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
*The Hindu : "Malayalam Wiki all set to expand database"*
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-kerala/article1611002.e…
*
The Malayalam Wiki is on a roll. After winning accolades for its innovative
endeavours, the Malayalam Wiki continues to hog the limelight with its
latest project titled, ‘Malayalam Wikimediayaye Snehikkunnu' (Malayalam
loves Wikimedia).
Inspired by the resounding success of Wiki projects elsewhere—like ‘London
loves Wikimedia'—the new Malayalam Wiki project seeks to expand the
Malayalam Wiki repositories of free-to-access and use knowledge by adding
copyright-free news and feature photographs concerning Malayalam users.
“During the two-week project period between April 2 and April 17, we intend
to sensitise Malayalam Wiki contributors and users to enrich Malayalam Wiki
ventures by contributing free-to-use photographs. Despite boasting over
17,000 articles on a variety of topics, the Malayalam Wiki can't claim to
have many copyright-free pictures. Hence the project,” maintains Shiju Alex,
Malayalam Wiki activist and coordinator.
The timing of the project couldn't have been any better, given the
forthcoming assembly polls. “This is the time you get to photograph the
State's prominent political personalities. We have articles on many of them,
but most of their available photographs are copyrighted,” he says. Four days
into the project, over 400 free-to-use photographs have been generated by
Malayalam Wiki users across the globe and uploaded into
http://commons.wikimedia.org and http://ml.wikipedia.org.
Besides political leaders, the project seeks to obtain copyright-free
photographs of places of historical significance; monuments; institutions of
governance including local bodies; noted personalities in the State's social
and cultural spheres as part of the project. “The two-week project period is
just a token observance. The exercise is sure to stay on further,” says Mr.
Alex. Contributors are encouraged to provide material besides additional
information pertaining to the photographs they upload. They have also been
asked to give, if possible, the geo-coding (on-map location coordinates) of
the photographs. An FAQ on the objectives and mode of implementation of the
project is available on the Malayalam Wiki page announcing it. A help mail,
help(a)mlwiki.in, has also been set up to field queries. Wiki activists Rajesh
Odayanchal and Ajay Kuyiloor have designed a unique logo and advertisement
for the project.
*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://wikimedia.in/wiki/In_the_news
Hi Folks
As many of you are aware, one of the decisions India Programs needs to take is where to locate the office. On a sub-page tof India Programs (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Office…), I've put together the selection criteria that are currently going into the decision, as well as the list of towns/cities to be evaluated.
Can I request you to have a look these, and share your views on the Talk page (or directly with me, if you prefer.) I'd appreciate any kind of comments, and from as many community members as possible. For instance, you could mention if any additional criteria should be included, or if some existing one(s) should be deleted, or if any particular weightage(s) is high/low. Also, I've put down the list of towns/cities currently being considered. I've deliberately kept an additional column for "any other location." Please discuss the name(s) of any other town/location.
You'll notice that I haven't actually put the scores down for each town/city; that's the next step.
Thanks!
Hisham Mundol
India Programs - Wikimedia Foundation
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs
skype: hisham.wikimedia
gtalk: hmundol(a)wikimedia.org
twitter: @mundol
A brief Report on OSSCamp at Lucknow, Dated 26-27th March, 2011
On 26-27th march there was an OSSCamp organised at *Babu Banarasi Das Group
of Educational Institutions* at Lucknow. College has taken
the initiative to invite the representatives of various OpenSource
communities like Wordpress, Joomla, Mozilla Firefox, Drupal, Php etc. Wikimedia
volunteers were also invited for the event. The purpose of the event was to
make students aware of the various open source technologies and their
advantages. Also, it was an effort to motivate students to come forward and
contribute.
Students from various colleges were gathered to learn and explore new and
different technologies. I went there to represent Wikipedia. My presentation
was scheduled on 26th of March, 2011 in the post lunch session. I talked
about the different projects of Wikimedia foundation, some Wikipedia
statistics, Wikimedia India chapter and discussed the role of volunteers and
in the end I tried to motivate them to contribute.
Over there, I was surprised to know that awareness of the students towards
Wikimedia foundation was minimal. Most of the students over there were not
even aware that they can actually edit the contents of Wikipedia. Only
couple of them knew about the other projects of Wikimedia foundation other
than Wikipedia like Wikitionary , Wikiquotes, commons etc.
