Here's what Foundation Report August 2011 has to say for our India Education
program
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/08/wikimedia-foundation-report-august-201…
*India Programs*
- Two new consultants selected – Nitika Tandon (Participation) and Shiju
Alex (Indic Initiatives). Nitika has joined and Shiju joins at the end of
September.
- Continued support of proposed WikiConference in Mumbai in November
($40k grant from WMF; Fellowship for organizer; Advisory services).
- Wikipedia India Education
Program<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Program>
pilot
in Pune looking good in terms of numbers (>1000 students) but requires
intensive effort to provide adequate training, enabling and hand-holding of
newbie students. Having said this, check out the following:
- User: Abhilasha369 started a new article: Robinson Crusoe Economy
- User: basic.atari is working on the Human capital article
- User: SaurabhKB is editing Self-organizing list
- User: Aishani Sharma on Social preferences
- User: Jinchurikidan has been actively editing the article on
Animation studio
- 12 new Campus Ambassadors selected for the Pune pilot; training
expected by September 12
- Continued progress on legal registration of the proposed independent
public trust in India.
- Initial meetings with major mobile carriers / manufacturers scheduled
for next week.
--
Thanks
Arnav (ricku).
(User:Rangilo_Gujarati) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati>
You can't copy-paste this homework
Padmaparna Ghosh | September 10, 2011
http://www.timescrest.com/life/you-cant-copypaste-this-homework-6226http://www.timescrest.com/timthumb.php?src=http://www.timescrest.com/media/…
The students of the Symbiosis School of Economics have suddenly
rediscovered the college library. Like most other students, whenever
asked to produce a research paper they would routinely look to every
lazy researcher's best friend, Wikipedia. But all that changed four
months back.
Like most members of the academic world, Ishita Ghosh, assistant
professor at the SSE, was worried about students turning into a
copy-paste generation. Till she decided to beat them at their own game
- she asked her students to write original entries for Wikipedia
itself. There are others like Ghosh in various colleges across Pune.
For more than 1, 000 students at SSE and the College of Engineering,
Pune, Wikipedia, the world's largest online, collaborative
encyclopedia, is not just a free online encyclopedia, but also a
platform to prove their worth as researchers. Professors at these
colleges, under an India Education Project by the Wikimedia
Foundation, are not asking their students to write papers but original
Wikipedia entries, complete with paper citations, references and
facts. This novel idea of student contributions has sparked a flurry
of activity on campus and is helping teachers judge fundamental
research skills of their students.
Unlike what it sounds like, writing an entry for the encyclopedia is
not easy. "They have to research primary sources. I judge their
entries on the content, flow and argument of the piece, how many
external sources and references they have used and how comprehensive
the article is, " says Ghosh. In a semester, Ghosh gives 10 per cent
weightage to these Wikipedia entries. For the Foundation India and its
participation, in fact, is important enough to warrant the
foundation's first office out of San Francisco being in here. And it
is here on a mission to help India represent itself better. The
project had targeted 250 such students initially but already have more
than 1, 000 and will spread to other cities next year. While initially
reluctant, students have now warmed up to the idea.
Every morning Abhilasha Sharma, a 20-yearold student at SSE, craves a
hit. Over the last 30 days, she got 950 but this 20-year-old keeps
wanting more. Sharma's day is now incomplete if she doesn't log on to
Wikipedia, the world's largest online collaborative encyclopedia, at
least once a day to check how many hits her entry received. But it
hasn't been easy. Within five days of her putting up her article on
Robinson Crusoe Economy her worst fear came true - the article got
nominated for deletion. For these students, writing an academic paper
is no longer an exercise in isolation. It means putting up your labour
of weeks online to a prospective audience of 400 million worldwide,
all of who can remark on the content and its quality, find holes in
the argument and edit it.
"I went live with my article too soon, when I had little content. So I
chatted with the guy who wanted it deleted, a 70-year-old guy in the
UK. It was really cool. My work was being watched but not by my
professor and he really pushed me to improve my content. This is a
dog-eat-dog world but not Wikipedia. If a stranger can be so nice to
me so can I, " said Sharma, who intends to continue contributing to
Wikipedia.
