Dear All,
The first Odia Wikipedia Workshop was conducted in CIS, Bangalore on *2011
March 06*. Here is a brief report about it.
Wikimedian Shiju Alex had took initiatives to organize this first workshop
of Odia wikipedia. 4 Odia Wikipedians from Bangalore (Ashutosh kar ,
Ansuman Giri, Subhashish Panigrahi and Satyaranjan Mohanty and 2 Odia
wikipedians from Cuttack (Srikant Kedia and Sambidhan Mohanty- through
Skype) attended in this workshop.
The workshop was conducted in 2 sessions. More details below.
*Session 1: (Introduction to Wiki, Wikipedia and sister projects, Wikimedia
Foundation, and Odia Wiki projects)*
In the first session, a brief introduction about Wiki, Wikipedia, and WMF
were given. Shiju also explained about the sister projects of wikipedia and
how they are different from each other. The first session helped
participants to understand about the current status of Odia wiki projects.
In Session I, he also explained about the:
- Five pillars of Wikipedia,
- Difference between Wiki, Wikipedia, Wikimedia...
- Why editing of content is free for all
- How vandalism is taken care
- How new projects are undertaken, incubated and grown to a full-fledged
level
- Importance of localization and translate wiki
- The need of Wikipedia in Indic languages
- Initiatives taken by various Indic communities to build community
- Statistics of Indian language Wikipedias based on the content and
quality
Participants asked numerous questions which helped them to understand the
current status of Odia wiki.
*Session 2: (Wiki editing session)*
Session 2 was a wiki editing session. Participants came up with several
questions making the session very live. The recently integrated typing
solution of Odia wikipedia designed by Malayalam Wikipedian Junaid was also
demonstrated by Shiju. Technical difficulties faced by common users were
discussed.
*General Discussion*
*
*
The major reasons for the low activity in Odia Wikipedia (even though it is
one of the first Indian Wikipedia started way back in 2002) was discussed.
Literacy rate, access to computers, and so on are given as some of the
reasons. Citing the example of Punjabi wikipedia, Shiju explained that the
literacy rate and activity in wiki are not related. Their might be different
reasons for each language community for its low wiki activism. Computer
literacy, awareness about free knowledge and culture, access to internet and
computers, support from government are some of the reasons cited. Added to
that are the poor support for Odia in computers, lack of awareness that our
computers are suitable for Odia, lack of typing solutions, are some of the
reasons put forward and discussed.
Idea of using articles from Odia Encyclopedia (‘Gyanamandala’ by Binoda
Kanungo), using Maps, Manuals, Books could be used for developing Wikipedia,
Wikimapia, WikIBooks and WikiSource, etc were dicussed.
We discussed about prioritizing the tasks and finding out various
important tasks that needs to be completed in Odia wikipedia. We already
started working on some of these. We also decided to conduct awiki workshop
in Odisha very soon.
ସୁଭ ପା/ Subhashish Panigrahi
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--
ସୁଭ ପା/ Subhashish Panigrahi
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