*The Hindu : An empire without kings *( 12-Feb-2011)
http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article1383906.ece
*As Wikipedia plans to open its first office outside the US in India, a look
at how it has democratised information and knowledge…*
*
*
*Today's de facto standard for fast and fairly reliable information on the
Internet is Wikipedia. To students and news junkies alike it has become
somewhat of an addictive habit to use Wikipedia. Research often begins at
Wikipedia, even if it is later corroborated by a more reliable source.
Wikipedia's meteoric rise is much like the story of the rest of the
Internet. Founded in January 2001, this online encyclopaedia has quickly
grown to become one of the top 10 visited websites since 2007. Currently it
stands at No.5, only beaten by Google, Yahoo, Youtube and Facebook. Web
traffic measuring firms have found Wikipedia to be one of the most heavily
visited sites on the Internet. Moreover, among sites that are focused on
educational and reference material, Wikipedia is by far the most popular
site, drawing nearly six times more traffic than the next-closest site.*
*
*
*One of the single biggest reasons for its popularity is the confidence it
has instilled in people, that no matter how obscure a topic, it will most
likely be found in Wikipedia's pages.*
*
*
*Meteoric rise*
*
*
*Wikipedia's flagship ownership model is what makes it so successful today.
The content on Wikipedia ultimately belongs to the people who created it. As
a collective human exercise in democratisation of scholarship, Wikipedia
achieves the goal of collaborative effort on a global scale.*
*
*
*Wiki is the Hawaiian word for “fast”. In keeping with its name, its growth
has been staggering. The English-language Wikipedia has expanded from
135,000 articles at the time of incorporation to more than three million
articles today. All Wikipedia languages combined contain more than 15
million articles.*
*
*
*Wikipedia is available in a host of Indian languages, including Hindi,
Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi and others. It has recently
announced plans to launch an Indian edition of its website, as part of its
global strategy to penetrate the fast growing South East Asian market.*
*
*
*Sharply polarised*
*
*
*Wikipedia has its share of diehard fans and sworn critics. Many promoters
and users of Wikipedia see it as a replacement for the traditional
encyclopedia. Yet, many others are hesitant to embrace it as a full-fledged
substitute, much less a replacement.*
*
*
*At Wikipedia decisions are made through consensus-building. The barriers to
entry are low – you don't have to have a Ph.D. or be a proven expert to
write on a topic. But it is precisely its amateur-friendly approach to
contributions that also results in some of its harshest criticisms. The
argument is with so many “rookie” authors and editors, how do you monitor
malicious content, inaccurate details and biased reports of polarising
figures. Many academics had initially doubted its value as a trustworthy
source and considered it to be spurious and unreliable. However, over time,
the vast body of information that Wikipedia has accumulated (according to
Wikipedia's write-up on itself, it has surpassed all other collections of
general knowledge ever compiled), and the sets of rules that it has put in
place have resulted in better quality of content. Many teachers now
acknowledge its utility and surprising accuracy though many refrain from
citing it as a source.*
*
*
*With a staff of only about 39 employees, the backbone of Wikipedia is its
thousands of volunteers who contribute content to the Wikimedia communities.
Also, it is funded primarily through donations, grants and gifts. They do
not use advertising as a source of revenue. This is one empire with no kings
and a vast population of voluntary foot soldiers.*
*
*
*Wikipedia has had its share of controversy and learnt its lessons. In 2005,
an anonymously written biography entry appeared, that linked former USA
Today Editor John Seigenthaler Sr. with the assassinations of President John
F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The writer, Brian Chase, later
issued an apology for a prank he says went terribly awry. Seigenthaler, in
an USA Today editorial, criticised Wikipedia and called the fake biography
“Internet character assassination”. This was a wake up call for Wikipedia to
get more aggressive about patrolling for vandals and blocking suspicious
edits. Wikipedia altered its editing policies so that now high-profile
subjects like Barack Obama are protected from anonymous revisions.*
*
*
*Wikipedia continues to be a work in progress. The debate rages on, in true
democratic fashion, about what stays and what goes, what worked and what
needs to get eliminated in keeping with the company's mission of “a world in
which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all
knowledge”. This endeavour reminds you of Isaac Asimov's best remembered
science fiction creation – the supercomputer called Multivac. Multivac was
fed so much information that in the course of time it could answer just
about any question asked of it. After years of servicing people's requests
and answering their questions, Multivac developed the quintessential human
quality of sapience and subsequent burnout. Multivac was famously asked the
question: “Multivac, what do you yourself want more than anything else?” To
which Multivac gave the unequivocal and succinct reply: “I want to die”.
