Grants:APG/Proposals/2016-2017 round 2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Progress report form

Purpose of the report

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This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their impact after completing the full year of their grant. The time period covered in this form will be the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). This form includes four sections; addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Global metrics overview - all programs

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We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Global Metrics. We understand not all Global Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

  1. Next to each required metric, list the outcome achieved.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
  3. In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
Participants 2,132 Upsurge in Marathi Wikimedia projects have resulted in higher number of participants
Newly Registered 853 Internship, Mentoring and WEP initiatives have been successful
Content Pages
  • 305 New articles created
  • 1,631 Page digitised on Wikisource
  • 13,969 Labels and descriptions are translated in Wikidata.
  • 2,594 Articles are improved
  • 452 New encyclopedic images are added on Wikimedia Commons
We have increased our metric as we aim to conduct three more large scale events
Footprint Tracker 25
  • Maharashtra= 9
  • Karnataka = 4
  • Odisha = 3
  • Andhra Pradesh = 3
  • Telangana = 1
  • Punjab = 1
  • Kerala = 1
  • Tamil Nadu = 1
  • West Bengal =1
  • Delhi = 1
Value of Bytes Deleted 3.74 MB We have increased this metric as our efforts to delete junk content has been appreciated by community members
Metric Projected Target
Participants
Metric Projected Target
Newly registered
Metric Projected Target
Content pages
Metric Projected Target
Footprint tracker
Metric Projected Target
Value deleted in MB

Telling your program stories - all programs

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Wikipedia Education Program

Continuous Internal Assessment

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Continuous Internal Assessment (CIA) is an evaluative pedagogic practice assigned to students studying at Christ University, Bangalore. More than 1600 undergraduate students in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Sanskrit and Urdu take part in this exercise and CIS-A2K has synced its WEP initiative with the CIA structure. This initiative brings in greater contribution from various languages. Editing on Wikimedia project platforms creates and builds student's skills of typing and writing an independent article. The first of its kind Wikipedia video tutorials in two languages — Hindi and Kannada are given to the faculty, facilitators, campus ambassadors, and students to clear doubts and make the WEP process hassle free. This initiative aims at making learning an all round activity (learning in the classroom and learning with the wiki communities) also provides various perspectives of learning (through research, through discussions) making it possible for applying knowledge to the benefit of the entire world by using Wikipedia. The CU-WEP follows a peer approved and annually reviewed structure to deal with large number of students in this WEP initiative. The large number of participants is one of the unique features of this initiative along with the multiple languages and multiple projects in which the students engage themselves during the academic year.

CIS-A2K is grateful for the active support it receives from the community in executing this initiative. Following steps describe the life cycle of WEP initiative during an academic year:

  • Community members/CIS-A2K team members assign topics for content, quality improvement and adding of images.
  • These are then given to the faculty.
  • The faculty gives assignments and details to the campus ambassadors who finally spread the word to the students.

The curriculum is divided into odd and even semester which consists of two CIA’s for the first and second-year students pursuing an undergraduate degree.

Internships

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Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru has started offering internships. Interested students are guided by the facilitators at CUWEP, Domlur, Bengaluru. It provides help to students who want to contribute to Wikipedia by the creation of articles in several languages. This intern workforce brings in the spirit of a collaboration and builds a larger dedicated team as a work force to keep articles on a live track throughout the year on Wikipedia. It is conducted in two batches in December and April- May respectively. Students who have taken Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Sanskrit and Urdu as their second language are given this opportunity. While securing internships on applied sciences and engineering subjects is comparatively easier in the Indian context, securing internships in areas of humanities and language research are hard to come by.

Certificate course

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As an active step towards enabling the spread of content editing and contributing skills on Wikipedia in Indian languages, Christ (Deemed to be University), in collaboration with CIS-A2K, began certificate courses on using and editing in Wikipedia in 2016 for students. The courses, conducted after class hours, are offered for a total of 45 hours (30 hours of theory and 15 hours of practical/hands on sessions), carry 2 credits to be added to students academic records. Around 30 to 45 students enrolled per batch.

The courses’ objective is to enable more students to help students acquire skills in using and working with Wikipedia as well as attempts to be technically equipped through its instruction. They consist of three major components:

  • The first is an introduction to what the concept of Wikipedia is, incorporating the history of online encyclopedias and Wikipedia itself, using sources, choosing and drafting articles and moving articles to the main space.
  • The second teaches how to edit and publish articles. Here, common templates, editing, and wikification of articles, adding content such as tables and references, licenses of sharing, policies and guidelines, tackling vandalism and tools for producing illustrations are dealt with.
  • The third component discusses Wikipedia’s reliability and social significance. Under this component, Wikipedia is discussed in a critical and evaluative manner, where matters such as its ethics, existence as a social community, existence as a democratic project, use by students, teachers librarians and journalists, criticisms and measures to improve its quality come under the purview.

Social media campaign

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In order to encourage students, highlight and ( article creation and editing) disseminate the work done by the Christ College students, an initiative has been taken to share articles written by the students on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

This initiative has been of great influence in connecting the work done by students to the communities and communities taking note of the work done by the WEP participants. While the students have often failed to understand the importance of WEP editing as a contribution towards Knowledge Production, amalgamating their efforts with google doodle, tweets and facebook posts regarding importance of articles help them to identify the potential and impact of their work.

