WikimediaIndia-l August 2013

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65 participants
69 discussions

End of the GLAM pilot project at BNHS
by Pradeep Mohandas 12 Aug '13

12 Aug '13

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

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Regarding the involvement of WMIN Chapter in Wikipedia Club Pune's Independence Day Workshop.
by Niraj Suryawanshi 12 Aug '13

12 Aug '13

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

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Research on academic institutions
by L. Shyamal 11 Aug '13

11 Aug '13

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 > >

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Malayalam Wikipedia crosses 1000 contributors milestone.
by Ravishankar 10 Aug '13

10 Aug '13

Hey, Malayalam Wikipedia crosses 1000 contributors milestone. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaML.htm Congrats for the awesome community. Ravi

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[Offtopic] India lost 220 languages in the last 50 years
by Pradeep Mohandas 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

hi, Thought this might be of interest here - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-lost-220-languages-in-last-5… Pradeep Mohandas How Pradeep uses email? - http://goo.gl/6v1I9

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Kannada Wikipedia completes 10 years!
by omshivaprakash＠gmail.com 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

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.info http://blog.shivu.in Phone: 91- 9902026518 linuxaayana.net | kindarajogi.com | sanchaya.net

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [wlm-in] WLM India 2013
by Lodewijk Gelauff 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

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 >

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[Press]: Techcrunch : "India’s Indigenous Languages Drive Wikipedia’s Growth"
by CherianTinu Abraham 07 Aug '13

07 Aug '13

*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.

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The Hindu : ‘We need more Kannada content in Wikipedia’
by CherianTinu Abraham 07 Aug '13

07 Aug '13

*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.

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Konkani: The Script Controversy
by Bishakha Datta 05 Aug '13

05 Aug '13

I remember Hari Prasad Nadig presenting on this at Wikimania Haifa in 2011, and found it fascinating. http://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/konkani-script-controversy.html Best Bishakha

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WikimediaIndia-l August 2013