CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/July 2015
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...
Event organized/participated
edit- 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.
- 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. The total number of bugs reported, subscribed to and identified came out to be 92 across various Indian language Wikimedia projects and English Wikipedia.
- 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.
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- 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
edit- 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
editTito Dutta, Luis Gomes and Abhinav Garule have joined the CIS-A2K team as Programme Associates this year. Tito, joined in January, will be working for internal documentation and resource building, and Luis and Abhinav, joined in March, will be implementing the Konkani and Marathi work plan respectively along with community liaison.
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 Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director at sumandro@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.
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