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CIS-A2K/Reports/Newsletter/August 2015

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This is an archived version of this page, as edited by Titodutta (talk | contribs) at 17:53, 14 September 2015 (→Media coverage: c/e). It may differ significantly from the current version.
August 2015

Odia Wikipedia (available at or.wikipedia.org), an Indian-language Wikipedia project, celebrated thirteen years of free knowledge contribution in June 2015. It was one of the first four Indic Wikipedias (Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi being the other three)to have started in 2002. The first edit on the Wikipedia was made on 3 June 2002. Currently the project has over 8,900 articles and about 17 active editors (also known as "uikiali"). The voluntary editor community has put its efforts into acquiring valuable content, re-licensing them under Creative Commons (CC) licenses, and building tools for acquiring more encyclopedic content from various sources.

Odia Wikipedia community assessment survey June 2015. It gives an overview about the various hindrances for the growth of Odia Wikipedia and the community.

During the thirteenth anniversary celebration, the community came together to assess community needs, address issues that had been identified earlier via IRC and mailing list discussions, and identify priority areas to focus on in the future. Odia Wikipedia administrators Mrutyunjaya Kar and Subhashish Panigrahi designed a needs assessment survey. Participating Wikimedians were asked to discuss various problems they face in editing and outreach two major areas that ensures quality standards. .

Two-fifths of participants said that problems with the rendering of Odia characters in different operating systems, ignorance or lack of more documentation about enabling encoding for Odia, input methods and keyboard layouts, and other font- and keyboard-related issues as the major reason for low readership and contribution on Wikipedia.

. . .Read more in the Wikimedia blog

Event organized/participated

  • Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Annamacharya library:
On 6 August a Telugu Wikipedia edit-a-thon was conducted at Annamacharya library to preserve rare Telugu literature text. Annamacharya library has a rare collection of the rarest religious and historical works in Telugu language. This event was conducted by Telugu Wikipedia Community and the Centre for Internet & Society. The second iteration of the event was organized in
  • Tamil Virtual University event:
On 8-9 August, a two-days' workshop on digital collaborations in Tamil-language was organized by Tamil Virtual University, Anna University Campus, Chennai. U.B.Pavanaja, behalf of CIS-A2K, attended the event. Four major topics discussed during the event were: Digitization, Research and Development, e-learning and Open source and Outreach.
  • SDM Ujire Kannada workshop:
CIS-A2K has ongoing partnership with SDM College, Ujire. The college's academic year started on 12 August. It was followed by an one-day workshop. In this workshop, the students were introduced to Wikipedia and taught about Kannada Wikipedia editing. The head of the journalism department of the College Bhaskar Shetty and others were present in the event.
  • Tulu Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Mangalore:
A three-day edit-a-thon on adding articles to Tulu Wikipedia was organized between 14-16 August in Mangalore in partnership with Tulu Sahitya Academy and Ramakrishna PU College. 30 Wikipedia editors participated and created about 89 new articles. 12 of these 30 participants crossed more than 10 edits. Some of the new participants faced problems with using the input methods and the Wiki-markup. It is important to note that even though Tulu has its own alphabet called Tigaliri, because of the lack of a free font and input system, and the speakers being well conversant in Kannada, we are using Kannada for the time being. There is a plan to organise a monthly meetup and/or edit-a-thon to continue the momentum these editors have brought in. Tulu Sahitya Academy has kindly supported the event.
  • Kannada Wikipedia workshop at DSERT:
A Kannada Wikipedia workshop was organized between 18-20 August at Department of State Educational Research and Training to improve science-related articles that are part of the Government of Karnataka's high school syllabus. During the workshop the lecturers were taught about basics of Kannada Wikipedia, editing policies, Kannada input, creating and editing articles on Kannada Wikipedia. U.B. Pavanaja and Tito Dutta from CIS-A2K conducted the workshop, behalf of CIS-A2K.
  • "Sau Dhuni Teen" project: Wikipedia workshop in TISS, Mumbai:
A two-day multilingual Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Women's Studies Department of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai between 22-24 August. This was an outreach event conducted under the scope of the "Sau Dhuni Teen" project.

Blog posts

These blog posts have been published in August:

Media coverage

Get involved

Request for collaboration

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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