On 25 June 2017 one of the student created an article on Max Born as a part of their internal assignment but on the 12-11-2017 it was selected as a Google Doodle

Time line

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Odd Semester
Month 1st Semester 3rd Semester
June Orientation on Wikidata, allotment of the Q numbers and students doing the activity Orientation and Writing the text about women achievers in 20 lines ( work done in Sandbox)
July Language correction and grading from the faculty Language correction and grading from the faculty
August - -
September Proofreading of text on Wikisource Wikification of the article written earlier and adding image
October Language correction and grading from the faculty Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty
November Verification of the work done by the students from community members or CIS-A2K Verification of the work done by the students from community members or CIS-A2K
December Moving qualitative articles to the main namespace and updating it to community members Moving qualitative articles to the main namespace and updating it to community members
Even Semester
Month 1st Semester 3rd Semester
November Orientation and Writing the text on their user page Orientation and Writing the text about their core subjects in 20 lines ( work done in Sandbox)
December Language correction and grading from the faculty Language correction and grading from the faculty
January Internship activity for the students Internship activity for the students
February Wikification of their user page and adding an Image Wikification of the article written earlier and adding image
March Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty Language correction, Wikification, and grading from the faculty
April and May Internship activity for the students Internship activity for the students
June Analysis of the work done by the students in this year and reporting to community members Analysis of the work done by the students in this year and reporting to community members

Wikipedia Education Program review

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Christ (Deemed to be University)
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An investment in Knowledge always pays the best interest.–Benjamin Franklin

As rightly said, this investment is seen with the collaboration of Christ (Deemed to be University) and The Centre for Internet Society (CIS), Bengaluru. Ms. Nichole Saad, Program Manager, WEP, Asia Region visited the institution and interacted with faculty and students. Her visit provided us a platform to share our learnings, experiences, and views on WEP initiative. Her meeting with the students was interactive on both the days and the discussion was fruitful. The session began with an introductory presentation wherein the achievements of the Wikipedia in the academic curriculum was mentioned. To keep the sessions active, activities were conducted for students on both the days. We shared our views on issues like acceptance of Wikipedia as a trusted Knowledge source was discussed widely. You can find the detailed report here.

Andhra Loyola College
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On 10 December 2017, A2K team arranged Nichole Saad's visit to Andhra Loyola College (ALC) where there have been WEP activities from past few years and Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology (VVIT) where Indic Wikimedian Krishna Chaitanya Velaga is trying to start a new Wikipedia Education Program. In Andhra Loyola College, institution management and A2K reviewed past activities and discussed how to scale up the current program. Nichole interacted with ALC students, management and staff who have been part of WEP and would be part of future activities during the visit. In VVIT, Krishna Chaitanya lead meetings with management where Nichole could give her insights and suggestions about successful Wikipedia Education Program.

Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences
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In the current workplan period, the A2K program tried to revive its an Wikipedia Education Program. As a first step, the A2K program organised a ground visit and needs assessment with the previously engaged teachers and authorities of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences. The plan was organised in collaboration with the Wikipedia Education Program team of the Wikimedia Foundation and CIS-A2K. The program was organised for two days to identify the gaps and failure of the previous program. On the first day, around 20 students and 10 teachers attended the basic Wikipedia orientation program on Wikipedia and about Wikipedia Education Program. During the second day, two hours long needs assessment conversation happened with the teacher to understand the current situation of the teachers and institution in reviving the WEP. A2K has proposed teachers and other authorities to share their curriculums and academic calendars and also to organise a digital learning workshop for the University faculty.



GLAM


Content donation

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Training of volunteers from Vigyan Ashram for Commons upload & OCR was conducted. After this training program an initiative has started to bring Copyright free books on Wikimedia Commons under Category:Books in Marathi. OCR of 15 books on Wikisource was completed using the OCR4Wikisource code in Python. Content donation started after IUCAA workshop. Books released under CC BY 4.0 by Jayant Narlikar, Mangala Narlikar, Sharu Ranganekar, Madhav Gadgil. The process has been started with Manoos Pratishthan, Sandarbh science magazine.Manoos magazine has been instrumental in shaping Maharashtra's socio-political and cultural structure from 1960 to 1985. Sandarbh Society is a registered society and public trust involved in publication of monthly magazine on science and education in simple lucid language for the last 10 years.

Wikipedia Library Project

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In continuation of the discussions with the librarians in the past two months, an event was organised by Pune University Library & Information Science Alumni Association (PULISAA). Here, about 50 active librarians from various institutes across state came together. We discussed about enriching Wikisource with valuable copyright free reference books, indexing of digitized books, Conference on digitization and Wikipedia Library Project. The project will be in synergy with global 1lib1ref project.

Wikisource Internship

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With the initiative of community and institution, Wikisource Internship Program is in progress at Garware College of Commerce in Pune. CIS-A2K is acting as facilitator. The students are actively involved in proof-reading of old Marathi book 'Arthashastrachi multatwe' written by famous economist G.C.Bhate in 1910.