Certainly not the fate we want Wikipedia to face.*
*
*
*For Wikipedia in local Indian Languages:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://wikimedia.in/wiki/In_the_news#February_2011
Hi all,
I know that sometime back unified login happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unified_login
This is what I was doing :-
a. Was in EN:WP and logged in - looked at the entries.
b. Went to hindi wikipedia and tried to edit an article. I was not logged in.
c. Thought perhaps I'm not chosen Unified login so went to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MergeAccount, says you are
unified.
d. Did a shift-F5 and refreshed the page without the cache, for some
reason the login didn't happen.
Any pointers as to what could be the issue ? This is on Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.3 on an Ubuntu 10.04 box although do not think its
something to do with either the browser or the distribution.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17
The Hindustan Times : BEHIND THE SCENES AT WIKIPEDIA.IN ( 13 Feb 2010)
( Please note the below article is copyrighted by HT media and sent on this
public list for representation purposes only. Request to not download or
reproduce the content)
*BEHIND THE SCENES AT WIKIPEDIA.IN *
MANY AVATARS Across India, hundreds of researchers, students, housewives and
professionals are editing Wikipedia articles in 20 Indian languages, setting
up new pages, holding Wiki workshops. It’s a growing community so vibrant
that, ahead of its 10th anniversary, Wiki announced its first ever overseas
office would be in India.
■ Sitting in the back of his SUV on his way home from work, Navi
Mumbai civil engineer Kundan Amitabh is working on the Angika Wikipedia
page, typing
out a doha (couplet) in the ancient Bihari dialect.
■ In a blue, single-storey government school in Mangudi village, Tamil
Nadu, a class of bright-eyed 13-year-olds is huddled around a bulky desktop
monitor,
reading about nuclear technology on the Tamil Wikipedia page.
■ In Bangalore, a group of Wiki editors is conducting a ‘Wikiacademy’
workshop at the office of a local NGO, instructing would-be editors in the
technical
aspects of uploading data, and the philosophy and principles of Wikipedia.
Across the country, a 10-yearold online encyclopaedia is changing the way
Indians process, access and store
information.And the movement is being led not just by techies and academics
but by students, professionals and homemakers
across the rural-urban divide. Many are not even writing in English — there
are now Wikipedia sub-sites
in 20 Indian languages, including Bhojpuri, Sindhi and Pali, the last a
language that has no native speakers left,
but has a rich body of literature.
Wiki sub-sites in 20 more Indian languages — including Tulu, Kutchi and
Bihari dialect Angika — are also in the works.
Combine this vibrant online community of editors with the fact that India is
set to become the third largest internet
user base by 2013 — preceded only by China and the US, in that order — and
it’s not hard to see why Wikipedia
celebrated its anniversary in mid-January with the launch of an India
chapter of Wikimedia (www.wikimedia.in), the
non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia. That’s not all. The San Francisco
based Wikipedia is set to open its first
ever overseas office here too. Explaining the move, Wikipedia founder Jimmy
Wales told HT over the phone in October: “There is a lot
of excitement in India about the Internet. With so many languages, India
poses a lot of opportunities. We already have
a very successful community in India and we want to strengthen it.”
In an e-mail response to HT last week, Wales added: “I think the main reason
Wikipedia has caught on in India is, of course,
the strong IT sector, but also the fact that there is a very strong
tradition of discussion and dialogue.”
That discussion and dialogue is also helping preserve dying languages and
oral literature, and making large swathes
of information from the Web accessible to a range of linguistic groups.
Take Tamil Wikipedia. Set up in 2003, the site now features more than 25,000
articles on everything from musician AR Rahman to sacked
telecom minister A Raja. The articles have been written or translated by
more than 250 people from around the world and the site now gets more
than 80,000 hits every day. Some of these hits are from local
vernacular-medium government schools, where daily ‘Wikipedia classes’ get
students
together around a computer so they can read pages on everything from
classical music to nuclear technology.Since many of them cannot read
English,
the site has become their only window to the worldwide web.
Then there’s Malayalam Wikipedia. InApril2010,the site released a Wikipedia
CD — the term for an official compilation of articles from a Wikipedia
subsite, sanctioned by Wikipedia. The collection of 500 articles from among
the 10,000 on the site was the first Wiki CD to be released in a non-
Latin script. Distributed as part of a government of Kerala initiative, the
CDs were then handed out to 60,000 teachers across the state
as reference material.
“A number of schools in Kerala have computers but poor internet
connections,” says Shiju Alex, 33,
a technical writer and active Malayalam Wikimedian. “This CD gives them
access to material that is
not available to them in their regional language.” This appropriation of the
online encyclopaedia
is a constantly growing movement in India. Over the past four months,
physical communities of
editors have formed in Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai. These
groups meet regularly and train
other volunteers. These classes even have their own Wiki tag — they’re
called Wikiacademies.
