Hi all,
We are very happy to announce that the Ministry of Home Affairs has
granted us prior permission under the Foreign Contribution
(Regulation) Act, 2010 (FCRA) to receive funds from the Wikimedia
Foundation, USA for Chapter programs.
Through this development, we pass the first hurdle of acquiring
limited funds from the foundation for running programs and enabling
volunteers across the country.
The application was made to the Government on 4 September 2011 and was
granted on 13 February 2012.
This would not have been possible without the persistent efforts of
Arjuna Rao Chavala, the President of Wikimedia India. He worked
tirelessly over months properly following up with the government and
did not leave any stone unturned to ensure that we received the
permissions in time.
On this occasion, we would also like to thank our consultant M
Narsimha Rao, Gautam John, Asaf Bartov and Barry Newstead, for their
help and guidance throughout.
We are working out the modalities of actual implementation of getting
funds into Chapter Bank account and will keep you updated.
On behalf of the Wikimedia India,
Anirudh Bhati
Treasurer, Wikimedia India
Dear friends,
WikiProject Gujarat is one of the many Task Forces/daughter
WikiProjects of WikiProject India on English Wikipedia,
I am happy to report that we have new blood and fresh activity in
WikiProject Gujarat for last few weeks. The participants of the last
photothon are continuing to maintain the momentum gained from that
event and we are seeing both results and new initiatives. Senior
editors from Gujarat are doing their bit and mentoring the young folk.
In this backdrop, it is my privilege to introduce Konarak Ratnakar,
(User:Kondicherry) to the community. Konarak has been very active in
Ahmedabad meetups and has agreed to promote WikiProject Gujarat on
English Wikipedia as a volunteer coordinator.
I request you all to join me in welcoming him and also to support him
as he goes around reviving the WikiProject.
Please note that WikiProject Gujarat, on English Wikipedia is not to
be confused with the similar sounding Gujarati Wikipedia.
With this, the number of volunteer coordinators on English Wikipedia
goes up to three - self, BPositive, and now Kondicherry. The actual
requirement is almost one hundred, that is how many
departments/TFs/daughter WikiProjects we have!
So if anybody would like the stewardship of any function in the
WikiProject, be assured there is lots of opportunity and so please
step forth and volunteer.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
Dear All,
A symposium on "Wikipedia" is planned on 25th Feb. on the occasion of
"Marathi Bhasha Divas” which is on 27th Feb. The program includes
seminar on Wikipedia and launching of "Marathi Wikisrot" which we were
waiting to release for a long time.
Well-known theatre and film personality "Amol Palekar" will be the
"Chief Guest" for the program.
Some details of the program are given below.
Organisers: Journalism Department, Ranade Institute, Pune University
and Pune Union of Working Journalists along with Pune Community of
the Wikimedia India Chapter
Participants: Students of Journalism and mass communication
departments from various colleges under Pune University, working
journalists, students of some other departments and you all !!
Day : Saturday, Feb. 25, 2012
Time: 2pm. to 5.30 pm. (The program will start at 2 pm. You are
requested to be seated by 1.50pm)
Venue: Patrakar Bhavan, Navi Peth, Pune
Aim of symposium: Wikipedia has emerged as a major source of authentic
information and its versions in different languages (including
Marathi) are also getting popular. Journalism students and journalists
should not remain only consumers of this huge and resourceful
information, but they should also contribute to it as writers and
editors. This symposium aims to acquaint the participants with various
aspects of Marathi Wikipedia and Marathi Wikisrot.
You are cordially invited for this program and celebrate Marathi
Bhasha Diwas and Marathi Wikisrot launch.
Thanks and regards,
Sudhanwa Joglekar and Mandar Kulkarni
--
~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!
web: www.sudhanwa.com blog: www.sudhanwa.in
Twitter: sudhanwa Check on FB, Linkedin for more.
I suddenly realised that amongst the guys who signed up for WikiProject
India in Jan-Feb are such hardcore Wikipedians as RSrikanth05, Joyson
Prabhu, Karthikndr & Sitush.
Which brings me to the corollary - there are oodles of established Indian
editors who are not yet members of WikiProject India!
Gosh, guys please sign up!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_India/Members
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
Hi everyone, The 3rd Wikipedia Ahmedabad Meetup was arranged on 19th February 2012, at Seva Cafe Navarangpura.[1] Total 5 wikipedians attended the meetup(excluding a volunteer from the venue who also joined us, I've led him to Facebook Mumbai Wikipedia group, he might attend future meetups there.)
