*Deccan Herald : 'Help Konkani Wikipedia come out of incubation'*
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/356925/039help-konkani-wikipedia-come-i…
*The functioning of the free online encyclopedia, ‘Wikipedia,’ is like a
true democracy. It is for the people and by the people, said The Centre for
Internet and Society Programme Officer (Indian Languages) Pavanaja U B.
He was speaking after inaugurating, "Wikipedia Editing Workshop," organised
by Aloysius Institute of Management and Information Technology (AIMIT) in
association with The Centre for Internet and Society in Mangalore on Friday.
Stressing on the need for more Wikipedia contributors and editors from
India, he explained to students the simplicity of creating a account in
Wikipedia and editing articles.
Wikipedia has 50 crore unique visitors and three crore are from India.
There are 6,000 editors registered from India, of which, around 2000 people
edit in Indian vernacular languages, and only 450 are very active, he said.
There are around 98,000 odd articles in Hindi, 14,600 odd articles in
Kannada. However, Konkani Wikipedia is in incubation for the last seven
years, as there are only 133 articles and very few registered editors. “To
get it out of incubation, many should write Konkani articles for
Wikipedia,” he said and added that out of 133 Konkani articles in
Wikipedia, over 100 are in Devnagari script, 31 in Roman and just two in
Kannada script and none in Malayalam.
Pavanaja added that being a contributor and editor of Wikipedia, will be a
positive add on to ones resume. "Today's IT companies need logical thinkers
and problem solvers. Writing for Wikipedia, enables one to think and
research, hence benefiting one’s personally," he said.
He also regretted that some people try to vandalise Wikipedia, with
disruptive editing and deleting articles. Though, this will be corrected by
other Wikipedia users instantly, it wastes precious time. Everyone benefits
from Wikipedia, hence the contributor should have a positive outlook with
regard to helping people and sharing knowledge, he said
He further added, that maintaining a neutral point of view, giving
significant coverage and writing on notable topics is important. One should
give opposing views and no personal views should be reflected, he added.
St Aloysius College Rector Fr Denzil Lobo said that the present generation
is lucky to have knowledge at their finger tips, and they should make the
best use of it.
AIMIT Director Rev Fr Pradeep Sequeira, Wikpedia Volunteer Harriet
Vidhyasagar among others were present. *
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
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Dear All,
Today, 11 September 2013, the application was submitted by Mr Biswarup
Ganguly & Me. The application is contained with;
1. The cover letter.
2. Print out registration certificate.
3. en copy of the certificate.
3. Main page of Wikimedia Foundation site.
4. Main page of en. wikipedia
5. Main page of bn. wikipedia.
6. Main page of hi. wikipedia
7. Main page of Wikimedia Chapter.
It is known that the will call a meeting for finalizing the contract at
late October, 2013.
With regards.
Jayanta Nath
> Could you help me understand why you need an interpretation of Indian law in this case?
> I understood that US Copyright laws would be applicable on Wikimedia Commons as the servers are in the US.
My understanding is that it needs both home (place where the work is
first published) and US laws to apply. Had the document been a work of
US government (federal), there would be no trouble.
PD-India along with evidence of it being PD in the US would be needed
for hosting on Wikimedia Commons.
best wishes
Shyamal
*Economic and Political Weekly: Widening Access to Educational Resources*
http://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/widening-access-educational-resources.html
By launching the National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER)
portal-a free online repository of National Council of Educational Research
and Training (NCERT) courseware-the government has taken a significant step
towards widening and improving access to learning resources and has
provided a fillip to the movement for free and open knowledge in the
country.
Rohini Lakshane (rohini.lakshane(a)gmail.com) is a freelance technology
journalist and Wikimedian based in Mumbai.
Imagine a student learning a science experiment at school and
supplementing her knowledge by watching a programme on the subject aired on
Doordarshan many years ago. Or learning a difficult concept in geometry by
using interactive software free of cost. Or a teacher adapting a useful
lesson from a curriculum taught in a different language elsewhere in the
country. All this and more is now possible, after the National Repository
of Open Educational Resources (NROER) <http://nroer.in/home/>, a free
online repository of National Council of Educational Research and Training
(NCERT) courseware, was launched in August 2013, by the Ministry of Human
Resource Development. The launch of the portal, which houses open-licensed
school textbooks and other educational content developed and published by
the government-funded NCERT, comes as a big breakthrough for the movement
for free and open knowledge in the country; knowledge that can be accessed,
applied, and shared freely.