Here, volunteers and editors conduct workshops on the technical aspects of
uploading data and on the philosophy
and principles of Wikipedia. Over the past year, ‘Wikiexperts’, in
association with the state education
department, have held workshops across eight districts in Kerala; there are
similar workshops in Tamil Nadu too.
Back in Navi Mumbai, Kundan Amitabh, 43, is using the page he set up six
months ago to preserve the rich oral
history of the Angika dialect. For about two hours every day, he transcribes
poetry and folk tales from this
Bihari dialect in Devnagari script, to be saved on en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Angika_literature.
“We live in a digital generation. Stories passed through the oral tradition
will soon become obsolete,” says
Amitabh. “If Angika is to survive, it must have a Web presence. And what
better place to start than on Wikipedia?”
Amitabh’s project now has three other active editors — a student from Delhi,
an Indian-origin businessman
from Australia and another from Nepal.
“Our page has brought Angika speakers from around the world together on one
platform,” he says.
His next step: A tour of schools in Jharkhand where students still study in
Angika. He plans to teach the youngsters
to access the information he has uploaded, thus helping them take their
first baby steps onto the information
superhighway.
*I N T E R V I E W*
*JIMMY WALES,CO-FOUNDER, WIKIPEDIA*
Why do you think the Wikipedia has caught on in India? One reason is that
the IT sector in India is very strong, but
I also think there is a verystrong tradition in India of discussion and
dialogue, deep in the roots of Indian democracy.
What has the response been like at the Wiki meets you attended in India?
What were the common problems people raised?
The main response is an excitement about the future. The main problems have
to do with keyboard entry — many
people have learned to type only in English and don’t know how to type in
their own language.
How does it help users to have a Wikipedia in their regional language?
Statistics show that only 5% to 10% of India’s literate are able to use
English effectively.
So there is a huge body of people for whom their mother tongue is the only
way for them to learn and expand
their horizons. The same thing is happening all around the world. In the UK,
Welsh is endangered because everyone there
speaks English. So the Welsh Wikipedia is a place where people write
joyfully in their mother tongue. I think this is wonderful.
*KOLKATA*
■ A Wikipedia birthday cake at one of the many celebrations held in West
Bengal; 97 ‘parties’
were organised in India to mark the occasion, more than in any other country
in the world.
In the state-run Jadavpur University in Kolkata, post-graduate English
literature students are now made to write
an article for Wikipedia as a part of the curriculum.The articles are graded
on editorial content,
research and material. “Too many students base their papers on information
available on Wikipedia. Now, they can no longer do
this,” says professor Abhijit Gupta, smiling.
*KERALA *
■ Would-be Wikipedia editors attend a Wikiacademy training session in
Palakkad, Kerala.
Editors of Malayalam Wikipedia are documenting the unique games endemic to
various villages across the state. While one volunteer
writes down the rules, another travels to the respective village for
pictures. Fifty games have been documented on the site so
far. “Some of these games are already dying, replaced by the national craze
for cricket and football,” says Malayalam Wikipedia editor
and technical writer Shiju Alex, 33. “We have to depend on oral descriptions
from village seniors in these cases.”
*PUNE*
■ At a civic school with no internet access, students use a Wikipedia CD to
browse through articles.
Pune Wikimedians are compiling CDs of select English Wikipedia articles for
free distribution to schools across the state that
have no internet access. Last month, an early copy of the CD was handed over
to a municipal school in Pune as an experiment.
“The students had never seen an encyclopedia before,” says electrical
engineer Nikhil Sheth, 25, the man behind the project.
“Some logged on to read about the history of the Taj Mahal, others started
exploring pages related to animals.”
*TAMIL NADU*
■ Last June, the Tamil Nadu government organised an essay-writing contest
where college students were asked to write articles
for the Tamil Wikipedia sub-site. More than 2,000 students participated and
1,200 entries are currently being uploaded. At
the same conference, the government donated a CD its own online glossary of
1.5 lakh Tamil words to
the Tamil Wikimedians. The Tamil Wiktionary is now among the world’s top
ten, in terms of number of words.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Hoi,
So far I knew that the Slavic languages need support to properly address
women. I just learned that the Indic languages also differentiate between a
male and a female user (inlike English). To top it off, Hindi has a form for
inanimate objects. I do not think that we need to go as far and localise for
our bots. We can safely address them though their operators but then again,
it is not for me to say. :)
What I would like to learn is if Bishanka has an opinion about being
addressed as a woman in her mother tongue. If other women on this list have
an opinion I am equally interested to learn their opinion
Any way, at translatewiki.net the overwhelming majority of the localisers is
male.. This is not by design, it just happens to be that way. When there are
women who are interested in supporting specifically their gender in their
language or in supporting their language in general, they are more then
welcome at translatewiki.net. Finding someone who is happy to hack at
translatewiki.net and help with our internationalisation and localisation
work would be absolute bliss.
