HelloI have created an article on yesterdays bombings. Now few foreigners are proposing to rename this article to Mumbai 2011 bombings. Please oppose this on talk page. Please support me.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:13_July_2011_Mumbai_bombingsI am opposing it for following reasons1) Year 2011 has not yet ended so how can it be labeled as 2011 mumbai bombings?
2) What if there are more bombings in this year? Editors are saying that if new bombing happens then we will rename it to 13 july Mumbai bombings! Why to go to double work?
3) All outsiders are supporting no Indian comments on it!! Please Vote on it
Suyog Vyawahare +919987135236
Hi All,
Glad to inform you all that the 35th Bangalore Wiki meetup was held on
10July2011 at CIS, Bangalore. This was the 2nd year celebration of Bangalore
Community meetups.
It was attended by 14 Wikipedians.
The main agendas for this meetup were:
- *Discussions*
- Preview of *Oral Citations* Project Video - Achal Prabhala , Shiju Alex
- Bangalore Community Engagement with Wikimedia Chapter
*The Oral Citations Project is a strategic research project funded by
a Wikimedia
Foundation grant<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_Fellowships/Oral_Citations>to
help overcome a lack of published material in emerging languages on
Wikipedia. It is being undertaken by Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board
member Achal Prabhala as a short-term fellowship.*
Shiju introduced the project to the audience and described about the main
goal of the project, how may literary, cultural and living customs and
important aspects of humanity could be cited with the lively "*Oral
citations"*. There was a 45 mins video shown to the audience to explain the
whole project and its outcome. The details of the project can be accessed at
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Oral_citations
- Bangalore Community Engagement with Wikimedia Chapter
Arjuna, President, Wikimedia Chapter has spoken about the community
engagement with Wikimedia Chapter <http://wiki.wikimedia.in>, registration
and EC Elections
details.<http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Announcements/Invitation_to_join_Chapter_as_Member…>
Post meetup, networking and photo session were held. Photos of this meetup
can be found at *Commons:Category:Bangalore Meetup
July2011<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bangalore_Meetup_July2011>
*
*
ସୁଭପାSubhashishPanigrahi
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia Bangalore mailing list
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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-blr<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-or>
....................................................................................
Wikipedia India mailing list
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facebook.com/WikimediaIndia <http://facebook.com/OdiaWiki>
*
hi,
This is to announce the Wikipedia Mumbai Meetup 11 will be held on:
Date: Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Time: 6 pm
Venue: InOrbit Mall, Malad
The agenda for the meeting is -
- Introductions & General Discussions.
- Updates on WikiConference India 2011
- Preview of Oral Citations Project Video
- GLAM update
You can sign up for the meetup here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Mumbai/Mumbai11. We'd like to
thank Moksh Juneja for organising the venue and to InOrbit Mall for
providing the venue.
warm regards,
Pradeep Mohandas
Hi all,
I am very glad to inform you that the first ever wiki marathon of telugu
wikipedia took place in Hyderabad this Sunday.
This was intended to encourage more people to join the community.
Also, very soon Te-wiki would reach the 50k article mark and this event has
boosted us to work more nearer to reaching it.
About a 50 new articles were created in the stipulated time and many
existing articles were improved.
Telugu wikipedia has been notorious for having mostly 2 lined articles.
Now we are trying to expand the existing ones with references taken from
local newspapers and citations from books.
Also, we at tewiki team are trying to bring out a printed book carrying
selected articles from tewiki for the benefit of people out of reach of
internet.
I thanks Arjuna Rao, Veeven, Kasyap, C.B.Rao, Chakravarthy and all others
for participating and making this first wiki marathon fruitful.
We are planning to organise one such marathon every month to encourage more
people to join wikipedia.
With thanks and Regards
Rahimanuddin Shaik
నాని
cross posting to Offline & Wikimedia-India.
Hi
I'm working on the Wikimedia Foundation's initiatives in India and I'm reaching out for help on a really exciting opportunity. Assam is a state in the North-East of India. The Government has an interesting scheme to give laptops to deserving students leaving secondary school (i.e., completed 10 years of education and about 15-16 year olds.) This scheme is being managed by an organisation called Amtron - who have issued a Tender for the procurement of these laptops.
There are 19,000 laptops that will be distributed in this initiative. (These are on Ubuntu Linux - and very reasonably configured.)