*What Does the Open License Mean?*
All the NCERT course books for students from class 1 to 12 for all subjects
have been available for free
downloading<http://www.ncert.nic.in/NCERTS/textbook/textbook.htm>,
though under copyright restrictions, for many years. However, copyright
meant that students, self learners, or teachers could not legally modify,
reuse, or redistribute the books without written permission from the NCERT.
About 30 textbooks of class 9 and 10 put together are now accessible on the
NROER under a Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
(CC-BY-SA) <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>.
The Creative Commons license is a legal tool which enables copyright owners
to manage their rights over their works. The CC-BY-SA license enables the
creators of educational content to reuse, modify, build upon, or
redistribute with attribution the vast collection of text files, audio
files, videos, images, interactive applications and documents uploaded to
the NROER. In case the content is tweaked, the same license will apply to
the new work, setting up endless possibilities for NCERT courses to be
modified and re-modified till they become an inextricable part of the
expansive digital commons. The content could be used in classroom
presentations, blogs, or books, be harvested for use on other open
education resource (OER) projects such as WikiEducator and repositories
such as *Wikipedia* or its sister projects. Licensing knowledge resources
is a way of bringing knowledge to those who find accessing it either
difficult or impossible.
Those who wish to collaboratively create new courses, start their own
courses, or donate the open educational resources they create can upload
them to the repository. Those who remix or adapt the NCERT content can give
back to the community by posting the new work on the NROER.
Students and self learners can now freely access the courseware, including
some finely scripted and directed audio and video programmes and appealing
interactive content, which would aid their learning. Some of the videos are
distance learning programmes created by the NCERT and previously aired on
Doordarshan.
Initially, the CC-BY-SA-NC<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/>-a
license with a clause to disallow commercial use of the content- was
going to be appended to the NROER. This would have ruled out the use of the
content, in say, a paid app, a paid online tutorial or a paid course. After
much lobbying by the *Wikimedia Chapter (India)*, a non-profit organisation
that promotes Wikimedia projects, and other proponents of open knowledge,
the CC-BY-SA license was adopted instead. The move was in keeping with the 2012
Paris Open Educational Resources (OER)
Declaration<http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/Events/English_…>of
the UNESCO, which recommends that governments freely license
educational
resources developed with public funds "to maximise the impact of the
investment". As the NCERT is an autonomous government body, much of the
lobbying was driven by the belief that knowledge, research and information
funded with public money should be freely accessible to the public.
*The Platform*
The Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education built the NROER website over a
period of six months on the open source Gnowsys-Studio kernel. Simply put,
the website is powered by a customised semantic network. All the content
has been broken down into small web pages. The user interface allows the
content to be searched, edited, rated, modified, described and commented
on. The website has the potential to build a community around the content
and to rope in more people to contribute to it.
*The Road Ahead *
The portal needs to iron out a few creases to fully achieve its purpose of
enabling access to education for all. Open access to knowledge and
information is linked to the use of open source software, the
implementation of open standards and the licensing of open content. Usually
the content on open education portals such as the NROER and Institute of
Distance and Open Learning (IDOL), University of Mumbai is present in
proprietary file formats (for example, docx). To ensure flexibility across
platforms, it is crucial that all content is posted using open standards.
Only 30 out of the 334 NCERT textbooks have been uploaded to the NROER,
since work on the website started six months ago. The rest are expected to
be uploaded over the next four and half years along with graphs, maps,
photos, graphics, diagrams and audio-visual material.
As of now, the textbooks are available in Hindi, English, and Urdu.
Hopefully over time . textbooks and course materials in different regional
languages would be uploaded. The NROER website should display a consent
form for contributors so that they do not unknowingly upload copyrighted
content. Also, they would be made aware that they are licensing away the
content they put up. Overall, the user interface needs some improvement for
better usability.
Numerous universities and institutions in India are working towards the
creation and diffusion of open education resources -from crafting and
digitising content to building quality assurance frameworks. The NROER is
the first open educational resources portal to be launched by the
government under the CC-BY-SA license. The rest are under either the
CC-BY-SA-NC license (Project Oscar, National Program for Technology
Enhanced Learning) or copyright (eGyankosh, IDOL). The NROER may set the
ball rolling for other entities in India to throw open their repositories
of precious knowledge and impart momentum to the country's open knowledge
movement.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes only.
