PANAJI: The Goa University, on Thursday, re-launched the four volumes of Konkani Vishwakosh (Konkani encyclopedia), and announced its ambitious plan to upload the same on Wikipedia – a free encyclopedia built collaboratively using Wiki software – so as to build the Konkani Wikipedia.
The university has entered into a 3-year memorandum of understanding with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), for building up the Konkani Wikipedia.
Vice Chancellor of Goa University Dr Satish Shetye, speaking during the
event held at the university said that Wikipedia is a global phenomenon
and a platform to bring people together for making creative activities
possible, which in fact, has challenged the monopoly of publishers and
created a movement in order to put together knowledge, further making it
accessible to public.
“This platform will bring together Konkani speaking people of the
world, besides providing an opportunity to learn about digitisation, and
write Konkani of global standard.”
Dr Shetye, who incidentally noticed large number of volumes of the
Konkani encyclopedia stacked in the Goa University premises, decided to
take them to maximum people through their re-launch and upload on the
Wikipedia.
The work for the Konkani encyclopedia project was commissioned during
the tenure of vice chancellor Prof B Sheik Ali, and was carried out by
various people from Dr Manoharrai Sardesai to Dr Tanaji Halarnakar, with
the aid of the Konkani department at the university.
The four volumes of the 3,632 page Konkani encyclopedia are being
re-released under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0 to support the
movement of open knowledge and open access. The programme director for
the Access to Knowledge Programme of the Centre for Internet and
Society, Vishnu Vardhan, speaking on the occasion said that the process
of uploading the four volumes of Konkani encyclopedia on the Wikipedia
would be complete in six months time, and includes processes like
scanning, digitisation and creating articles as per the requirement of
Wikipedia. He also stressed on the need to rewrite some of the articles
in Konkani encyclopedia so as to contemporarise their contents.
Vardhan also informed that relevant training programme would be
specially co-designed by the CIS as well as the university to put up the
content on the Wikipedia.
Goa University is the first university in the country to re-license
copyright of its content, and hence can be termed as the ‘Champion of
open knowledge’, he observed. Registrar Prof V P Kamat and head of
Konkani department Priyadarshini Tadkodkar were also present on the
occasion.