Dear Wikimedians,
Today we have released first version of FAQ
for Hindi Wikipedia
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hindi_Wiki_Projects_FAQ_Version_1.0.…>.With
a nice effort of malayalam wiki community they translated their FAQ from
malayalam to english.That translation helped us a lot for preparing FAQ for
Hindi Wikipedia.Special thanks to Shiju Alex and Junad pv who gave this FAQ
its Final pdf form.
Thank you and Regards
Mayur
and, perhaps this also goes out to the listadmins of the -pune and
-westbengal lists. Will you consider a request to ensure that these
lists are available via gmane.org as well ? It allows one to use a
conventional newreader to go through the lists.
--
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>
Scholarship form is closed today morning.
Total number of applicants : 7070
Do you require a full, special or partial scholarship?
Full Scholarship, travel and accommodation included
4807 68%Full Special Scholarship, including travel and accommodation for
caregiver
3805% Partial Scholarship, accommodation only
71910%Partial Scholarship, travel only
3896%50% of Travel and Accommodation costs (You bear 50%)
2944%75% of Travel and Accomodation costs (You bear 25%)
480 7%
Sex:
Male
633190% Female
73810%
Do you plan to speak in Wiki Conference India 2011?
Yes
296242%No
410758%
Do you contribute to Wikimedia commons?(Optional question)
Yes
138420% No
419459%
Number of responses without dates: 1
Number of daily responses
Naveen Francis
for Scholarship Team, WCI 2011.
So here's a question - given that there is much content that is out of
copyright in India but not necessarily in other parts of the world, is
there any sense in looking to create an Indian Wikisource for content
that is out of copyright here?
Thank you.
Best,
Gautam
________
http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html
Hi Members and Wikimedia Community in Bangalore,
I am glad to announce that we are planning for the first Wiki
academy<http://wiki.wikimedia.in/File:WikiAcademyCoHostingOpportunityBrochure.pdf>
co-hosted by Department of Public Libraries, Karnataka for their senior
Library professionals The draft agenda is as follows
Date: 29 Aug 2011, Monday
Time: 11AM to 2 PM
Venue: Indira Priyadarshini Childrens Library, Near State Central Library,
Cubbon Park, Bangalore
Agenda
11:00-11:30 Wikipedia History and Overview
11:30-12:00 Wikipedia policies
12:00-12:15 Setting up computer for Indian languages
12:15-12:30 Break
12:30-14:00 Wikimedia Lab: Browsing Wikipedia,Editing Wikipedia
We invite volunteers especially Kannada wikipedians to join the Chapter EC
members in co-facilitate this event.
Cheers
Arjun
This is relevant to all those who have written to the various lists and
asked how one can participate. volunteer or help in any way.
We need people to upload images to Wikimedia Commons.
- We face a problem in that photographers are willing to go out & shoot
and donate images. But they are unfamiliar with Commons and do not upload it
there. However, we find that they know Flickr and are willing to upload it
under a suitable Creative Commons license.
- There are hundreds of free images on the net, we can show you how to
locate them. These can be uploaded to Commons. We are at this point of time
interested in images pertaining to India only.
It is a job requiring patience, care for details and intelligence as the
images need to be categorised also. Where relevant we would like to add them
to articles too.
We need a small TEAM of three to five - people, age, sex, religion, etc,
etc, no bar, except that they should have:
* Knowledge of uploading images to Commons
* know how to categorise
* know how to load images into Wikipedia
* Possess good judgement.
* Possess an abiding love for Wikipedia and willing to contribute to it.
If you are interested, let us know. This is a serious commitment under the
"India Loves Wikipedia" initiative. Dont apply if just for "time paas".
Helpers will be awarded barnstars at a suitable date after the project is
done.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
Dear Wikimedians
I would like share an unusual story (unusual - especially for Indic language
wiki communities) that Malayalam wiki community had faced few months back.
