cross posting to Offline & Wikimedia-India.
Hi
I'm working on the Wikimedia Foundation's initiatives in India and I'm reaching out for help on a really exciting opportunity. Assam is a state in the North-East of India. The Government has an interesting scheme to give laptops to deserving students leaving secondary school (i.e., completed 10 years of education and about 15-16 year olds.) This scheme is being managed by an organisation called Amtron - who have issued a Tender for the procurement of these laptops.
There are 19,000 laptops that will be distributed in this initiative. (These are on Ubuntu Linux - and very reasonably configured.)
Assam has traditionally had a problem with infrastructure and Internet access is a problem. Someone who is supporting Amtron has asked the Foundation if we can give them an offline version of Wikipedia to pre-load onto these computers. Given that it is for 15-16 age group, it does need to be of appropriate content. They'd like it to have topics of academic interest covered (e.g., classical sciences, humanities, literature and accountancy.) Ideally we'd like them to also have articles on India (e.g. history, geography, culture, etc.) as well as other areas of general interest (e.g., music, sports, etc.) Currently, everything is required in English only.
While these laptops aren't going to necessarily be in classrooms, given that they will be with some students, it's safe to assume that other students, friends and relatives would access these. Given the context of Assam, I thank we can easily assume that 10 people would access these computers. That adds up to improving access for nearly 2,00,000 people! I'm really inspired by the potential of this partnership because because it allows us huge scale with efficiency in effort.
I understand that Wikipedia for Schools is readying for release sometime in July 2011 - and the timing couldn't be better.
Can you help us out with a) how you could help on adding the additional articles that this initiative would require? (You could also sign up on the Volunteer Page) b) how fast this can be given to Amtron? (They are looking for the inputs in July 2011.) c) any other ideas that you think might be useful?
Many thanks.
Best,
Hisham Mundol
Wikimedia India Programs skype : hisham.wikimedia gtalk : hmundol@wikimedia.org twitter : @mundol
There's a slightly more nuttier scheme brewing in the south, where 900,000 laptops are going to be distributed to students next year [1]. Let me see if i can access someone in the TN govt regarding this. -Arun
[1] http://ibnlive.in.com/news/free-laptops-will-have-tn-logo-burnt-on-chips/160...
Yes, it would be great if we could support this as well.
Hisham Mundol
Wikimedia India Programs skype : hisham.wikimedia gtalk : hmundol@wikimedia.org twitter : @mundol
On Jun 23, 2011, at 3:35 PM, Arun Ganesh wrote:
There's a slightly more nuttier scheme brewing in the south, where 900,000 laptops are going to be distributed to students next year [1]. Let me see if i can access someone in the TN govt regarding this. -Arun
[1] http://ibnlive.in.com/news/free-laptops-will-have-tn-logo-burnt-on-chips/160...
-- j.mp/ArunGanesh _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Yes - it would be great. Any further contacts on this, Arun?
Based on this article, it sounds like they are keen to have educational content pre-downloaded onto the computer. We should definitely be bundled into this package.
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 3:21 AM, Hisham Mundol hmundol@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Yes, it would be great if we could support this as well.
*Hisham Mundol*
Wikimedia http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home
India Programshttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs
skype : hisham.wikimedia gtalk : hmundol@wikimedia.org ** twitter : @mundo *l
On Jun 23, 2011, at 3:35 PM, Arun Ganesh wrote:
There's a slightly more nuttier scheme brewing in the south, where 900,000 laptops are going to be distributed to students next year [1]. Let me see if i can access someone in the TN govt regarding this. -Arun
[1] http://ibnlive.in.com/news/free-laptops-will-have-tn-logo-burnt-on-chips/160...
-- j.mp/ArunGanesh _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Hi Hisham,
Some work on this regard had begun from our side (self & Tinu) but the process is turning out to slow & laborious. If any-one is to start working on this he need not start from scratch but can use the beginning we made here...
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Projects:_Wikipedia_for_Schools/Indian_version
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------
On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 12:33 AM, Jessie Wild jwild@wikimedia.org wrote:
Yes - it would be great. Any further contacts on this, Arun?
Based on this article, it sounds like they are keen to have educational content pre-downloaded onto the computer. We should definitely be bundled into this package.
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 3:21 AM, Hisham Mundol hmundol@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Yes, it would be great if we could support this as well.
*Hisham Mundol*
Wikimedia http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home
India Programshttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs
skype : hisham.wikimedia gtalk : hmundol@wikimedia.org ** twitter : @mundo *l
On Jun 23, 2011, at 3:35 PM, Arun Ganesh wrote:
There's a slightly more nuttier scheme brewing in the south, where 900,000 laptops are going to be distributed to students next year [1]. Let me see if i can access someone in the TN govt regarding this. -Arun
[1] http://ibnlive.in.com/news/free-laptops-will-have-tn-logo-burnt-on-chips/160...
-- j.mp/ArunGanesh _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
-- *Jessie Wild Global Development, Manager Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 15:35, Arun Ganesh arun.planemad@gmail.com wrote:
There's a slightly more nuttier scheme brewing in the south, where 900,000 laptops are going to be distributed to students next year [1]. Let me see if i can access someone in the TN govt regarding this.
Tamil Wiktionary(Also 10th largest Wiktionary project) is a perfect candidate for this scheme since its "hassle free" in terms of effort (no proof checking etc required) and bulk of the words(mostly technical glossary) were from Tamil Virtual University. Let me dig more into it.
Regards Srikanth.L
What a great opportunity! Thanks for spear-heading, Hisham. Some notes below, which I'd love thoughts on:
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 2:54 AM, Hisham Mundol hmundol@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I understand that Wikipedia for Schools http://schools-wikipedia.org/ is readying for release sometime in July 2011 - and the timing couldn't be better.
July 2011 was the most recent update we heard from User:BozMo, who is the lead for SOS Children's Wikipedia for Schools (WPFS) project. It would be great to get an update from him on this timing!
The list of current articles can be seen here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_Projects/Content_Development/Schools The primary changes in the version pending release in July 2011 will be newer revisions of these articles.
*Can you help us out with * *a) how you could help on adding the additional articles that this initiative would require?** (You could also sign up on the **Volunteer Page* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_Projects/Volunteer_Page*)*
WPFS is geared to match the UK curriculum, which is very useful but undeniably lacking in its coverage of other geographically important topics, such as history & geography of India.
To that end, if we had a list of ~200 additional articles which *should* be included in an educational encyclopedia for India, we can add these to the updated version of WPFS. Kenya is also doing a similar thing (they are recording their list on the offline projects pages of metawikihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_Projects/Content_Development/Schools/Kenyan_Topics).
* Would anyone be interested in spear-heading this for India-specific content? *I have some ideas for how this could be facilitated (namely, by leveraging the work done by the Wikipedia 1.0 team and the India WikiProject [1], so reach out to me directly!!
[[1] Toolserver: http://toolserver.org/~enwp10/bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&projecta=India&...
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