity to the way information get on to Wikipedia. This very complexity makes it stand out as a completely different system altogether that learns, changes the ways of approach, preserves learning and presents itself is an institution.

So far, most of the Indic languages Wikipedias are the largest reservoirs of knowledge despite the challenges of sustaining the contributing community. To take them to a new level needs the risk of allowing potential vandals of taking it to the larger audience as a contributor and taking to the knowledge seeking mass as an Open Educational Resource. As Wikipedia itself, this would be another happening journey if the challenges and mistakes are accepted. Otherwise, bringing the right balance and opening up the existing system might just take centuries and that is alarming for this society that cannot wait inside the cocoon of being completely perfect but outdated and afford to walk slower.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-education-working-group-may-27-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-indic-language-wikipedias-as-open-educational-resources

Indic Language Wikipedias — Statistical Report — 2012

shiju — 2013-02-03T02:40:48Z

I have compiled the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias for the year 2012. As usual, in this report, my aim is to provide my perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language wikipedias.

(The period of analysis is editor contributions between December 1, 2011 to December 31, 2012. December to December data is taken to account for the seasonal variations). Read the 2011 report here and the 2010 report here. The data for this report and analysis is based on the statistical data published at http://stats.wikimedia.org. A special thanks to Erik Zachte for compiling all this information.

Here is my executive summary after analyzing the data for 2012 and my experince with building some wiki communities:

Steady and sustainable growth is available for communities which focus on community building.
Small languages with guidance and support are making huge progress than many big languages.
Lack of support from proper channels at the much needed time had affected the community growth of some communities.
Even though many outreach programs had happened across country, that is not showing up in terms of number of active editors.
Still many language communities (especially big languages) are not open to the idea of reaching out to the speakers of the respective language.
Pageviews of Indic projects continues to increase.

This report is presented in the following sequence. This is done so because I believe that community is central to the Wikimedia movement. Community will give us content which will drive readership.

Community
Content
Readership

Community

As mentioned above, according to me, community is the backbone of Wikimedia movement. But still many communities are not understanding the importance of this. It is important that all language wiki communities give adequate importance to community building to build the free knowledge repository in their language. The following table gives information based on two important parameters about the community. The first parameter shows the highly active editors (more than 100 edits per month) in wiki. The second parameter shows the active editors (more than 5 edits per month).

Like last year, Malayalam continues to show an upward growth in terms of the number of active users. It has close to 120 active editors now. The graphical summary shows that mean number of editors is around 100. Malayalam is the biggest wiki community among Indic languages even though Malayalam is only the 11th biggest spoken language in India. The sincere efforts put by Malayalam wikipedians to build its community is the only reason for this. The programs like Malayalam Wiki conference, Education program, CD project, wiki workshops, photo events, Wikimeetups, and many other outreach events started showing its result. If the community continues with these type of efforts then I am sure that the community strength in Malayalam Wikipedia will cross 150 in 2013. Apart from Wikipedia, the importance given to Malayalam Wikisource, Wiktionary, and more recently to Wikivoyage (in incubator) will attract more Malayalam speakers to the Malayalam wiki projects.
Tamil comes second with close to 80 active editors. However, the number of active editors has gone down from last year. The graphical summary shows that number of active users was around 70-75 especially during the last two quarters.
Bengali comes third with around 60 active editors. This is a slight increase from the last year’s number of active editors. The involvement of editors from India in Bengali Wikipedia is less. That needs to be changed. Bangladeshi wikipedians are having many outreach programs to build Bengali wiki community. It will be nice if they extend their support to Indian Bengali speakers also as Indian Bengali wikipedians are not growing.
Telugu, Urdu, Gujarati, and Punjabi are the wikipedia languages that show notable increase in the number of active editors. But it will be be a mistake from my part if I am not mentioning that these numbers are not encouraging and the current number of active users is not showing justice to the number of speakers these languages have. This statement is more significant when we consider the fact that some smaller languages are showing a better progress.
We have seen that last year (2011) the success stories were Odia and Assamese wikipedias. In 2012, the shining star is Punjabi. The community has grown from one active editor from last year to almost 15 active editors now. As mentioned in my blog posts (post 1, post 2, post 3, and post 4) about building Punjabi wikipedia community, the task of building community for Punjabi was very challenging. Initiated in 2002 along with Assamese, Punjabi is one of the first Indic language wikipedia. But nothing much had happened in that wiki until deliberate efforts to build community initiated. The news is now we have an active community in Punjabi Wikipedia. From the just one person last year (Guglani – who took lots of pain to travel to multiple locations to introduce Punjabi wikipedia), now Punjabi wikipedia has close to 15 active editors. Unlike Odia and Assamese, I have faced so many issues during Punjabi wikipedia community building (mostly conflicts between editors). But I am happy to see that community is slowly coming out of all that. The technical team has fixed some of the bugs related to typing tool which was very important for Punjabi wikipedia. Punjabi wikipedians require lot support from other wikipedians to sustain the current momentum and grow the community further. My best wishes to Punjabi wikipedians.
Gujarati and Urdu are the two other communities that made considerable progress in community growth. The efforts put by Gujarati wikipedians to reach out to Gujarati speakers started showing the results. I am sure with the significant attention also given to Gujarati Wikisource (which was created last year), more Gujarati speakers will be attracted to Gujarati wiki projects. The involvement of Indians in Urdu Wikipedia is very less. But it is good to notice that Urdu wiki community slowly started growing. May be Wikipedia is one place where Indians and Pakistanis can work together.
The wikipedia languages that haven't shown significant change in number of active editors are Marathi, Odia, Assamese, and Nepali. The respective communities need to start putting efforts to build community by taking lessons from other Indic language wiki communities.
The languages that have considerable reduction in number of editors are Hindi, Kannada, and Sanskrit. Among this, except Sanskrit, all are spoken by at least five crore people. It is not good to see that speakers of these languages are not giving any attention to the wiki projects in their respective language. The case of Hindi is very strange considering the fact that it has support of the central government and many state governments of India.
The dormant language communities are Sindhi, Bhojpuri, Kashmiri, and some other small languages. Considering the fact that Odia, Assamese, and Punjabi were also dormant two years before, I am sure if someone is putting effort to build communities for these now dormant communities, these language wiki communities will also grow like it happened for Odia, Assamese, and Punjabi. Now there are multiple entities to support wikimedia movement in India and I hope that someone will take care of this apart from concentrating on the bigger languages.
In short, the point I want to emphasis is, conscious efforts are required from different stakeholders to grow communities and to sustain that growth for all Indic language wikipedias.

