CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/November 2015
IRC meetings with Focus Language Areas: 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.
- Four Marathi Wikipedians Santosh Dahiwal, Suyogaerospace and Santosh Shingare along with Wikimedian and CIS-A2K member Abhinav Garule joined for the IRC. The discussions were focused on CIS-A2K's work from July 2015 and Marathi Wikipedia work plan. 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.
- Thanks to the seven Kannada Wikimedians Omshivaprakash, Deepu, Yogesh, Vishwa, M.G.Harish along with CIS-A2K team members Anant, 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:
- Four Odia Wikimedians User:Akala Kushmanda and User:Swagatika91 along with Sailesh and Subhashish Panigrahi 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 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.
- 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 and Kannada so that the Telugu community could assess if the similar tutorial could be made for Telugu Wikipedia.
Event organized/participated
edit- Community discussion for 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 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: 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".
Blog posts
edit- Shaik, Rahmanuddin and Hasan, Tanveer. Konkani-language books from Konkani-language culture center Mannd Sobhaann to enrich Konkani Wikipedia, 1 November 2015
Media coverage
edit- शंभर वर्षांपूर्वीच्या पुस्तकांचे होणार डिजिटायझेशन, Lokmat, 11 November 2015;
- Dr. Pavanaja featured in Vijayavani, Vijayavani, 16 November 2015;
- तेसर फ्यूल कॉन्फरेंस आओर मोज़िला हैकाथन संपन्न, esamaad, 19 November 2015;
- ଅନ୍ଲାଇନରେ ପଢ଼ିହେବ ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ ପ୍ରସାଦ ଦାସଙ୍କ ୩୦ଟି ବହି, Sambad, 19 November 2015;
- तीसरा फ्यूल कॉन्फ्रेंस और मोज़िला हैकाथन संपन्न, 23 November 2015;
- तीसरा फ्यूल जिल्ट कॉन्फ्रेंस और मोज़िला हैकाथन चेन्नई में संपन्न, Aaj Tak, 24 November 2015;
- भाषाई कंप्यूटिंग के मानक बनाने के लिए चेन्नई में हुआ तीसरा फ्यूल जिल्ट, Outlook, 26 November 2015;
Team updates
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After several rounds of the selection committees formed for Kannada, Odia and Telugu, the CIS-A2K team finally got on-board Anant Subray, Sailesh Patnaik and Pavan Santosh 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 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 and is part of the organizing team of 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" which was aimed at creating a catalog of Telugu books available in the 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 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
edit- Tulu Wikipedia tutorial: A series of "how-to" tutorials were created by Pavanaja for new editors of the Tulu Wikipedia. The tutorials explain in details about various aspects of Wikipedia editing like creating account/loggin 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.
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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