Assam has traditionally had a problem with infrastructure and Internet access is a problem. Someone who is supporting Amtron has asked the Foundation if we can give them an offline version of Wikipedia to pre-load onto these computers. Given that it is for 15-16 age group, it does need to be of appropriate content. They'd like it to have topics of academic interest covered (e.g., classical sciences, humanities, literature and accountancy.) Ideally we'd like them to also have articles on India (e.g. history, geography, culture, etc.) as well as other areas of general interest (e.g., music, sports, etc.) Currently, everything is required in English only.
While these laptops aren't going to necessarily be in classrooms, given that they will be with some students, it's safe to assume that other students, friends and relatives would access these. Given the context of Assam, I thank we can easily assume that 10 people would access these computers. That adds up to improving access for nearly 2,00,000 people! I'm really inspired by the potential of this partnership because because it allows us huge scale with efficiency in effort.
I understand that Wikipedia for Schools is readying for release sometime in July 2011 - and the timing couldn't be better.
Can you help us out with
a) how you could help on adding the additional articles that this initiative would require? (You could also sign up on the Volunteer Page)
b) how fast this can be given to Amtron? (They are looking for the inputs in July 2011.)
c) any other ideas that you think might be useful?
Many thanks.
Best,
Hisham Mundol
Wikimedia India Programs
skype : hisham.wikimedia
gtalk : hmundol(a)wikimedia.org
twitter : @mundol
Now that the Wikipedia India Education Program and Campus Ambassador Program
have been in full operation for just over one month I think it is timely to
provide an update to you, the Wikipedia Community.
In early June staff from the Wikimedia Foundation's San Francisco office, as
well as Hisham Mundol (Consultant, India National Programs) and two
Wikimedia Fellows conducted a two-day training session for the first batch
of Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors in India. Since conducting that session
we've been hard at work recruiting professors to participate in the program.
We held faculty workshops at 7 colleges during which we introduced Wikipedia
and this project to interested faculty members. For these sessions we
welcomed Dr. Bob Cummings, a professor of English at the University of
Mississippi, to talk about his experience using Wikipedia in the classroom.
These workshops provided excellent opportunities to talk honestly with the
professors about not only what benefits they could expect, but also what
challenges they would face. On the whole, faculty members
(and administrators) were extremely supportive and enthusiastic.
The final two weeks of June were extremely busy as we worked to finalize
commitments from professors. It was hard work, but it certainly paid off. We
now have twelve professors and about 500 students committed to using
Wikipedia in the classroom this semester. And we're still not done! We are
continuing recruitment efforts at several other colleges so it is likely
that these figures will increase in the coming weeks. For an up-to-date list
of the participating colleges and professors please see the Wikipedia India
Education Program project page (linked
here<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Program>
).
Last week the first Wikipedia campus workshops outside of the United States
happened at the Symbiosis School of Economics (SSE) in Pune. Two campus
ambassadors (Abhishek
<goog_82403213>Suryawanshi<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AbhiSuryawanshi>
and
Wasim Mogal <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wasimmogal2007>) conducted
introductory editing sessions for over 150 students. This was an important
moment. Until this point we had largely been interacting with professors and
administrators. And while their support is crucial, ultimately it will be
the students who will make this project successful. Based on what I saw last
week I am very confident that this project will indeed be a resounding
success.
We continue to charge ahead. This coming week we will return to SSE to talk
to students specifically about the Wikipedia assignment the professor
designed for their class. Next week we will be conducting our first sessions
at the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP). Very soon we will be seeing the
first Wikipedia edits coming from these students. I know this is the moment
we've all been waiting for and I assure you that it is not far off.
Your continued support is critical to the success of the project. Please
feel free to contact me (pjtabit(a)gmail.com) with any questions you may have.
All the best,
PJ Tabit
Wikipedia Fellow, Wikipedia India Education Program
*NewsDay : "India: Wikipedia's next frontier"*
http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/india-wikipedia-s-next-frontier-1.3016849http://jasonoverdorf.blogspot.com/2011/07/india-wikipedias-next-frontier.ht…
*Wikimedia Foundation taps India for first foray into developing world.*
*
*
*By Jason Overdorf*
*
*
*
*
*NEW DELHI, India — With growth slowing in the United States and Europe,
Wikipedia has settled on India for the beachhead of its next round of
expansion — which will see the seemingly ubiquitous online encyclopedia
storm into the developing world for new users, and new contributors, in a
host of languages.*
*
*
*The Wikimedia Foundation — which administers the online encyclopedia — is
set to open its first foreign office in New Delhi in a matter of months.*
*
*
*The nonprofit has already mushroomed here in its typical guerrilla style.