Content

Number of articles is an important parameter, but it has misguided some wiki communities in the past. Fortunately that trend is coming down.

With more than 1,04,000 articles, Hindi continues to be the biggest Indic language wikipedia in terms of the number of articles. Almost 3500 articles were added to Hindi wikipedia in the year 2013.
Tamil and Malayalam had added around 7000 articles which is the "biggest growth" in terms of number of articles. Urdu and Nepali added close to 5000 articles.
If we consider percentage of increase then Assamese language has shown more than 100 per cent increase in the number of articles.
Some of the important milestones are, Tamil and Telugu crossing 50,000 articles, Malayalam crossing 25,000 articles, and Assamese crossing 1,000 article milestones.
The languages that have shown very slow growth in terms of number of articles are Gujarati, Telugu and Kannada. I assume at least for few of these languages the focus went into enhancing the existing articles and building the community rather than creating thousands of stub articles.
As mentioned in the past reports, communities don’t need to worry about the number of articles. Also the examples of Bishnupriya Manipuri and Newari Wikipedias shows the after effect of increasing the article count without focusing on building the community.

Readership (page views)

Unlike the number of editors, the number of page views in wiki is showing an upward trend irrespective of the language.(Please note that the information available in the below table is the total visits (page views) for a language wikipedia for a month from all the platforms combined. It includes visits by readers and editors. This is NOT the list of Number of Unique Visitors to the website).

This is the one parameter where the figures are showing relative justice to the number of speakers.
Hindi with 78 lakh page views is in the top position.
The page views for Tamil had increased by more than 50 per cent.
Assamese has more than 100 per cent growth in page views.
Since the support for Indic languages is increasing for smart phone operating systems, I am sure the page views are going to increase further.

Conclusion

I am concluding this report with the following thoughts:

Being the biggest language (or number of speakers) does not automatically build community for an Indic language wikipedia. Efforts from respective language speakers are necessary to build community.
Most Indians who have access to internet and computer still don’t know their respective language typing. This is the biggest road block to build Indic language wiki community.
Do not get obsessed by article counts or readership. These are natural outcomes of community building.
Focus on community building through community interaction (through meetups, talk pages, village pumps, and mailing lists).
Focus on community building through community collaboration (WikiProjects or planning outreach efforts or advocacy).
Focus on community building through doing more outreach, better outreach, and being supportive of newbies.
Stay away from bots and translation tools for article creation as they do more harm than good. Use bots in such a way that it is not affecting the growth of the community.

Wishing all of you a wonderful wiki year 2013.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indic-language-wikipedias-statistical-report-2012

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report: January – June 2012

Shiju Alex — 2012-09-28T15:41:31Z

The following is a compilation of the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias from January to June 2012. The author provides perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language Wikipedias during the period.

The period of analysis is editor contributions between January 1, 2012 and June 30, 2012. (Read last year’s report here). The data for this report and analysis are based on the statistical data published at http://stats.wikimedia.org. Thanks to Erik Zachte for compiling all this information.

Some of the important points from this report are:

As always Indic wikipedia communities that are focused on community building had done well. Progress is slow but the results are steady and sustainable.
The communities that have made substantial progress in community building are Urdu, Oriya, Assamese, and Malayalam. (among this, for Urdu Wikipedia most of the activity is from Pakistan). The most recent entry to this club is Punjabi which will show up in the statistics of next few months.
Providing adequate support for newbies is very much required after each outreach. But many communities are failing here. This is affecting the conversion rate even though many outreach activities are happening across the country,
As seen in the past the readership of Indic language wikipedias is still growing up.

This report is presented in the following sequence.

