hi,
It was announced earlier that a Wikipedian from Mumbai, Rohini Lakshane was working with the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) on a GLAM pilot project. I am happy to inform you that this is now completed. A short note on the pilot was posted here -http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/July_2013/Contents/India_report
It will be great to do similar projects in other cultural and/or scientific institutions in your city. If you need help from the Chapter in doing this, please feel free to contact me on this email id.
warm regards,
Pradeep Mohandas
Pradeep Mohandas
How Pradeep uses email? - http://goo.gl/6v1I9
Hello All,
As per the discussions with WMIN EC member Pranav K. , the WMIN Chapter has
not intentions of involvement in the upcoming Independence Day Events
(Edit-a-thons) which are scheduled on 14th & 15th August '13 in Pune.
And as requested by the EC, formally, I regret to inform everyone the same.
Regards & Thanks
Niraj Suryawanshi
Just to take off on Ashwin's suggestion. IISc which as an organization was
the first in the country to have an Intranet and Internet long before most
others had heard of email has perhaps done reasonably well with Wikipedia
contribution even if it has been in a small and quiet way with editors here
and there. For a while I tried to keep an eye on the key science orgs in
Bangalore and their contributions (unfortunately I could only work on the
anonymous IP edits) and it was quite clear that there was no inability to
contribute on the technical front. I suspect however that few really
contributed in a substantial way - although I know of exceptions, like
User:ABhadra (a student of Prof R. Gadagkar who produced a fairly
substantial review of Ropalidia marginata, their research subject). These
institutional IPs however change but I think it is quite interesting to see
how the edits relate or not relate to their academic interests.
Surprisingly even within these academic islands, there is a lot of
parochial and self-identity related contributions - things to do with caste
for instance. Perhaps someone could consider a project with the WMF to
analyze (properly anonymized) data on edits from within Indian academia to
make a more meaningful survey of our potential "expert" editors. For a
taste of how these edits can look like you can see an old set of IPs and
their contributions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shyamal/sandbox#Indian_Academia.21
best wishes
Shyamal
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2013 12:25:42 +0530
> From: Ashwin Baindur
>
>
> Hi Tejaswini,
>
> perhaps its time for a pilot with a more receptive organisation in
> Bangalore? Which organisation is your professor in? IISc?
>
> Ashwin
>
>
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಕ್ಕೆ ೧೦ನೇ ವರ್ಷದ ವಾರ್ಷಿಕೋತ್ಸವದ ಶುಭಾಶಯಗಳು.
Kannada Wikipedia completes 10 years today. Thanks and congratulations to
all who have supported and contributed to Kannada Wikipedia all these
years. We have a long way to go and more responsibility to give access to
knowledge to each Kannadiga across the globe!
--
--
With Best Regards,
Omshivaprakash.H.L | ಓಂ ಶಿವಪ್ರಕಾಶ್ ಎಚ್. ಎಲ್ | ॐ शिवप्रकाश् एच्. एल्
http://platonic.techfiz.infohttp://blog.shivu.in
Phone: 91- 9902026518
linuxaayana.net | kindarajogi.com | sanchaya.net
Hi all,
After last year, I was thrilled to see the huge participation of Indian
people in Wiki Loves Monuments! The huge amount of pictures and new users
(from the top of my head, more than 2000 participants from India alone,
ranking it with distance above all other countries) was unique, but also
was the huge enthusiasm of those people. It clearly showed how proud
Indians are of their cultural heritage. Of course this was perhaps best
illustrated by having 2 (!) Indian pictures in the top-10 of the world best
monument photos.
For 2013, I hope that there will be another Indian contest, but that
doesn't happen all by itself, for that your help is needed. Arnav and
Karthik have requested your help (I'm not sure if you've seen it though),
and I think that without some help, it would be very hard to organize the
contest. I'm not 100% sure if the board of Wikimedia India has already
committed itself to organizing the contest (and making available the
necessary budget for prizes etc), but I'm confident that if there is enough
enthusiasm, that will not be a big issue.
So what do you say? Are you willing to help out organizing the Wiki Loves
Monuments photo competition in 2013? Worl that needs to be done includes
on-wiki work (tidying up the monument lists, adding information such as
coordinates, categorizing and checking images as they come in etc - quite
boring but you can do it whenever and where ever you like) but also a bit
more organizational: setting procedures for judging, helping find suitable
jury members, sponsors, translating the website and interfaces, doing some
PR for the contest, finding government and NGO-partners for the contest in
India etc.
You have a wonderful base to work from, I sincerely hope some volunteers
will pick up the challenge and beat last year's contribution!
Looking forward to many more Taj Mahal pictures,
Lodewijk Gelauff (member of the international coordinating team)
2013/6/6 Arnav Sonara <sonara.arnav(a)gmail.com>
> Hey,
>
> After (virtually) helping Karthik in WLM 2012 and seeing other countries
> expressing their interest to participate in WLM '13, I request Indian
> Community interested in helping organize WLM '13 to start planning and
> discussions for the same.
>
> If anyone is interested to help, please get in touch with Karthik or me so
> that we can start planning for India's successful participation in WLM '13.
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Thanks
> Arnav (ricku).
> (User:Rangilo_Gujarati)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati>
>
> _______________________________________________
> wlm-in mailing list
> wlm-in(a)lists.wmnederland.nl
> https://lists.wmnederland.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wlm-in
>
*Techcrunch : "India’s Indigenous Languages Drive Wikipedia’s Growth"*
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/06/indian-languages-drive-wikipedia-growth/
*Despite accommodating the world’s second largest English-speaking
population behind the United States, it is India’s indigenous language
speakers that are creating and consuming the content that is driving
Wikipedia’s growth on the subcontinent.