Wikipedia is the fourth most visited website among India's 100 million
internet users.*
*
*
*Contributors and editors to Wikipedia are few in number compared with the
United States and Europe, but the quantity of entries that they produce can
be remarkable. One contributor alone said he had edited more than 14,000
pages and created so many that he's lost count.*
*
*
*That kind of enthusiasm is vital for Wikimedia. By 2015, the foundation
aims to increase the monthly visitors to its sites to a billion people from
around 400 million today, while boosting the number of articles available
online to 50 million from 20 million, according to its latest strategic
plan.*
*
*
*But the number of contributors — "the lifeblood of Wikimedia projects" —
has plateaued around 100,000 active editors.*
*
*
*India's real promise, therefore, lies in its huge, young population and the
rapid growth of internet penetration. Its 100 million internet users will as
much as double by 2015, according to some estimates, as web-ready smart
phones draw more mobile users online.*
*
*
*And due to a dearth of libraries and the infrequent revisions of
government-mandated school textbooks, the demand for Wikipedia promises to
be greater here than virtually anywhere in the world.*
*
*
*"Wikimedia is like an alternative market response to the failures of the
state in India," said Anirudh Singh Bhati, a member of the executive council
for the Wikipedia India chapter. "If a student needs information which is up
to date they use mainly Wikipedia to get it."*
*
*
*To tap that potential, Wikimedia is working to promote 40 individual
encyclopedia sites in Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, as well
as mobilizing volunteers for programs like "Campus Ambassadors," which are
designed to turn users into contributors, said Bishaka Datta, a Mumbai-based
documentary filmmaker who was recently appointed to Wikimedia's board of
directors.*
*
*
*"In India there are thousands of languages, so if you want to reach
somebody who's been to school and studied in Malayam entirely, then that
person has to be reached in Malayalam," Datta said.*
*
*
*That presents its own challenges. Nagging software issues make it difficult
to enter text in Indian languages — none of which use the English alphabet.
Discussions about the accuracy and neutrality of the encyclopedia entries
must often be conducted in multiple languages.*
*
*
*And even though the non-English sites are vital for expansion, the advance
guard of contributors and editors has come mainly from the portion of the
population that speaks English (along with another language), so the number
of entries on the Indian language sites has not grown as rapidly as it might
have.*
*
*
*The Malayalam Wikipedia languished with only around 400 entries for its
first three years, for instance, even though it is spoken by some 36 million
people — most of whom live in Kerala, a state with an unusually high
literacy rate.*
*
*
*India's desperate need for basic research materials, however, has already
begun to act as a stimulus to the growth of the editing community, both in
English and Indian languages. Last month, a Wikimedia team led by Hisham
Mundol — a development sector expert recently hired to drive the expansion
of readership and editor base in India — visited the university hub of Pune,
Maharashtra to roll out the first Campus Ambassadors program outside the
United States.*
*
*
*Academics like Rimi B. Chatterjee, a novelist and historian who teaches at
Kolkata's Jadavpur University, are pioneering ways to leverage students'
reliance (and over-reliance) on Wikipedia to motivate habitual rote learners
to think about their research papers in new ways.*
*
*
*And the government of at least one state, Kerala, has embraced the online
encyclopedia as an educational tool that can save it from using vital
resources from its meager budget essentially to reinvent the wheel — a move
that helped boost the number of entries on the Malayalam Wikipedia from 400
in 2005 to more than 18,000 today.*
*
*
*"I think the potential [for India] is huge," Datta said. "Platforms like
Wikipedia can really equalize access. People in the [developing] countries
of the Global South have always lacked access to knowledge and institutions.