Community
Content
Readership

Community

As community is the backbone of every Indic language Wikipedia, it is important that the respective language wiki communities give adequate importance to community building. Many language communities are still not understanding the importance of building the community. To achieve the goal of building free knowledge database in the respective language we need participation from maximum number of speakers of the respective language. The following table gives information on two important parameters about the community in the respective language Wikipedia:

Number of users who had 100 or more edits in a month (high active Wikipedians)
Number of users who had at least 5 or more edits a month (active Wikipedians)

User growth in Indic language Wikipedias during 2012 January-June

Some of the important information that we can make out from this table are:

The number of high active editors (editors with more than 100 edits per month) are the backbone of each language wikipedia. Apart from doing normal article editing they are the users maintaining the wiki. Tamil and Malayalam continue to be on the top spot with almost 24 active users . Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, and Urdu also showed growth in the number of high active users.
Assamese Wikipedia is showing a reduction in the number of high active users even though its number of active users increased. This means that Assamese Wikipedia requires some more current active users to take up the role of wiki adminship and similar leadership roles.
The number of active users (editors with more than 5 edits per month) give an overview of the overall activity in wikipedia. Here also Malayalam and Tamil continue to be on the top. Some of the languages that showed notable growth in the number of active users are Urdu, Oriya, and Assamese. As we know there are lot of community building activities happening in both Oriya and Assamese. Along with community building activities both the communities are making sure they are providing sufficient support to newbies using various options. And there efforts are showing up in the form of community strength.
The number of active members in Odia has increased to 25 which means community has grown 3 times over the past 6 months.
The number of wiki editors per million for most Indic languages is still below 1. This shows that awareness about Indic language wiki projects is still an issue for most Indic Wikipedias. From this statistics (http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm), we can see that for Sanskrit the number of editors per million speakers has become 280 which is one of the highest in the world. No other Indic language Wikipedia is near Sanskrit in this parameter. Malayalam comes second with 3 editors per million and Assamese and Bishnupriya Manipuri comes third with 2 editors per million. Tamil is in the fourth place with 1 editor. For all other Indic languages the number of editors per million population is below 1. This shows that still the penetration of respective language Wikipedia among the speakers of a language is very low. We need more outreach programs to reach the speakers of the respective language.

Content

The number of articles is an important parameter which has misguided some wiki communities. However, it is a very important parameter if communities are increasing the number of articles in a way helpful to the readers of the wiki.

Hindi continues to be on the top spot with 1,02,902. During the past 6 months almost 2000 articles got added to Hindi Wikipedia.
Telugu Wikipedia crossed the 50,000 article milestone is one of the major accomplishments during this period. I remember reading the news about Telugu Wikipedia crossing the 30,000 article milestone in June 2007 which shows that it took almost 5 years to reach 50,000 article milestone. As pointed out by User:Veeven in his blog post (about Telugu Wikipedia crossing the 50,000 articles), Telugu Wikipedia needs more support from Telugu speaking population to build the free knowledge project in Telugu. The current number of active users in Telugu Wikipedia is not showing justice to the huge speaker base (more than 8 crores) of Telugu.
Another major milestone was Assamese Wikipedia crossing the 1,000 article milestone.
Tamil and Malayalam are the two language wikipedias that added most number of articles during this time period. Both the language wikipedias added close to 3000 articles.
Sindhi, Newari (Nepal Bhasha) and Bishnupriya language wikipedias showed reduction in the number of articles. There are 2 reasons for this:

There is no active community to add new articles (see the first table for the number of active users)
Spam/vandalism pages were deleted by stewards/global sysops.

Readers (Pageview)

Number of people visiting the website continue to increase for all Indic language wikipedias and the total visits for all Indic language wikipedias combined is close to 4 crore now.

Please note that the information available in the below table is the total visits (page views) for a language wikipedia for a month from all the platforms combined. It includes visits by readers and editors. This is NOT the list of Number of Unique Visitors to the website.

(The number of readers shown in the below table is in lakhs)

(The Number of Readers shown in the above table is in lakhs)

For most of the Indic languages readership has gone up. For Assamese and Odia it almost doubled.
Among big languages unlike the number of active users when it comes to readers most Indic languages are doing justice to its speaking population volume. So even though many of our speakers are not editing the respective language wikipedia they are reading it. Bengali and Telugu are two languages that behaves different here which shows that awareness is very low for both the languages.
As the Indic language support in smart phones and different OSs is in better position now, I am sure the readership is going to increase further in future.

Still a major percentage of our speakers (I mean speakers who has access to internet) doesn’t know that there is a Wikipedia exists in their own mother language and they not using it is a big issue. If our reader base is not increasing it will affect the community growth also. Hope things will improve as at least few language communities are involved in various awareness and outreach programs.

Originally posted at http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/indic-language-wikipedias-statistical-report-2012-january-2012-june/

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/indic-language-wikipedias-statistical-report-jan-june-2012

Indian Women in Science Wiki edit-a-thon

praskrishna — 2014-10-13T06:17:56Z

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon is being held at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on October 11, 2014 from 10.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. The event is being organized by IndiaBioScience in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team.

CIS-A2K will conduct the first three edit-a-thons.

