Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Odisha Dibasa 2014: 14 books re-released under CC license, Odia Wikimedia community to being Wikisource live
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editOdisha Dibasa 2014: 14 books re-released under CC license, Odia Wikimedia community to being Wikisource live!
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Odisha became a separate state in the British India on April 1, 1936 on the basis of its more than 2500 year old language, Odia that recently got the status of an Indian classical language. Odia Wikimedia community celebrated this day on March 29 at Bhubaneswar with a gathering of 70 people. Linguists, scholars and journalists discussed the state of Odia language in the digital era, initiatives for its development and steps which could be taken to add more access to books and other educational resources during this event. 14 copyrighted books have been re-licensed under the Creative Commons license and the digitization project on Odia WikiSource was formally initiated by an indigenous educational institute, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS). The community released a DVD containing an Odia Opentype typeface "Odia OT Jagannatha" licensed under OFL, an offline input tool "TypeOdia," ISCII to Unicode font converter, offline Odia Wikipedia in Kiwix, various free and open source software packages and Ubuntu operating system. Professor Udayanath Sahu from Utkal University, The Odisha Review's editor Dr. Lenin Mohanty, Odisha Bhaskar's editor Pradosh Pattnaik, Odia language researcher Subrat Prusty, Dr. Madan Mohan Sahu, KISS, Allhadmohini Mohanty, Chairman, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa and trust's secretary Brajamohan Patnaik and senior members Sarojkanta Choudhury and Shisira Ranjan Dash spoke in the event.
Eleven books from Odia writer Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were re-released under Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license by the "Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa," a trust founded by Dr. Mohanty for the development of Odia language. Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to Odia Wikimedia to release and digitize these books. The community will be training students and a group of six faculty members at KISS will be coordinating the digitization of these books. 'Collaborative efforts and open access to knowledge repositories will enrich our language and culture,' said linguist Padmashree Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak inaugurating this event. Dr. Pattanayak and Odia language researcher Subrat Prusty from the Institute of Odia Studies and Research also re-licensed under the same license three books based on their research on Odia language and the cultural influence of the language on other societies. KISS is going to digitize some of these books and make them available on Odia Wikisource.
An OpenType Odia Unicode font, "Odia OT Jagannatha" designed by Sujata Patel from Odialanguage.com was released under OFL license. This is the first Odia OpenType font that the community actively tested. A new Odia offline input tool called "TypeOdia" by Wikipedian Manoj Sahukar was also released for public distribution. DVDs containing the font, the input tool, Odia language dictionaries, Open source softwares, Offline Odia Wikipedia, Wikipedia editing guide and Ubuntu package were distributed to the participants.
Active Odia Wikipedian and Admin Mrutyunjaya Kar gave the inaugural speech. Subhashish Panigrahi from the center for Internet and Society read the annual report and vision of Odia Wikipedia. Chief guest Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak discussed about the efforts being laid for bringing Odia language as the sixth Indian classical language. A large majority of Odia publications are not available on the internet and readers are devoid of easily accessibility. He, further discussed the process of digitization for preserving valuable books that are out of print and the old palm lead manuscripts. Professor Udayanath Sahu presented on the process, progress and implementation of machine translation project in Utkal University.
Experienced Wikimedians conducted an advanced Wikipedia workshop on the second day of this event at the KIIT University, Bhubaneswar that was attended by majority of the existing Wikimedians from the community including new Wikipedians who signed up for the Odia Wikipedia Education Program at Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal. Mrutyunjaya Kar demonstrated about WikiData and various tools for linking and accessing information in multiple languages on various Wikimedia projects. Ansuman Giri discussed the advanced technical aspects; use of various gadgets, proper categorization, how to use subpages, how to auto-list archive pages, customizing WikiLove feature, user rights modification, including how important it is to cite biographies of living persons with secondary sources, etc. where as Shitikantha Dash discussed about copyright, issues with it and uploading images and other media files on Wikimedia Commons. Dr. Subas Chandra Rout demonstrated about "notability, referencing and creating citations for the notable topics" whereas Subhashish Panigrahi discussed the work plan for the year, failure of program projects, collective learning and the dos and don'ts of community building.
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We hope that more authors will come forward and re-release their books under CC-BY-SA license. The Odia community is excited to see or.wikisource.org go live. A few Wikipedians are even interested in typing their favorite free licensed books to make them available on Wikisource. I believe it'll be challenging to train the KISS students to type and proof-read the written texts. In the CISA2K's draft plan, the goal to have the number of editors seems overestimated. The students need to have some knowledge about Wikimedia and how it works in general before they start working. We hope that the books will be digitized properly and in coming days more users will join us in the process as we will have more free books in Odia Wikisource. I appeal to the Odia people to be a part of the Odia Wikimedia community and make Odia Wikisource a successful project, we need all the time you can devote. :-) |
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Ansuman Giri, Odia Wikipedian | ||
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editby Subhashish Panigrahi. Copyedit and quote by Ansuman Giri.
Copyright note: Release of DVD containing Odia font, open source tools and Offline Odia Wikipedia.jpg by Ahemadullah Shaikh, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported. Odia wikipedian mrutyunjaya kar and ansuman giri on 30the march 2014.jpg by Jnanaranjan Sahu, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported. A group photo of Odia wikipedians at kiit conference hall on 30th march 2014.jpg by Jnanaranjan Sahu, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.