And that is what the Foundation wants. "Out of about 100, 000 editors
worldwide, only about 1, 250 are from India, which is a shame. By
population or internet access proportion one in every 5 or 6 editors
should be from India, " said Hisham Mundol, consultant to the
foundation.
The students are helped along the way by volunteer campus ambassadors,
who are Wikipedia enthusiasts. "This is about institutionalising the
habit of writing and editing. This does not have a shelf life. Here is
an audience of 400 million or even take 10 per cent of it. You are not
writing for a dustbin, " said Ram Shankar Yadav, a campus ambassador.
The foundation, whose only office out of San Francisco is in India,
had called for applications for volunteers for 20 positions and they
received more than 700. "This was unexpected because all I had
promised was a T shirt and some love from me, " laughed Mundol.
Students are even putting their experience up on their resumes for
campus placements in a bid to differentiate it from the crowd.
The project has also brought out the intense competitor in Sharma
thanks to the Leaderboard ranks for contributors according to the
amount of content added in bytes. "I am really obsessive about it.
That has motivated me so much. I want to be on top, " said Sharma.
The India story of Wikipedia is, however, different from the solely
English-speaking world. Though at present most of the editors and
contributors are in the English language version, more and more
regional language wiki communities are logging on.
Shiju Alex, a 34-year-old Bangalore-based software engineer and
Wikipedia outreach volunteer said that lack of awareness about free
editing, access to internet and language barriers keeps a mammoth
chunk of India's non-English speaking population from participating.
At present there are 20 active Indian language communities and 20 are
in incubation.
"Southern communities, such as Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu are doing
better mostly because of access to Internet, love for their mother
tongue and outreach programs, " said Alex.
The Malayalam community is the strongest with 250 active editors,
mainly because of Alex who is leading the indic languages growth. "We
have held Wiki workshops in Kerala, have started an offline Malayalam
version and also tied up with the IT dept of Kerala's education
department, under which volunteers received training in almost all
districts, " added Alex. Similar outreach programmes are being built
for Tamil and Oriya speakers as well.
But one sore point for Wikipedia around the world is yet to find a
solution in India as well - the presence of women
editors/contributors. Worldwide, almost 90 per cent of contributors
are male. "This is evident when you visit a Star Wars article and each
character is explained in excruciating detail while, say, an article
on sarees would be sketchy, " said Mundol.
For Wiki evangelists such as Yadav and Alex the potential of India in
the encyclopedia is a no-brainer. "We are a country which gave people
like Aryabhatta, Bappi Lahiri and Poonam Pandey. The India story needs
to be told, " said Yadav. Initial analysis of edits from India post
the outreach has revealed that people from rural parts have started
writing about their towns, villages and monuments.
The value of such 24/7 online chatter on discussion groups, which can
passionately argue and debate issues from video game characters, to
the finer points of a climate model or Justin Bieber's latest single
is varied. For Rashabh Tatiraju, a 15-year-old cyclone enthusiast, it
is teamwork with an expert in the US and for Pradeep Mohandas, an
astronomy and wiki fan, it is how to respect differing points of view
on a subject.
The foundation believes and hopes that, like Sharma, all the Pune
students will go on to become regular Wikipedians, because now they
know the power of an edit button.
Santhosh Thottingal joins the Foundation Engineering Team and Gerard
Meijssen as technology outreach consultant.
Gerard Meijssen , if I may call as an indophile, is very dear for many of us
and others who reads india mailing list :)
Special congratulations and best wishes to both of them.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alolita Sharma <asharma(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:40 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Welcoming our Internationalization/Localization
Features Engineering team
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi Everyone,
Please join me in welcoming our newly formed
Internationalization/Localization (I18n/L10n) features engineering
team. The I18n/L10n team will focus on design and development of open
source tools to improve screen font rendering on web browsers using
open web fonts, input method tools including keymaps and
transliteration software to support Non-Roman languages specifically
starting with Indic languages this year.
