CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/August 2015
Odia Wikipedia (available at or.wikipedia.org), an Indian-language Wikipedia project, celebrated thirteen years of free knowledge contribution in June 2015. It was one of the first four Indic Wikipedias (Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi being the other three)to have started in 2002. The first edit on the Wikipedia was made on 3 June 2002. Currently the project has over 8,900 articles and about 17 active editors (also known as "uikiali"). The voluntary editor community has put its efforts into acquiring valuable content, re-licensing them under Creative Commons (CC) licenses, and building tools for acquiring more encyclopedic content from various sources.
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During the thirteenth anniversary celebration, the community came together to assess community needs, address issues that had been identified earlier via IRC and mailing list discussions, and identify priority areas to focus on in the future. Odia Wikipedia administrators Mrutyunjaya Kar and Subhashish Panigrahi designed a needs assessment survey. Participating Wikimedians were asked to discuss various problems they face in editing and outreach two major areas that ensures quality standards. .
Two-fifths of participants said that problems with the rendering of Odia characters in different operating systems, ignorance or lack of more documentation about enabling encoding for Odia, input methods and keyboard layouts, and other font- and keyboard-related issues as the major reason for low readership and contribution on Wikipedia.
. . .Read more in the Wikimedia blog
Event organized/participated
edit- Main CIS-A2K event page
- On 6 August a Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon was conducted at Annamacharya library to preserve rare Telugu literature text. Annamacharya library has a rare collection of the religious and historical works in Telugu language. This event was conducted by Telugu Wikipedia Community and the Centre for Internet & Society's Access To Knowledge program. The second iteration of the event was organized on 31 August.
- On 8-9 August, a two-day long workshop on digital collaborations in Tamil-language was organized by Tamil Virtual University, Anna University Campus, Chennai. U.B.Pavanaja, on behalf of CIS-A2K, participated in this event. Four major topics discussed during the event were: Digitization, Research and Development, e-learning and Open source and Outreach.
- CIS-A2K has ongoing partnership with SDM College, Ujire. The college's academic year started on 12 August. It was followed by a one-day workshop where the students were introduced to editing in Kannada Wikipedia. The head of the journalism department of the College Bhaskar Shetty and others supported the event.
- A three-day edit-a-thon was organized between 14-16 August in Mangalore for bringing good quality content in Tulu Wikipedia. This event, organized in collaboration with the Tulu Sahitya Academy and Ramakrishna Pre University College, saw 30 Wikipedia editors participating and creating about 89 new articles. 12 of these 30 participants crossed more than 10 edits. Some of the new participants faced problems with using the input methods and the Wiki-markup. It is important to note that because of the lack of addition of Tulu-alphabet code points in the Unicode chart, and the speakers being well conversant in Kannada, they are using Kannada script for Tulu Wikipedia Incubator project. There is a plan to organize a monthly meetup and/or edit-a-thon to continue the momentum these editors have brought in.
- A Kannada Wikipedia workshop was organized between 18-20 August at the Department of State Educational Research and Training to improve science-related articles that are part of the Government of Karnataka's high school syllabus. During the workshop the lecturers were taught about the basics of Kannada Wikipedia, article editing policies, Kannada input, creating and editing articles on Kannada Wikipedia. U.B. Pavanaja and Tito Dutta from CIS-A2K conducted the workshop, behalf of CIS-A2K.
Sau Dhuni Teen project
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A Wikipedia workshop was organized at Srimati Savitribai Phule Pune University on 20 August 2015. Under the scope of “Sau Dhuni Teen” project, the workshop focused on building resources in Indian languages for women's studies on Wikipedia.
Read more...
- A two-day long and multilingual Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Women's Studies Department of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai between 22-24 August. This was an outreach event conducted under the scope of the "Sau Dhuni Teen" project.
Read more...
Blog posts
edit- Pavanaja, U. B. "Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore" (18 August 2015)
- Pavanaja, U. B. "Edit-a-thon to improve Kannada-language science-related Wikipedia articles" (19 August 2015)
- Panigrahi, Subhashish. "Odia Wikisource has a new Wikisourcer, and he is the youngest in the Odia Wikimedia community!" (21 August 2015)
Media coverage
edit- ಬೆಳ್ತಂಗಡಿ:ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕಾಲಕ್ಕೂ ಲಭ್ಯ ಇರುವ ಸ್ವತಂತ್ರ ಹಾಗೂ ಮುಕ್ತ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾ-ಪವನಜ. SahilOnline; 14 August 2015
- ಗ್ರಾಮೀಣ ಪ್ರದೇಶದ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಪ್ರಗತಿಯಿಂದ ದೇಶದ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಪ್ರಗತಿ ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ Mangalorean.com; 13 August 2015
- Telugu religious and historical work preserved at Annamacharya library to come on Wikisource! The Hans India; 7 August 2015
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director at sunil@cis-india.org or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director at sumandro@cis-india.org.
CIS is grateful to its primary donor, Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.
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