In the month of February 2011, I had received an SOS call from a school
teacher (Satyasheelan) who is teaching at the Government School for the
Blind in the Kasargod
distric<http://www.webelmediatronics.in/brlads/directory_Kerala.htm>t
of Kerala. Satyasheelan was seeking Malayalam wikipedian's support to fix
few issues that he and his students faced with few Malayalam alphabets when
they read Malayalam wikipedia using a speech synthesizing software called
eSpeak <http://espeak.sourceforge.net/>. His phone call was surprise to us
since Malayalam wikimedians were not aware that visually challenged people
are using Malayalam wikipedia. (We were aware about the existence of a
software by Santhosh (named Dhawni <http://dhvani.sourceforge.net/>) to read
unicode Malayalam (and other Indic languages also) which is in its early
stages of development). So Satyasheelan's call was surprising.
After his phone call few Malayalam wikipedians (Junaid, Thachan Makan, and
I) contacted Jonathan Duddington <http://sourceforge.net/users/jonsd>, the
primary developer (?) of eSpeak, and we worked with him to fix the issues
for Malayalam that Satyasheelan had pointed out. Jonathan fixed the issues
pretty fast and later Satyasheelan informed us that now they are able to use
Malayalam wikipedia without any issues.
Later while we were planning for the 4th Malayalam wiki
meetup<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%…>(2011
July 11) at Kannur, we decided to invite Satyasheelan to conduct a
session, since Malayalam wikimedians liked to hear the experience of
students of Blind school (using Malayalam wikipedia). But when Satyasheelan
came for the meetup we were surprised and taken aback when we learnt that
Satyasheelan is also a visually challenged person. Few of the his colleagues
(who are also visually challenged) also attended the meetup. Satyasheelan
was accompanied by his son, Nalin.
The meetup was attended by more than 80 Malayalam wikipedians. Few photos
are available here<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Malayalam_Wikimeetup_4_-_Kannur_…>.
We are happy that Bishaka, Hisham, and Tory were kind enough to join us for
this meetup. There were various programs conducted as part of this meetup
(the report of the meetup is available at various locations (in Malayalam)).
Definitely the highlight of the meetup was the demonstration by
Satyasheelaman. So this mail is about that.
Malayalam wikimedian Ajay Kuyiloor took extra efforts to record
Satyasheelan's session. We are sharing an edited version of this session
assuming that this information will help other Indic language wiki
communities.
The video of Satyasheelan's session is available here: *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1T3HeBTvU* The duration of the video is
around 9 minutes. We specially thank Ajay Kuyiloor, Girish Mohan, and Jithin
who worked on this video. We admit the low quality of video since we were
not prepared for such a session. Inconvenience due to this is deeply
regretted.
Malayalam community is welcoming your comments regarding this story so that
the discussion regarding this will benefit rest of the Indic wiki
communities also. We are actually humbled by the fact that work we do in
wikipedia is reaching out to people from all wakes of life.
*NOTE:* Satyasheelan specially thanked Malayalam wikimedians for creating a
special navigational
template<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%AB%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%82:%E0%B4%85…>for
reaching out easily to wikipedia articles. I still remember in 2008
when
Malayalam wikipedia user:Sadhik Khalid
<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%89%E0%B4%AA%E0%B4%AF%E0%B5%8B%E0%B4%95%…>created
this template, some of us had doubted the need of such a template. Our doubt
was, why such a template is required when users can reach out to articles
easily using serach box. Now to our surprise we understood this template is
very much useful for the visually challenged people (whom we never thought
about before).
Video of Satyasheelan's session is available here:*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1T3HeBTvU*
Thanks
Shiju Alex
I'm User:Walkerma from the English Wikipedia. I've been working for some
time on producing offline collections of Wikipedia content from the
English
Wikipedia. We're currently looking at the possibility of subject-based
books (e.g., on topics such as mammals or chemistry) for schools, using an
affordable local printer.
Working with PediaPress I put together a "taster" example on chemistry,
which is available here:
http://pediapress.com/files/schoolbooks/chemistry.pdf
though I'd like to expand it. This one is aligned to the English schools
GCSE, but others could be designed around the curricula of different
countries or provinces. I would see this just as a start - we would want
to cover other subjects, other countries and other languages if it was
successful.
My questions:
*Would anyone here be interested in working with me on developing this
further?
*Would English language books be useful in schools, or could we only use
ones in Hindi, etc?
*If these books are useful, does anyone here have contacts with a
provincial or local ministry/board of education that might support an
initiative like this?
Thanks for your time,
Martin
Martin A. Walker
Department of Chemistry
SUNY College at Potsdam
Potsdam, NY 13676 USA
+1 (315) 267-2271