Strengthening existing community


Telugu Wikisource Workshop

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Several Telugu Wikimedians are interested in contributing to Wikisource but lack the knowledge of the process and those who are aware of it have been unsure of using tools like OCR. In order to bridge this knowledge gap, a large-scale Telugu Wikisource Workshop was conducted on 22 and 23 July, 2017 in Hyderabad. The workshop focused on participants learning about overall process, right from uploading a pdf file to Commons to making it a downloadable eBook, as well as useful tools like OCR. They were also trained in the policy knowledge related to the process such as copyright and Creative Commons licenses. This would enable them to select books and discern whether they could be uploaded on Wikisource. Existing Wikimedians and new volunteers who were specifically interested in contributing to Telugu Wikisource Project and are willing to learn the process of Wikisource were selected participate in the event. New volunteers who participated in this event continued contributing consistently and become very active in project.

I am contributing to Telugu Wikisource for a long time, regularly. I could learn how to do some important aspects of Telugu Wikisource like indexing a book and techniques like OCR in this event. This turned out to be a very useful event. As resource persons are from Telugu language and sessions were in Telugu, I could easily and quickly grasp things.

WikiTungi Program

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WikiTungi is a city-based Wikipedia community management program that provides Wikipedians a platform in the city to meet with each others and share their learning. The current Tungi program is based out of two cities, Puri and Bhubaneswar. The community members have helped in removing the barrier of follow-up events (by meeting regularly) in those cities and also help mark the presence of the movement across these cities.

Like the previous years, the A2K program has continued its support towards the WikiTungi program. This year the Puri WikiTungi marked its 2nd anniversary. Started in December 2015, the Puri WikiTungi has around 10 active volunteers contributing to different Wikimedia projects. During this journey, they have organized 10 WikiTungi meetups, mini MWT and TTT, Wikipedia 15th anniversary celebration, Rathayatra GLAM, Wikidata-thons, Image-a-thons and other activities. The A2K program has helped the community members in the ideation process and execution for some activities and programs.

Bhubaneswar Heritage Edit-a-thon

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Bhubaneswar, the Temple city of India, is not well represented on the world wide web and Wikipedia. Many state governments and government institutions are supporting Open data projects, kick starting e-governance portals to align with the Smart City project. A2K program forged a partnership with the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA) to harness the available data regarding the monuments of the city for creating content on Wikimedia projects.

Bhubaneswar Heritage Edit-a-thon is an online edit-a-thon aimed to improve and create articles on the heritage monuments of Bhubaneswar. In this edit-a-thon around 26 Wikipedians from 12 different Wikipedia projects participated and created around 192 articles. The edit-a-thon was a pre-event program for the QRPedia activity, after analysing the outcome edit-a-thon, the A2K and the Bhubaneswar WikiTungi will help BDA in installing QR codes in the heritage monuments of the city. This activity will help to turn Bhubaneswar into a QRpedia city. Installing QR Codes in the city will help the city more tourist friendly and will also help in promoting awareness about the Wikimedia Movement.

Digital Telugu Conference and other Government collaborations

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The Telugu Wikimedia Community participated in the conference titled "Digital Telugu" which was conducted by the IT, Electronics & Communications Department of the Government of Telangana in the wake of the World Telugu Conference 2017. CIS-A2K supported community efforts to call for policy changes and other efforts needed in order to improve the state of free knowledge in Telugu at the conference. As part of the government's efforts to improve the usage and visibility of Telugu in the digital domain, Wikimedians presented Telugu Wikipedia and Free Knowledge in Telugu. It is hoped that this would bring about cross-domain collaboration between other sections of Digital Telugu and the Telugu Wikimedia movement.

In order to make the community more sustainable and achieve a wider impact, CIS-A2K is making efforts to work with government departments and implement policy level changes to improve the condition of Open & Free knowledge in Telugu. After several discussions with the department as well as the community, CIS-A2K entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Digital Media Wing of the IT Department of Telangana. This partnership has been entered into with the objective to free-license photos and archives of the department into CC-BY-SA license and upload encyclopedic and educational content from it, onto Commons. This MoU also aims to improve awareness about free licenses in among government officials and departmental employees in various departments. Activities related to the MoU will begin in the coming months.



Content Enrichment Activities


Expanding Telugu Village Articles with Census data

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With this grant period, CIS-A2K continued working on improving Telugu Village Articles in collaboration with Telugu Wikimedians, leading to the second phase of the project which employed more automation and enabled better collaboration with community members in the three months of the past year. Utilising the information from the Indian government's latest census, thousands of Telugu Wikipedia articles about villages in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were improved. Each of these articles was improved with information about literacy, educational facilities, medical facilities, geographical location, demographics, drinking water, sanitation, communication, transport, market, banking facilities, entertainment, nutrition amenities, electricity, land use, manufacturing and agricultural products.

In 2006 and 2007 Telugu Wikipedians created thousands of pages about villages in Andhra Pradesh with basic information using a bot. Wikipedians, interested in geography-based articles improved these articles mainly with demographic data, categorisation and templates, along with other details based on the availability of material. Over the next few years, the Telugu Wikimedia community prioritised the improvement of these articles and, often, less content in many village articles has been considered a threat to the quality of the project.

During late 2016 and early 2017, CIS-A2K collaborated with eminent environmentalist Madhav Gadgil and team, in order to improve village articles based on the 2011 census data. The Telugu Wikimedia community started working on automatically generated content after several discussions and taking stock of various concerns.

