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
The 32nd Bangalore Wikimedia Meetup was organized on 2011April10 at 3 PM in
CIS, Bangalore. This meetup was headed by Subhashish Panigrahi
[[User:Psubhashish]] and attended by 7 Wikipedians. The speakers of this
meetup were Arjun Rao C, Achal Prabhala and Anirudh Bhati.
1st Talk: Arjun Rao C/ Experience in Berlin Wikimedia Conference, 2010
Arjun Rao talked about his participation in the Wikimedia conference held in
Berlin. He discussed about the new plans and ventures for Wikimedia projects
which will be the current focus for the chapters of several countries. He
also briefed the audience about the plans for the proposed projects under
Wikimedia India such as:
Knowledge kiosks in public libraries, Academies, Projects for improvements
in Indic language tools, Indic Wiki CD/DVD, improve participation of women
in Wiki communities, Wikimania for Indian Wikipedians, etc. Arjun showed
pictures of speakers from several countries who he befriended and shared
ideal structures of the the Wiki projects in those all countries.
2nd Talk: Achal Prabhala/ “Open Citation” & its perpectives
Achal introduced the audience about his ongoing project on “Oral Citation”,
its purpose, authenticity, possible issues and their solutions. He explained
the problems Malayalam Wikipedians faced when they have created well
constructed articles on several games played in villages, but there was no
proper citations as none ever tried to make literature based documentations
for them. Even he also stated the similar experiences he has with the
“Sapheri” speaking South African tribe where many traditional games were
never put under the modern documented rules and regulations but they are
great resources for the anthropologists. Many such important heritage
related articles could be cited using oral citation which is easier to
create, transform, share and cite. He also explained how credibility and
authenticity were created by interviewing the people about the dance
form/game/any such intended aspect. Most of the verbal conversation could be
translated and added to the audio file itself and later can be translated to
any other language. The source and copyright info can also be explained in
the audio file itself which would make this a very simplistic approach, but
potentially more accessible. Audio files would be more self explanatory,
easy to share in the form of podcasts and an elaborated audience could be
targeted.
3rd Talk: Anirudh Bhati/ “Outreach Campaign in North-East”
Wikimedia India member Anirudh Bhati has organized has visited to NREST
(North-Eastern Regional Institute), Arunanchal Pradesh in the festive season
of “Mopin”, a regional festival and “Srishti 2011”, NREST's institutional
function. Anirudh along with Wikipedian Nikhil Sheth introduced Wikipedia
and other WMF projects to almost 110 students and lecturers in CREST. They
demonstrated them “Editing in Wikipedia” and students themselves created
articles based on the demonstration over there. Surya Vaigunth, a final year
student and a computer enthusiast personally took initiative to teach to
masses and bring out a set of persistent contributors. Though most of them
were interested to see the opportunities of Indic Wikipedias, majority of
the critical mass was more interested for English article speculated more
about Arunanchal Pradesh and even uploading more picture than content
development. He also has demonstrated how to use Indic Wikipedias and
editing them. Srikanth added a note to uploading pictures and geotagging
them using external maps which would be useful for online searches. As a
part of the outreach program Anirudh also explained about the Offline
package developed by taking selected Wikipedia articles for school students
as a part of SOS Children's Village where Ashwin helped for creating list of
important articles. 2 major software programs OpenZIM and Kiwix are used for
compilation and running of the offline package respectively where the total
package (2.75 GB) could be burnt in a DVD. The team also had a video chat
with Portugese Wikipedian Beria Lima who had a talk about “Mirandese
language and Gender Gap”, Mirandese, being one of the dying languages needs
collaborative efforts and Wikipedia could be one solution to protect it. She
also discussed abput the low contribution of women because of several
reasons like Lack of Confidence, Lack of detailed knowledge, Male oriented
social set up , etc. Even she also connected thr same problem in the Indian
context.
Nikhil introduced Wikipedia to Kendriya Vidyalaya students. Saibal
Chatterjee, visiting prof and Chief- Coordinator of Srishti 2011 also
supported the event.
It was fun-filled and successful event with less audience but fruitful with
new ideas shared.
