Hello,
Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) program
would like to share with you the newsletter below for the month of November
2015. We look forward to hear any feedback or input you might have.
Wikimedia communities of four (Kannada, Marathi, Odia and Telugu) out of
the five Focus Language Areas joined for the IRC-based meetings on 29
November 2015 to discuss about the next set of activities for the newly
recruited Programme Associates.
Marathi:
(https://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/विकिपीडिया:आय.आर.सी._चॅनेल/२९-११-२०१५)
Four Marathi Wikipedians Santosh Dahiwal (User:संतोष दहिवळ),
User:Suyogaerospace and Santosh Shingare (User:Cherishsantosh) along with
Wikimedian and CIS-A2K member Abhinav Garule (User:Abhinavgarule) joined
for the IRC. The discussions were focused on CIS-A2K's work from July 2015
and Marathi Wikipedia work plan (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Work_plan_July_2015_-_June_2016/Mar…).
Wikimedians joined in the discussion proposed for diversifying the outreach
and take it to many other cities and towns apart from the usual places like
Mumbai or Pune. Santosh Dahiwal, administrator of Marathi Wikipedia
appreciated encouraged to keep posting about every Marathi Wikipedia
community activity and invite for various activities organized in different
places.
Kannada:
(https://kn.wikipedia.org/wiki/ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ:ಸಮ್ಮಿಲನ/೨೦)
Thanks to the seven Kannada Wikimedians User:Omshivaprakash, Deepu, Yogesh
(User:Yogesh), Vishwa, User:M G Harish along with CIS-A2K team members
Anant (User:Ananth subray), Pavanaja (User:Pavanaja) who participated in
this meeting to discuss about priorities for the community and how to take
the programmatic works forward with the help of the new Programme
Associate. The community members suggested for more work related
documentation for the community to know about programmatic work by CIS-A2K
e.g. books relicensed and digitized.
Odia:
(https://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ:IRC/29-11-2015)
Four Odia Wikimedians User:Akala Kushmanda and User:Swagatika91 along with
Sailesh (User:Saileshpat) and Subhashish Panigrahi (User:Psubhashish) who
are part of CIS-A2K program joined in the IRC suggested for creating
monthly offline meetups and online campaigns where the latter could help
recruit new editors from Twitter , Facebook and other social media. They
also emphasized on featuring Wikimedians in local newspapers and websites
so the Wikimedians and other potential Wikimedians would be encouraged to
contribute. There is a potential for the Odia Wikiquote (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikiquote_Oriya)
which is in Incubator at this moment and there was a request to make it
live. The Wikimedians also suggested for creating more projects for quality
improvement of article. One of the participants of the IRC also showed
interest in supporting outreach in the southern and western part of Odisha.
Telugu:
(
https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/వికీపీడియా:సమావేశం/వెబ్_ఛాట్/సమావేశం_16/సంభాష…
)
Five Telugu Wikimedians JVRK Prasad, Arjuna Rao.C, Sujatha.T., Pranay Raj
Vangari and Viswanadh.B.K. along with CIS-A2K program members Pavan and
Rahim joined in this IRC. Arjuna emphasized on conducting a reader survey
to assess various interest areas for the Telugu Wikipedia. Wikipedians also
shared how important it is to develop a tool that could ease in extracting
text from scanned books using Google OCR so that could be useful for Telugu
Wikisource. Improving quality of Telugu author Sayeed Naseer Ahmad's books
that exist on Wikisource was also discussed. Most of the participants
expressed interest in collaborating for celebrating Telugu Wikipedia Day
and Telugu Wikipedia 12th anniversary. The community members asked to share
the statistics on success of the "how-to" video tutorials that the CIS-A2K
program created for Hindi (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Learn_to_edit_Hindi_Wikipedia)
and Kannada (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/category:Learn_to_edit_Kannada_Wikipedia)
so that the Telugu community could assess if the similar tutorial could be
made for Telugu Wikipedia.
== Events ==
⬤ Community discussion for making Tulu Wikipedia live (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/making-tulu-wikipedia-live): CIS-A2K
Programme Officer Rahmanuddin Shaik visited Mangalore on October 28 and 29
and again on November 5 and 6, 2015. During his visit he interacted with
Wikipedians for making the Tulu Wikipedia live. There were discussions on
translations of system messages that appear on Wikipedia interface,
creating templates pages and adding images. Around 79 strings were
translated on Translatewiki.net, the community project for MediaWiki
localization, and about 500 strings were approved. This event was organised
at Tulu Bhavana, Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Akademy. The director of the
institution was part of the meeting who agreed for relicensing lower
resolution cover pages of their published books and metadata of 157 volumes
of books under Creative Commons licenses, and share detailed information of
Tulu Sahitya Akademy award winners which would add close to 100 biography
articles on Tulu Wikipedia.
⬤ Open Source India 2015 (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/open-source-india-2015): On 19 and 20
November, the twelfth Open Source India event was held at NIMHANS
Convention Centre in Bangalore. On 19 November Subhashish Panigrahi
attended the event behalf of CIS-A2K.
⬤ FUEL GILT Conferences 2015: (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/fuel-gilt-conference-2015): FUEL GILT
Conference 2015 was held at Tamil Virtual Academy, Anna University Campus,
Gandhi Mandapam Road, Kottur in Chennai between 20-22 November 2015.