From August 2017, the community and CIS-A2K have been working on improving basic articles produced out of the automation to avoid the repetitive work of correcting grammar, transliterating names of places and style of the article. Due to this improvisation, the current structure of the automated article is being published with very little changes. CIS-A2K in collaboration with User:Chaduvari started working on model template article and improved the logic for better automation and worked with a programmer to create a code based on the logic. By transliterating the data present in the 2011 census and a running code on it, coordinators of this project created automated articles with census data that match the style guide for village articles and reduce the human effort. Apart from Wikipedia articles, this project is also improving Wikidata items of the villages with census data.

Improving village articles with this content also helps in enhancing the quality of Telugu Wikipedia. This project also holds lessons for other Wikimedia communities that create information using large datasets.


Thematic Workshops

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There are well-known organizations working on social, cultural and environmental issues in Maharashtra. Working at the grassroots level, these organizations possess materials and resources that are crucial to serve as knowledge in Marathi. CIS-A2K started networking with these groups and conducted thematic workshops on rural culture & developmental issues, women, water, science, and environment. As a result, the process of forming specific 'Communities of Interest' is initiated. Two thematic workshops were conducted for science writers and mathematics experts also.

Date Event details Media files
18 Nov Marathi Wikipedia Workshop for writers of Sandarbh Science magazine commons:Category:Marathi Wikipedia Workshops in Maharashtra
2 Dec Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Bhaskaracharya Pratishthan, Pune commons:Category:Marathi Wikipedia Workshops in Maharashtra
16 Dec Thematic Workshop at Jeevan Jyoti Women Empowerment Centre commons:Category:Marathi Wikipedia Workshops in Maharashtra

Government of Odisha Collaboration

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In September 2017, the Government of Odisha, an Indian state adopted a policy to promote transparency and unlimited access to Knowledge. Governments are huge producers of original content and data, releasing its content under Creative Commons license allow projects like Wikipedia and others to use the content created and improve the existing content. This collaboration made the Government of Odisha as the first government in India to adopt Creative Commons license in its social media accounts. The collaboration was a follow-up of Asian athletics championships and was made possible because of Odia Wikimedians, Wikimedia Foundation, and CIS-A2K. The government of Odisha is continuing its collaboration and releasing content and data of some major departments under Creative Commons license. This collaboration has helped to illustrate around 13 articles.

Wiktionary work at Hampi

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CIS-A2K worked with Kannada University, Hampi in digitising Dravida Nighantu (A dictionary in 5 Indic languages (Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Tulu, Malayalam)). In University six research students of Dravida Samskruti Adhyana Kendra learned the digitisation process and typed all the entries in the book in a spreadsheet. After that, they digitised the complete book in the duration of one month. The re-licensing process is done. There are more than 50000 words in the dictionary. It will be added to commons and Wiktionary once the digitisation process is complete.

Karnataka Rajyotsava Edit-a-thon

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November 1 of every year is celebrated as the day of unification of Karnataka. The entire month of November is celebrated as Karnataka Rajyotsava month. Hence to integrate social fervour with the spirit of Wikimedia we have organised Edit-a-thon. A2K conducted a month-long Edit-a-thon based on theme Karnataka-Kannadigas-Kannada. In this Edit-a-thon 48 articles were created in the Kannada Language. About 34 articles were expanded. Other than Kannada Wikipedia in other language Wikipedias like Telugu, Odia, and Nepali Wikipedia 15 articles were created.

Gubbi lab workshop

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In the month of November A2K conducted workshop Gubbi Labs R&D centre at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. It was a theme based workshop which provided orientation about the Wikimedia projects and resulted in an Edit-a-thon. During the workshop creating articles on Ecology, Wildlife, Nature and related themes were given importance.
In the month of December A2K trained Vivekananda Institute for Leadership Development, Mysore. The gathering had multilingual participants. Participants from Kannada, Odia, Telugu, English language proficiency were trained to write articles and add content.



Cultivating new editors


Institutional Partnerships

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Another initiative in content generation is taken by Mahrashtra Rajya Marathi Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal by coming up with 20 volumes and now it has pioneered a decentralized form of Knowledge generation by establishing 60 Dyanamandals for different knowledge streams. As of now, this Marathi encyclopedia contains 18,000+ articles on various subjects. Both Vishwakosh and Wikipedia are joining forces for conducting programs for authors for creating Knowledge in Marathi. Taking into consideration this noble cause, Prof. Madhav Gadgil, Marathi Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal, IUCAA,CIS-A2K, Rawat’s Nature Academy and Saptahik Vivek Shilpakar Charitrakosh Prakalp took initiative to organize ‘Wikipedia-Vishwakosh Workshop for Science Writers’ in Pune. Major organizations working for scientific knowledge propagation and diffusion like, Marathi Vigyan Parishad, Vijnana Bharati, Srushti Dnyan and Sakal Trust are also coming forward for technical facilitation and coordination.

The workshop participants included science writers, organisations working for science promotion and active citizen science community. Total 330 people across the state participated. The workshop inspired science related institutions to take initiative for content generation. Series of workshops of science writers, maths writers, astronomy enthusiasts were conducted. Also content donation to Wikisource and Commons has started. Science magazines have also announced to re-licence their previous issues. Mass awareness was generated through the press and electronic media. All the leading newspapers covered the event extensively. Two editors wrote special features in Sunday issues.