The publisher ( EPW ) of the above news article owns the copyrights of the
article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
*DNA Blog : "Konkani Wikipedia climbing up the Indian language ladder"*
http://www.dnaindia.com/blogs/1885294/post-konkani-wikipedia-climbing-up-th…
Recently the CIS- A2K team organised a four-day workshop in collaboration
with Goa University for students of MA (Konkani). This workshop involved 38
students creating 43 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia, which is
incubation. We hope that these efforts will contribute towards bringing
this seven-year-old project out of incubation into a live Wikipedia project.
Guest post by* Subhashish Panigrahi*, who works with the Access to
Knowledge team. A2K works towards the promotion of Wikipedia and its sister
projects in India.
Recently the CIS- A2K team organised a four-day workshop in collaboration
with Goa University for students of MA (Konkani). This workshop involved 38
students creating 43 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia, which is
incubation. We hope that these efforts will contribute towards bringing
this seven-year-old project out of incubation into a live Wikipedia project.
Before a Wikipedia shapes up as a live project, it undergoes an incubation
process. A community of volunteers gradually grows to sustain this
Wikipedia in incubation with active contributions. The Konkani Wikipedia
Incubator started way back in 2006. However, owing to many reasons it could
not take off. One of the major reasons has been the usage of multiple
scripts. Because of political and religious reasons, Konkani has multiple
writing and verbal standards as also multiple scripts. Devanagari is the
official script, but Konkani is also written in the Roman script (also
known as Romi), the Kannada script (in the Konkani speaking regions of
Karnataka, primarily in and around Mangalore), the Malayalam script in
Kerala (Kochin region), and in Perso-Arabic script. The most used script
for Konkani is Devanagari. Goa University is world's first university to
offer a master's programme in the Konkani language, in which the writing
standard is in Goan Konkani written in Devanagari. We met with the students
and introduced Konkani Wikipedia to them. Four students volunteered to
coordinate the workshop. They discussed plans for the workshop and its
prerequisites, going through the list of articles on Konkani Wikipedia,
writing a unique article by collecting resources before attending the
workshop. To our surprise, all of the students including the four
coordinators came up with at least two pages of written content before the
workshop.
*Day 1: Intro yourself*
To start with the first day of the workshop held at Krishnadas Shama State
Central Library, Goa we had an “Adjective Name” activity. It was fun to
know how people judge themselves with adjectives. I turned out to be
Sub-Hashish and *Nitika* turned out to be Naughty-Nitika! Then we had a
discussion about the articles students planned to write. A few of them were
not sure if articles on social issues or biographies of a writer could fit
into Wikipedia framework.
*Editing time*
Article titles were decided, everyone was ready with their homework write
ups and books for adding sources. Only four-five of them knew typing in
Devanagari. For the first time some of them typed few words and they typed
correctly. I could see the glow of triumph after they typed correctly using
Transliteration layout. My experience with majority of the Indian language
outreach participants had been more or the less the same; most new
wikipedians struggle to type. This time we printed some handouts with the
layout for typing help. It worked well. Students managed to type albeit
with small typographical errors.
*Game time*
We had to cut the session for an activity break and invited them to play
“Tumi Kashi Asat” (meaning "How do you do?" in Konkani). This is a game I
learnt from my colleague *Vishnu*. To make it more interesting we got it
translated to Konkani by our coordinator Supriya. The host has to make some
body movements and ask “Tumi Kashi Asat?” and bend forward. The
participants have to move their body in the reverse way and answer “Ami
bari ashat” (I’m doing well). This replaced the caffeine intake for the
four days and kept all of us lively.
*More editing post lunch:*
The editing spree went on for rest of the day. Regular doses of small fun
activities were served to keep the Goan tides high. To our surprise all of
the students created articles; I don’t know if I could judge them as "Stub"
or "Start" class articles. For me it was the greatest start for a language
to have the asset of these sweet Wikipedians, even as the Konkani Wikipedia
has seen many struggles and spent seven years in incubation.
*Rat and frog game*
There was surprise for participating Wikipedians: Rat race. Participants
sit on chairs and one of them is made to stand in the centre. The rat makes
others run and replace each other's seats and one of the participants
becomes the 'rat'. This rat race brought back old childhood memories and
for a moment everyone forgot their age. At the end of it students sat down
to take a deep breath and we taught them some basic Wiki codes (bold,
italics, and adding references). To our surprise all of the students had
created their first articles by the end of the day.
*Konkani (Devanagari) keyboard layout and typing*
*Day 2: Climbing up the ladder*
This was the day to tell the students about the advanced options and ensure
addition of more citations. Citations on Wikipedia are very essential for
readers to validate the facts. But bringing this to the students who just
had started learning to type in their language a day earlier was not easy.