Thanks,
GerardM
Hello everybody. I am a Wikipedian who is very interested in translation. I am helping with English to Kannada, but I am also learning chapter language. What is this? For eg.
*Anirudh:* At this point of time, we don't feel the need for having more list administrators, however list subscribers who are interested in keeping a check on the spam filter as moderators can write an email to either list admins.
*Translation:* Can all the ordinary members of this list please keep out of my business? I would prefer to continue censoring this list with my best friend HPN. After all, I am the EC of the India chapter and I have an unlimited Wikimedia Foundation sponsored travel budget which I regularly use to go to Frankfurt, Pune, Delhi, Bangalore, Berlin, etc. etc. and I would really like to get back to my travel now and stop worrying about stupid issues but if any of you slaves feels like doing my dirty work while I travel then of course I welcome that with open arms.
hi,
Tinu Cherian and Moksh Juneja were discussing this on twitter. Tinu
suggested that there be held a Workshop for Women in Wikipedia as a response
to the news article/study on the point about percentage of women who
participate in Wikipedia.
These are a few blog and newspaper articles you can read for background
which shows that fewer than 15% of the editors on Wikipedia are women.
1. Wikimedia Blog -
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2011/02/01/wikipedias-gender-gap/
2. New York Times article -
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?bl - which
triggered the debate.
3. Sue Gardner, among the people covered in the NY Times article, posted a
separate blog post -
http://suegardner.org/2011/01/31/new-york-times-prompts-a-flurry-of-coverag…
which writes about the coverage.
A mailing list has now been created called Gender Gap as a "a space where
Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians can share research and information and
tactics for making Wikipedia more attractive to women editors." This mailing
list can be found here - http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/
Tinu's suggested workshop idea has led to Moksh urging him to take it up
seriously and he's offered to help in the Mumbai end of things. I suggested
that the first such event under that or other name could be held on March 8,
2011 (the centenary year of International Women's Day). The workshop is seen
as a space to help and mentor passionate women editors on Wikipedia who need
help. I think we do this anyway but the very bad gender skew means we have
to do it more often.
This has just been posted as a starting point for conversations. Ideas,
suggestions etc are all welcome.
warm regards,
Pradeep Mohandas
user:prad2609
At bottom :-
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <wikimedia-in-mum-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 10:14
Subject: Your message to Wikimedia-in-mum awaits moderator approval
To: shirishag75(a)gmail.com
Your mail to 'Wikimedia-in-mum' with the subject
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-in-mum] Liam Wyatt's visit
to Mumbai and GLAM meetup - a summary
Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval.
The reason it is being held:
Post by non-member to a members-only list
Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive
notification of the moderator's decision. If you would like to cancel
this posting, please visit the following URL:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/confirm/wikimedia-in-mum/c8dbcac193d1c7…
</forwarded message>
Hi all,
This is a query about the moderation affair and sorry for making
another thread for the same. I get this message and get these kind of
messages when I'm posting to the mailing list . The same logic should
be applied to all suspected vandals,trolls etc. as some automated
intelligence (some filter/some bot) is there which does this work.
Couldn't that be configured to send notices to the member stating that
the message is suspected to be of 'x' nature (define x = troll,vandal
whatever the filter/bot suspects it for) and moderator would do it.
If this is in the current work-flow then I do not know what the whole
'hoopla' is all about. If its not, then of course it needs to be
implemented.
I can share some part of the plug mailing list
http://www.plug.org.in/mailing-list/ where the same thing things and
I do get an automated message when my message gets moderated. This
happens instantly.
When the message is rejected, I do get a mail from the mailing list
listing the reason/s for the mail being rejected.
Then obviously I re-do the mail so its doesn't contravene whatever
reason they said or/and publish the same mail to some other mailing
list as well.
Lastly, if nothing of the above strategies work then I have my blog to
fall back on and do a 'Public letter' kinda thing.