Student community expressed interest in working for technical issues by taking up internship projects. Total 6 edit-a-thons were conducted in various institutions and organisations.

Exploring new communities of interest

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The events were organised in collaboration with government language departments and community-based organisations in Maharashtra. The voluntary group in Satara is eager to implement innovative projects for the active citizens and field activists. It has decided to integrate Wikimedia Projects and training modules for capacity building of citizens science movement volunteers. To get the overall introduction of Wikimedia Projects and basic skills, this training program was organised for botany & Ayurveda experts in the organisation. The group is also connected with Aryangla Vaidyak Mahavidyalaya in Satara.

Sterlite Tech Foundation and Jnana Prabodhini are the organisations working for Women's Empowerment in Velhe Block of Pune District Maharashtra. Jeewan Jyoti - Sterlite’s flagship initiative aims to address these issues by empowering the underprivileged sections of society, especially rural women with equal learning opportunities and with professional training courses in their formative years; thereby providing them with sustainable income opportunities. CIS-A2K acting as technical resource agency to develop content on these subjects. Last year, we conducted two workshops for rural women. The women worked on village articles and development issues. For the year 2018, the thematic approach is taken to enrich content on Rural Culture on Wikimedia projects. Two workshops were conducted to develop this theme. Extensive discussions started with different prominent stakeholders in an online content generation for developing a holistic approach & strategies. These include - ThinkMaharashtra.com,Rural Relations, Let's Talk Sexuality, Sanshodhan, Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited and Marathi Vidnyan Parishad.

Improving retention

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To improve retention in new editors getting on-board, A2K Worked with Communities of Interest and trained New Wikimedians individually as well. As part of these activities, we invited only two members who are already part of a WhatsApp group - "Padya Soundaryam" which celebrates, explains and critically discusses Classical Telugu poetry. A2K followed up with training programs with these two new volunteers who started contributing to Telugu Wikisource from "Telugu Wikisource Workshop". These 2 Volunteers have continued to contributing Telugu Wikisource since then for months.
A2K encouraged users like Shiv's fotographia and Aditya Pakide to take up #100WikiCommonsDays challenge, where Aditya pakide signed up for Wikipedia after individual training session and used challenge as an opportunity to get into continuous engagement. We worked with them and followed-up with their queries and encouraged by publishing videos with their photos in Social Media and by notifying their work in Telugu Wikipedia Village pump. This resulted in retention of the users and hundreds of quality pictures to Wikimedia Commons. Currently out of 180+ pictures uploaded by these two users 29 are being used in articles of several Wikipedias including Telugu Wikipedia.[1]

User File Used in User File Used in User File Used in
Adbh266 English Wikipedia Adbh266 Telugu Wikipedia Shiv's fotographia Dutch Wikipedia,
English Wikipedia
Esparantho Wikipedia
Gujarathi Wikipedia
Hindi Wikipedia
Adbh266 Russian Wikinews Shiv's fotographia vi Wikipedia Adbh266 Telugu Wikipedia
Adbh266 Telugu, English Wikipedias Adbh266 Telugu and English Wikipedia Shiv's fotographia vi Wikipedia
Adbh266 Telugu Wikipedia Adbh266 Telugu Wikipedia Shiv's fotographia English Wikipedia


Supporting community Leadership


Kannada University Hampi

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CIS-A2K has supported newly formed community members at Kananda University, Hampi in digitising, re-licensing and providing resources in scanning process of Dravida Nighantu. They faced legacy font issues. We provided the software to write in Unicode and tools to convert non Unicode to Unicode. CIS-A2K further helped in initiating the process of re-licensing of Dravida Nighantu.

Vivekananda Institute for Leadership Development

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CIS-A2K has supported the newly formed community members at Vivekananda Institute for Leadership Development students by training how their social work can be integrated with the theme of Wikipedia. For example every weekend they visit schools which do not have well equipped library and these schools can be provided with Kiwix for dissemination of Knowledge.

Supporting a Wikimedian

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CIS-A2K has supported individual editor like Kiran. It lead towards initiating workshop in Vivekananda Institute for Leadership Development, Mysore.
We have tried to highlight the excellent work of Sangappadyamani (talk · contribs)|}} who creates, expands or translated the personalities/phenomena that are represented on Google Doodle via social media and are in conversations of providing references for further editing.

For me Wikipedia is bridging knowledge between Kannada and English readers. In Kannada people can understand more than understanding in English. Sangappadyamani (talk · contribs)

Wikipedian of the month

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CIS-A2K is coordinating an initiative called Wikipedian of the month. The process of the selection is initiated by the A2K. With few set selection criteria community members will vote on Village pump. After this selection process will be conducted by the community. A2K community advocate will collect the information about the selected person. Once these process is completed information will be posted on the main page of Kannada Wikipedia. This is proposed by community member in 2017 to motivate the new user and existing inactive user. A2K has observed that this activity has motivated a few inactive users to edit regularly.