The second day was spent giving small breaks during the editing session for
small activities. Running, jumping, and shouting fueled the students to be
happy editors and not burdened. We managed to teach them the advanced
options for proper Wiki-formatting (Bold, Italics, Heading, and Category),
and citations. By the end of the first two days 22 students created 24
articles (about 42 pages of written content). Everyone clapped for their
friends. We welcomed them to Konkani Wikipedia community.
*Day 3: Fresh batch, new start*
16 new students from MA course were welcomed. Four student coordinators and
one from the first batch of students joined us. The entire day was spent
having lots of fun, creating articles and basic know how of Wiki syntax.
Half the students in this batch knew how to type using the Devanagari
InScript layout. Our first and second day taught us how students ask their
fellow students more than they ask us for small help. Thanks to the Fedora
Devanagari keyboard layout, it helped us to look and guide the students.
All the students created their first articles.* John, Supriya and
Vaishali *(from
the first batch) gave final touches to their respective second articles.
*Day 4: No need to say good bye!*
This was the day to do two very important things; applaud their
contribution on the first day and tell about contribution of their friends,
teach about the advanced options and extending support further. Seeing the
newspaper coverage about the workshop featuring some of their friends was a
delight for our new Wikipedians after two long days. A few of them came
forward to share their experience about the workshop and their vision for
Konkani language.
At the end of four days all of them bid us farewell. It felt like saying
bye to good old friends. These were the foundation days and the biggest
editing rally Konkani Wikipedia Incubator has seen in the last seven years
with this milestone that the students had created. Happy faces of our new
found friends is going to be a great piece of memory in this personal
journey.
*Important links:*
Konkani Wikipedia Incubator
Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (21-24 August 2013) at Goa State Central Library
Konkani department, Goa University, Goa
Media files (Photos, videos, presentations, etc.)
Bio: Subhashish Panigrahi is a Wikimedian from Odisha and currently working
as Programme Officer for Access To Knowledge at The Centre for Internet and
Society (CIS-A2K), Bangalore. Prior to his work at CIS-A2K Subha was also
part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program as a consultant. He
contributes to Odia Wikipedia, donates pictures, presentations and videos
to Wikimedia Commons, writes, speaks and conducts activities for South
Asian language communities for Open Source, Digital natives and
Collaborative contribution models. When not online, he travels, goes
biking, meets new people, cooks and tastes various cuisines, learns new
languages, and explores the world outside. subhashish @ cis-india.org
Copy edited by *Rohini*: rohini at wikimedia dot in
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes only.
The publisher ( DNA ) of the above news article owns the copyrights of the
article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
Hi ,
I'm an IEG grantee from India. My
proposal<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Replay_Edits> was
to build a tool to visualise the edits in an article.
It aims to make it easier for an editor to go through the edits/revisions
in an article. Rather than showing the changes in wikitext the tool shows
the page as a reader would see it. The content that was removed/ deleted in
a revision disappears & the new content/ modifications appears.
- Please checkout the live
demo<https://googledrive.com/host/0B1hJO1N6piYFTTVZdW1mU2c0S28/visualise.html>
.
- An updated
mockup<https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1hJO1N6piYFMWUzVkpsR2dmUFU/edit?usp=sharing>
of the tool
It is a work in progress and I'm working on the following features.
- Pause/Forward/Rewind buttons
- Draggable timeline , you can select from where to start playing &
where to end.
- Skipping minor edits etc
- Playback of a specific users edits alone. (I'm not sure how I'll do
this)
Would be awesome if you could add features you would like to see
here<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IEG/Replay_Edits#Features_for_t…>.
Moreover now that wikipedia has gone live with editing on mobiles
I'm hoping the tool would be really useful there too as mobiles are much
more interactive than desktops. I'm trying to talk to as many people as
possible about the tool so that people will use it once I'm done building
it & also to be sure that what I'm building is useful :-) Please share the
demo link around.
Thanks
Jeph
*DNA Blog : "Wiki Loves Monuments, do you? "*
http://www.dnaindia.com/blogs/1886663/post-wiki-loves-monuments-do-you
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) is a photography competition aimed at creating a
freely licensed repository of photographs of historical monuments and
heritage sites around the globe. Held in September every year, it is the
world's largest photographic competition according to the Guinness Book of
World Records.
