CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/February 2016

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February 2016

Kannada Wikipedian Vasanth S.N. during a Wikipedia workshop.

Kannada Wikipedia anniversary: The Kannada Wikipedia is all set to celebrate its 13th anniversary. The first ever edit on Kannada Wikipedia was made on 12 June 2003 with a message “Kannada Vishwa Koshakke Suswaagatha!” (meaning welcome to the Kannada encyclopedia in Kannada). However, it took over a year—on12 July 2004 the first article about a city Shimoga was created. Over the last decade Kannada Wikipedia has been a great gamechanger for the Kannada language where the Wikipedians have played a great role in making it a household name—there were about 700,000 pageviews in December 2015. The annual average of active editors for last year was 48, 91 (February) being the highest and 22 (May) the lowest and 80 being the count in last December. The peaks and valleys also signify that major outreach like Wikipedia Education Program at Christ University Bengaluru could have boosted the total number of editors during the months when the program was being rolled out. Since its inception, the project has gone through many ups and downs over time, the major one being a small community to edit and curate such a high-level task of creating new articles in Kannada, editing and enriching them with more information and citations, and cleaning up many articles.

Vasanth S.N. has edited the Kannada-language Wikipedia since 2006. As part of the WikipediansSpeak series, Subhashish Panigrahi of CIS-A2K caught up with Vasanth to learn about his contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia, which just celebrated its 13th anniversary. In the discussion Vasanth shares his long time involvement in the Wikimedia movement, and what drives him every day to edit Wikipedia and helping other fellow Wikimedians.
. . .Read more..

Event organized/participated

Participants during a digitization sprint at Andhra Loyola College.

1. Digitisation sprint at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada to bring more books on Telugu Wikisource: A digitization sprint was organised during February 12-14 at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada. The goal of the sprint was to train the students about scanning books using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and digitize books on Telugu Wikisource. 35 students from the college participated in this sprint.

Articles, blogs and Learning Patterns

1. Kruusamägi, Ivo; Panigrahi, Subhashish; and Erhart, Ed. Community digest—Estonians working on a new feedback system for Wikipedia articles. Wikimedia Blog, 13 February 2016.
   Discusses a new feedback system for Wikipedia articles being developed by Estonian Wikimedians
2. Panigrahi, Subhashish. Can Wikipedia revive dying Indian languages?. The Hoot. 19 February 2016
   Explains the role of Wikipedia in helping to revive and inject new energy into some Indian languages
3. Panigrahi, Subhashish. ମାତୃଭାଷା ଦିବସ: ଆଜିର ସମସ୍ୟା ଓ ଆହ୍ୱାନ, Sambad, 21 February 2016
   This editorial explains the challenges of expanding a knowledge base in Odia language and helping it grow beyond just the literature and to a language of knowledge
4. Panigrahi, Subhashish. ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଏକ ଅନୁଶୀଳନ. Samaja. 21 February 2016
   This article, written on the International Mother Language Day 2016, looks back and narrates several success stories of digital activism for languages
5. Panigrahi, Subhashish. କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟର ଯୁଗରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା. Suryaprava. 22 February 2016
   Discusses Ol chiki script that is used to write in the Santali language
6. Panigrahi, Subhashish. Looking ahead to the future of the Kannada Wikipedia: Vasanth S.N.. Wikimedia Blog. 28 February 2016
   Panigrahi interviews Vasanth S.N., as a part of the WikipediansSpeak series, about his contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia and his views and suggestions to improve the project

Submissions

1. Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER (Panigrahi, Subhashish; February 27, 2016). Panigrahi's submission under the theme of "Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education" has been selected for the OER16 conference to be held in Edinburg, Scotland from 19 to 20 April 2016.

Media coverage

1. Youth is responsible for protecting Telugu, Eenadu, 14 January 2016
2. Why aren’t Indians using Wikipedia to hold the government to account?, Scroll.in, 6 February 2016
3. Now trending: Regional Indian language social media networks, Hindustan Times, 14 February 2016
4. Mechanical engineering topics available in Kannada Wikipedia. The Hindu, 15 February 2016
5. International Mother Language Day, Eenadu, 21 February 2016
6. The Intellects holds 2nd International Conclave of Odia Language, Odisha News Insight, 20 February 2016

Awards

The Intellects, a Delhi-based progressive forum of intellectuals, held the 2nd International Conclave of Odia Language at the India International Centre in New Delhi on February 20, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event and was honored with the Yuva Prerana Samman award. Odisha News covered the event.