Dear all,
CIS-A2K would like to share with you the newsletter for the month of
July 2015. We look forward to hearing any feedback or input you might have.
The Goan Konkani Wikipedia (available at gom.wikipedia.org) has gone
live after spending nine long years in incubation.
Konkani Wikipedia has many heroes, Melissa Simoes and Darshan Kandolkar
are two of the many long-term contributors who joined Konkani Wikipedia
during the Konkani Wikipedia @ Goa University program and are still
active even after the program was formally concluded. Darshan is an
Assistant Professor at the Government College Pernem in Goa. His
professor at Goa University, Dr. Madhavi Sardesai—who passed away last
year—played a vital role in inspiring him to pursue higher studies in
Konkani. Darshan realized that there is a lot to be written in Konkani
when he was introduced to Wikipedia, and after that, he became dedicated
towards contributing to the project.
The Konkani Wikimedia community has been using social media actively to
promote the Konkani Wikipedia project, and to celebrate the successes of
its contributors. After Melissa became the top contributor to the
project, her fellow editor Luis Gomes congratulated her. That brought
Melissa into the spotlight, gaining the attention of editors from the
global Wikimedia community. The community is continuing a tradition to
rewarding the most prolific contributor of each month as the "Wikipedian
of the Month".
More in the Wikimedia blog:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/07/15/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live/
== Event organized/participated ==
* Christ university Undergraduate program (July 1-8):
Students were initiated into the Wikimedia activities with hands on
sessions of typing on Wikisource. Faculty of the Christ University
helped the A2K team in deciding on the texts that were to be typed.
These texts will provide much needed impetus for Wikisource related
activities in Indian Languages. Wikipedia Education Programme at Christ
University received support from Ravishankar.A of the Tamil Wikimedia
community and Sayant Mahato from Sanskrit Wikimedia community.
* St. Aloyisius college, Mangalore (July 4-5):
Tulu and Kannada Wikipedia workshops were conducted in St. Aloysis
College, Mangalore. Tulu Wikipedia is in Incubator and a small community
is growing in Mangalore. Pavanaja U.B. and Rahmanuddin Shaik
participated in this events.
* MediaWiki Train the Trainer Program2015
A four-day long train-the-trainer program aimed at building leadership
among technical contributors to Indic language Wikimedians in the areas
of bugs, bots--Pywikipedia and Auto Wiki Browser, various MediaWiki
tools, and translations. This program was organized during June 24-27 by
CIS-A2K with support from Ravishankar.A from Wikimedia India, MediaWiki
developers Pavithra H., Yogesh Omshivaprakash H.L. and Harsh Kothari,
and Tamil Wikimedian Dineshkumar Ponnusamy.
* Wikimania 2015, Mexico City:
** Learning Day (15 July 2015):
A whole day dedicated for evaluation of strategies and activities by
various major stakeholders of the Wikimedia movement; community members
who lead major activities, Wikimedia chapters, affiliate organizations
and Wikimedia Foundation itself. There were several group activities,
exchange of ideas focused on project and community level outreach and
other activities, tools and techniques, and best practices. Subhashish
Panigrahi participated in this event.
** Talk on Guerrilla GLAM:
Subhashish presented about doing GLAM the guerrilla way--by sharing many
frugal practices, and ways around acquiring cultural content to enrich
Wikipedia and Wikipedia's sister projects where the conventional GLAM
partnerships do not fetch much success.
* * Panel discussion "Edit-a-thons for bridging the gender gap on Wikimedia:
A panel discussion centered around using edit-a-thons as an outreach
tool among women, measuring its impact and comparing it with other modes
of outreach. Subhashish along with Malayalam Wikimedian Netha Hussain as
moderator, and other fellow Wikimedians in the panel Rohini Lakshane,
Emily Temple-Wood, Siko Bouterse (WMF) and Heather Walls participated in
the discussion.
** Indic meetup:
During Wikimania, an Indic meetup was organized where Wikimedians from
India, Bangladesh and Nepal representing various language communities,
Wikimedia India, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Wikimedia Nepal, and Access To
Knowledge (CIS-A2K) gathered to discuss about various challenges,
cross-community collaborative projects, organizing larger events, and
strategies to grow the Wikimedia movement in South Asia.
* "Classical Languages In The Digital Era" conference, Central Institute
of Indian Languages, Mysore (Participated by Tanveer Hasan on 17 July 2015):
Organized by Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore this
conference was aimed at discussing about the future of Indian classical
languages in the digital era. Classical languages that are more of
confined within the print media have to find their way out to reach to
masses using the digital media. Linguists, researchers and scholars
representing various Indian languages gathered at CIIL where Tanveer
Hasan from CIS-A2K participated.
* Hackathon at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay (28 June 2015)
Around 35 students (25 male and 10 female) and interns together from IIT
Bombay participated in a hackathon organized in the institution by the
Wikimedia community led by Santosh Singare and Rahul Deshmukh.
Rahimanuddin Shaik from CIS-A2K delivered a presentation on Wikidata and
bots and Abhinav Garule supported in organizing the event. The students
formed groups and worked on brainstorming about different bots.
* Odia Wikipedia Turning 13 this June 3 (Organized by the Odia Wikipedia
Community and supported by CIS-A2K; Institute of Physics, Sachivalaya
Marg, Sainik School PO, Gajapati Nagar, Bhubaneswar, Odisha; June 3, 2015):
The Odia Wikipedia turned 13 on June 3. The community gathered in
Odisha's capital city Bhubaneswar for a day to celebrate this day.
During the thirteenth anniversary celebrations, the community had a day
long session to assess community needs, address issues, and identify
priority areas to focus on for the future. A legacy encoding →
Unicodeencoding converter was released publicly during the event. This
'encoding converter' is a community project led by Wikimedians
Jnanaranjan Sahu and Manoj Sahukar and converts the encoding systems
used by Odia newspapers, the Odisha government websites and many
publications into Unicode.
== Blogs ==
* Panigrahi, Subhashish. Konkani Wikipedia Goes Live After 'Nine Years'
of Incubation (July 18, 2015)
* Patnaik, Sailesh. Odia Wikipedia meets Google Developer Group
* Hasan, Tanveer. Magic words (29 July 2015)
* Hasan, Tanveer. Train the Trainer: Running effective outreach
activities in India (30 July 2015)
== Team updates ==
Tito Dutta, Luis Gomes and Abhinav Garule have joined the CIS-A2K team
as Programme Associates from March this year. Tito will be working for
internal documentation and resource building, and Luis and Abhinav will
be implementing the Konkani and Marathi work plan respectively along
with community liaison.
Communications:
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
* Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CISA2K
* Visit us at: https://cis-india.org
This newsletter is also available on Meta at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/July_2015
--
Best!
Subhashish Panigrahi
Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge
Centre for Internet and Society
@subhapa / https://cis-india.org