Something like this can really erase that inequality of access."*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news#July_2011
*"Konkani going places; first Wikimania, next Wikipedia" - DNA / Dainik
Bhaskar*
http://daily.bhaskar.com/article/BAN-konkani-going-places-first-wikimania-n…http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_konkani-to-be-heard-in-wikipedia-after…
*Mangalore/Bangalore: For the first time, the world will hear Konkani spoken
by people in the coastal states of Karnataka, Kerala, Goa, Maharashtra and
Gujarat. And it will be heard at Wikimania, the world conference on language
interface and web media being organised by the Wikipedia group at Haifa in
Israel starting on August 2.*
*
*
*For the first time, Konkani will be interfaced with other Indian languages,
which will be shown to the world. Thanks to the research done on
inter-script transliteration programme by the Konkani Language and Cultural
Foundation at the World Konkani Centre located here, experts around the
world will have a glimpse of the rich literature, traditions, music, theatre
and culture of Konkani people in 'plug in' form.*
*
*
*"It means a whole lot of things to the development of Konkani. The new
research programme, which has fructified just recently, will open a new
world to the Konkani language and culture," said director of the Konkani
Language and Cultural Foundation Basti Vaman Shenoy.*
*
*
*"For the first time, Konkani language will break away from the barriers of
scripts, giving it a universal acceptance and understanding," Shenoy said.*
*
*
*Two Konkani scholars Gurudutt Buntwalkar, who is also assistant director of
the World Institute of Konkani at Mangalore, and Hariprasad Nadig have
conceptualised this inter-script transliteration programme in 'plug in'
version. By doing do, they have clearly emerged as pioneers in this concept
for Konkani.*
*
*
*Giving an exclusive preview to DNA, Gurudutt articulated on the concept.*
*
*
*"Usage of multiple scripts in Konkani language has been hindering sharing
of knowledge between the communities which speak the same language but are
separated by usage of script. In the advent of Internet, technology has
enabled an accessible knowledge-sharing platform for Indian languages
through Unicode. The ability to 'search' in Indic scripts as well as to do
'transliteration' and 'translation' for the Indian language content has
enabled more avenues," said Gurudutt.*
*
*
*An initial effort to create a Konkani Wikipedia lost its momentum because
of script conflict.*
* *
*It was a real obstacle to the users to create four different pages in four
scripts for each content page without which the content created in the
language would limit itself for the specific region which the script is in
use.*
*
*
*Hence, the Konkani language Wikipedia is still at the incubator stage.*
*
*
* *
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Hi All,
The 1st Odia Wikipedia Workshop has been organized on 26th of June 2011 at
Orissa Academy of Social science & Integrated Studies(OASIS). This was
started when I was looking for few wikipedians who can contribute to Odia
wikipedia. This was for Odia Wikipedia to bring awareness and motivate
common mass from different educational and social background. Odia Wikipedia
was started way back in 2002, but because of the lack of proper awareness
and activism there was a slight movement for almost 8 years. Odia Wikipedia
is an online encyclopedia in Odia language to make knowledge available
freely for masses.
The workshop was conducted by Dr. Laxmikanta Tripathy, Artist Kesu Das and
me with the help of wikipedian Subhashish Panigrahi. Dr. Laxmikanta Tripathy
who is Organizing Secretary of Odia Bhasa Bikash Aandolon(OBBA) invited many
members of Odia Bhasa Bikash Aandolon. Some of them are Dr. Bhagavat Prasad
Das, Secretary of OBBA Pt. Surendra Nath Kara and President of OBBA Dr.
Ramakanta Behera. Several participants from the nearby management colleges,
engineering students have also participated. We also got the support of Mr.
Sanjay Sahu the Director of OASIS.
Dr. Laxmikanta Tripathy addressed the participants and introduced Poet
Brajanth Ratha and Others. Brajanath Ratha the poet has officially
inaugurated this event enlightening about Odia language and his catching on
Odia wikipedia. A FAQ Booket version 1.1 was released by and distributed
among them. I demonstrated the basics of Wikipedia, Current status, Sign up
process, How to Edit Odia Wikipedia, Searching Existing Articles, Creating
new articles, How to Upload picture and adding that to article and their
alignment along with basic introduction of syntax for the new users. This
was an interactive session where the participants interacted with each other
and several discussions went on about Odia wikipedia. They came up with
several suggestions such as :
- To add Purnachandra Bhasakosa (Odia Lexicon) link on Odia wikipedia
article pages.
- The Pages should be protected so only the authorized person can edit to
avoid vandalism.
- To build a Community Center where members can work on various
fields/Categories to improve Odia wikipedia.
- They use to Windows XP and not ready to the other availability of
Operating System. Issues on XP for Odia Language.
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*<http://or.wikipedia.org>and the Facebook page for
Odia Wikipedia is
*http://facebook.com/OdiaWiki <http://facebook.com/odiawiki> .*
To read this *Report<http://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AC%89%E0%AC%87%E0%AC%95%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%AA%…>
* on Wikipedia Click Here <http://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MBLS1>.
Ansuman Giri
*
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ
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Wikipedia Odia (Oriya) mailing list
wikipedia-or(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-orfacebook.com/OdiaWiki
Tweet @OdiaWiki
*