CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/January 2021

Access to Knowledge

January 2021

Newsletter

Volume 01

Online meeting of Punjabi Wikimedians

CIS-A2K conducted a virtual meetup for the Punjabi Wikimedia community. A total of 14 Wikimedians took part in the event and discussed some of the keep aspects during this meeting. The meeting kick-started with the discussion of Wikipedia 20th anniversary celebration and continued with the discussions of Punjabi-Hindi Wikimedians call and detailed talk about Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021 by the User:Mulkh Singh and community members shared the feedback and suggestions about the WMWM read more...

Marathi language fortnight

CIS-A2K organised a Marathi Fortnight intending to celebrate Marathi Language day. In past few years A2K has organised several workshops in the different parts of the states but this time due to pandemic there was a change in the way of organising and focused on re-licensing appeal campaign on these occasions. The appeals were sent to various groups, authors, heirs/copyright holders, publishing houses, NGOs etc. After reaching out to several organisations few of them responded back with a great Intrest. Five authors have handed over 12 books for scanning and further processing. The OTRS process is being completed by copyright holders. In January, five books were processed and uploaded on Wikimedia Commons read more...

Online workshop for active citizen groups

CIS-A2K organised with Active citizen groups from various places shown interest to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Based on the interest shown by the members of this group the sessions were arranged, mostly this was an introductory session to Wikimedia projects but some of the important point like Unicode, open-source, Marathi websites, copyright issues, authors database were discussed. A total of 45 participants actively took part in these sessions, this was 2.5 hours workshop which was conducted over zoom platform read more...

Lingua Libre workshop for Marathi community

CIS-A2K started working with Marathi community members on Lingua Libre (LL) project from November 2020. Several community members from various places have attended the first introductory session on 23 January. In this workshop, the importance of LL project, the process of creating local lists, selection of Wikimedia lists and the actual process of recording & uploading were demonstrated. The hands-on activity was done to clarify doubts and troubleshooting. Expert Wikimedian Tito Dutta explained the planning process for the group, how to develop the lists, the integration with Wikidata Lexeme project and application of LL content in other free knowledge projects read more...

Online book release event with Solapur University

CIS-A2K is working on various Wikimedia projects with partner PAH Solapur University for the last two years. The online programme was conducted on 24 January 2021. This one & half-hour programme was attended by professors from different universities, writers and citizens. CIS-A2K representative explained the content generation process in Wikimedia projects with a specific focus on relicensing. Prof. Gadgil elaborated on open knowledge platforms and status of Marathi language content on the web. Author of the book, VC Mrunalini Phadnavis spoke about the contents of the book and expressed her wish to release more works under a free license. Total 80-100 people participated in this event. The University has decided to work on digitisation and relicensing programme this year. We received a positive response from many authors and copyright holders after the session. The event was well published by the media read more...

Punjabi Books Re-licensing

CIS-A2K collaborated with Gurbhajan Gill, Dharam Chand Vatish and Fateh Jeet to digitise the some of there books ono Wikimedia commons. Their works mainly related to Punjabi language and literature. A total of 17 books are relicensed and published on Wikimedia commons after a good round of scanning and post-processing. Books can be accessed here, here & here

Research needs assessment

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.

Wikipedia 20th anniversary celebration edit-a-thon

CIS-A2K conducted a mini edit-a-thon on behalf of the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia. This was a two-day edit-a-thon were 12 (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Santali, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu) Indic language communities with a total of 40 Wikimedians took part in the mini edit-a-thon to contribute on Wikimedia projects. This was a third event in the mini edit-a-thon series read more...

Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021 updates

Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021 is an online wiki-event by A2K to be conducted from 19 – 21 February 2021 during the occasion of International Mother Language Day. This will be an entirely online wiki-event with different components such as online workshops, presentations, discussions, etc. During January the programme committee has been through the submission and prepared the programme schedule which can be seen here and also open the registration for the interested participants and community members.

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