The members on this team are Siebrand Mazeland as product manager,
Niklas Laxström and Santhosh Thottingal as software engineers, and
Gerard Meijssen as technology outreach consultant.
Siebrand Mazeland got pulled into Free and Open Source software
translating the FreeBSD Handbook in 2004. After translating a few
hundred pages, and making a few edits on Wikipedia (to the FreeBSD
article of course), he rediscovered Wikipedia in 2006. As an
administrator for the Dutch Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, he was
introduced to "translating MediaWiki" on an obscure wiki (“Betawiki”)
run by Niklas Laxström. Siebrand finds it hard to believe that he is
still going strong on language support in open source projects after 5
years. With translatewiki.net now providing almost 20 opens source
projects with excellent translations and a community of 3,000
translators, he is thrilled to join the Wikimedia Foundation
engineering team as I18n Product Manger, along with his long-time
friends from translatewiki - Niklas and Gerard.
Niklas Laxström is a software and language engineer, with a M.A. in
Language Technology (pending thesis review). He has been a free
software contributor since about 2003, mostly focused on translation.
Niklas joined Wikimedia in 2004 and soon became an administrator of
Finnish Wikipedia and a MediaWiki translator. To aid his translation
work, he created a wiki which has grown to become translatewiki.net,
which now manages translation of dozens of free software projects in
hundreds of languages. Niklas is the author of the Translate extension
for MediaWiki. He is also president of Wikimedia Finland. Niklas has
studied a number of languages including Russian and a little Tamil. In
his spare time, he likes to go for long bicycle rides (taking the
opportunity to improve OpenStreetMap) and to watch sci-fi films
including his favorite Stargate SG-1 series.
Santhosh Thottingal is a free software developer from Kerala, India.
He has been in the aerospace and automotive related IT industry for
the last 6 years. He has contributed to many free and open source
(FOSS) projects. His projects have been around language computing,
especially in his mother tongue Malayalam . He has contributed code,
bug reports and translations to FOSS projects like GNOME, KDE,
Openoffice/LibreOffice, Firefox, TeX, GLibc, Python, Aspell, Hunspell,
m17n, scim to help improve Indic language support. He is an upstream
developer for many packages in popular Linux Distros and is lead
developer for Dhvani, an Indic language TTS, SILPA, an Indic language
computing framework and a Pango-Cairo based PDF rendering library. He
is project administrator of the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing FOSS
developer community. His contributions to Wikimedia projects include
Malayalam Wikipedia and Wikisource offline versions. He is currently a
member of Wikimedia Language Committee. Santhosh is also constantly
improving the readability of Wikimedia projects, especially in
non-Roman languages with the Webfonts Mediawiki extension. He has also
been improving the Input Tool Mediawiki extension. As a team member of
the I18n team, he hopes to develop features that all wikis can use to
display and render all languages. Santhosh comes from a farmers'
family and is passionate about farming. Also as a fan of Malayalam
literature, he has helped the Malayalam Wikisource community digitize
and archive many precious works from Malayalam literature. He blogs at
www.thottingal.in/blog.
And last but not least, in the Wiki world Gerard Meijssen is known as
GerardM. He claims to be the one who has bored people to tears about
languages and language technology via his blog and presentations. Now
he has accepted the challenge to convince people about how
improvements by the I18n/L10n team will make using MediaWiki and
editing Wikimedia projects easy and fun. Gerard will be blogging
officially on the WMF blog as well as on his personal blog about
interesting and relevant topics. He sees his role in this team as the
storyteller who will narrate the team’s progress as stories and help
transform tools developed into new opportunities. Gerard has been
involved in language standards, lexicography and terminology. He is
particularly proud of demonstrating how a multilingual dictionary
approach helps people find pictures on Wikimedia Commons. He has
worked on projects to install and update software, medical terminology
with OmegaWiki which is still an ultimate Wiktionary. He has also
translated text and software on translatewiki.net. He predicts that
“languages in non-Roman scripts will do substantially better on the
Internet as we get the word out how easy it is becoming to read and
write. And the team’s projects will be in the forefront of this and
may astound us all.”
