Talk:CIS-A2K/Draft Work plan July 2014 - June 2015/Bangla

Suggestions

• How about if we totally develop the wiki-voyage project in Bengali?? It will be a nice work then!!! If it is totally developed! TechnoAyan (talk) 05:05, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi TechnoAyan, thanks for going through the Bangla plans. Currently CIS-A2K's mainstay is on Indic Wikipedia and Wikisource projects. But we are open to suggestions about including other sister projects. Could you share more of your thoughts on why and how Wikivoyage in Bangla should be invested upon? --Visdaviva (talk) 07:38, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions by Pasaban

I have some suggestions as below, -

• Wikitionary
  • Suggestion: Lets concentrate on expanding and making it more exhaustive for Bangla Ovidhan.
  • Reason: There is no decent online Bangla dictionary, let alone complete. Am saying this keeping in mind the Samsad one.
• GLAM - Libraries
  • Suggestion: Lets take all copyright expired Bangla books to digital world. I have a plan around it.
  • Reason: The golden age of Bangla literature has mostly served its term under copyright. It would be better if we can bring that to online.
• GLAM - Museum
  • Suggestion: Lets collaborate with Victoria Memorial, Indian Museum-Kolkata etc. To digitise all the history of Bangla as a whole. Here I am considering all the three roots of Bangla - West Bengal, Bangladesh and Tripura.
  • Reason: First of all, it's a blessing in disguise that we do not have much Museum-like establishments that we need to tap to find out our history. Secondly, our museums are in general very poorly managed (my personal view); hence unless they are digitised, we will have hardly anything to pass down as a legacy of our forefathers.
• Wikiversity
  • Suggestion: We can have an online course of Bangla as a language.
  • Reason: There are many second generation Bengalies in abroad who might find it useful.
• Technology
  • Suggestion: We can target and finish the BanglaOCR project at (https://code.google.com/p/banglaocr/).
  • Reason: This would be very helpful in GLAM - Libraries suggestion above.

Above is a few ideas that I have. We can have a discussion on this if needed. Pasaban (talk) 18:22, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi Pasaban, we appreciate the above suggestions, which are all excellent! We are in complete agreement with you about the rationale for working on these ideas. However, we would like to think through some of these suggestions with you.

• Given that we have limited resources at our disposal and a relatively smaller community of volunteers in Bangla, would it not be better to prioritize the main stay projects like Bangla Wikipedia and Wikisource? Would it make strategic sense to invest in Wikitionary and Wikiversity? Probably it would be best to give need based support to these projects. Is there any specific requirement that CIS-A2K could immediately support?
• Wikiversity and online course of Bangla... appreciate the idea. But it looks like a long way around to grow the Bangla community, if you were intending to suggest that we can get the second generation Bengalis abroad onto the Wikimedia projects. If it is simply to offer a language course using the Wikiversity platform, we could suggest it to some potential Bangla departments and leave it there, than to take it upon ourselves. Let me know if I misunderstood your suggestion.
• Partnering GLAM institutions is an excellent idea. We have listed some potential institutions and some measurable goals. We could certainly include the institutions suggested.
• Bangla OCR: CIS-A2K will be quite keen to help in whatever way possible. We do not have internal technical expertise. As per our understanding OCR for Indian scripts is quite a complex task and an effective OCR is not that easy to come by. However, we will be open to suggestions by the Bangla community to invest in a resource after a thorough due diligence. In the past we tried to support Tamil OCR development by a volunteer, but this has not progressed much beyond some exchange of e-mails. If the Bangla community is keen on identifying a resource, we need to ensure that the resource delivers in a time-bound manner. The other thing that CIS-A2K will explore, though not mentioned in the plan, is to see if there is any (relatively effective) existing Bangla OCR (was told about ISI, Kolkata efforts) and try to get some licenses to be used for Bangla OCR. See for instance, the proposed Gujarati Wikisource project.

Thanks again for these suggestions! Would welcome more discussion on how and where we can add value to the Bangla Wikimedia projects and community.--Visdaviva (talk) 05:41, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion by Jayanta Nath

Apart from Pasaban, I am adding few ideas and suggestion

Hi Jayanta, thanks for engaging with the plan very closely and for the suggestions. Would like to think through some of the ideas and your long time association with the Bangla projects will be of great help. Thanks!--Visdaviva (talk) 07:06, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Project Wikisource

1. Digital Library of India & West Bengal Public Libraries Network : There are already lots of resources with wrong meta data. As you know very well it is Govt Website ( navigation, downloading feature , online reading very poor). So you can contact with the DLI & WBPLN and collect all data with CD/DVD/HDD and upload in Archive.org (with proper meta data) and transfer commons ( this is the present cycle). This is not for Bengali Wikipedia, it can be very helps for all Indic Wikisource project.

