Bhubaneswar: The 2nd Odia Wikipedia Academy has been organized on 3 April 2011 at Bharatuya Vidya Bhavan, Bhubaneswar. This was the fist official outreach academy of Odia Wikipedia to bring an awareness and motivate common mass from different educational and social background.
Odia Wikipedia was started way back in 2002 and was one of the four Indian languages, Asamese, Odia, Pujabi, Malayalam.
But because of the lack of proper awareness and activism there was a snail movement for almost 8 years.
Then after the 10th Anniversary of Wikipedia Ashutosh Kar and few Odia fellows got interested to take initiative to reform the movement and take it ahead which gave birth to the first Odia Wikipedia Academy, conducted in Bengaluru on.
Odia Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia in Odia language to make knowledge available freely for masses.
Dhanada Mishra of Human Resource Development Management Studies has officially inaugurated this event. A FAQ Booket was released by and distributed among the first time participants of the Wikipedia Workshop. Malayalam Wikipedians Shiju Alex and Tinu Cherian were also took active part in facilitating the event.
The workshop was conducted by Odia Wikiali (Odia version of an Wikipedian/User) Subha Pa.
The whole Academy/Workshop was conducted in 2 main sections, Subha introduced Odia Wikipedia to the audience, said about the history and the development and current status. The second session was focused on how to type in Odia using the transliteration/Inscript tool which was newly incorporated, solving typing issues, searching existing articles, creating articles and editing for enhancement of old article.
In this session he has demonstrated how to add content using the commonly used syntaxes, adding pictures and other media files.
This was an interactive session where the audience interacted with the demonstrator and each other and several discussions went on based on the major issues.
Several participants from from the nearby management colleges, engineering students, entrepreneurs, college students have also participated.
At the end of the session a lotion based core group of active users was formed which will be promoting the Wikipedia movement and bringing more and more contributors to enhance it, make it more user friendly and make it reach to masses.
Contributors came with several suggestions such as motivating more and more students and freelancers to contribute and also monitor the ongoing activities and discussing them through the mailing list of Odia Wikipedia. [ http://bit.ly/ormail ].
More and more such activism are expected in the coming future with the involvement of people who are eager for the development of Odia language on web.