Hi Folks
I am writing to all of you to correct a potential error. As you might be aware, the Wikimedia Foundation has set itself an important objective of supporting the community in India to expand participation. As part of this, India Programs has been set up - and I work for it.
I have put together a plan for India (please see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs) - and I had communicated this on the India mailing list. This has generated interest as well as debate and discussion. However, I understand that some of you might not be on that mailing list. I therefore thought I'd correct this by reaching out directly to you and requesting you to have a look at the page and share your comments (on the Talk Page or on this mailing list or directly to me; my contact details are in my signature.) It outines the thinking behind India Programs, key initiatives, milestones, team structure, visit reports, IRC logs, recommendations on office location and some other details. I hope you find it interesting, and I'd love to hear your views / comments / suggestions.
Also, we I have a monthly IRC on India Programs with whoever is interested - on the first Thursday of every month. I'll send out an invite to your mailing list from now on. Do see if you can join in.
I am also going to try and attend as many community meet-ups in as many locations as possible - so I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible, as soon as possible. If you would be kind enough to let me know when the next meeting is planned for and on what schedule (e.g. 2nd Saturday, etc.) then I'll work out how to attend asap.
(Do excuse me if you have received this message through other mailing lists, or it's a bit of a duplication if you are already on the India mailing list.)
Thank You.
Warm Regards,
Hisham Mundol
Wikimedia Foundation India Programs
skype: hisham.wikimedia
gtalk: hmundol(a)wikimedia.org
twitter: @mundol
*The Telegraph , Calcutta : "Regional Wiki"*
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110417/jsp/calcutta/story_13861947.jsp
*Wikipedia may be one of the most popular websites in the world, but few
know that it can be accessed in 270 languages, including 20 Indian ones.*
*
*
*Wiki Bangla has been around since January 2004, but with little awareness
about its existence there have been few contributors. A workshop and
brainstorming session was organised by NGO Sanhita along with Wikimedia
Foundation at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre recently to
introduce Bangla Wiki to academicians and NGOS and invite contributions on
women’s right and gender-related issues.*
*
*
*“The Bengali section of Wikipedia has hardly any information on women
rights and laws. If we can enrich this section it will benefit many women in
rural areas, especially those who are not conversant in English,” said Soma
Sengupta, the director of Sanhita.*
*
*
*Women’s rights activist Vishakha Dutta represented the Wikimedia
Foundation. Professors of women studies departments of various colleges were
encouraged to select students who can contribute for this section. Some of
the participating colleges included Sreerampur Girls’ College, Basanti Devi
College, Jaiprakash Institute, Lady Brabourne College and Shibnath Shastri
College.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
P.S. The story is short, but I think it appears on the front page of
TT today.
Dear all,
Apologies for this big delay in reporting - between work, travel and the
rest of my life, I've been in a spin.
As previously announced on this list, Sanhita, a gender resource centre in
Kolkata had offered to host a half-day session on 'Gender, Information and
Technology' to explore, understand and plan how women's studies departments
in Kolkata's colleges might create content related to 'gender/women's
studies/women' on Bengali wikipedia, for use by colleges across West Bengal
(and of course, by anyone else).
The workshop was held on 18 March at the Seagull Media Resource
Centre<http://www.seagullindia.com/samrc/facilities.html>where the
Kolkata wiki10 celebrations had been held in January - Sanhita
took on the venue rental and snack costs. Sanhita currently works with 18
women's colleges in Kolkata and West Bengal: it creates and distributing
information resources in Bengali on women/gender. It would like to
collaborate with a technological platform such as Bengali wikipedia to
further its goal.
Biswarup Ganguly, Jayanta Nath, Arnab Dutta and Rimi Chatterjee were the
wikipedians from Kolkata who led this workshop, along with Soma Sengupta of
Sanhita. I was invited along to bridge the gap between gender studies and
wikipedia. The entire workshop was conducted in Bengali; there were 30
participants - 28 women and 2 men, quite the gender reverse of other
workshops I've attended. Please see the
photos<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Kolkata_Mar2011>that
Biswarup took to get a visual sense of this.
Each of the 30 participants used English wikipedia - only 1 knew of Bengali
wikipedia; none used it. All the participating teachers are not necessarily
intending to edit wikipedia themselves in Bengali, but are 'gatekeepers' to
students. So they were more interested in a conceptual understanding of
wikipedia during this preliminary planning session, than a hands-on editing
demo.
Given the academic nature of participants, the first question was about the
authenticity of articles. How is this established? Along with talking about
the need for references and citations and the no original
research/verifiability principles, two examples [1} [2] were shown. The talk
page on Babri Masjid [1] was also used to demonstrate one aspect of the
editing process - how authenticity is constantly challenged and
renegotiated. The page on Begum Rokeya [2] attracted considerable interest,
since she was a pioneering figure in undivided Bengal to whom this group
could relate. The lack of citations about her was brought up, and the oral
citations project [3] was cited.
In a similar vein, the following pages were also discussed in detail:
Feminism portal [4], Gender Studies category [5] and Gender Studies project
page [6] - to see if something similar could be launched in Bengali
wikipedia with those present and others who had expressed interest via
email.
Since some of those present saw themselves as advocates, we clarified that
wikipedia is not an advocacy platform, it is a knowledge platform - and
discussed NPOV etc in this context.
