from:"Shiju Alex"

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Use of Fair use messages from Wikipedia in a CD for distribution in India

2013-11-04 Thread Shiju Alex

A detailed workflow of Malayalam wikipedia CD is documented here (in
English). http://shijualex.in/creating-malayalam-wikipedia-cd/

\\A) Whether we can include all the non free content on CD?\\

For non-free images we need to meet few criteria. See this for details
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content#Images

But I found some of the images currently tagged as non-free in Telugu
wikipedia will not fall under fair use license. For example this
imagehttps://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%A6%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%82:Abhinav_Bindra_Olympicgold.jpg.
As mentioned in the above blog post it is better to include only
Free-Licensed images in the CD. See the section *STEP 3 – Verifying the
license of the images* in the above blog post. To be on the safer it is
better to include only free images from Commons in the CD.

\\B) Whether WMF/WMIN will approve the use of Wikipedia Logo on the
cover?\\

Yes. Ask WMF/WMIN. For the recent release of the second edition of the
Malayalam wikisource CD also Malayalam community took permission from WMF
to use logos. It is advised to get permission before using the logos in the
CD.

\\C) Any other precaution/disclaimers that need to be included on CD to
prevent any legal dispute in future.\\

Yes. This is very important. See the section Step 6 – Creating content for
copyright, disclaimer, and other supporting pages in the above blog post.

Shiju

From: Arjuna Rao Chavala arjunar...@gmail.com
Date: Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 9:36 AM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Use of Fair use messages from Wikipedia in a
CD for distribution in India
To: Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia.
wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Hi,

As some of you have noticed, several Indian languages have celebrated/are
celebrating tenth anniversary. Telugu language community is contemplating
release of Telugu wikipedia http://te.wikipedia.org content on a CD
with appropriate modifications for School children use. The CD is proposed
to be distributed to all schools in Andhra Pradesh.

Out of 9053 (approximate) images, 2071 (30%) are non free images(mostly
book cover, cinema posters, logos etc) . We are looking for advice on the
following
A) Whether we can include all the non free content on CD?
B) Whether WMF/WMIN will approve the use of Wikipedia Logo on the cover?
C) Any other precaution/disclaimers that need to be included on CD to
prevent any legal dispute in future.

As Malayalam community has produced a CD in the past and there have been
attempts to produce an English School Wikipedia CD for India, I would like
to hear from people with experience and expertise on these matters

Cheers
Arjuna Rao Chavala
Telugu Wikipedian

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] OT: Open Content and Open Educational Resources in India

2012-06-18 Thread Shiju Alex


 Assuming a lower threshold as well, that it's just available for free
 and no necessarily the other elements, are there resources that come
 to mind?



Texts books (of few subjects) are available for download from the education
department website of the following states (There might be some more state
government sites).

   - Tamil Nadu - http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/
   - Gujarat - http://gujarat-education.gov.in/textbook/
   - Karnataka:  http://dsert.kar.nic.in/textbooksonline/first.asp
   - Kerala - https://www.itschool.gov.in/initiatives.php
   - Madhya Pradesh -
   http://www.educationportal.mp.gov.in/Public/TextBooks/View_TextBooks.aspx

But as you already mentioned, like the NCERT text books,  these PDFs (in
some cases it is scanned PDF) are available just for download. None of
these are in Public Domain or under free license.


Shiju

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 Hello!

 I'm trying to write a piece on Open Content and Open Educational
 Resources in India and am asking for your help.

 Open Content is defined as:

 Reuse - the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim
 form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)
 Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content
 itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
 Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with
 other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content
 into a mashup)
 Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your
 revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the
 content to a friend)[3]

 [from: http://opencontent.org/definition/]

 Wikipedia and sister projects apart, do you know of content, both
 educational and otherwise, in India that would fit this definition?
 Assuming a lower threshold as well, that it's just available for free
 and no necessarily the other elements, are there resources that come
 to mind?

 I can think of the NCERT textbooks
 [http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/textbook/textbook.htm], NPTEL
 [http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/], VASAT [http://vasat.icrisat.org/],
 FlexiLearn [http://www.ignouflexilearn.ac.in/flexilearn/] and Pratham
 Books, if I say so myself,
 [http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Case_Studies/Pratham_Books].