In India, Science as a discipline is subject to many of the same gender issues as it is worldwide - women scientists are fewer in number than men, they occupy fewer positions of power, and face distinct issues by virtue of their gender and the accompanying societal pressures. Women Scientists in India also tend to be less visible than their male counterparts, and public awareness of Indian Women Scientists is low.

IndiaBioScience will be organising a series of public events to raise the profile of women scientists on one of the most-popular online encyclopaedias - Wikipedia. At these events, participants will be encouraged to create and complete profiles of Indian Women in Science.

To participate sign up below or click here (http://www.indiabioscience.org/content/women-science-wiki-edit-thon

Contact the IndiaBioScience Team for more details: www.indiabioscience.org & team@indiabioscience.org

At the venue, the events will begin with a short, hands-on introduction to Wiki editing. Participants can then go on to pick the scientist they would like to work on. There will be an interaction session with a guest Woman Scientist around lunch, with a discussion of issues commonly faced by women in science. In the afternoon session, participants can continue working on the Wiki pages, with a break for tea. Participants are requested to bring their laptops. We have a few desktops available at Saturday's venue for those who cannot do so.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/india-women-in-science-wiki-edit-a-thon

Indian WikiWomen celebrate Women’s History Month

Netha Hussain — 2013-04-29T09:21:45Z

March 2013 was a busy month for women Wikimedians in India, as we conducted various events, such as edit-a-thons and workshops to celebrate the presence of women in Wikimedia projects. The women Wikimedians, members of the Wikimedia India Chapter and the Access to Knowledge Team, brainstormed about the possible events, which we wanted to conduct to encourage women to participate and to increase the quality of articles related to Indian women in Wikipedias in English and the Indian languages.

This is a guest post by Netha Hussain, a Wikipedia contributor from India who regularly contributes to Malayalam Wikipedia, among other projects. The blog post was originally published on the Wikimedia Foundation page.

We decided to conduct the workshops and meetups in various Indian cities, in addition to online edit-a-thons. We created a co-ordination page on English Wikipedia and added suggestions for articles to edit. We invited participants to join the edit-a-thon by spreading the word on mailing lists, social media networks and blogs. The Times of India published a feature about the event, which attracted many newbies to participate in it. We also created separate pages for offline events taking place in parallel, and we added a summary of the events to the main page. The participants of the edit-a-thon signed up on the co-ordination page, where we also added the details and status of Women’s History Month events happening in various Indian language Wikipedias.

The inaugural event took place on International Women’s Day (March 8) at Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa. Out of 100 participants who attended the event, 90 were female. Veteran Wikimedians Rohini and Nitika conducted a basic Wikipedia editing workshop. The event also set off the two-day long online edit-a-thon in which fourteen editors participated. Among those who participated in the program were homemakers, students and professionals. Rohini took charge as the Chairperson of the special interest group (SIG) for Gendergap at the Wikimedia Chapter India on the day of the workshop (March 8). She plans to conduct more workshops for women in the future.

Organizers subsequently held a series of events at two venues in Bengaluru and one in Ernakulam. Experienced Wikimedians Pavithra and Nikita Belavate led the workshops in Bengaluru. The workshop also served as an occasion for editors living in and around Bengaluru to meet. The Ernakulam event was aimed at increasing the participation of women in Malayalam Wikipedia and was led by Wikimedian Ditty Mathew. Around 40 women participated in the three edit-a-thons. A Wikipedia Academy with 9 participants was conducted in Hyderabad. Led by Anupama Srinivas, the last of all events took place on 30 March, 2012, in Chennai.

Nikita, who led the Bangalore event, said she was filled with happiness watching the exuberance in the eyes of women participants who edited and saved their edits live on Wikipedia. “This year’s Women’s History month makes me once again believe in the power of women and honing it by empowering them, Wikiwomenising them,” said Nikita.


Participants of the Bangalore workshop organized by FSMK

Vishnu Vardhan, the Program Director of the Access to Knowledge team, was with the WikiWomen throughout the editathon, connecting people, planning events and urging them to contribute. He encouraged his mother, wife and female cousins to contribute to Wikipedia.

“I wish more of us took the initiative of involving the women in our life to share their knowledge on Wikipedia and truly make the Wikipedias the sum of all human knowledge,” he said. Harriet, one of the key organizers of the women’s day events, believes that the Indian Wikimedia community has gained momentum in favor of bridging the gender gap because of this event. She urged the Indian community to follow this success and to increase the participation of women in the Wikimedia movement. Though she could not attend the events in person, she ensured her participation in the edit-a-thon by arranging the logistics, monitoring the coordination page and suggesting changes.

The events had good participation from men as well. Among the 14 participants who signed up on English Wikipedia, 5 were men. In Malayalam Wikipedia, 18 out of the 26 participants who signed up for the online edit-a-thon were men. Dileep Unnikrishan, a male participant of the edit-a-thon, and a fan of Wikipedia, participated in the Ernakulam event because he was curious to find out how Wikipedia works. With women participants, he edited three articles and found it exciting to “be a part of the movement that has brought about a knowledge revolution in the world. The best thing I noticed about Wiki is that it has a peer-to-peer way of organization, which makes it warm and welcoming to newbies like me,” said Dileep.