There were questions about how to take this knowledge to colleges in the
state without access to the internet or to computers. We discussed the
creation of offline CDs and PediaPress books, using online content.
All in all, there was great excitement around the prospect of
collaboratively creating gender-related content on Bengali wikipedia - Arnab
and Jayanta demonstrated this. Rimi spoke about how she uses wikipedia with
her students, while Biswarup did a quick demo of Commons.
All of us felt "a positive energy" (to quote Rimi), specially about the
"practical concrete questions about next steps" (Jayanta). One disability
rights activist from an NGO called Sruti had suggestions for improving said
page in Bengali wikipedia - and
Sanhita confirmed that several participants emailed back the next day with
good feedback.
Hopefully, with this optimistic start, this will now go places - and
contribute not just to Bengali wikipedia, but also to reducing the overall
gender gap. A special thanks to Jayanta, Arnab, Biswarup, Rimi, and Soma for
excellent coordination, planning, camaraderie and teamwork to make this
workshop a grand success.
Cheers
Bishakha
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babri_masjid
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begum_Rokeya
[3] http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2011/01/12/new-wikimedia-fellow/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Feminism
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Gender_studies
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Gender_Studies
FYI
On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 9:24 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak(a)gmail.com>wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Just when we were having discussions on urls, here comes
>
>
> http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_urls-in-7-regional-languages-soon_1528…
>
> ""Experts say companies will try to race to book their names under all
> seven languages to prevent the misuse of their names and trademarks.""
>
> Can the foundation / chapter block Wikipedia domain names in all these
> languages as soon as they come to prevent misuse?
>
> Regards
> Srikanth.L
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
> Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>
>
--
With Warm Regards,
*Jayanta Nath*
Calcutta,West Bengal
Facebook :http://www.facebook.com/jayantanth
Wikipedia :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jayantanth
আসুন পাইরেসি মুক্ত ভারত গড়ি,সবাই মুক্ত সফ্টওয়ার ব্যবহার করি [image:
O:-)],অন্যকে ব্যবহারে উৎসাহিত করি।
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যারা উইকিপিডিয়ায় বিভিন্ন নিবন্ধ যোগ করে অবদান রাখেন, তাদের জন্য সবচেয়ে সহজ
এবং নিরাপদ উপায় হচ্ছে ইংরেজি বা অন্য কোন ভাষার উইকিপিডিয়া থেকে সরাসরি নিবন্ধ
অনুবাদ করা। সহজ এবং নিরাপদ এই জন্যে যে উইকিপিডিয়া অনুবাদের ফলে অবদানকারীকে
তথ্যের উৎস এবং কপিরাইট নিয়ে চিন্তা করতে হয় না। কারণ সকল উইকিপিডিয়াই একই
লাইসেন্সের আওতায় নিবন্ধ প্রকাশ করে। একটি উইকিপিডিয়া লেখা ছাড়াও বিভিন্ন ছবি,
উইকি মার্কআপ, ইনফোবক্স, রেফারেন্স এবং বিভিন্ন ট্যাগ দিয়ে নিবন্ধটি বিন্যাসিত
থাকে। সাধারণভাবে এগুলোকে অনুবাদক বা অবদানকারী নিজেকেই খেয়াল এবং রক্ষণাবেক্ষণ
করতে হয়। তবে একটি বড় এবং ভাল মানের নিবন্ধকে অনুবাদ করতে একজন অবদানকারীকে
নিবন্ধের সকল বিষয় খেয়াল রেখে অনুবাদের কাজ করতে বেশ কষ্ট করতে হয়। অনেক সময় যা
প্রায় দুঃসাধ্য হয়ে পড়ে। ফলে অনুবাদের কাজটিও অনেক সময় মান সম্পন্ন হয়ে ওঠে না।
গুগুল ট্রান্সলেশন টুলকিট ওয়েবভিত্তিক এমন একটি অ্যাপ্লিকেশন যা উইকিপিডিয়ার
জন্য অনুবাদকারীকে অনুবাদ কাজে এসব বিষয়ে সহযোগিতা সহ আরও বেশ কিছু সুবিধা দিয়ে
থাকে। এ অ্যাপ্লিকেশনটি অনুবাদ কাজকে আরও সহজ এবং সাচ্ছ্ন্দময় করে। আমার
ব্যাক্তিগত অভিজ্ঞতায় এটি উইকিপিডিয়ার জন্য যে কোন অনুবাদে বেশ কার্যকরী। আমার
অভিজ্ঞতা থেকে অ্যাপ্লিকেশনটি কিভাবে উইকিপিডিয়া অনুবাদে কার্যকরীভাবে ব্যবহার
করা যায় তা আমার ব্লগে শেয়ার করছি। ব্লগটি হয়তো আপনাদের উইকিপিডিয়ায় অবদান
রাখতে আপনাদের সহযোগিতা করবে।
ব্লগ পোষ্টের লিঙ্কঃ* http://wp.me/pcRF1-ad*
বেলায়েত
--
Belayet Hossain
http://www.facebook.com/bellayethttp://twitter.com/bellayethttp://bellayet.wordpress.com (Bangla)
Knowledge is universal
...so share it.
Hillel____
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?
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