Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Community Digest: Half of the Odia Wikipedia editors edit from mobile devices; news in brief

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  • Community Digest: Half of the Odia Wikipedia editors edit from mobile devices; news in brief
  • Community Digest: 50% of the Odia Wikipedia editors edit from mobile devices and 40% of the mobile editors are female; news in brief

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  • As per the last updated statistics in July there are 30 active editors of the Odia Wikipedia, the oldest among all the South Asian language Wikipedias. Over 50% of these 30 editors have internet connectivity issues and edit Wikipedia from their mobile phones.

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The Odia Wikisource is turning two this October 20. The project came out of the Incubator on the same day in 2014 and has seen many published works being digitized so far. Odia Wikisource community has had the opportunity to work with many authors and publishers to get several copyrighted works relicensed under CC-BY-SA license.


News in brief edit

The September statistics of South Asian language Wikisources are out

The recent statistical report prepared and shared by Bengali Wikimedian Jayanta Nath shares statistics of #pages, #page #page validation, #page proofread and % of scanned pages across all the active South Asian language Wikisource projects.

Assamese Wikimedia projects get a new phonetic input method

Rodali, an open source phonetic input method that was created by some of the members of the Assamese Wikipedia community and had already gained popularity was finally made available on all the Wikimedia projects.

The newly appointed WikiJournal Medicine's associate editor Subas Chandra Rout happens to be the only editor from South Asia

Subas Chandra Rout, one of the most active Wikipedians of the Odia Wikipedia community has recently been appointed recently one of the associate editors of the "WikiJournal of Medicine", an open access journal that is published by the Wiki Project Med Foundation. He is the only Wikimedian from South Asia to be in this respectable position. Rout has over 519 Odia-language Wikipedia articles, of which 461 are related to medicine, to his credit. He was also the sole contributor of the 2013 Lilavati's Daughters edit-a-thon, a campaign-edit-a-thon that ran over a month to chronicle articles on Indian female scientists.

Hindi Wikipedia
Gender gap academic studies

While research on the Wikipedia gender gap issue has predominantly put English Wikipedia under the spotlight, research focus on Indian contexts has been on the rise. From WCI and meetups of Wikiwomen, we learnt that women’s feeling and experience should come in to the core of our studies to help build better gender-gap-narrowing interventions in our local communities. For a summary of the gender gap issue and movements in both Indian and global context, please see the series of blog posts on CIS-A2K.

Nature lover from India's Kerala relicensed 20K images on Flikr that can now come on Commons

Dinesh Valke, a resident of the Indian state of Kerala relicensed over 20,000 images of plants on Flikr from "All Rights Reserved" to Creative Commons Share-Alike 2.0 (CC-BY-SA 2.0). Some of the images have recently been moved to Commons and there are many more yet to come to not just widen the scope of local plant varieties of Kerala in both Commons and Wikipedia, but also encourage more such photographers to contribute some of their works on Commons.

New relicensed books for Telugu Wikisource
Rise in the female editors in Odia Wikipedia community

The Odia Wikipedia was started in 2002 along with Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedia, much before the top three spoken languages; Hindi, Telugu and Bengali. Spoken by between 33-50 million speakers (the first figure being based on 2007 Indian census and the second from Britannica Encyclopedia) mostly based in the Indian state of Odisha and other Indian states-Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and West Bengal, Odia is one of the three classical languages surviving over 1500 years. The overall literacy as per 2011 in Odisha is 73.5% whereas majority of speakers lie in the age group of 20-29. There are over 155 dailies published in the language by 2014. The recent Wikipedia statistics shows that there are five female editors among the top 15 active contributors. The Odia Wikimedia community that had almost zero female editors has over 33% women. And the Odia Wikisource community, which is really small, is led by two female Wikilibrarians and has a equal number of female and male members. The quarterly community magazine "Uikisikha" is published and edited by three female editors. And several community activities, especially capacity building activities, encouraging the female members in the community to lead activities have helped the community to move towards creating a right balance in the community.

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Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society-Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K)
Ting-Yi Chang, Intern, Centre for Internet and Society-Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K)