The Indian WikiWomen are planning to conduct similar events in the future to increase the participation of women in Wikipedia and its sister projects. We are hopeful we will bridge the gender gap in the Indian Wikimedia community by conducting outreach programs, increasing awareness about free knowledge programs among women and conducting action-oriented events targeting women.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/indian-wiki-women-history-month

Indian Wikimedia community coordinates Women’s History Month

Jeph Paul and Netha Hussain — 2014-03-06T11:49:10Z

The Indian Wikimedia community is pleased to invite you to participate in Women’s History Month events, 2014. We started off with a pre-event Wikipedia workshop at Roshni Nilaya School of Social Work, in Mangalore on the 26th of February.

This was cross-posted from the Wikimedia Foundation website.

We have planned events all through this month. They aim at creating new articles, expanding the existing stubs and translating English articles to various Indic languages.The schedule includes Wikipedia workshops, online edit-a-thons and wikiparties. You could edit articles, translate them, blog about the events or even be an enthusiast. Visit this page to learn more about getting involved.

Real-life Wikipedia workshops will be conducted in different parts of India. Two online edit-a-thons have been planned. The first one on the 8th & 9th of March focuses on women parliamentarians and the second one on the 15th & 16th will be looking to expand the work done during the last year events on women scientists from India. Participants of the Women’s History Month events in India are requested to fill up this opt in form to help the organizers evaluate the quantum and quality of the edits made. Centre for Internet and Society (Access to Knowledge) has extended their support to the Women’s History Month events in India this year.

The Indian events are being conducted as a part of the global event supported by the Wikiwomen’s Collaborative. We look forward to welcoming all participants at this year’s event.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikimedia-community-coordinates-womens-history-month

Indian Languages Mela 2013 in Mumbai

praskrishna — 2013-10-17T05:04:13Z

Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education is organizing The Indian Languages Mela in Mumbai. Tejaswini Niranjana will participate in the event.

The Indian Languages Mela organized by the recently-established CILHE at TISS aims to celebrate the linguistic diversity of our daily experience and show how our cognitive capacities are tied to that diversity.

The CILHE is interested in strengthening Indian-language resources in higher education. It will do so by undertaking research training, incubating research projects, supporting the production of new curricular materials, and providing opportunities to make the teaching-learning experience more diverse.

The programme for the Mela includes a two-part seminar - Interrogating Pedagogic Practice, and Interrogating Translation Practice; an exhibition showcasing Indian-language scripts, visual and sound artefacts, and new digital interfaces; and cultural events involving theatre and music. The theme languages of this year will be Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi, although other languages will be brought in wherever relevant.

As part of the Mela, the CILHE is calling all TISS students (Guwahati, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Tuljapur campuses) to send in entries for two competitions:

A two- or three-minute audio recording made on any digital device of your choice – the recording could be in a railway station, a bazaar, a street corner, a cafeteria or any other everyday location. Capture an interaction between two or more persons speaking in different languages about any topic. Prepare a poster interpreting what happens in your audio recording. Do remember to add an English translation of the interaction in your recording. Students are encouraged to use free editing software available for both Windows and Linux platforms. Posters can be in English or in any of the three theme languages. Group submissions are encouraged. Submissions over email are accepted.

Creation of a new article on any Indian language Wikipedia (preference will be given this time to Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati entries, but other languages will also be considered). Training workshops on editing Wikipedia will be held at each TISS campus during August 2013. Send us details of your Wikipedia entries and mention your Wikipedia UserName in your email.

Tentative Schedule

September 20

11 am to 5 pm – Exhibition (4^th Floor, Library Building, new section, Main Campus)

2 pm - Inauguration of the Mela by Kiran Nagarkar, eminent Marathi/English author

2.30 to 6.00 pm – Seminar on Interrogating Pedagogic Practice

6.00 pm - Presentation of awards to winners of student competitions

6.45 pm – Introduction to the play

7 pm to 9 pm – Play directed by Sunil Shanbag: Stories in a Song

9 pm - Dinner for invited speakers, TISS faculty and members of the theatre troupe (TISS Guest House)

September 21

11 am to 5 pm – Exhibition (4^th Floor, Library Building, new section, Main Campus)

2 pm to 5.30 pm – Seminar on Interrogating Translation Practice

Also read the report published by IBN here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/indian-languages-mela-2013-mumbai

Indian Language Wikipedia Statistics (September 2012 – April 2013)

T.Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2013-08-23T01:48:16Z

The Access to Knowledge team carried out a quantitative analysis to identify trends and growth patterns in Indian Language Wikipedias over the time period from September 2012 to April 2013.

It is difficult for the CIS-A2K programme to either take direct credit for the growth or direct blame for the lack of it in the Indian language Wikimedia projects. However, we believe that we have been one of the factors — and sometimes a key factor — in impacting the growth of the Wikimedia projects and communities in India since the commencement of the project.

Though the A2K programme has done some amount of work with almost all Indian language Wikipedias, the A2K team has had relatively more involvement in 10 Indic languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Telugu.