2. Recruit/contract one dedicated software developer stuff for developed Indic OCR. First year target both Devnagari (http://code.google.com/p/parichit/ served Sanskrit Hindi Marathi and more ) and Bengali Font. ( it will served Bengali, Assumese and Manipuri Languages) Target (https://code.google.com/p/banglaocr/) as open sourced Google Tecerract. Personally I can help to developers because I have been using this from 2009, its working 50-60%. This Bangla OCR already installed in Bengali Wikisource proofreading page.

3. Finished the School of Cultural Texts And Records (SCTR) project of Jadavpur. Collect the all data. I know now its online. as bichitra. The problem is same as Govt Website.

4. Again try to explore National Library of India and Asiatic Society of India, Kolkata. Because they have all copyright expired Bangla books ( including all Indic language Book). Pasaban's GLAM - Libraries proposed will not successful as said Suggestion: Lets take all copyright expired Bangla books to digital world. I have a plan around it.

Please read the below points sequentially to the above points.

1. Completely understand the problem you state about DLI catalogue. We have encouraged a Telugu volunteer to take up this project, rather than doing it internally at CIS-A2K. Do you think we could do something similar for Bangla? We could come in with necessary technical and other support if a Bangla volunteer is keen to take up this task. @Wikitanvir: would this be of interest to you?
2. Could you please see the discussion on OCR above and give further inputs?
3. As shared in the plan we now have a formal agreement with SCTR. AFAIK the detailed catalogue of the content with SCTR is not available in the public domain. Could you please point to the specific location, if you have seen it? Thanks.
4. Jayanta as we have discussed before, these are large institutional behemoths and are difficult to engage. We are open to trying again. However, it may be better for us invest these energies on partners like SCTR, which we know could be successful. Probably, it is good for us to collectively arrive at an institutional priority list using a matrix, before we go further with this. As you know building institutional partnerships is a very time consuming task. My only concern is not to bite more than what we can chew, especially given the small size of the Kolkata based community, especially someone like you, who is already stretched a lot. Let's discuss this more and arrive at a more realistic and achievable milestones that we could collectively achieve in the next one year.--Visdaviva (talk) 07:06, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

General Ideas

5. Fixed the bug 28206 ASAP for the Indic Community. Your present staff Rahmanuddin Shaik can do this or can give some ideas about the issues.

Bangla Wikipedia 10th Anniversary

6. Monetary Support to community: Kolkata or Bangla Commuty try to organized Meetup/workshop every month with tentative budget 5000/-per month. ( You had already proposed this at 12 offline monthly meetings/events at "Implementation Plan" section India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_July_2014_-_June_2015/Bangla#Capacity_Building_Meet-ups

7. During Kolkata Bookfair project we had registered 1200+ visitors who are wished to contribute Bangla Wikipedia. We can capitalized them with regular followup.

8. We had a celebration plan for Bangla Wikipedia 10th Anniversary this year.

9. Personnaly I had talk with Department Head of Bangla at Calcutta University & Presidency University.

Hi Jayanta, thanks for these ideas, which are immensely useful. Some updates and thoughts below.

• Yes, we are actively following this bug. We are hopeful to resolve this and of course Rahim has been looking into this and hopefully will bring it to a closure.
• Yes. Precisely. Let's do it in a transparent manner.
• This is an excellent idea!
• Could you let know how CIS-A2K can help support the Bangla community? Needless to say such community events are a very good opportunity for introspection and planning.
• Glad to see that you are actively exploring institutional partnerships! Let's include Presidency University too in the list of potential partners to explore. What is the outcome of your meetings with them?

Cheers--Visdaviva (talk) 07:50, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Budget Breakup

10. You should break up all budget main head.

Hi, where-ever possible we have given a detailed break-down of the budget items. The rest of the budgets like "Volunteer Support", "Events/Meet-ups" are optimal estimates based on the spending patterns during the last year. Do you have a question on any specific line-item?--Visdaviva (talk) 07:54, 17 April 2014 (UTC)