Dear Wikimedians,
Please find below CIS-A2K's newsletter for the month of February, 2015. The newsletter contains details of all the activities conducted and organised by CIS-A2K team during February, 2015.

Regards,

Telugu Wikipedia Winter Camp at Andhra Loyola College

Students of physics, statistics and Telugu departments of Andhra Loyola College spent 5 days of their Christmas vacation of 2014 to edit and enrich Telugu Wikipedia and Wikisource. They worked on their respective subject areas and came up with more than 100 new articles on Telugu Wikipedia and about 300 pages of Veeresalingam's works were typed on Telugu Wikisource.
CIS-A2K has signed an MoU with Andhra Loyola College to make available free knowledge in Telugu to all Telugus across the globe. In this approoach, a two month camp was organised in the college campus. In continuation to the two month camp, 5 days of students' Christmas vacation were marked as Wiki Winter Camp at Andhra Loyola College. 5 students from each of Physics, Statistics and Telugu showed interest to attend the camp. By the time, camp began, there were not 15 but 41 students from various disciplines who attended the camp.

Op-ed

Our Endangered Languages (Subhashish Panigrahi; February 21, 2015)

Blog Entries

  1. A Wikipedia Presentation at BITS, Goa (Radhakrishna Arvapally; February 9, 2015). Arvapally was a guest blogger.
  2. Developing Open Knowledge Digital Resources in Indian Languages (Tejaswini Niranjana; February 20, 2015).
  3. Telugu Wikipedia Winter Camp at Andhra Loyola College (Rahmanuddin Shaik; February 26, 2015).

Event Organised

  1. Train the Trainer (Organized by CIS-A2K; CEO Centre, Dodda Gubbi, Bangalore; February 26 – March 1, 2015).

Events Supported

  1. Tewiki11 at Tirupati
  2. Hindi sammelan at Delhi
  3. Sanskrit Workshop for University VCs, professors

Media Coverage

  1. More online free content in Telugu Wikipedia soon (A.D.Rangarajan; Hindu, February 16, 2015).
  2. Cultural knowledge needs to be more open (Jen Wike Huger; OpenSource.com; February 18, 2015).
  3. Online Free Content in Telugu Wikipedia (Andhra Jyothy; February 19, 2015).

Participation in Events

  1. Hindi Wiki Community Baithak (Organized by Wikipedia Community; February 14 – 15, 2015). Subhashish Panigrahi attended the event.
  2. An International Conclave of Odia Language (Organized by the Intellects; February 20 – 21, 2015; Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.

Announcement

  1. 2015 Opensource.com Community Awards: Every year, Opensource.com awards people from our community who have excelled in contributing and sharing stories about open source. Subhashish Panigrahi from the CIS-A2K team won the award under the category ‘People's Choice Awards’.
  2. CIS-A2K team also published the Telugu Wikipedia Stats tables. Most metrics have been collected from a partial dump (aka stub dump), which contains all revisions of every article, meta data, but no page content.

The Access to Knowledge Team

  1. Wikimedia Foundation has funded A2K to anchor the growth of the Wikimedia movement in India. The A2K team consists of five members, all of them being based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Subhashish Panigrahi, Rahmanuddin Shaik and Tanveer. We also have one Advisor, Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana working with us.
  2. Archives of our newsletters can be accessed here. Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programmes, technical bugs, logistics-merchandise and media, public relations and communications here.

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organisation that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

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Request for collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor, Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

This bulletin is also available on Meta-wiki at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Reports/Newsletter/February_2015

Thank you all for your kind support and collaboration,

Regards,

Tanveer Hasan
Programme Officer
Access to Knowledge
The Centre for Internet and Society
Bangalore