CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/February 2021

Access to Knowledge
 February 2021 
Newsletter 
 Volume 02 

Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021

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CIS-A2K conducted Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021 an online wiki-event on 19 – 21 February 2021 during the occasion of International Mother Language Day. This event had many Indic and International participants. The opening keynote speaker of the event was Asaf Bartov and the second-day keynote speaker was Katherine Maher the Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation. You can see the details schedule of the event here. This event had different components such as online workshops, presentations, discussions as per the needs of the Wikimedians. All the session during the events were recorded as per the Wikimedians request and can be seen here.

Online Meeting with Punjabi Wikimedians

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CIS-A2K conducted an online meeting with the Punjabi Wikimedians. In this meeting, a total of 11 Wikimedians joined. The main focus of this meeting was to discuss the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of trustees. The discussion was long as there were so many things to discuss. In the end, it was decided that participants need more time to understand the whole thing. So, they will submit their opinion later read more... 

Marathi Language Day

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CIS-A2K is focusing on re-licensing activity in Maharashtra for the last three years. As of now, 150+ books have been re-licensed, scanned and uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. The occasions like Marathi Language Day, Women's Day etc. are utilised to appeal to the individuals and organisations to re-license the books.  With respect to these online sessions on the process were conducted with the Manavlok organisation and other authors. They have started the OTRS process to re-license a total of 7 books. The books are being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons after the scanning read more...

Wikisource Audiobooks workshop

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CIS-A2K in collaboration with Janna Prabodhini has mobilised the group of 40 women in knowledge creation activities. This women group has started working on the language-related content on Wikimedia projects. One of the group is working on the Lingua Libre project and other members who had worked on the recording earlier have started working on the Audiobooks project. This first online session was conducted with 22 members. Total 8 members have selected various re-licensed books from Wikimedia Commons from the Marathi books category. The group has decided to upload at least 3 books in Women's History Month, March 2021 read more...

2021-22 Proposal Needs Assessment

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CIS-A2K is in a process of writing the work plan for the year 2021-22. We are planning to design the work plan based on the needs of the Indiana Wikimedia community. In order to obtain collective suggestion and thoughts. We will be doing the next years work by considering the responses/feedback about the events conducted previously. We request you to go through the various sections in the Google form and respond.

CIS-A2K Team changes

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Bhuvana Meenakshi the Bridging gender gap research intern at CIS-A2K will be moving on to another organisation soon. She was associated with A2K for almost two years now. During this time she mainly worked on research related to the gender gap in the Wikimedia projects which can be seen in details here

Research Needs Assessment

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CIS-A2K has been engaged with research on various topics related to Indian language Wikimedia content and communities since 2019. This year, as a follow-up to this work, we decided to undertake a needs assessment exercise to understand the awareness about research within Indian language Wikimedia communities, identify existing projects if any and gather community inputs on knowledge gaps and priority areas of focus. The needs assessment has been shared on all relevant community platforms in January. Interested community members are encouraged to respond to the questionnaire here and if you have queries do write to us here.

Gender gap case study

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The final report of a study on the prevalence of a gender-based gap/bias in participation and content creation in Indian language Wikimedia communities was published in February 2020. Titled 'Bridging the Gender Gap: A Report on Indian Language Wikimedia Communities', the study focused on three thematic areas, namely the engagement of women contributors in online and offline spaces, challenges in the development of content created by/about women on Wikimedia projects, and strategies for sustained participation. The study also mapped existing efforts and initiatives in this area and outlined learnings related to offline/online participation, awareness, training and outreach, and community health. The research was undertaken by Bhuvana Meenakshi Koteeswaran, with editorial oversight and support by Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and additional inputs from Ambika Tandon and Sumandro Chattapadhyay. The full report may be accessed on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki and the CIS website.

International Mother Language Day

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CIS-A2K organised a label-a-thon on the occasion of International Mother Language Day. This was conducted on 6 February 2021 and was a day event. During this label-a-thon 24 Wikimedians took part and contributed to Wikimedia projects. This was also a pre-event of Wikimedia Wikimeeet India 2021. During this label-a-thon, 1,580 Wikidata edits were made. read more...

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