Skill Building Activities

Background

One of the primary objectives of CIS-A2K's work plan is to conduct and support skill building initiatives and activities for Indic Wikimedia community members owing to the fact that these activities and initiatives play a crucial role in empowering a community. In the work plan CIS-A2K wrote:

CIS-A2K proposes to conduct:
  • 3 national level skill-building workshops/initiatives and
  • 10-12 regional skill-building activities[2]

Where we expect to

  • Involve at least 100 Wikimedians to undergo various levels of training and develop the requisite skills to troubleshoot problems faced by Indic Wikimedia communities,
  • Train at least 8 Indic Wikimedia Community Ambassadors dedicated to providing technical support and guide new Wikimedians in matters related to MediaWiki.

It is to be noted that two of the three major national-level events, Train-the-Trainer and MediaWiki Training are to be conducted and the dates for the same have been finalised on Train-the-Trainer (26-28 January 2018) and MediaWiki Training (1-2 February 2018).

CIS-A2K aims to conduct a few more large-scale national-level workshops in the current grant period. In this section, we would discuss the skill-building activities and initiatives that CIS-A2K has conducted and supported in the first half-year of its program.

Please note every that other program verticals too have skill building initiatives of their own. }}

Supporting and co-facilitating Wikimedia Strategy Meetings

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Since its inception, the A2K team has been working closely with the Indic language communities in developing editor base, improving quality of content and, developing skills regarding outreach activities.

2017 saw the Wikimedia Foundation reach across the globe to zero in on a strategy direction. Given that CIS-A2K's mandate to work with Indic language communities, CIS-A2K conducted as well as helped facilitate several strategy salons across the country. CIS-A2K took this up as an effort to integrate Indic Wikimedians with Wikimedians across the globe.

This opportunity helped CIS-A2K understand the culture of collaboration across Indic language communities. It enabled our team to identify community leaders, gather and collate expectations of community members, ideate the local level strategies discussed by communities to continue building and strengthening the Wikimedia movement at the grassroots level.

Following strategy salons were organised by the local communities in collaboration with CIS- A2K:

Location Organised By Theme of the Salon Participants
IIT, Mumbai Wikimedia India Chapter Track A, 'Organised Groups' Executive Committee, WMIN, Faculty members of IIT Mumbai and external experts
University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram Malayalam Wikimedians New Voices: Readers, experts, and partners Faculty members of University of Kerala, Swatantra Malayalam Computing
University of Patiala Punjabi Wikimedians User Group New Voices: Readers, experts, and partners Faculty members of University of Patiala, Punjabi Wikimedians and Free Knowledge Enthusiasts
WBNUJS, Kolkata West Bengal Wikimedians User Group Bengali Wikimedia projects in future West Bengal Wikipedians
CIS office, Bangalore CIS-A2K What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years Publishers, Digital Humanity Researchers, Faculty member of IISC, Bangalore

It is a matter of pride for the A2K team to note that many of the strategy discussion suggestions were represented and highlighted in the final strategy document released by the foundation. Many participants at these salons also actively endorsed the final document.

Do read a report from our involvement at the Punjab Strategy Salon

Kananda Wikimedia Template Workshop

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A Wikimedia template workshop was conducted in Bengaluru on 30 July 2017. The workshop, as the name suggests, dealt with how to create, modify and manage Wikipedia templates. This was an introductory workshop. Nine Kannada Wikimedians participated in this workshop. The following topics were discussed in the workshop: the introduction to templates, structure of basic templates, variables, the basic structure of info-boxes. The workshop aimed to enhance the technical capabilities of Kananda Wikimedians. Plans are also afoot to conduct a follow-up workshop for those who attended this workshop in addition to an advanced level workshop that Wikimedians who are familiar with basic topics may attend.

The event page may be seen here and a blog post on the same is here.

Supporting Technical trainings in India

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During the months of September and October 2017, Asaf Bartov (WMF employee) conducted a series of Wikidata workshops in India. These workshops were conducted in Cochin, Mangalore, Vijayawada, Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, Pune. CIS-A2K provided both logistical and coordination support for the workshops in Mangalore, Vijayawada, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, and Pune.

In an effort to promote Wikidata and facilitate technical skill-building amongst Indic Wikimedians, CIS-A2K collaborated with Asaf Bartov who is also senior Wikimedian experienced in Wikidata. These trainings have successfully created first generation Wikidata amabassadors across India. These trainings also lead to the beginning of Wikidata WikiProject India. Additionally, another important outcome of Wikidata training in India has been synergy displayed amongst Indic WikiProjects. Volunteers who were contributing exclusively to individual projects (such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons) are now integrating their work with Wikidata efforts.

User:Chaduvari has taken up Wikidata on an epic scale using a Wikidta tool that has added to the Village Project initially started by Telugu Wikipedians. A few editors such as User:Aliva Sahoo (Odia Wikimedian), User:Satpal Dandiwal (Punjabi Wikimedian) became very active and completed their 100wikidatadays.

CIS-A2K successfully co-ordinated these activities both with its Focus Language Areas as well as non-Focus Languages, and intends to carry forward the initiatives by collaborating and organising advanced level training and workshop for Indic Wikimedians. In order to collate the specific needs of the communities, CIS-A2K would conduct a needs-assesssment survey for these future activities.