Needless to say, till date haven't had to go that far.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 50D 53FB 729A 8B17
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 10:18 AM, sankarshan
<foss.mailinglists(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/2/14 shirish शिरीष <shirishag75(a)gmail.com>:
>
>> In Pune, around this time lot of colleges have their technical weeks
>> where they show projects, last year and couple of years before I had
>> seen students who had made nice OCR's which could work with indic
>> languages but obviously required lot of polish and getting into the
>> whole 'code maintainance' thing. The students motivation for that had
>> been to do as a project and not getting things 'maintained' which is
>> unglamorous grunt work. Also documentation is something that would
>> need to be looked at and fine-tuned.
>
> Indic OCR, at least the bits that are available under an appropriate
> FOSS license, have an accuracy of around 80%. Considering the volume
> and fragility of what you will OCR, that's remarkably low.
>
please send links to such technology. it does not matter if the
accuracy is only 80%. Which means people have a role to play there.
I see this as a clear opportunity asking for volunteer time. create a
site with an image and the partially correct page side by side, and
ask the volunteers to correct it.
we can conduct workshops in colleges to seek help of this kind.
Meanwhile, when people recognize where and what kinds of places the
OCR sucks, we can think of solving those problems. This kind of work
itself will help improve the existing OCR for indic-languages.
--
GN
--
GN
*The Hindustan Times : Wiki to tie up with city galleries, museums*
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Wiki-to-tie-up-with-city-galleries-museums/Ar…
*A 14th-century manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the Asiatic Society
of Mumbai’s most treasured possession. And, if all goes well, you may soon
be able to read all about it and how it ended up in the city, on
wikipedia.com. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind
*
*
*
* *
*Wikipedia, is in the process of tying up with galleries, libraries,
archives and museums for what is unofficially called the GLAM project, a
global cultural initiative that seeks to make exclusive material available
to the world via the online encyclopaedia.*
*Liam Wyatt, now a cultural partnerships fellow with Wikimedia Foundation,
had been working independently with several museums around the world towards
this end. Last month, he was roped in by the foundation for a one-year
fellowship.*
*
*
*India was Wyatt’s first destination as part of GLAM and he officially
launched the project in Mumbai on Saturday.*
*
*
*“The amount of content in Indian cultural institutions is massive,” said
Wyatt. “That, combined with the potential for*
*
*
*Internet penetration in India and the vibrant Wikipedia community here,
make this a great destination for GLAM.”*
*
*
*The project will also urge experts and curators to upload information about
topics of their choice. “Enough information about the cultural heritage of
India is still not available on the internet. For a young girl in a village
in Maharashtra, a textbook should not be her only resource,” said Wyatt. "We
need experts who have this information to come on board and help.”*
*
*
*In March, Wyatt plans to travel to Switzerland, France and Germany to
promote GLAM.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://wikimedia.in/wiki/In_the_news#February_2011
Hi all,
Due to the recent nature of things and events a very basic question
occured to me ? What is the purpose of this mailing list?
A very broad definition or understanding which was there of the list
is to co-ordinate indian activities in and around wikipedia and
wikimedia.
I went to the mailman interface to see if I could garner some more
info. about the purpose/aims of the list but could not.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
If I look at the wikimedia india homepage I found info. about the
mailing list in a stub way :-
Wikimedia India Mailing List :- Important for all wikipedians to
signup and stay connected.
As far as the list is concerned, who is its target audience ?
a. Programmers.
b. Editors, baby editors and that ilk
c. Users of Wikipedia.
d. Translators
e. Content creators, mashup creators ~ creative visionaries
f. All of the above.
g. Some of the above - describe who
Let me talk from where I'm coming from , I come from b. and c. I am no
high-level editor, I do some things for fun which leads to something
learning and vice-versa.
>From both a community member perspective, a user perspective and a
potential tester (in the near future) I see the list as a :-
a. help list
b. sounding board for new ideas.
c. Making exciting events happen in and around the various wikipedia
and wikimedia products
3-4 months ago before when I didn't even know that there was an
Indian mailing list all my queries esp. while editing were on the
#wikipedia IRC channel on freenode.
Now while sometimes my issues used to get solved, sometimes not and I
was not even that there was an Indian community and an Indian mailing
list. The sad part then was any of the issues could be drowned out in
the noise which has a possibility of it being documented on the
mailing list.
>From an Indian's perspective the Village Pump is not at all adequate
enwp.org/wp:vp
<bias>
if you look at that page itself, it has Americana written all over it,
its all points and stuff and something about why and what it for and
all those answers are atleast one link down or not more </bias>
If it was perhaps an Indian vp it would have somewhat of a more gentle
introduction to things and perhaps then roll off into other things.
Lastly, I am not looking for one person to respond on this but looking
at the whole community (old and new) to participate and perhaps get
some sort of feedback on this.
Looking forward to the discucssion. on this topic.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17