I’m proud to welcome this team of very passionate and accomplished
people who have been bold in their many contributions to open source
software. I hope that this team continues to change the landscape of
free and open source language computing tools and help make every
Wikipedia truly open and accessible to all people in all languages.
Feel free to say hello to Santhosh, Niklas, Siebrand and Gerard online
or next time you see them in person :-)
--
Alolita Sharma
Director, Features Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
*Penn-Olson : "Its Wikipedia Season in India"*
http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/09/07/wikipedia-indi/
*Wikipedia is now all set for it’s first WikiConference in India which is
scheduled to be held in Mumbai on November 18th, 2011. Delegates from any
country can participate, but the conference will be quite India-centric,
according to the event page on Wikimedia.*
*
*
*Here’s a quick overview of the schedule for the WikiConference which will
act as a platform for Indian Wikimedians and Wikipedians to meet, discuss,
and share their opinions regarding Wikipedia India issues, Indian language
projects on Wikipedia, and discuss affairs in the Wikicommunity in India and
abroad.*
*
*
*Date 18th to 20th November, 2011*
*Venue Convocation Hall, University of Mumbai (Fort Campus) & associated
rooms*
*Accommodation Sea Green Hotel and Chateau Windsor hotel (for those who
receive scholarships)*
*Hosts Mumbai and Pune Wikipedia communitites, Wikimedia India branch*
*Sponsors Wikimedia Foundation, Eregnow.com*
*Social Media Facebook and Linkedin event pages, and official Twitter
account*
*Email conference(a)wikimedia.in*
*
*
*
*
*We recently spoke with the India program consultant to WikiMedia, Mr.
Hisham Mundol. We discussed the WikiConference, a new Wiki course in the
College of Engineering at Pune (CoEP), and how to be a Wikipedia
contributor.*
*
*
*What is the conference all about? Why is it being held and how do you think
it’s beneficial for Wikipedia?*
*
*
*This conference is going to be the first national conference held by the
Wikimedia community in India. It’ll be fantastic for the existing community
to meet up and share stories and knowledge and have a good time! We also
hope that it will attract newcomers to Wikipedia.*
*
*
*Also, Wikipedia’s activities in India have increased as it has recently
collaborated with College of Engineering, Pune launching a course in which
over 800 students will contribute to the Wikipedia’s page as a part of their
first semester.*
*
*
*Why did Wikipedia choose CoEP over top colleges like the Indian Institute
of Technology (IITs) and National Institute of Technology (NITs)?*
*
*
*The College of Engineering at Pune has a wonderful reputation, student
body, and faculty. We decided to do the pilot in Pune – and we’re honored
the CoEP has agreed to partner with us. Right now, the college has the
highest number of students enrolled in our program, anywhere in the world.*
*
*
*What benefits will this course add to Wikipedia as an organization?*
*
*
*The Wikipedia movement will gain tremendously because of the quality of
content that students are adding, and will be adding.*
*
*
*What is the future plan? Is the organisation planning to launch this course
in other colleges as well?*
*
*
*Our immediate plans are to continue with this pilot at Pune in the short
term. We are looking at a roll-out to other colleges and cities. We’d love
to hear from whoever is interested. For those who want to get involved
immediately, an option is to start a Wikipedia Students’ Club. There are
further details available on our outreach page.*
*
*
*How can one contribute towards the Wiki community?*
*
*
*Anyone and everyone can contribute. You can check the Welcome to Wikipedia
section and the Introduction Page.*
*
*
*The basic process would be to read those two links, create a user account,
go to the edit button on the top right of any article and start editing! You
can also contribute images and other media files to Wikimedia Commons which
is amongst the world’s largest storehouse of free-to-use media files.*
*
*
*Lastly, How many Wikipedia contributors hail from India at the moment?*
*
*
*Right now, there are about 1,500 active editors in India – but that number
keeps growing. We’d like it to become many, many times larger, and we invite
anyone and everyone to join in!*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news#Sep_2011