Supporting the Hindi Wikipedia Workshop in Jaipur

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On 11 and 12 November,2017 Hindi Wikimedians conducted a training workshop in Jaipur, Rajasthan. CIS-A2K representative attended the workshop as resource person. Topics ranging from technical support to policy were discussed with enthusiastic participation from the participants. This training workshop provided an opportunity to identify 'tech leaders' for the Hindi Wikimedians User Group. CIS-A2K aims to work with the tech leaders for the Media Wiki Training and Wiki Technical Training. The workshop conducted at Jaipur was a multi lingual and multi community collaborative attempt to identify the Technical needs of participating Indic communities. The workshop also dealt with topics such as Wikipedia tools, gadgets, fighting vandalism, administrative actions among others. The event page may be seen here.

Wikimedia Technical Workshop at University of Pune

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A technical workshop was conducted at the Savitribai Phule Pune University on 27 and 28 November 2017 for the students of the institute. 22 students participated in the workshop. Topics covered during the workshop ranged from Wikipedia templates to info-boxes and parser function and magic words to scripts, tools as well as a basic introduction to creating bots. The workshop also presented CIS-A2K with the opportunity to collaborate with the university. The collaboration entails involving the university's undergraduate and postgraduate engineering and technology students to create applications, tools, and gadgets related to Wikipedia and its sister projects. The university proposed to do this as part of their academic calendar. However, owing to time constraints, this has been pushed forward to the second half of the year. The event page can be seen here and blog here


Global Engagement

As part of our effort to leverage networks and make accessible innovative ideas from the global community for the benefit of Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K initiated the Global Engagements plan this grant year. This was also with the aim of facilitating the knowledge transfer and collaboration between the Indic Wikimedia communities and the global movement. Our intention of directing our communities towards these ideas and concepts, was that they may then choose to localise these ideas to suit the needs of their respective communities. Such localisation of content helps inform Wikimedia policies and guidelines at the community level as well. CIS-A2K plans to take up the global engagement component with more vigour in the upcoming plan year. We believe that many global lessons are openly available (from Wikimedia chapters and affiliates) and must be studied, understood and used to help communities in India. CIS-A2K will aim to leverage its access to these lessons, organisations and peoples to bring the best of technical and content related components to Indian Wikipedia communities. CIS-A2K hopes that the global engagement initiative changes from passive learning to that of active collaboration.

We launched our Technical Wishes plan in July. The Technical Wishes project drew inspiration from WMDE. This was an attempt to find out if the Indic Wikimedia communities face any technical challenges that CIS-A2K could help solve. To this end, CIS-A2K constituted a panel of technical experts involving a few technically well-versed Wikimedians who wished to help CIS-A2K resolve the issues.

These panelists were kept abreast of the requests that came our way. Although we didn’t particularly have requests that were of a technical nature, we thought of this as breaking the barrier between the communities needs and our ability to leverage the network of Wikimedians we have access to.

Knowledge belongs to all of us - 2030.wikimedia.org
  • CIS-A2K as a movement affiliate was involved in several global initiatives this year. CIS-A2K played an active role in enabling the strategy salons that took all over the globe. CIS-A2K documented the process with Wikimedia stakeholders as well as external external stakeholders from like-minded movements.
  • In addition to this, CIS-A2K held a gender gap consultation with persons working in the field of gender equality in order to bridge the provide the CIS-A2K with the much needed strategic direction in this regard.
  • CIS-A2K was also represented in the pan-India effort to kick-start an awareness campaign regarding Wikipedia in India.

In addition to this, CIS-A2K has made efforts to realising its Hyperlocal QRpedia through working the Bhubaneswar Development Authority. CIS-A2K assisted the Odia Wikimedia community in free-licensing the social media accounts of the Chief Minister of Odisha. CIS-A2K is also in talks with Utkal University for conducting a Wikimedian in Residence program.

In order to help provide for the overall research and literature of the Wikimedia projects the world, CIS-A2K is also in the process of releasing two documents: one, a comparison of the by-laws of various chapters, user groups and affiliates, and two, a study of the best practices emerging from the various successful efforts of Wikimedia communities in implementing their gender gap policies and guidelines. This is an effort to add to the literature as well as to find ways and means of localising them to suit the needs of Indic Wikimedians. As part of the ongoing effort to support the Indic Wikimedia communities in terms of infrastructure, CIS-A2K also conducted a pan-India needs assessment. This was to help the Wikimedia Foundation and the project sponsor, Google, collate the various needs of Indic Wikimedia communities.

CIS-A2K helps conduct monthly Wikipedia edit-a-thons in collaboration with Feminism In India, an organisation whose cause is gender-equality.


Bridging Gender Gap

Participants at the Feminism India Edit -a-thon

CIS-A2K has been working with FII Wiki Project (FII) in order to bridge the content disparity on Wikipedia, we have continued to co-organise edit-a-thons as part of our initiative to bridge the gender gap on Wikipedia. CIS-A2K has collaborated with Breakthrough, a human rights organisation working to make violence and discrimination against women and girls unacceptable, in order to overcome biases on Wikipedia. To this end, CIS-A2K's last work plan period hired an independent research intern who undertook the development of a toolkit that details best practices which may be followed for encouraging the participation of women. In addition to this toolkit, we have been working with Indic Wikimedia communities in an effort to bridge the gender gap on Indic Wikimedia projects.