 What else comes to mind? Examples and links would be very helpful.

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Blog post]: Numerals in Indic languages

2012-06-01 Thread Shiju Alex

I would also like to ask Shiju if Wikipedia community has the right to
adopt the say its own numeral standard without considering the fact that
whole world does not use it.

This is my personal opinion as an Indic language wikimedian. According to
me, Wikimedia community should be following what the speakers of that
language use. We cannot force numerals/script through wikimedia projects on
the speakers of a language if the speakers of that languages are not even
aware about it. That is the reason why few Indic language like Tamil,
Malayalam and so on completely moved to Arabic numerals since the
respective language speakers do not know the language numerals. But take
the case of Kannada. The Kannada speakers are aware about kannada numerals
and they use both numeral system in their daily life. So it was easy for
Kannada community to stick to Kannada numerals. This will not be possible
in Malayalam or Tamil since majority of the speakers of the respective
language do not know the respective numerals. So in short Wiki community
cannot forcefully adopt a numeral system with out considering the speakers
of the language. That is why it was so easy for Assamese and Bangla to
adopt the respective numeral.

Can Wikipedia be used as medium to introduce language changes or should the
task be just documenting things?

If we think from English or European language wikipedias the answer might
be No. Here I am answering from the perspective indic language wikipedias.
So the answer (according to me) to this question is, *to some extent* Yes.
Remember for most Indic languages, Wikipedia is the first unicode website
in that respective language. Even though the primary mission of wikimedia
is to document things through various projects, for Indic languages
knowingly or unknowingly we are brining many revolutionary things for that
language in the cyber world. So for Indic language, Wikimedia projects are
not just another website in that language. Which means there is some sort
of language intervention is happening through the work done by Indic
Wikimedians.

Over the past 6 years I have seen many of us asking (only we Indians will
ask like that) about the relevance of Indic Wikipedias when English
Wikipedia is available. I personally met and heard wikipedians itself
speaking against it and lobbying for it. But now a days I am able to note
that these same people who had criticized the existence of Indic wikipedias
now started speaking for it and even slowly started editing on it :) I have
seen users who never used an Indic language for their studies earlier, now
started studying their mother language just to contribute to the wiki
project in their mother language. This trend is going to continue and
increase now and we will see more speakers of a language speak and work for
their language wiki projects. That is why I told Indic language wiki
projects are doing more than just documenting the things.

May I also please ask you to add a Copyright notice on blog(similar to
copied text/images wmf blog) since the same is pasted from meta.

I have asked the chapter blog administrators to add copyright notice at the
footer of the blog. I do not have access to that.

Shiju

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Noopur Raval nra...@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hey folks,

Shiju has published an interesting post on numerals in an Indic context.
It's a really fascinating overview - including how numerals are depicted
across Indic languages, their use across languages, the policies adopted by
the various Indic communities, the need for some community decisions to
take things forward, a bit of Shiju's personal grumble on the fact that
Hindi film posters are no longer in Hindi :-) and a picture of a Northern
Railways bed sheet!

Intrigued? Read more on either on
metahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Numerals_in_Indic_Languages__Indic_language_Wikipedias
and
or the Chapter
bloghttp://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/06/01/numerals-in-indic-languages-indic-wikipedias-2/
.

[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Numerals_in_Indic_Languages_%26_Indic_language_Wikipedias
[2]
http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/06/01/numerals-in-indic-languages-indic-wikipedias-2/

Good read. Thanks for the post Shiju.

Coincidentally I came across Kaplan's blog[1] about digits and numbers
just yesterday. It was a good read, also throws in implementation
(technical + usage) related issues. I would also like to ask Shiju if
Wikipedia community has the right to adopt the say its own numeral standard
without considering the fact that whole world does not use it. Can
Wikipedia be used as medium to introduce language changes or should the
task be just documenting things?