*
ସୁଭପାSubhashishPanigrahi
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia Odia (Oriya) mailing list
wikipedia-or(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-orfacebook.com/OdiaWiki
Tweet @OdiaWiki
_______________________________________________
"Wikimedia India Community list
wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
*
Today's meet saw different participation from last time. For the record we
had with us :
* The usual suspects - Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Harshad Gune & Ashwin Baindur
* Budding editor - Arnav Sonara
* Newbies - Sudeep Ghiya & Saurabh Agrawal
* Editors returning back to Wikipedia after a long hiatus - Vijay Kudal &
Sohel Bohra
* Distinguished attendee - Dr Radha Misra, Professor, SNDT Womens College,
Pune
* Proxy - Manjusha Joshi representing her daughter Shravani (user:Shravanisj
on en:WP)
The meet started with a short welcome and introductory session. All were
informed of the activities being done/planned for Pune Wikipedians -
* Editing English & Marathi Wikipedias.
* Efforts for Commons (sadly not taking off)
* Forthcoming GLAM initiative.
* Software development efforts at SICSR.
* Campus Ambassador program.
Mandar Kulkarni spoke about his motivation to edit in Marathi and why this
is such a worthwhile and important activity. Mandar regularly features a
Marathi article in WikiPuneri. He is the author of more than 600 articles on
Wikipedia.
The highpoint of the evening was a Skype call with Hisham Mundol. Hisham
outlined the Campus Ambassador program and explained that Pune was chosen as
the location of the pilot project of the Campus Ambassador scheme. The
reasons for choosing Pune included, among others, large number of
educational institutions, cosmopolitan student body and established
Wikipedia user community. The lessons learnt here would be useful for the
next stage when the movement would be moved.
In the discussion which followed a number of points were made -
* The vacations are due so Hisham/the program needs to move fast. Hisham
said he's coming to Pune next week.
* The number of active editors in Pune may not suffice keeping in mind the
scope of the pilot. Hisham plans to call for campus ambassadors country-wide
and involve people who are not yet Wikipedians but interested in
participating.
* There is a need to approach those in authority in all educational
institutions so that the followup will be seen by all as sanctioned by
authority and therefore moreachievable.
* In Maharashtra, college students need to undergo 100 hours of computer
training/involvement which is not syllabus driven. This provides scope for
Wikipedia to get involved.
* Getting the experiences of Mozilla ambassadors and others in Red Hat etc
who have been invoilved in outreach programs will be useful.
* Hisham requested that we should meetup with as many contacts as possible
when he is in Pune and is open to the idea of Skype talks and cold calls to
heads of institutions.
Those who had come to the meetup for the first tme were then asked as to how
we could help them or how they could help us. The last activity was an
editting session for the newbies in which a new concept was tried out. The
first two exercises of a newly prepared worksheet for learning editting in
Wikipedia :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AshLin/Academy
Next monthly meetup is on 14 May 2011. Meeting when Hisham is here will be
intimated by Sudhanwa.
Au revoir, Ashwin Baindur
Hi Folks
It's probably slightly ill-adivised to use the word "cheat-sheet" in connection with a campus activity - but this comes dangerously close to that! :-)
I've received a bunch of queries regarding Fellowships (and Campus Ambassadors) for the upcoming Pune pilot of the Campus Program. The document Fellowships Proposal Template outlines the Fellowships that are required for this pilot. I thought I would make it easier for those who wish to apply for Fellowships by making this document in the format that you can use for a Fellowship Proposal.
Some additional context and the process is outlined in Fellowships. You could write "Design, Implement, Manage & Monitor Campus Program Pilot in Pune, India" in the "Create Proposal" option at the bottom of the Fellowships page. You can then cut and replace the proposal from my document. I have left comments in my document to additional material that you can (and ought to) add. It's really important that your individuality and thinking comes through in your proposal so please do amend at will while you are submitting your proposal. If you're interested, please do submit proposals as early as you can because the timelines are short for the pilot.
Please do share this email with whoever else you think might be interested but are not on this mailing list.
As always, feel free to reach out to me if you need any help/clarifications.
Many thanks.