CIS-A2K Programme Officer Subhashish Panigrahi participated the conference
as a speaker and discussed about "Consensus in localization in a
multi-stakeholder community: Wikimedia as a case study" (
http://slides.com/psubhashish/consensus/fullscreen).
== Blog posts ==
⬤ Shaik, Rahmanuddin and Hasan, Tanveer. Konkani-language books from
Konkani-language culture center Mannd Sobhaann to enrich Konkani Wikipedia (
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/konkani-language-books-from-konkani-l…),
1 November 2015
== Media coverage ==
1. शंभर वर्षांपूर्वीच्या पुस्तकांचे होणार डिजिटायझेशन (
http://epaper.lokmat.com/newsview.aspx?eddate=11/11/2015&pageno=2&edition=4…),
Lokmat, 11 November 2015;
2. Dr. Pavanaja featured in Vijayavani, Vijayavani (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/dr-pavanaja-featured-in-vijayavani), 16
November 2015;
3. तेसर फ्यूल कॉन्फरेंस आओर मोज़िला हैकाथन संपन्न (
http://www.esamaad.com/regular/2015/11/13714-third-fuel-conference-complete…),
esamaad, 19 November 2015;
4. ଅନ୍ଲାଇନରେ ପଢ଼ିହେବ ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ ପ୍ରସାଦ ଦାସଙ୍କ ୩୦ଟି ବହି (
http://sambadepaper.com/Details.aspx?id=209489&boxid=2111679), Sambad, 19
November 2015;
5. तीसरा फ्यूल कॉन्फ्रेंस और मोज़िला हैकाथन संपन्न (
http://surkhiyan.com/fuel-gilt-conference/), 23 November 2015;
6. तीसरा फ्यूल जिल्ट कॉन्फ्रेंस और मोज़िला हैकाथन चेन्नई में संपन्न (
http://aajtak.intoday.in/story/third-fuel-conference-completed-in-chennai-1…),
Aaj Tak, 24 November 2015
7. भाषाई कंप्यूटिंग के मानक बनाने के लिए चेन्नई में हुआ तीसरा फ्यूल जिल्ट (
http://www.outlookhindi.com/media/social-media/third-fuel-jilt-in-chennai-t…),
Outlook, 26 November 2015
== Team updates ==
After several rounds of the selection committees formed for Kannada, Odia
and Telugu, the CIS-A2K team finally got on-board Anant Subray (User:Ananth
subray), Sailesh Patnaik (User:Saileshpat) and Pavan Santosh (User:Pavan
santhosh.s) as Programme Associates (PAs) for the three fore-mentioned
languages out of the five Focus Language Areas. The three PAs will be
working closely with their respective language communities based on several
community priorities and implement the work plans. Anant is a Kannada
Wikipedian who joined the community during the WikiProject Christ
University (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/WikiProject_Christ_University)
outreach and later became a Campus Ambassador mentoring his junior batch
students for contributing to Kannada Wikipedia and Wikisource. Active since
2012, Sailesh is a long time Odia Wikimedian and is active in Odia
Wikipedia outreach. He has also participated actively in various national
projects like Wiki Loves Food (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Food) and is part of the
organizing team of WikiConference India 2016 (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2016) and various
other global initiatives. Pavan is the first Telugu Individual Engagement
Grant (IEG) recipient for his IEG "Making Telugu content accessible" (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IEG/Making_telugu_content_acces…)
which was aimed at creating a catalog of Telugu books available in the
Digital Library of India (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Library_of_India). Pavan has been one
of the keen organizers of the monthly Telugu Wikimedia community meetups in
Hyderabad, Telengana apart from participating in various community
initiatives. All the PAs went through an orientation by the core team at
CIS-A2K for five days. Kannada Wikimedians Pavithra H, Yogesh and
Omshivaprakash along with Tamil Wikimedian and Wikimedia India's (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India) Program Director
Ravishankar A. joined in an evening during the orientation to share their
advise to the PAs. Kannada Wikimedian Kiran Ravikumar also joined in
another day and spent time with the PAs advising on various aspects of
their work.
== Resources created ==
⬤ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tulu_Wikipedia_Tutorial_01.webm
⬤
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TuluWikipediaTutorial01-With-Audio.…
⬤ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TuluWikiTutorial02.webm
⬤ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TuluWikiTutorial03.webm
⬤ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TuluWikiTutorial04.webm
Tulu Wikipedia tutorial (
http://cis-india.org/openness/news/tulu-wikipedia-tutorial): A series of
"how-to" tutorials were created by Pavanaja for new editors of the Tulu
Wikipedia (https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/tcy/ಮುಖ್ಯ_ಪುಟ). The
tutorials explain in details about various aspects of Wikipedia editing
like creating account/logging in, Wikipedia basics and wiki mark-up,
editing Wikipedia and adding citations. The Tulu Wikipedia is in incubation
at this moment and CIS-A2K is helping build a community in Mangalore and
places around Mangalore where a significant Tulu speaking community
live.
This newsletter is also available on Meta at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/November_2015
Thank you
Tito Dutta
CIS-A2K Programme Associate