I ask this because we are also having similar debates about language
style[2] (not to be confused with grantha, which is planned to be discussed

[Wikimediaindia-l] Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhiji is added to Gujarati Wikisource

2012-05-02 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

On behalf the Gujarati community, I wanted to share a nice update. On 22nd
April, Gujarati Wikisource reached a major milestone with the completion
of સત્યના પ્રયોગો અથવા
આત્મકથાhttp://gu.wikisource.org/wiki/%E0%AA%B8%E0%AA%A4%E0%AB%8D%E0%AA%AF%E0%AA%A8%E0%AA%BE_%E0%AA%AA%E0%AB%8D%E0%AA%B0%E0%AA%AF%E0%AB%8B%E0%AA%97%E0%AB%8B_%E0%AA%85%E0%AA%A5%E0%AA%B5%E0%AA%BE_%E0%AA%86%E0%AA%A4%E0%AB%8D%E0%AA%AE%E0%AA%95%E0%AA%A5%E0%AA%BE
(Saty Naa Prayogo Athavaa Aatmakathaa) It is the Autobiography of Mahatma
Gandhi (The story of my experiments with
truthhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_My_Experiments_with_Truth).
This book has 454 pages in 169 chapters in 5 sections.

The work to digitize this book was started less than 1 month before.

The following Gujarati wiki librarians contributed to this project.

1. સુશાંત સાવલા (Sushant Savla)
2. ધવલ વ્યાસ (Dhaval Vyas)
3. vyom25 (Vyom)
4. સતિષ પટેલ (Satish Chandra)
5. જેઠાભાઇ ઓડેદરા (Jethabhai Odedara)
6. અશોક મોઢવાડીયા (Ashok Modhavadia - Captain)
7. jaishree
8. Roopal Mehta
9. સંજય બાલોતિયા (Sanjay Balotia)
10. જીતેન્દ્રસિંહ (Jinedrasinh)
11. નિલેશ બંધીયા (Nilesha Bandhia)
12. Findjigar
13. દેવેન્દ્રસિંહ ગોહિલ (Devendrasinh Gohil)

To me, this is actually the biggest part of this story! *13
wikilibrarians*from all over the world collaborated on this! That is
amazing for
a relatively new community.

I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Ashok Modhavadia from
Junagadh for managing the project, and for Sushant Savla and Dhaval Vyas
for being inspirations behind it. Incidentally, Ashok managed the scanning
of all the pages, the allotment of chapters, and all other aspects of
project management.

For anyone interested in how to manage a Wikisource initiative, do look at
the discussions on this page

[
http://gu.wikisource.org/wiki/%E0%AA%9A%E0%AA%B0%E0%AB%8D%E0%AA%9A%E0%AA%BE:%E0%AA%B8%E0%AA%A4%E0%AB%8D%E0%AA%AF%E0%AA%A8%E0%AA%BE_%E0%AA%AA%E0%AB%8D%E0%AA%B0%E0%AA%AF%E0%AB%8B%E0%AA%97%E0%AB%8B_%E0%AA%85%E0%AA%A5%E0%AA%B5%E0%AA%BE_%E0%AA%86%E0%AA%A4%E0%AB%8D%E0%AA%AE%E0%AA%95%E0%AA%A5%E0%AA%BE
]

Digitization of the next book will be managed by Vyom.

There is an lovely quote I will close this mail with: આજ આનંદ મારા આંગણે
રે લોલ! (Aaj aanand maara aangane re lol!) which means Today is a joyous
day for us!
Congratulations to the Gujarati community.

Wishing Gujarati wiki community all the best.

Warmest Regards,

Shiju Alex
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhiji is added to Gujarati Wikisource

2012-05-02 Thread Shiju Alex

What is the bug number?
Has the PDF been uploaded to Commons?

John, this is related to the PDF export option in Wiki. The current
solution won't support Indic scripts. There are several bugs related to
this. One is this. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28206

An alternate solution (not a good solution) is using LibreOffice by copying
text and format the text outside wiki. But I hope a solution will come as
we move forward. I know Santhosh was working on this earlier. Do not know
its status now.

Shiju

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 7:01 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Dhaval,

What is the bug number?

Has the PDF been uploaded to Commons?

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 4:02 AM, Dhaval S. Vyas dsv...@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks once again Ashwin,

I have been considering to release the books officially, but
unfortunately,
PDF conversion is not working with Gujarati. The bug is filed a while
ago,
and I have been told that it may get quite a long time to fix the issue.
Without having capability of exporting the page as PDF or preparing a
book,
I won't really feel to rush for the book release.