Hisham Mundol
Wikimedia Foundation India Programs
skype: hisham.wikimedia
gtalk: hmundol(a)wikimedia.org
twitter: @mundol
Hi Folks
Just thought I'd let you know that the goe-targetted banners we are planning for Campus Ambassador recruitments are going live tonight (India time.)
Thanks
Hisham Mundol
Wikimedia Foundation India Programs
skype: hisham.wikimedia
gtalk: hmundol(a)wikimedia.org
twitter: @mundol
Wikimania 2012 is in Washington D.C.
Yours sincerely,
Anirudh Bhati
00 91 9328712208
Skype: anirudhsbh
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Owen <jowen(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 6:04 AM
Subject: [Wikimania-l] Wikimania 2012 Awarded to Washington, DC
To: "Wikimania general list (open subscription)" <
wikimania-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear all,
The Wikimania jury are pleased to announce that they have selected
Washington, D.C., USA as the location for Wikimania 2012[0]. The DC team
presented an imaginative and exciting bid[1] that the jurors found
impressive. As before, all the bids to host Wikimania had strong points in
their favour and making this decision was difficult. We will send detailed
feedback to each of the bids, but for now we know the winning team will
appreciate the community's support and help in making a great Wikimania in
2012. The jury particularly thanks the other finalist in the process, the
South African team[2] for their excellent work, and encourages them to bid
again in the near future.
If you have never been to a Wikimania before I would urge you to consider
attending. This year the conference will be in Haifa, Israel[3], and
promises to be an excellent event. Wikimania is always a great way to meet
members of our global community and help improve the movement, and
Washington DC looks to be a worthy successor.
Our congratulations to the Washington DC team and many thanks to all of the
bidders for working so hard. I encourage all bidders to use the fantastic
energy they have put into their bids by hosting smaller continental or
regional events, and considering another bid for Wikimania in the future.
The jury welcomes looks forward to discussing the result and the Wikimania
process with the community.
[0] Jury, process& timeline:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2012
[1] DC bid:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2012/Bids/Washington,_D.C.
[2] SA bid: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2012/Bids/Stellenbosch
[3] Wikimania 2011:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2011
Yours,
The Wikimania 2012 jury moderators [non-voting]
* James Forrester
* Joseph Seddon
On behalf of the Wikimania 2012 jury:
* Ting Chen
* Austin Hair
* Richard Knipel
* Deror Lin
* Patricio Lorente
* Abbas Mahmoud
* Takashi Ota
* James Owen
* Achal Prabhala
* Liam Wyatt
* Phoebe Ayers [non-voting advisor]
* Sue Gardner [non-voting advisor]
* Samuel Klein [non-voting advisor]
* Delphine Menard [non-voting advisor]
_______________________________________________
Wikimania-l mailing list
Wikimania-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
Not to forget Srikant Kedia (User:wikiodisha1), an now active Wikipedian in
Odia.
Here is an interesting story ( sharing with his permission) about his
involvement. He started "using Wikipedia" in 2003/04 for "mischievous
work"..like adding his name to articles etc.. And his many many accounts
were blocked. In 2010 December, he created User:Odisha1 & then started
volunteering on English Wikipedia. Later he discovered Odia WIki and
now editing Odia articles & promoting Odia Wikipedia everywhere. He
was going around meeting principals of many schools to tell students about
Or wiki. In fact, he is the one of the organizers of the upcoming Cuttack
Wiki workshop this weekend.
Another new Wikipedian in Malayalam , Sai_K_shanmugam (
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sai_K_shanmugam ) is a Class 2 student :).
Will beat Abhishek_Jacob, who joined in his Class 9 or so. Sai's main
interest is in taking and uploading commons.
I trust the school wiki initiatives ( http://www.schoolwiki.in/ ) in Kerala
must have brought in more young Wikipedians.
If you know of such interesting young Wikipedians , do share with us .
Regards
Tinu Cherian
On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 5:52 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
<tinucherian(a)gmail.com>wrote:
> Achal,
> I would like to steal your youngest Wikipedian tag from Srikanth
> (rsrikanth05) to this kid (Bvajresh) whom we met in Trichy :)
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trichy_Wikimeetup1_2060.jpg
> He has been editing for more than 2 years , he claims...He edits mostly
> anonymously though..