[Winning entry at WLM from 2012, Safdarjung's Tomb, Delhi, India, by *Pranav
Singh*]
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) is a photography competition aimed at creating a
freely licensed repository of photographs of historical monuments and
heritage sites around the globe. Held in September every year, it is the
world's largest photographic competition according to the Guinness Book of
World Records. Fifty countries including oceanic Antarctica are
participating this year in the contest, which is organised by Wikimedia
Chapters in the respective countries and various Wikimedia groups.
Started in 2010 in the Netherlands, WLM has attained lasting popularity. In
2011, 18 European countries joined the Netherlands and created a collection
of nearly 170,000 photographs, achieving the Guinness record. Thirty five
countries participated in 2012 in the contest, which received more than
350,000 photos overtaking its own record from the previous year.
*Participate*
To enter Wiki Loves Monuments, participants upload their entries to the
Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license. The Wikimedia Commons
is a media repository that serves Wikipedia and its sister projects. Like
Wikipedia, it is free and open to all. Learn more about participating in
Wiki Loves Monuments.
*WLM in India*
India has more than 7,000 historical sites spread across its 28 states and
seven union territories. In India, where WLM is in its second year, it is
supported by the Wikimedia India Chapter, a non-profit organisation. Last
year, WLM received more than 15,000 photos of Indian monuments, most of
which were those of the Taj Mahal. Over 2,000 people participated from
India, which made India rank the highest in the contest in terms of the
number of participants. A few winning photos from India went on to be a
part of the international WLM contest. Pranav Singh from Delhi won the
first prize in the international contest. Narender Kumar, also from Delhi,
ranked sixth.
*Awards*
The main for the international contest is a trip to Wikimania, the annual
international conference of the Wikimedia movement. Every country awards a
few prizes nationally as WLM is a federated contest. The highest prize in
India is Rs 25,000. Read more about Indian prizes here, and the
International ones here.
Indian website: http://wikilovesmonuments.in
International website: http://wikilovesmonuments.org
Contact details: wlm(a)wikimedia.in
More links:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013/Media
Contact* Rohini Lakshané*: rohini at wikimedia dot in
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes only.
The publisher ( DNA ) of the above news article owns the copyrights of the
article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
*DNA: Wikipedia's India chapter preps to participate in the world's largest
photography contest*
http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/1885807/report-wikipedia-s-india-chapter-pr…
The Internet's go-to website for every imaginable piece of information,
Wikipedia, launches its international heritage photo contest in India.
Dubbed as “*Wiki Loves Monuments, India 2013<http://www.wikilovesmonuments.in>
*” the photo contest focuses on the promotion of regional heritage
architecture and cultural monuments of India.
The concept originated in the Netherlands in 2010 with primary focus on
European heritage. It resulted in the creation of a database of 12,500
freely licensed images of monuments that can be used in Wikipedia and by
anybody for any purpose. The subsequent 2011 event, added another 165,000
images submitted by over 5,000 participants, to this.
Incidentally, while the 2011 contest was marked by the Guinness Words
Records as the “largest photography contest” in terms of number of photos
received, the 2012 contest overtook with over submission of over 3,50,000
photos.
India's successful entry in 2012 made way for a more locally stratergised
campaign to promote local and regional heritage spots. *Arnav Sonara*, a
country organiser of the contest and an editor of Wikipedia from India,
explains, “The idea is to gather and curate culturally significant images
of heritage structures on Wikipedia. Last year, we had two images winning
the international contest, and the first prize winner was an Indian.”
He attended the annual Wikipedia conference in Hong Kong in August 2013 as
his prize.
*How to participate?
*Organised in association with *Indian National Trust For Art and Cultural
Heritage* <http://www.intach.org>, the Indian franchise of the contest will
send ten best pictures of our monuments to the international contest.
Sonara elaborates, “Every country has a different definition of
“monuments”. For the Indian edition, Archaeological Survey of India has
provided an *official
list*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_India/Wiki_Loves_Monumen…>,
which the participants must refer, before uploading”
Rules are simple—pictures should contain an identified monument and be
nominated through a national contest, in our case, India. They should be
self-taken, freely licensed and uploaded in September 2013, devoid of
watermarks/ copyright symbols.
Interested participants can submit their entries,
*here<http://www.wikilovesmonuments.in>
*
*These are some of the photos received so
far.<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_Wiki_Loves_Monuments…>
*
To view some of the prominent heritage structures in Mumbai, *click
here*<http://dnai.in/buMj>
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes only.
The publisher ( DNA ) of the above news article owns the copyrights of the
article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
