Hi all,
While we are all working on reaching out to more and more people to join
wiki community in India, I see an area we need to focus before it becomes a
problem.Few days back there was a thread posting a link to article[1] in
which a user claimed "Foreigners deleting Wikipedias India content". In the
Chennai meetup that happened last week too, there was a person claimed new
users are being BITE <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BITE>N by
admins among other things which indicated his lack of understanding in wiki
policies / guidelines. I just came across another ANI incident[2] involving
an Indian editor and 3 admins. Without going to details / commenting on it,
am quoting part of this comment about[3] "cultural gap that exists from
being an Indian editor editing from India in an English Wikipedia dominated
by Anglophone people. He needs to know when to persist, when to back off and
needs to learn the general etiquette of the Western world"
There are few common patterns / misconceptions among a set of new Indian
editors most of whom never come back to wikipedia.
1. Admins have superpowers, remove content and BITE.
2. Lack of understanding of wiki policies. Neutrality and Copyrights seem
to be problem areas.POV Pushing happens quite a lot and there is general
lack of awareness about copyright.
3. Then this "cultural" differences.
While the examples are from English wikipedia, these issues might be common
to Indic as well as they grow.
If we could address these, we could avoid newcomers leaving wikipedia.
[1]
http://www.ciol.com/News/News/News-Reports/Are-foreigners-deleting-Wikipedi…
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Yogesh_Khandke_and_Three_Admins
[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents&action=historysubmit&diff=397820910&oldid=397820751
Regards
Srikanth.L
Google Profile <http://j.mp/SrikanthL>
Hi !
A Meet up has been organised on 28th November, 2010 at Mumbai.
For details please visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Mumbai/Mumbai4
*A demonstration will be held for typing Indic Languages (Hindi, Marathi, **
Gujrati, **Malyalam, Angika, Urdu etc.) on web by means of Inscript
Keyboard.*
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Mumbai/Mumbai1>
All are invited to attend.
--
Best Regards.
Kundan Amitabh
Managing Director,
Ang India Technologies,
www.angindia.org
CH-2/52, Kendriya Vihar, Sector-11,
Kharghar, Navi Mumbai,
Mumbai-410210,
INDIA
======================
9320255450 / 9869478444
======================
"Let's Keep Our World Green for Our Children's Future!
Please don't print this email unless it's really necessary"
Hi all,
Last month, Microsoft Research (MSR) released a open-source Mediawiki Extension
called WikiBhasha that helps in producing content in a non-English Wikipedia by
translating from the corresponding English Wiki article. For a recap of the
initial reaction in this list, please check
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-October/thread.h…
MSR now wants to get feedback on the User Interface, User Experience, and the
philosophical issues in creating Wiki content using this tool. They have
proposed a two hour session where experienced Wikipedians will use the tool and
then discuss their feedback. It is tentatively planned for end of November or
early December. If you're an experience Wikipedian who wants to participate,
please signup at http://wikimedia.in/wiki/WikiBhasha_for_Indian_Wikis Please
also pass on this message to your respective wikis.
- Sundar
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for
the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
FYI. Way to go, Gautam!
Yours sincerely,
Anirudh Bhati
00 91 9328712208
Skype: anirudhsbh
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Allison Domicone <allison(a)creativecommons.org>
Date: Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 12:31 AM
Subject: Letter from Gautam John, Creative Commons Superhero
To: "anirudhsbh(a)gmail.com" <anirudhsbh(a)gmail.com>
View this email in a
browser<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
Dear Creative Commons supporter and friend,
I'm pleased to introduce Gautam John, one of our exceptional CC Superheroes,
who will tell you in his own words why he supports Creative Commons and why you
should too<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>.
Gautam John is Manager of New Projects at Pratham Books, a children's book
publisher in India that truly embodies a spirit of openness and innovation
on the web. They've now released 105 children's
books<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>(in
English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati) as well
as
loads of delightful
illustrations<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>under
a CC-BY license so they can easily be shared and even remixed to
create new content<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>relevant
to other languages and cultures. Here is Pratham's story. Join
Gautam in supporting Creative Commons with a donation
today.<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
Best,
Melissa Reeder
Development Manager, Creative Commons
[image: [ Gautam John ]]
*"As a children's book publisher, we have always struggled to be as
inclusive as we can. However, as a small non-profit, we do function under
severe constraints of time, money and ability to live up to this ideal and
it was the Creative Commons model of licensing that allowed us one of our
biggest moments of joy* — when our books were made available as Braille and
Audio Books for print impaired children across the world. Without the
Creative Commons licensing model and philosophy, we would not have been able
to engage with multiple organizations to help build inclusion and scale.
At Pratham Books, we have a very simple mission - “A Book in Every Child's
Hand” and this drives all of our work and we constantly test what we do
against this goal. The mission has two parts, one is to create more reading
matter such that there is more available for children to read and the second
really is a corollary – that we need to be able to get books to where
children need it the most and that the books need to be culturally and
linguistically relevant as well.