After the talk, on special request of students I demonstrated the editing
process in Wikipedia and took hands on workshop of interested students.
Students were very keen and enthusiastic to learn about Wikipedia. The
session went on for almost ninety minutes and I had one to one interactions
with the students. The inquisitive questions and their high level of
interest made me more motivated to explain.
Pic1: http://tiny.cc/stu1
Pic2: http://tiny.cc/stu2
Even after the hands on session, many students contacted with different
queries. For me also, it was wonderful learning experience. The college
authorities and student organisers namely Nitesh Sinha and Abhinav Upadhyay
deserves huge round of applause for their tireless effort for organising a
successful OSSCamp.
Regards,
Piyush Aggarwal
Hoi,
While the Odia Wikipedia has less then 1000 articles, it is growing them and
it is growing its traffic. Given the activity for writing articles,
localising messages there is a great opportunity to grow its traffic by at
least half the numbers for a good number of months to come (it almost
doubled traffic in March).
I have written about this on my blog and, I have written unasked advice
about how I think a Wikipedia can be grown. This works not only for Odia but
for any Wikipedia. I have heard Shiju Alex well when he says that quality is
vitally important for Indic Wikipedias. They indeed do have to compete with
English. There is however nothing stopping you from writing great articles.
It does not make too much sense to want to concentrate on being complete in
any range of topics. When you are as small as the Odia Wikipedia is, you
want traffic and new editors. You want that desperately because when you
have it, you do not have to let go.
Thanks,
GerardM
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/04/traffic-for-odia-wikipedia.html
Hello all,
Kannada wiktionary has reached the 1,00,000 words milestone, becoming the
second indic wiktionary (after Tamil) to achieve 100k. The statistics page
is here (
http://kn.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%B2%B5%E0%B2%BF%E0%B2%B6%E0%B3%87%E0%B2%B7…
)
Kannada wiktionary has been growing at a phenomenal pace in recent times
(25k words in 6 months). Congratulations to all KN wiktionarians who have
made this possible.
regards
Bala
*The Hindu : "Attempts on to revive Odia Wikipedia"*
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article1629497.ece
*Some people who edit the Odia Wikipedia say that getting a Wikipedia in the
language is an important tool to keep the language alive. At present, an
attempt is on to revive Odia Wikipedia (or.wikipedia.org), one of the
earliest Indian language Wikipedias to be created.*
*
*
*Interestingly, the guidance to stoke the Odia Wikipedia is led by
Bangalorean Shiju Alex, who edits the Malayalam Wikipedia, while another
Bangalorean, Subhashish Panigrahi, translates and creates templates for the
language.*
*
*
*While Mr. Panigrahi has spoken about the Odia Wikipedia to 6,000 students
across six schools in Bhubaneswar, Mr. Alex, who is passionate about growing
Indian language Wikipedia and writes for the Malayalam Wikipedia, noticed
the low content in Odia Wikipedia. He scouted for Odia editors in Bangalore
and finding no response initially, he took the initiative to Orissa. On
April 3, he helped organise the second Odia Wikipedia Academy in
Bhubaneswar, to bring an awareness of the Odia Wikipedia among people.*
*
*
*The Odia Wikipedia was one of the first few Indian language Wikipedias to
be created. Although started in 2002, along with Wikipedias in Assamese,
Punjabi, Nepali, Oriya and Malayalam, prior even to the Hindi Wikipedia in
2003 July, the Odia Wikipedia never grew. It has, to date, only 700
articles.*
*
*
*“We have to save Odiya. We have to take the movement online and Odiya
Wikipedia is a vital part of it,” says Sambidhan Mohanty, a Cuttack-based
businessman from a family of Odiya writers who studied in Bangalore.*
*
*
*Mr. Mohanty says he appreciates Shiju and Subhashish as they got Odia
speakers involved in Odia. “We came together because of them,” he says.*
*
*
*Mr. Mohanty says the main aim is to get people attracted to Odia Wikipedia,
to get more people to speak the language and write in it. Next is to get the
State Government's attention so that Odiya Wikipedia can be made part of
school curricula.*
*
*
*A big challenge he sees is the number of Odia dialects. Although the
language has a script, it has six dialects, including Sambalpuri (or
Kosali), Kalahandia and Berhampuri. So even within a small group of editors,
there is a difference of opinion of how a word should be written (for
example, “dharm” or “dharma”).*
*
*
*Mr. Alex says the reasons for the low interest in Odia Wikipedia might be
many including the number of people who speak the language, the number of
people with access to a computer, availability of required fonts and
browsers.*
*
*
*A major challenge was the inability, till now, to type in Odiya within
Wikipedia, and the large dependence upon an external tool to add content.