Regards,
Dhaval

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.com

wrote:

Hi Dhaval,

That is really very good to hear. We must maintain the highest
standards in all things WikiSource. Unlike Wikipedia, errors cannot be
allowed to co-exist. Well done to all Gujarati Wiki-Source-ians. Keep
yup your great work.

I request that this book may be please be got officially released to
gain publicity and attention to Gujarati WikiSource the community.

Ashwin

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 9:56 PM, Dhaval S. Vyas dsv...@gmail.com
wrote:
Thanks Ashwin,

Not only this book, but the other one that is completed and the one
underway, are all proof read against original. These are all manually
typed
and not OCR'd. Thanks to the lack of available OCR Tool/software for
indic
scripts.

If you or anybody else here is aware of good and reliable tool for
Indic,
especially Gujarati, script please share. That will help us upload
book
in
remarkably less time than it has taken.

Best,
Dhaval

On 2 May 2012 17:01, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.com
wrote:

Hi Dhaval,

No doubt a great achievement and my very sincere congratulations. I
just wanted a clarification. This is very important! Have you checked
each word for correctness against the original text? Or is it OCR'd
text?

Sincerely

Ashwin

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 9:04 PM, Dhaval S. Vyas dsv...@gmail.com
wrote:
Dear Shiju,

Thanks a million for sharing this with the wider community.

An update:

The next collaborative work is already started and in just a week's
time, it
is almost 25% completed as well.

Kind Regards,
Dhaval

On 2 May 2012 16:11, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote:

Dear All,

On behalf the Gujarati community, I wanted to share a nice update.
On
22nd April, Gujarati Wikisource reached a major milestone with the
completion of સત્યના પ્રયોગો અથવા આત્મકથા (Saty Naa Prayogo
Athavaa
Aatmakathaa) It is the Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi (The story
of
my
experiments with truth). This book has 454 pages in 169 chapters
in
5
sections.

The work to digitize this book was started less than 1 month
before.

The following Gujarati wiki librarians contributed to this
project.

સુશાંત સાવલા (Sushant Savla)
ધવલ વ્યાસ (Dhaval Vyas)
vyom25 (Vyom)
સતિષ પટેલ (Satish Chandra)
જેઠાભાઇ ઓડેદરા (Jethabhai Odedara)
અશોક મોઢવાડીયા (Ashok Modhavadia - Captain)
jaishree
Roopal Mehta
સંજય બાલોતિયા (Sanjay Balotia)
જીતેન્દ્રસિંહ (Jinedrasinh)
નિલેશ બંધીયા (Nilesha Bandhia)
Findjigar
દેવેન્દ્રસિંહ ગોહિલ (Devendrasinh Gohil)

To me, this is actually the biggest part of this story! 13
wikilibrarians
from all over the world collaborated on this! That is amazing for
a relatively new community.

I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Ashok Modhavadia
from
Junagadh for managing the project, and for Sushant Savla and
Dhaval
Vyas for
being inspirations behind it. Incidentally, Ashok managed the
scanning
of
all the pages, the allotment of chapters, and all other aspects of
project
management.

For anyone interested in how to manage a Wikisource initiative, do
look
at
the discussions on this page

Digitization of the next book

[Wikimediaindia-l] Ones and O’s: The Advantages of Digital Texts in Wikisource

2012-03-27 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

When I wrote about the digitization in Wikisource using
DjVuhttp://shijualex.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/digitization-of-books-in-wikisource-using-djvu/few
Indic language community members asked me the following question.

When we are able to store the books in its graphic format say PDF/DjVu
 format. what is the need to type it? why not let it be as it is, the reader
 will read it in its graphic format.


This question is very important from Indic wikimedian's perspective. The
immediate answer I could give is about the importance of *searchable* and *
reusable* text.

But when I discussed this topic with Amir Aharoni (a multi language
wikimedian, which includes Indic languages also :)). Amir shared with me
lot of other important topics about this, which helped me
to understand that digitization in Wikisource is more than
about searching and reusing.

The result of our discussion turned out to be blog post. Here it is:
http://aharoni.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/the-advantages-of-wikisource/ In
this blog post Amir discusses about the Advantages of Digital Texts in
Wikisource.  Kindly share your comments.