The meetup started with the discussion on Wikipedians in Ahmedabad. There aren't many people from the city (even Gujarat) who actually edit wikipedia regularly, so we discussed the ideas on getting people aware of what Wikipedia is. Inspired by Bangalore Meetup 42 I'm planning to post a GeoNotice to Wikipedians from Ahmedabad, so if there are users that edit but aren't in active in the community, can come forward. The other ideas that we put on table included a proposal to Smit Shah, a student from LD college of Engineering to lead WikiAcademy in the same college in March or April and as part of GLAM project, try getting information on obtainable and/or given permissions in the Museums in Ahmedabad.[2]
Afterwards Kartik Mistry talked about the Gujarati Wikipedia interface translation (on Translatewiki.net). He and another user translated about 1500 interface files to Gujarati, couple of weeks before the meetup.
I introduced them to some major details of Wikipedia's Policies and Guidelines and Citing sources, some gadgets that can help them in editing Wikipedia more efficiently, the google books and JSTOR citation tool (which Ashwin Baindur posted on the mailing list some time ago).[3]
Finally we had off project discussion about Raspberry Pi and Linux community and stuff like that, and a photo session of course.[4]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Ahmedabad/Ahmedabad3
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Museums_in_Ahmedabad[3]http://reftag.appspot.com/
[4] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ahmedabad_Meetup_Feb2012
I would like to thank the Wikimedia India Chapter for their help and guidance with organizing the event,On behalf of Wikimedia Ahmedabad Community,
--Konarak Ratnakar | kondi
*The Hindu : "The struggles of keeping Kannada Wikipedia afloat"*
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article290900…
/In the world of online Kannada content, blogs may be thriving but
Wikipedia is struggling. The reasons vary from technology barriers to
lack of contributors, say Wikipedians.
While there has been a surge in Kannada content in the last two years,
contributors to the language have been grappling with technology barriers.
After floundering for years, the Kannada Wikipedia picked up with font
availability, said *Hari Prasad Nadig*, a Kannada Wikipedian. The
software to add to Kannada Wikipedia is not so user-friendly, and only
geeks can edit it properly.
Unlike English, which has a large community, technology issues are
glaring in smaller communities. "Growth is slow with respect to
technology in smaller communities," he said. The lack of a good Unicode
font has been a persisting problem so the reader ends up seeing boxes
instead of Kannada text. After trying to write using the 'Thunga' font,
which had problems with vowels, besides other bugs, today, 'Kedage' is
the most complete font, though issues remain with this one too, Mr.
Nadig said.
Besides, various operating systems provide different levels of support
for the script. "All these small factors together discouraged people
from contributing. It's not that people don't want to use Kannada on the
Net. Traffic on the Net is very high; there is Kannada on Facebook and
Twitter too," he said.
Another challenge is writing and adding quality content. "The community
has to grow if Kannada Wikipedia is to grow," he said. The quality of
content also matters. One person adding thousands of 'stubs' on, say,
Kannada films, does not help the reader, and in fact, drives them away
from the site. Also, Kannada Wikipedia needs "starter" articles, to get
people reading before they can start adding content, he said.
In order to grow, Kannada Wikipedia requires an active, organic
community, which is not imposed through a catalyst of paid content
creators. Once, Google started a tool that had machine-translated
content improved by manual translations. Yet the Kannada content was
"looking like spam. They (manual translators) didn't understand markup,
templates; (it was) all malformed", he said.
An observation about contributors is that people in metros prefer
writing to the English Wikipedia though they know Kannada and are
tech-savvy. "Bangalore has less than 10 people writing to Kannada
Wikipedia," he said.
*Omshivaprakash*, Chair for Kannada Special Interest Group for
Wikipedia, said people are not aware that Kannada Wikipedia now has
simple tools to add content. He said "Wiki academies" would be set up to
train people on adding Kannada content. "Everyone complains that the
quality of Kannada Wikipedia is low, but they do not know that they can
edit it themselves," he said./
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes
only. The publisher ( The Hindu ) of the above news article owns the
copyrights of the article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
Hi all,
This is a brief report on the Wikipedia Eleven celebrations in
India.
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Eleven
Wikipedia turned Eleven on the 15th of January 2012. The Wikimedia India
chapter also completed its first year of operation on 3rd of Jan 2012.
The eleventh anniversary of Wikipedia was celebrated in different parts of
the country. More than 8 Indian cities and towns and over 200 Wikimedians &
Wiki enthusiasts celebrated this occasion of Wikipedia anniversary, around
the nation.
Some of the meetups had a Wikipedia anniversary cake to celebrate the
occasion.