In addition to this based on the various outreach work done by A2K we have attempted to present an analysis of direct new Wikipedia users that have emerged in languages impacted by the A2K programme, keeping in mind that community mobilisation will always be an autonomous activity to some extent.


Graph 1: Growth of Articles in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to April 2013

The growth momentum in Indian languages over the eight month period from September 2012 to April 2013 looks healthy.
Some language Wikipedias have been growing at a phenomenal rate than others in terms of percentage change since September 2012.
Assamese, Punjabi, Kannada and Odia Wikipedias have a growth rate of 58 per cent, 55 per cent, 30 per cent and 26 per cent respectively. These were the top four Indian language Wikipedia projects during the eight month period.
In terms of absolute number of articles, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi Wikipedias have grown by about 4,200; 3,600; 3,300; and 2,300 articles respectively.
However, given the small size of the Wikipedia communities in Assamese, Punjabi, Kannada and Odia (as given in Graph 2 below) the growth achieved by them is much commendable and all efforts have to be put to ensure that this momentum continues by strengthening these communities and also expanding them.


Graph 2: Active Editors in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to April 2013

There is a fluctuation in the number of active editors in majority of the Indian language Wikipedias, except for Punjabi Wikipedia, which has seen a consistent growth. Starting from July 2012, the Wikimedia India Programs Team began working with the Punjabi community, an activity which we have continued at the A2K programme.
The active editors on Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit Wikipedias have been consistently coming down, which is a cause of concern.
It is important to note that Kannada and Telugu Wikipedias where the number of Active Editors were in a declining trend as of September 2012 have shown a remarkable turnaround. The A2K programme has spent the last 3-4 months working closely with both the Kannada and Telugu communities.
Overall the active editors on Malayalam Wikipedia have crossed the 100 mark numerous times, making it the first Indian language Wikipedia to reach this benchmark.
Looking at the trends Tamil Wikipedia may soon reach the 100 active editor mark.
Even Bengali Wikipedia community could cross 100 active editors if concerted efforts are put in.
The Assamese Wikipedia, which received support from A2K programme until January 2013, had a consistent active editor population which was around 20 people. However, once the support from the A2K programme dwindled a declining trend (since February 2013) has set in. This is worrying as it gives rise to the possibility of building dependencies through the A2K programme. Going forward we need to address this and rectify by creating self-sustaining momentum in our outreach work that lasts beyond our involvement.


Graph 3: Monthly growth of New Editors on Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to April 2013

On an average 96 new editors have joined Indian language Wikipedias every month.
Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil Wikipedias have consistently seen more than 10 new editors joining every month.
Assamese, Odia and Sanskrit Wikipedias did have many new editors joining.
A total of 673 new people have become editors for Indian language Wikipedia since September 2012.
However, the conversion rate of new editors into active editors is still a challenge across all Indian language Wikipedias.


Graph 4: Snapshot of “Page Views” of Indian Language Wikipedias in September 2012 & March 2013

Overall the “Page View” trends of Indian Language Wikipedias look positive.
Bengali, Odia and Punjabi Wikipedias have shown the highest percentage growth in page views since August 2012.
In absolute numbers Bengali Wikipedia has seen a spectacular growth of 14,00,000  page-views, Marathi and Tamil Wikipedias witnessed a growth of about 10,00,000 and 8,00,000 page-views respectively.
These clearly indicate the demand for knowledge and information in Indian languages on the internet.

In the below given Graph 5, we have also looked at the direct impact the A2K programme had in cultivating new editors on Indian language Wikipedias through various outreach programmes conducted during September 2012 to April 2013.

It should be noted that a total of 1,275 participants were reached out by the A2K programme. However, the username data for more than 700 participants could not be ascertained, due to inefficient data collection and input. This includes participants giving wrong usernames, trouble with the handwriting of some of the participants, etc. We have already taken note of this issue and have put in measures to efficiently capture the new user data. Hence, we have only presented an analysis of 558 participants, whose usernames are valid.

Of this it can be noted that more than 120 users have done more than 5 edits, which is 21 per cent of the participants. Further, 24 participants have done more than 100 edits on English and various Indian language Wikipedias, which constitutes 4 per cent of the total participants that the A2K programme has reached out to.


Graph 5: Snapshot of “New editors from outreach” of English & Indian Language Wikipedias in September 2012 and March 2013

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics

Indian language localization community meets in New Delhi

praskrishna — 2016-10-03T13:26:31Z

Localization is one of the less glamorous aspects of computing. Despite the fact that less than 6% of the world speaks English, a majority of projects don't feel inclined to accommodate the rest of the population. One of the primary reasons for sticking to English is the steep learning curve and the lack of standardization in various aspects of the localization process.

The post by Mayank Sharma was published by Opensource.com on October 3, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

The FUEL Project organized the GILT conference in New Delhi, India September 24-25 to highlight and address these issues. The annual event showcases the efforts of language technology organizations and volunteer communities, but this year's also gave a platform for non-technical users to voice their concerns. The Indic computing developers were joined by academics, reporters, language researchers, publishers, and entrepreneurs who rely on localization tools to connect and interact with audiences in the various regional languages in India. The brainstorming between the two groups, both on and off the stage, was one of the highlights of the conference.