This is where our challenge lies – to massively scale the production of high
quality, low-cost children's books for a massively multi-lingual and
multi-cultural market. Looking at this challenge it is fairly obvious that
this is not a problem that any one organization can solve. The solution has
to be scalable, flexible and catalyse our fundamental mission as well.
At this point, we realised that there were several internal questions to
answer and some of them painfully introspective. Questions as to whether the
books we create and distribute have to be a Pratham Book, whether it implied
that every book must be paid for by either the reader or an intermediary
and, from being a publisher, questions as to whether we are gatekeepers of
content or content curators, how we could create infinite good with finite
time and resources and most importantly, how we can create more value than
we capture?
Having answered most of these questions using “openness” (whereby, we asked
ourselves whether allowing unrestricted access to use and re-use our content
furthered our mission) as a test and finding that it did fit our mission,
the second set of questions to answer was more technical – how, as a small
non-profit, do we do this and not find ourselves overwhelmed. It was at this
point that we had a moment of realization – that reading is an extremely
social activity and that there are communities and organizations who were
more than ready to help us achieve our goals.
It was at this juncture that we hit upon the Creative Commons licensing
model as one that would help us achieve many of our aims of flexibility,
scalability and being able to help catalyse our mission of a book in every
child's hands. In particular, three things stood out – a shared value system
of sharing and openness, a community that was deeply embedded in these
ideals and, from our perspective, it was scalable because it allowed us to
license content to multiple organizations and individuals, both known and
unknown, with a one time effort of releasing them under a Creative Commons
license as opposed to the traditional model which involves time consuming
negotiations and discussions with each known organization or individual who
wants to use our content.
As an organization, we did spend some time choosing a license and, from our
perspective, a choice between openness and sharing which reduced to a choice
between the Attribution<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>and
Attribution-Share-Alike<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>license.
We have decided that the Attribution license will be our default
license with a fall-back to the Attribution-Share-Alike license in cases
where needed. It is best said by
P2PU<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>“it
emerged that our choice lay between two licences: Creative Commons
Attribution and Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike ...chose to use
Creative Commons licences because Creative Commons have become a global
standard and are supported by a large international community. Both licences
are Free Culture licences and are more permissive than any of the other
Creative Commons licences. In other words, the choice was not between two
extremes but between two open licences at the same end of the licence
spectrum.” Given that our goal was being as open as possible, it followed
that our license choices were essentially around licenses that allowed for
the greatest possible use and re-use because our initial hypothesis was, and
continues to be, that being open allows us to fulfill our mission better
than a traditional copyright model allows.
We now use Creative Commons licenses everywhere! We license entire books
under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses, we license our illustrations similarly
and even photographs and other publicity material too. Over the last year we
have been building the foundations for a social publishing model – where we
curate communities that are passionate about reading and help us create
content. Such a model rests on the idea of a participatory culture and an
essential ingredient is a permissive licensing strategy – Creative Commons
licenses offers us this, a large community with shared values and an
ecosystem to tap in to.
While this licensing and publishing model works well in theory, it has been
extremely heartening for us to see it come to life – our communities have
created multiple derivative works ranging from iPad and iPhone
applications<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>,
to porting our works to OLPC
laptops<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>,
to creating entirely new
books<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>from
existing illustrations and, my personal favourite, creating versions
of
our books for the print impaired – from DAISY and
Braille<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>books
to rich
audio books<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>such
that our mission truly does encompass every single child.
I firmly believe that we would not have been able to achieve what success we
have had without the help of Creative Commons licensing. These licenses and
the values that they stand for are vital to building and strengthening a
digital commons from which we all benefit. I hope you will consider supporting
Creative Commons<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>and
licensing content that you own or control such that we all benefit
from
the growth of the commons."
*Follow Gautam on
Twitter<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
*.
Special thanks to Maya Hemant from Pratham Books for getting all content
(books, images) up online and for managing the Pratham community.
*[image: Support
CC]<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>We
rely on our supporters to continue our work enabling stories like
those
above. *
*Follow us on Twitter<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
.
Join us on Facebook<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
.
Find out about upcoming
events<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
.
Subscribe to the CC
Newsletter<https://creativecommons.net/civicrm/mailing/subscribe?reset=1&gid=121>
.*
*Donate<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
* to CC or peruse the cool swag available at the *CC
Store<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
.*
To unsubscribe at any time, visit this web
page<https://creativecommons.net/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/unsubscribe&reset=1…>
.
Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of
organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Google, LuLu, the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, The
Omidyar Network, Red Hat, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as
well as members of the public (you!).
[image: Creative Commons
License]<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>This
mailing is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License<https://creativecommons.net/sites/default/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php?u=…>
.
Just a reminder of the upcoming Wikimeetups in Chennai and Bangalore on Nov
14 , this weekend
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Chennai/Chennai2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore21
Please do sign up if you are planning to attend.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 9:25 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
<tinucherian(a)gmail.com>wrote:
> A wikimeetup @ Chennai is planned for Nov 14 , 2010.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Chennai/Chennai2
>
> The venue & agenda is currently under discussion . We need some more local
> help from Wikimedians in Chennai in organizing it.. It will be great if you
> can drop me a personal mail at the earliest , if you are willing to lend a
> hand.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Regards
> Tinu Cherian
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 12:26 PM, CherianTinu Abraham <
> tinucherian(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It has been a long time since Wikicamp 2007 Chennai...
