The Funds Dissemination Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant to support the growth of Indian language Wikimedia communities to the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) to expand their Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K) in India. The grant enabled CIS to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India and to expand upon Wikimedia’s Indic language free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia in Indic languages. Further, the grant aims to generate sustainable ideas in the context of India-relevant free knowledge domain and in sync with Wikimedia’s English projects and also for wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge aim within India.
CIS-A2K (Centre for Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge) is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape.
If you have a general proposal/suggestion for Access to Knowledge team you can write on the discussion page. If you have appreciations or feedback on our work, please share it on feedback page.
Project: Access to Knowledge Programme
Grantee: Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, India
Grantor: Funds Dissemination Committee of Wikimedia Foundation
Grant Period: 12 months (July 2014 to June 2015)
Grant Sanctioned: 
12,000,000/-
Grant Disbursed: 7,000,000/-
- Background to the Access to Knowledge Programme
This is the fifth quarterly report being published by CIS-A2K program and it reports about the Wikimedia projects and community related activities held during October to December 2014 and their outcome. The report provides a brief overview of the quarterly progress of CIS-A2K's initiatives.
Overview
editLanguage area
editThis section gives a brief overview of the language area work plans based on several parameters mentioned in the work plan.
Telugu
edit
During this quarter, CIS-A2K further strengthened the collaboration with the Andhra Loyola College. A two month Wikipedia Camp was organized during November and December. As part of the Camp, a 5 day production sprint for students from the Department of Physics was conducted. Apart from the ALC collaboration, Annamayya library from Guntur has released a comprehensive index of Annamayya Sankeertanas (religious verses sung by masses during procession). A hackathon covering various topics about Mediawiki was organized at Hyderabad towards the end of the quarter.
Please see here for the detailed report of all activities and events in Telugu language area during this quarter.
Odia
editDuring this quarter 67 books from seven different notable authors were relicensed under CC-by-SA 4.0 license during this quarter. Out of these 67 books, 25 books are encyclopedic in nature and will benefit both Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource. A public gathering "Odia Wikisource Sabha 2014" was held at Bhubaneswar to create awareness about Odia Wikisource and Odia Wikipedia. A few students from Indian Institute of Science (IISC), Bangalore who took interest in contributing to science related articles on Odia Wikipedia were supported in creating new articles and enrich the existing ones.
Please see here for the detailed report of all activities and events in Odia language area during this quarter.
Konkani
editKannada
edit55 books of noted Kannada author Niranjana were relicensed under Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-by-SA) by her daughter Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana who is the copyright holder of the above mentioned works during this period. This is possibly the largest ever content donation under CC license of a single author in India. During this quarter, activities began with strengthening CIS-A2K's Institutional Partnerships. One new partnership has been initiated with St Aloysius College, Mangalore. Generating articles on Kannada Wikipedia by taking inputs from the Mysore University's encyclopedia (which is currently on Kannada Wikisource) has continued. 22 books published by the Government of Karnataka have been re-licensed under CC license during this period, and CIS-A2K played a crucial role in this license migration. Three outreach sessions were conducted across Karnataka during this period to instill growth in Kannada Wikipedia. A few projects were initiated in Kannada Wikipedia for improving the quality of articles, creating new articles on Mechanical Engineering and other science related topics.
Please see here for the detailed report of all activities and events in Kannada language area during this quarter.
Marathi
editOther languages
editCommunity strengthening initiatives
editSeveral community specific initiatives were taken in the priority language areas and they are covered in the respective language area subsections. Similar initiatives for Stand-alone projects are explained in detailed in the next section.
Stand-alone Wikimedia projects
edit"Odia-Silalekharu mobile (Documentary)" © Produced by Subhashish Panigrahi, freely licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0.
- Main article: /Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects.
Creating movement resources
editPublicity, Research and Documentation
editFor the core language projects and all other Indian language projects CIS-A2K has helped in various ways to publicize the activities and community efforts. Details of the blog posts published, print and digital media coverage and all work related documentations are listed here.
General support and service to the movement
editCIS-A2K has tried its best to address all requests for various kinds of support from the Indian Wikimedia communities. The requests that we have received and have supported are listed here and here.