Don't miss those mouth watering images at
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Eleven#Anniversary_cakes :)
Google Hangout was also conducted between different cities celebrating at
the same time.
The New Wikimedia India portal ( wikimedia.in ) was launched on this day.
It is designed to provide quick and rapid access to Indic wikimedia
projects - Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikinews,
Wikiquote and Commons.
A full collection of images related to the celebrations, around the nation,
can be found here
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_11_in_India
Cheers to all who organized and participated the celebrations in different
places !
Long Live Wikipedia !
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Dear all,
The 42nd Bangalore Wikipedia Wikimeetup was held on 12 Feb
2012, at Wikimedia India Chapter office ( The Centre for Internet and
Society), Domlur. [1] Five Wikimedians attended the meetup.
This time, we introduced GeoNotice on English Wikipedia for
announcing the meetup on the same morning in the Bangalore area [2]. A
geonotice is a notice similar to a sitenotice, but it is displayed only to
users who are physically located in some subset of the Earth. This is only
a watchlist geonotice , appearing on the watchlist page of logged in
users. May be we should try this at least a week ahead, next time, to catch
enough attention of regular Wikipedians, and possibly on other Wikipedias
too.
Arun Ramaratnam gave a talk and demo on How QR codes work, How
QRPedia (http://qrpedia.org/) <about:blank> used this technology in an
innovative way. QRpedia is a mobile Web based system which uses QR codes to
deliver Wikipedia articles to users, in their preferred language. When a
user scans a QRpedia QR code on their mobile device, the device decodes the
QR code into a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) using the domain name "
qrwp.org" and whose path (final part) is the title of a Wikipedia article,
and sends a request for the article specified in the URL to the QRpedia Web
server. It also transmits the language setting of the device [3] The crowd
discussed on the possible ways of implementing QRPedia in Indian contexts
and museums in India. We discussed about the current limitations and how
they can be improved.
We discussed on how to take forward the Wiki Loves Monuments
initiative in India [4]. Naveen Francis announced the registration of
wikilovesmonuments.in We discussed about the MoU with National Handicrafts
and Handlooms Museum, New Delhi . It was decided to follow up and close the
loop in signing the MoU with the Museum. Radhakrishna Arvapally also
discussed about a possible partnership with Brain Museum of NIMHANS,
Bangalore (Only Brain Musium in India). Arun talked about his earlier
interactions with the Government Museum of Bangalore [5]. We need to
complete this list of Museums in India. [6] and identify volunteers to work
with them.
The Meetup was adjourned with the customary group photo sessions.
You can find more photos here [6]. The next Bangalore Wikimeetup ( Meetup
43) is to be held on Sunday, 11-March-2012 Time: 3:00 PM IST. [8]
Notes:
1) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiMeetups/Bangalore/Bangalore42
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice#Bangalore_Meetup_42
3) Source : Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QRpedia
4)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012/Timeline
5)
http://www.bangaloreindia.org.uk/tourist-attractions/government-museum.html
6) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/List_of_Museums_in_India
7) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bangalore_Meetup_February_2012
8) http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiMeetups/Bangalore/Bangalore43
Thanks to Tinu for help !
--
Thanks & Regards,
RadhaKrishna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Arkrishna
For the RC Patrol.
And yes, we have a Huggle Mailing List ... ;-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Movchin <michael(a)movchin.de>
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:43:08 +0100
Subject: [Huggle] 1. HuggleCon
To: huggle(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hello,
the first IRC meeting Huggle (HuggleCon) will be on *4th March at 18:00
UTC*.
Other timezones, see:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=HuggleCon&iso=2012…
The topics are:
_*1. Developer conference part (30 minutes)*_
* Huggle 3
* New development concept
* Other
_*2.1 Beta-testers conference part (20-25 minutes)
*_ _*With the developers
*_
* New beta-testing concept
* Why some users left Huggle and are now using other tools?
_*2.2. Mini-Workshop (5-10 mins): How to test huggle correctly to find
bugs?*_
_*3. Supporting (open end)*_
_*Feel free to ask any contributors about Huggle*_
Thanks to all who participated in the doodle-poll. I'm glad to see you
all soon.
*The conference will be held in the IRC channel "#huggle".*
Sincerely,
Michael Movchin (mmovchin)
Volunteer Huggle core developer and conference coordinator
mmovchin(a)toolserver.org
--
Regards,
Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on February 12th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
Aliens invaded Tamil Nadu, left their Spacship and now it is a Toll Plaza.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IVRCL-Vijayamangalam-Toll-Plaza.JPG