The following report is by Japleen Pasricha for Feminism in India. It is reproduced here with permission:

"We are all aware of the large reach and popularity of Wikipedia. However, what most people don't know is that, according to a study conducted in 2011, globally only 9% of the editors on Wikipedia were women. And the percentage for India is even lower, just 3%.

Wikipedia recognises the systemic gender bias that is created because of factors such as these and thus enables its diverse range of users to edit and create Wikipedia pages, with reliable and authentic sources.

Feminism in India conducts monthly Wikipedia edit-a-thons with different organisations exploring various facets of gender in India, thus increasing content on women and marginalized communities on Wikipedia as well as training women to create and edit Wikipedia pages and hence increasing the number of women editors.

For November, we collaborated with The Centre for Internet and Society and co-hosted one on Indian Women In Law at CIS’s Delhi office. The edit-a-thon was aimed at creating/editing Wikipedia pages of Indian women lawyers and judges who lack representation on the platform currently.

The CIS-A2K and FII Team prepared a list of women judges and lawyers a week before the edit-a-thon, while most of the names did have a page on Wikipedia, they had very basic and limited information (stub pages). We used online resources for references.

We were a group of 6 participants in total with one person participating remotely. The event began with a discussion on Wikipedia and its gender gap and on the whys and hows of Wikipedia editing for new-comers.

After that, each participant chose one or more Indian woman lawyer or judge absent from Wikipedia, and started digging through the internet looking for interviews, news reports and e-books to write comprehensive Wikipedia articles on them."


Future Goals


CIS-A2K has not been able to achieve desired outcomes in the Global Engagement and Bridging Gender Gap Vertical. We aim to conduct well planned edit-a-thons along with follow-up events during March 2018 by collaborating with Art+Feminism and other ally organisations. As we have already met two of our metrics (Content pages and Value of Deleted Bytes) we have increased the metrics keeping in mind the activities being planned during the next six months of the current grant period.

The following table gives a preview of the upcoming activities of CIS-A2K and the projects it would have impact on:

Activity Project Metric Community/Institution
Train The Trainer Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons Number of Participants, Skill building CIS-A2K, Marathi Community, Telugu Community and Odia Community
Technical Workshop Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikisource Number of Participants, Skill building CIS-A2K
Edit-a-thons Wikipedia Content pages,Newly registered State Government of Maharashtra,Marathi & Kannada community
Thematic Workshops Wikipedia Content pages,Newly registered Marathi Community
Wikisource Workshops Wikisource Content pages Marathi Community
Photothons Commons Content pages Marathi Community and Telangana Government IT Department
MediaWiki Training Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource and Commons Number of Participants, Skill building CIS-A2K
Wiki Technical Training Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource and Commons Number of Participants, Skill building CIS-A2K
Wikimedia Conference (India) Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource and Commons Number of Participants, Skill building CIS-A2K
Edit-a-thons on occasion of Utkal Dibasha & Marathi Bhasha Day Wikipedia, Wikidata Content pages Odia & Marathi community
Women Edit-a-thon Wikipedia, Wikidata Content pages Sambad,Women's Organisations in Pune & Satara
Content Relicensing Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource Content pages, Newly registered State Government of Odisha
Creating Video Resources Wikimedia Commons Content pages Odia Community
Wikipedia Education Program Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource and Commons Content pages, Newly registered Kannada and Telugu Community
Diversity community Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikisource and Commons Number of Participants Telugu Community



Metric Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) Projected (end of year) Comments
Participants 3,440 - 2,132 3,440 Upsurge in Marathi Wikimedia projects have resulted in higher number of participants
Newly registered 1,730 - 853 1,730 Internship, Mentoring and WEP initiatives have been successful
Content pages 12,754 - 18,951 25,000 We have increased our metric as we aim to conduct three more large scale events
Footprint tracker 47 - 25 47 In an effort to cater to Pan Indian communities A2K is actively engaging non FLA communities
Value of bytes deleted 3.4MB - 3.74MB 6.0MB We have increased this metric as our efforts to delete junk content has been appreciated by community members

Revenues received during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Conversion rate

Indian national rupees (INR) 1 → US$ 0.01459

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
WMF INR 7,000,000 4,297,935 2,702,065 - - 4,297,935 102,130 62,706.87

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Conversion rate

Indian national rupees (INR) 1 → US$ 0.01459

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
- INR 7,000,000 1,382,370 1,629,942.87 - - 3,012,312.87 102,130 43,949.65 43.033% -

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

  • You can find the detailed expence here

In-kind support

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Conversion rate

Indian national rupees (INR) 1 → US$ 0.01459

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
Volunteer support INR - 44,000 - - 44,000 641.96
Travel & Stay INR - 35,000 - - 35,000 510.65
Event organization and logistics INR - 77,500 - - 77,500 1,130.73

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Compliance

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Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

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As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

Signature

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Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Resources

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Resources to plan for measurement

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Wikimedia Blogs
Learning Patterns

Collaborated with Government organisations, What's next?

Resources for storytelling

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Footnotes

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  1. https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/CIS-A2K/Telugu_New_Users_in_Commons/home
  2. Note, these initiatives are divided across language vertical work-plans and also involve the non-FLA language communities for wider dissemination.