CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/May 2016

CIS-A2K Newsletter, May and June 2016
Train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training for Indian language Wikimedians
English Wikipedia administrator Tinu Cherian educating participants of Train-the-train programme 2013 about Wikimedia-related media strategies.

After two iterations of the Train the Trainer in 2013 and 2015, CIS-A2K organised the third programme during June 15-17 at Bengaluru. The Mediawiki training was designed to help groom technical leadership skills of the technical contributors of the communities. A total of 45 participants, that were selected by a collaborative consultation with the community, took part in these events. The trainers for both the events consisted of subject experts from the Wikimedia community, the free knowledge movement, the free and open source software community and CIS-A2K programme staff. CIS-A2K thanks Wikimedia India for their support and participation in these events.

. . . Check the event page for more details of Train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training.

Community celebrates birthday of Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wiktionary
Chinmayee Mishra (Community member)
Subhashish Panigrahi (CIS-A2K)
and Sailesh Patnaik (CIS-A2K)
:
Odia Wikipedia's 14th year celebration event. Photo by 2sarojkumar, CC BY-SA 4.0.

With the Odia Wikipedia and its sister projects, a handful of dedicated volunteer editors are taking the Odia language to the world outside. The editor community that has recently celebrated Odia Wikipedia’s 14th anniversary in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India is collectively growing two more projects; Odia Wikisource, an online library that already has over 300 volumes of text, and Odia Wiktionary, an online dictionary that has over 100,000 entries. With these live projects and more projects in the pipeline, this community is bringing a digital revolution in Odia by sharing valuable content online and creating many language tools inside and outside the Wikimedia projects.
. . . Read more

Event announcements
Event announcements and press releases:

Project celebrations:

Upcoming events

Programme reports
Outreach, education programme and community engagement programme reports:

A week-long online edit-a-thon was organised by the Telugu Wikipedia community to cover popular social, political and other events on the Telugu Wikipedia.
The Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) programme at The Centre for Internet and Society, has been involved in organising workshops on developing open educational resources (OER) in Indian languages with undergraduate and masters students across various institution to introduce students to tools of collaborative knowledge production on the Internet and methods for generating new online content in Indian languages.
The Kannada-language Wikipedia celebrated its 13th anniversary on February 14 in Mangalore. To celebrate the journey of the project and the community, Kannada Wikipedians gathered at Saint Aloysius College, Mangaluru on May 14.
Read reports of 29 May, 28 May, 21 May, 19 May and, 16 May

Articles/blogs
Articles, opinion pieces, analysis pieces:

Since Wikipedia is considered as the go-to source for different kinds of knowledge by anyone starting off in a particular field of study, and since Indian languages (IL) are often the default languages of the classroom in India, strengthening the quality of the material available on IL Wikipedias is certain to have widespread tangible and intangible impact.
An overview of Odia Wikipedia and the journey of the project and the contributor community.
Editorial column about the Odia Wikipedia editor community's journey to make the 14 year old project the largest online Odia encyclopedia.
Blog on Odia Wikipedia's 14th birthday.
Editorial column about Odia Wikipedia and how the contributor community is using it as a tool to grow the Odia-language on the Internet.
Blog on WikiTungi Puri, an informal collective of the Odia-language Wikimedians living in the city of Puri. It featured interview of an editor Adyasha Sahu.
Indian English Wikipedian User:Nvvchar completed 1500 Did you know articles. This is the second highest on English Wikipedia. This blog features User:Nvvchar's constant effort in featuring many India-related articles on English Wikipedia.
Wikipedia articles form a criterion for quality when they have more images, illustrations, and citations, etc. An article without these is considered dull. Hence images and external links form a criterion for quality of articles on Wikipedias. This blog post tries to analyse the current scenario of CIS-A2K's five focus language areas and indicates the state of images and links.

Media coverage
Events and activities that we have organised or participated in:

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