>
> An admin from Malayalam Wikipedia, Abhishek_Jacob is also a school
> student.
>
> Nothing to undermine your huge efforts, Srikanth .. You have been always
> one of the most energetic young Wikipedians, we all know :)
> Keep up the good work.
>
> Regards
> Tinu Cherian
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 11:58 PM, Achal Prabhala <aprabhala(a)gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I must say that one lives and learns in the most unpredictable ways.
>> This Sunday, at the Bangalore meetup, I learned that Srikanth (who I met
>> for the first time) is finishing his last two years of school. Srikanth
>> told me off-list that he is not the youngest Wikipedian in India. For
>> the record, however, he is the youngest Wikipedian that I know in India.
>> And it felt pretty amazing....
>>
>> Glad that you do what you do Srikanth. The world is a better place with
>> you editing it!
>
>
>
Hi all,
Happy to announce that Short URLs are now available in every page of Tamil
Wikipedia. Sharing Indic URLs with unicode characters are never fun since
one will get an ugly looking URL like
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…
.
(Forget about twitter, even mails are tough).Now its easier
http://tawp.in/r/262 !! The short url is visible on top right of every page,
extreme right of the article title. For the technically inclined, the
shortening happens by encoding the page id of a mediawiki page to base36 (No
database for shorturls here!) and hence doesnt depend on any other server.
I would like to thank User:Mountain[1] for the shortify project[2] which
powers this. (Gerard, this is already localized in tamil,malayalam :) ). It
would be great if this could be "extensionized" in mediawiki as its a
feature must for wiki's running in non latin languages.I would also like to
thank YuviPanda for setting this up on his server and doing some
customization for Tamil wiki. (YuviPanda is an ubergeek looking to do some
serious work for mediawiki in GSoC), Kishore for some quick css help in
making this happen.
It would be great if this can be supported by Wikimedia itself. Even if the
fancy twitter friendly short domain name is not there,if just the
redirection part is hosted for all projects on wikimedia servers(existing
domain names will do), it will be of great use, especially for non latin
languages.
I understand Malayalam wikipedia has a redirect mechanism based on the
english interwiki title for sometime now.Even we would want to do this, but
am thinking if redirects are an optimal, search engine friendly solution or
are there better ways of doing it.Can someone please educate me. Also IMHO
URLs with transliterated text will help Indic languages. But making them
search friendly is a key thing and if we could do this, am sure the
readership would bound to increase a few times.(Not everyone knows to type
in regional language and many use transliterated text for search and then
consume vernacular content). Wikipedia is missing them!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mountain
[2] https://github.com/mountain/shortify
Regards
Srikanth.L
FYI
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Wikipedia 10 Kochi <wikikochi(a)gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 9:17 AM
Subject: Wiki allround - Kochi on 13th April
To:
Dear Wiki-Patron,
Thanks you for your interest in participating for the Wikipedia 10 meetup at
Kochi.
Instead of a full fledged meetup that we were planning earlier, we have
decided to have an informal gathering 'Wiki allround' to kick-off for future
plans.
*Venue:* Conference Room, Edapally Changampuzha Park, Kochi
*Date:* 13th April, 2011
*Time*: 4 - 6 PM
*On behalf of the volunteering group, I invite you to this get-together and
network with the regional Wiki community and enthusiasts.*
Sorry for the inconvenience caused by the short notice in the change of
plans.
In case of any queries please revert back or contact us at the following
numbers: 09400036496 (Nithin) / 09447062441 (Johnson).
*Your suggestions are welcome as always. Also, please share this information
to your friends in Kochi.*
*Updates are also posted here:* http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kochi
*and here: *http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171101316265391*
*
*
*
Hope to see you soon.
Warm regards,
For Wiki allround - Kochi event
Nithin Naik
It's really amazing to see your spirit Mr. Gokul, we actually expected less,
so 7 including the speakers turn up. But I'm sure Achal can update allof us
with his new findings soon which is pretty exciting to me. About both Arjun
and Anirudh's experience, their descriptive report will give more insight.
Subha