Focus on standardization

Another recurring theme discussed in detail at the conference was the need for standardization. The FUEL Project spearheads standardization efforts with its terminology management system to preserve consistency across translations. The project also created translation style guides for various languages, including Spanish, German, French, Scottish Gaelic, and several Indian languages. In addition to these guides, the project is also working on a couple of tools to help maintain the accuracy of the translations. One that caught the attention of the translators at the conference is the Unicode Text Rendering Reference System (UTRRS). It's a web app that lets you enter a character, word, or phrase and then compares it to a reference image generated by a text rendering engine.

The current state of localization

The conference began with an inaugural address by the keynote speakers. Rajesh Ranjan, who heads the FUEL Project and is currently the open source community manager at the Indian Government's National eGovernance Division (NeGD), kicked things off by talking about the evolution of the 8-year-old project. There was also an enlightening address by Jeff Beatty, who heads localization efforts at Mozilla. He talked about the role of his alma mater, the University of Limerick, in the initiation and growth of multilingual computing. Later, Vinay Thakur, director of project development at NeGD, discussed the Indian Government's increased interest in localization and listed the various initiatives currently underway.

This was also reiterated by Mahesh Kulkarni, assistant director at CDAC's GIST research labs. He talked about the scale of the government's plan for making all its official websites available in all the officially recognized 22 Indian languages.

Addressing problems

Kulkarni also chaired a panel discussion later in the day. The panel members talked about the issues plaguing the localization community and what it would take to solve them. Sudhanwa Jogalekar, a well-respected contributor to Indic computing, suggested that translators should get ISO certified as a first step toward standardization. Jogalekar pointed to the ISO 7001:2015 standard, which certifies conformity in translation services. Another panel member, Prabhat Ranjan, executive director of the technology think tank TIFAC, talked about the stress on translation in the Vision 2035 document recently released by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ranjan's team found English to Hindi translation easier when documents are first translated into another Indian language. Based on this experience, Ranjan bounced the idea of agreeing on a meta language to ease the translation process.

A chat with the Document Foundation

The conference also had a video conference session by the Document Foundation's Italo Vignoli about LibreOffice. While the talk was fairly overview-ish the Q&A generated some valuable suggestions that Vignoli promised to take up with the LibreOffice developers. One of the concerns raised by Pavanaja U.B. was that localizing the office suite was a cumbersome process, as it involved recompiling the entire application. Pavanaja, who is well-known in the localization community for creating the Kannada version of the Logo programming language, requested Vignoli ask LibreOffice developers to brainstorm a less tedious process for the localizers. Later in the day, Pavanaja also talked about his experience localizing Wikipedia in Kannada and Tulu languages.

Unicode

^{Karunakar G demos an in-development spell checker for the Hindi language. Photo by Mayank Sharma. CC-BY 3.0.}

The second day began with a session on the evolution and current status of the Unicode standard. It was delivered by Karunakar G, one of the stalwarts of the Indic localization community. A longtime localization developer, Karunakar also demoed the support for Indian languages in LibreOffice. He highlighted a few missing features, such as the lack of an Indic thesaurus and autocorrect functionality.

Sailfish OS

Karunakar was followed by Raju Vindane, who introduced the audience to the Sailfish OS. He also demoed the only Sailfish OS phone available in the Indian market, the Intex Aqua, which retails for about $90. Vindane mentioned that while the community is encouraged to contribute and improve the Indic translations to the Sailfish OS project, these wouldn't be included in the Indian phone, as Intex does its translations in-house.

Other highlights

^{Ryan Northey asks the community to explore the use of XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format). Photo by Mayank Sharma. CC-BY 3.0.}

The day also had introductory presentations by Ryan Northey, lead developer at Translate House, and Satdeep Gill from the WikiTongues project. Northey mentioned that there's been a disconnect between software development and localization, and that going forward localization should become a part of the software development cycle.

In addition to the scheduled sessions, there were several fruitful discussions during lunch and tea breaks. The presentation-free exchange of gray matter between the stalwarts and the young padawans were a delight to witness. The 2016 edition of the GILT conference helped bring together longtime developers and experts from the government with niche communities and individuals working on different aspects of localization in various parts of the country. The conference ended with the participants hoping that the Government's increased focus on localization would translate into a considerable leap in the quality and quantity of localized content and localization tools.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/open-source-mayank-sharma-october-3-2016-indian-language-localization-community-meets-in-new-delhi

Indian Govt to Build Machine Translation System for 22 Indic Languages

praskrishna — 2013-12-11T07:14:35Z

National Translation Mission is preparing a Machine Translation System (MTS) to instantly translate texts from vernacular Indian languages to English, reports New Indian Express.

Brindaalakshmi's article was published by Medianaama on November 14, 2013. CIS memorandum of understanding with Goa University is mentioned.

The report states that scientific and technical terminologies are being developed in 69 disciplines of study in 22 languages as part of this project. Apparently, 25,000 to 30,000 lexicons have been identified in each subject to create the MTS.