However, now a typing solution has been developed for Odia so that problem
has been resolved to some extent.*
*
*
*Mr. Alex says lack of a typing solution within Wikipedia was a problem that
assailed content creation across all Indian languages (using a non Latin
script) on Wikipedia. A big help has been the typing solution for Malayalam
within Wikipedia, which was developed in 2007. The solution has a base,
which can be extended to other Indian languages and was used for creating
typing solutions in Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi and Bengali WIkipedias
through 2010. Other languages are going on.*
*
*
*Srikant Kedia has introduced the Wikipedia to at least 35 people.*
*
*
*“Now, we need support from the Odia community to test the language. Now
that it has a mature community, I can move on,” says Mr. Alex, who has given
demos of edits in Odia Wikipedia in Bangalore and Bhubaneswar.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://www.wikimedia.in/wiki/In_the_news#April_2011
*Dainika : "2nd Odia Wikipedia Academy organized"*
http://www.dainika.com/regional/2nd-odia-wikipedia-academy-organized
*Bhubaneswar: The 2nd Odia Wikipedia Academy has been organized on 3 April
2011 at Bharatuya Vidya Bhavan, Bhubaneswar. This was the fist official
outreach academy of Odia Wikipedia to bring an awareness and motivate common
mass from different educational and social background.*
*
*
*Odia Wikipedia was started way back in 2002 and was one of the four Indian
languages, Asamese, Odia, Pujabi, Malayalam.*
*
*
*But because of the lack of proper awareness and activism there was a snail
movement for almost 8 years.*
*
*
*Then after the 10th Anniversary of Wikipedia Ashutosh Kar and few Odia
fellows got interested to take initiative to reform the movement and take it
ahead which gave birth to the first Odia Wikipedia Academy, conducted in
Bengaluru on.*
*
*
*Odia Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia in Odia language to make knowledge
available freely for masses.*
*
*
*Dhanada Mishra of Human Resource Development Management Studies has
officially inaugurated this event. A FAQ Booket was released by and
distributed among the first time participants of the Wikipedia Workshop.
Malayalam Wikipedians Shiju Alex and Tinu Cherian were also took active part
in facilitating the event.*
*
*
*The workshop was conducted by Odia Wikiali (Odia version of an
Wikipedian/User) Subha Pa.*
*
*
*The whole Academy/Workshop was conducted in 2 main sections, Subha
introduced Odia Wikipedia to the audience, said about the history and the
development and current status. The second session was focused on how to
type in Odia using the transliteration/Inscript tool which was newly
incorporated, solving typing issues, searching existing articles, creating
articles and editing for enhancement of old article.*
*
*
*In this session he has demonstrated how to add content using the commonly
used syntaxes, adding pictures and other media files.*
*
*
*This was an interactive session where the audience interacted with the
demonstrator and each other and several discussions went on based on the
major issues.*
*
*
*Several participants from from the nearby management colleges, engineering
students, entrepreneurs, college students have also participated.*
*
*
*At the end of the session a lotion based core group of active users was
formed which will be promoting the Wikipedia movement and bringing more and
more contributors to enhance it, make it more user friendly and make it
reach to masses.*
*
*
*Contributors came with several suggestions such as motivating more and more
students and freelancers to contribute and also monitor the ongoing
activities and discussing them through the mailing list of Odia Wikipedia. [
http://bit.ly/ormail ].*
*
*
*More and more such activism are expected in the coming future with the
involvement of people who are eager for the development of Odia language on
web.*
*
*
*Odia Wikipedia can be accessed at or.wikipedia.org and the Facebook page
for Odia Wikipedia is facebook.com/OdiaWiki .*
*Some other local online reports :*
http://www.odishaeye.com/Odia-Wikipedia-Workshop-held-in-Bhubaneswar-2428.h…http://orissadiary.com/ShowEvents.asp?id=25754
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://wikimedia.in/wiki/In_the_news#April_2011