The Wikimedia Foundation last year issued a $440,000 grant to the
Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), which, along with
the local Wikimedia chapter, has trained almost 2,500 Indians how to edit
and create content in their local languages.
While the country’s official languages are Hindi and English (when the
country earned its independence in 1947, the states couldn’t agree to be
represented by a single local tongue) there are over a thousand recognised
dialects, and 22 official languages spoken by over a million people.
Last September, CIS targeted ten tongues — Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati,
Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Telugu — and started
working with India’s Wikimedia chapter, responsible for coordinating the
local volunteer efforts, to boost the amount of local language content
being created on a range of websites including, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and
WikiCommons.
CIS said that between September 2012 and April 2013 the number of page
views increased by almost four million. Additionally:
- 13,400 articles were added in the top four languages, Tamil, Malayalam,
Kannada and Hindi.
- Page views on the 25,000 Bengali entries grew by 1.4 million to about 4
million.
- There were consistently over 100 active Malyayam Wikipedia editors.
While each community used the platform for a different purpose there were
three themes that cut across the different languages: cinema, places, and
local personalities.
The training attracted people from all walks of life.
Tamil grandfather Sengai Podhuvan didn’t even know how to switch on a
computer before the training, but the 78-year old has become one of the
site’s biggest contributors; a blind man now edits Hindi Wikipedia entries;
and Sujarta, a Chennai stay-at-home mum, who doesn’t speak English, now
edits the Telugu Wikipedia between the hours of 11am and 3pm, when most
housewives, who, like herself, did not go to university, are usually
watching India’s colourful soap operas.
While the program has had an impact, director T. Vishnu Vardhan admitted
there were some ominous findings. After CIS stopped supporting the Assamese
Wikipedia in January 2013, the 20 active editors all but left the site.
“The decline over the last three months also alerts us to the possibility
of building dependencies on the program, which is a concern that we need to
address going forward,” Vishnu said. ”We need to ensure this community and
new people are sustained, that we engage them keep and them interested by
showing them the excitement of being part of open knowledge building.”
Ultimately, Vardhan hopes this capacity building exercise will spark a
self-fulfilling cycle of local Wikipedia content production and
consumption. These reach of these tools is growing as last month, mobile
operator Aircel and Wikimedia India announced that subscribers could freely
access m.wikipedia.org, available in 19 Indian languages, from their mobile
phones.
“Everyone is now Googling stuff but what if an ordinary Urdu-speaking guy
sitting in Lucknow, using a smartphone, wants to learn about Delhi? Where
is the content? While the majority of the population understands bits and
pieces of English they’re not fluent in writing or reading and still need
to access information in their mother tongue. This is where I personally
see a huge potential for Indian language Wikipedias,” Vardhan said.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes only.
The publisher ( Techcrunch ) of the above news article owns the copyrights
of the article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
*The Hindu : ‘We need more Kannada content in Wikipedia’ *
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/we-need-more-…
*There are 48,000 Sanskrit-speaking people in the country (as per the 2011
Census report) but there are nearly 10,000 articles in that language on
Wikipedia. However, consider that there are nearly 6 crore Kannadigas, but
only 14,500 Kannada entries on Wikipedia.
It took the Kannada Wikipedia 10 years to reach this figure, after its
inception in June 2003, which is indicative of the Kannadiga apathy to
contribute, edit and publish Kannada content in the free encyclopaedia. In
a step to reverse this situation, a workshop on generating content for
Wikipedia in Kannada was organised by the Centre for Proficiency
Development Placement Services, University of Mysore and Centre for
Internet Society, Bangalore (CIS), here on Tuesday.
The number of Kannada entries or articles on Wikipedia is in contrast to 4
million-plus English articles. Among Indian languages Hindi has prime
position with nearly 1 lakh articles.
U.B. Pavanaja of CIS, Bangalore, who describes himself as an ‘Indian
language computing enthusiast’, said the growth and evolution of Kannada
hinges on its use and adaptation in the realm of science, technology,
commerce, law and medicine. “People want information in the realm of
current affairs and non-fiction, but it is not available in Kannada. It is
for you and me to bring it to them.”
Applications
“Kannada’s growth does not hinge on the works of Pampa, Ponna and Ranna but
in its [Kannada’s] use and application in daily life and in the
marketplace. But Kannada litterateurs and protagonists are not contributing
to it and suffer from technophobia,” said Dr. Pavanaja who described
Wikipedia as one of the outlets for Kannada to grow and evolve and bring
the world to the people in that language.
It was pointed out that there were nearly 3 crore Indians who access
Wikipedia regularly, of whom only 5,500 contribute to enrich it. Of them
2,000 write in Indian languages of whom only 360 are Kannada contributors.
But even here, there are about 38 active editors and only 4 of them are
active editors who edit or contribute more than 100 articles a month in
Kannada, according to Pavanaja. For the record, two of the four active
editors are senior citizens.
Niranjan Vanalli, Director, CPDPS, described the workshop as “a significant
milestone” which would go a long way in enriching Kannada content on
Wikipedia. P. Nagabhushan, HoD of Computer Sciences, University of Mysore,
inaugurated the workshop and said Wikipedia could facilitate the growth of
Kannada in this digital era. Nearly 50 participants took part in the
workshop.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes only.
The publisher ( The Hindu ) of the above news article owns the copyrights
of the article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.