Speaking at a media event, Prof V Saratchandran Nair, Director of National Translation Mission said that the project is being initiated to help students who have done their schooling in vernacular languages but have to study in English during college. He also added that only Tamil currently has translated materials in all 69 disciplines, while Oriya has it in 49 disciplines. In contrast, there is no science material available in Santhali, Manipuri and Konkani languages.

National Translation Mission is a Government of India initiative that intends to establish translation as an industry and facilitate higher education by making available translated study material for students. The program also trains translators in different languages. Interestingly, the website states that it will not replicate the efforts of other organisations like C-DAC, TDIL that are also involved in creating indic support for computers and services. However, it seeks to build technology to directly translate a sentence typed in English into an Indian language. When we checked, we noticed that the website also offers dictionaries and other resources for translators.

Other efforts to provide indic support: In September 2013, the Goa university had entered into a three year memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this partnership, Goa University will be uploading the four volumes of Konkani encyclopedia. This could be a good start to building a repository of translated works for science in Konkani.

In July 2013, Technology Development for Indian Languages Programme (TDIL) of DeitY (Department of Electronics and IT) had developed Urdu language fonts and keyboard drivers for Windows and Android.

In June 2013, DeitY had also created a repository of fonts for all 22 constitutionally recognized languages through TDIL. These fonts are available as a CD that can be procured from TDIL or the entire suite can also be downloaded from the TDIL website.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/medianama-november-14-2013-brindaalakshmi-indian-govt-to-build-machine-translation-system-for-22-indic-languages

Indian Govt looks to provide free access to publicly-funded research works

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T05:34:37Z

Sunil Abraham gave his inputs to the blog entry published in Medianama on July 23, 2014.

Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the Ministry of Science and Technology recently released (pdf) the draft of what is termed as Open Access Policy and has invited comments from the public until July 25, reports The Times of India. Comments can be submitted to madhan@dbt.nic.in.

The objective of this policy is to provide unrestricted access to research work funded by the departments. The draft states that since all funds disbursed by DBT and DST are public funds, it is important that the information and knowledge generated through the use of these funds are made publicly available as soon as possible.

As per the draft, DBT/DST will be creating a central repository wherein grantees can either publish their papers in an open-access journal or post the final accepted manuscript to an online repository. This includes papers funded by the two departments in 2012-13 as well as review articles invited by DBT/DST or author initiated that received funding from these departments.

The draft suggests that the full text of the research paper and metadata of all research projects fully or partially funded by DBT/DST or the projects that utilised infrastructure built with the support of DBT/DST will have to be made publicly available, failing which they wouldn’t be considered for future grants or fellowship opportunities among others.

The department believes that providing free access to these publications through gratis open access repository will enable increasing the distribution of these publications and will ensure that these research can be read and built upon.

Copyright of research papers: The draft also sheds light on copyright issues. It states that research work produced by a scientist as an employee of a government body or private institution the copyright would remain with the respective government body or private institution. However, following the final acceptance of the paper by any journal, it has to be deposited in an open access repository within a period of one week.

The author of the research paper will retain the right to reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display the article in any medium for non-commercial purposes. They can also prepare derivative works from the article, and authorise others to make any non-commercial use of the article with credit.

Implications: This is a godsend for students, teachers and institutions that don’t have the means to purchase expensive academic journals. Sunil Abraham, executive director of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) told TOI that the idea is that taxpayers shouldn’t pay twice to access research funded by taxpayers’ money.

Earlier developments in Open Data

In August 2013 the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Resource Development, the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), and National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) had launched an initiative called National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER). The objective was to provide free educational resources to school students under the Creative Common license.

The Union Cabinet had cleared the DST formulated National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NPDSA) back in February 2012. NPDSA was supposed to increase accessibility and ease sharing of non-sensitive data amongst the registered users and their availability for scientific, economic and social developmental purposes. However, very little has been reported on how NPDSA was utilised since then.

Click to read the article published in Medianama here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/medianama-july-23-2014-riddhi-mukherjee-indian-govt-looks-to-provide-free-access-to-public-funded-research-works

Indian government includes open source in RFPs

subha — 2016-06-18T18:18:54Z

The Government of India has implemented a remarkable new policy-level change for open source software (OSS) deployment.

The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has asked that open source software-based applications be included in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for all new procurements. Note there is not a plan at this time to replace existing proprietary systems with open source software.

As stated, the policy will "adopt open standards and promote open source and open technologies" in order "to prepare India for a knowledge based transformation into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy."

Three major objectives of the new policy for OSS:

To provide a policy framework for rapid and effective adoption of OSS
To ensure strategic control in e-Governance applications and systems from a long-term perspective
To reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of projects

In addition to adopting open source and open standards, the Indian Government is also emphasizing on opening up the source code without any royalty for the community to use, modify and redistribute the original/modified software. This is compliant with the Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

Proprietary software (labeled as "closed source software" and "CSS" in the policy document) would only be permitted for demonstrated urgent/strategic need or lack of expertise or non-availability of open source software. The suppliers then are not bound to use open source software, though it is preferred over proprietary per this policy change. The policy document also mentions government collaborating with local and international open source communities for software development

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-source-subhashish-panigrahi-june-8-2015-indian-govt-includes-open-source-in-rfps