>> Planning for a Wikipedia Wikimeetup @ Chennai , possibly next month.
>> Need volunteers. If you are interested , please send a personal mail to me
>> .
>>
>> Regards
>> Tinu Cherian
>>
>
>
Hi,
Tamil Wiktionarians added 70,000+ English words recently to make it the 9th
biggest Wiktionary globally. Now, we have 1,90,000+ words.
http://www.wiktionary.org/
This addition was done by a community run auto Wiki Browser bot account
after a 3 month long careful planning and redesign of page format for Tamil
Wiktionary.
The words are mainly technical in nature and donated in an excel sheet
format by the State Government of Tamilnadu during Tamil Internet
Conference, 2010.
We hope to bring more such publicly available sources to Tamil Wiki projects
in future.
Regards,
Ravi
(On behalf of Tamil Wiktionarians)
FYI.
Yours sincerely,
Anirudh Bhati
00 91 9328712208
Skype: anirudhsbh
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Moka Pantages <mpantages(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 11:20 PM
Subject: [Wikimedia Announcements] NEWS: Seventh Annual Campaign to
Support Wikipedia Kicks Off
To: press-release(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Seventh Annual Campaign to Support Wikipedia Kicks Off
Yearly fundraising campaign sets goal of $16 million and invites
readers to become editors
SAN FRANCISCO, November 15, 2010 — The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the
non-profit behind Wikipedia, today announced the launch of its annual
fundraising campaign. This year's goal is to raise $16 million so that
Wikipedia and its sister projects can remain freely available to
people around the world. The $16 million raised in this campaign will
help fund the Foundation's total 2010-11 operating budget of $20.4
million. And for the first time this year, the campaign will also
invite readers to donate time as well as money, by joining the
Wikimedia community of volunteer editors. Once the financial goal has
been met, the campaign will encourage Wikipedia's nearly 400 million
monthly readers to become editors.
"Over the past 10 years, Wikipedia has become a vital public resource
for hundreds of millions of people. We've come to depend on it being
there for us -- free to use, without any bias or interference, and
without advertising," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "If you can
afford to make even a small donation, that's important. You're helping
to keep Wikipedia available not just for yourself, but for others
--kids, people in poor countries-- who themselves can't afford to
donate."
The 2010 campaign seeks to raise the funds needed to preserve
Wikipedia, the world's fifth-most-popular site, as a space for the
free and open sharing of human knowledge. As Wikipedia continues to
grow in size and readership, it needs to increase spending on servers
and bandwidth, and to invest in supporting the continued health and
diversity of the editing community.
"Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia: it's written by ordinary
people, and it makes sense that ordinary people would pay to support
it," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director. "Having a broad base of
many donors from everywhere around the world is important to us: it
means the encyclopedia is free to evolve to meet the needs of its
readers, rather than being distorted or thrown off course by special
interests. I'm glad so many people appreciate Wikipedia, and I'm
delighted when they choose to support it financially."
In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation raised just over $8 million from
more than 240,000 individual donations (up from 139,000 donations
during the 2008 campaign). The average donation in 2009 was $33, and
donations came in from over 100 countries.
The 2010 campaign will run through January 2011, with notices at the
top of pages on Wikipedia and its sister sites, asking readers for
their support.
Make a donation now:
http://donate.wikimedia.org
Follow us on:
http://identi.ca//wikipediahttp://identi.ca//wikimediahttp://twitter.com/wikimediahttp://twitter.com/wikipedia
Follow or share your thoughts with the tag #keepitfree
or
Facebook.com:
http://www.Facebook.com/Wikipedia
About the Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://blog.wikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix,
Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation
receive 398 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th
most popular web property world-wide (Sept, 2010). Available in more
than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 16 million articles
contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000
people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation
is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through
donations and grants.
Contact:
Moka Pantages WikimediaFoundation.orgblog.wikimedia.org +1 (415)
839-6885 x 635 moka(a)wikimedia.org
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What about Bombay?
Thank you.
Best,
Gautam
________
http://social.prathambooks.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Anirudh Bhati
Sent: 15/11/2010 5:18:31 pm
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikipedia Wikimeetup @ Kolkata
On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 5:16 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
<tinucherian(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Wikipedians,
> We are planning for Wikipedia Wikimeetup @ Kolkata in
> near future. If you are from the city or can help in Wikimeetup or
> interested to attend the same, please drop me a personal mail.
Great initiative, Tinu!
>
> If you would like to see a Wikimeetup @ also in your town /city and can
> possibly help us seting it up , feel free to contact me.
I am currently working with Netra to organize a Wikimeetup in Ahmedabad.
Anirudh Bhati
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
> Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>
>
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