Thanks
Shiju Alex
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Digitization of books in Wikisource using DjVu

2012-03-24 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear Wikimedians,

This mail is more relevant to wikimedians working in Wiksiource.

Here is a small blog post about the digitization of books using DjVu (or
about using Proofread extension).
http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/digitization-of-books-in-wikisource-using-djvu/


Post is also placed in metawiki at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Digitization_of_books_in_Wikisource_using_DjVu

Few Indic wiki source communities (Sanskrit and Malayalam) are using this
method extensively to digitize the books. But some other communities are
not aware about the use of such an extension.

This post is for sharing the best practices from differenent Indic wiki
communities.  Going forward I will be sharing these type of best practices
and lessons from various Indic language wiki communities. This
is essential since in most cases challenges, issues, and solutions are
similar for Indic wiki communities.

Shiju Alex
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Encyclopaedia Britannica stops the print version

2012-03-13 Thread Shiju Alex

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-never-ending-story-as-print-editions-bite-the-dust/story-fn5h1vlf-1226299200770

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2012/03/britannica-no-more-wikipedia-wins

Journalists already concluded it is due to Wikipedia

--Shiju Alex
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikipedia Telugu article count crosses 50, 000

2012-03-13 Thread Shiju Alex

Congrats to all Telugu Wikipedians.

Telugu wikipedia is the 3rd Indic Language wikipedia to cross the 50,000
article milestone.

As Naveen mentioned it would be nice if you could create a banner and use
that for outreach. Please let me know if you require support on this.

Shiju

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:03 AM, రహ్మానుద్దీన్ షేక్ nani1o...@gmail.comwrote:

Hi all

Wikipedia Telugu's article count has crossed 50,000 mark. On this
occasion, I congratulate everyone who was directly and indirectly involved.

Now I request every tewiki user to concentrate on articles' quality
improvement.

తెవికీ సభ్యులందరి కృషి వలన తెవికీ ౫ వ్యాసాల మైలురాయిని దాట గలిగింది.
అందరికీ శుభాకాంక్షలు. ఇకపై ప్రత్యేక వ్యాసం యొక్క నాణ్యతను మెరుగుపరుద్దాం.

--
Rahimanuddin Shaik
నాని
॥రామానుజార్య దివ్యాజ్ఞాం వర్ధతామభివర్ధతాం॥
Telugu Wikipedia : http://te.wikipedia.org

A new address for ebooks : http://kinige.com

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] India Program: Community Monthly Report: Feb 2012

2012-03-10 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

I would like to join Tinu in apologizing for any emotional comments that I
made.  I care for our movement.  I want our movement to grow.  I will do my
very best for our movement.


*NOTE*:My access to Internet is limited now due to the change in service
provider. Sorry for not sending this note earlier.


Shiju Alex

(Malayalam Wiki projects volunteer)


On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 4:48 AM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 Thanks Srikanth for the clarification.

 chapter hat
 The India Chapter is here to serve the community. It makes
 no distinction between chapter or (other) community members in these
 efforts. AFAIK, Naveen had told RSrikanth that his travel expenses (
 related to NITT) will be reimbursed by the chapter ( Before his travel 
 after). There was no reason why he had a different thought. If any chapter
 member has told you differently, it is his personal view and not the
 chapter's .

 Everyone is free to join the chapter as member or not. But regardless of
 whether you are a member or not, we will support you in your Wikimedia
 activities in the best efforts we can and the limited resources we have.

 /chapter hat

 personal cap
 I think this thread has gone too far with unnecessary  off-topic
 discussions, personal attacks  .. While I stand by my personal views
 expressed in this thread, the tone used by me wasn't the best of me. I
 think I got a bit carried by the emotions and heat in this discussion.
  Please understand that there was nothing personal, but I was just standing
 up for the values and philosophies that I personally believe in.  If I have
 unknowingly  unintentionally hurt anyone through my words, I express my
 deepest apologies..
 personal cap

 Enjoy your weekend. For those in Bangalore, Don't forget to come for the
 monthly meetup tomorrow. :)

 -TC

 On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 parakara.gh...@gmail.com wrote:

 Okay, so the person who blasted me about Trichy caught me on this one too.
 Let me clarify.
 Tinu, I know the Chapter has been supportive of my actions even though
 I'm not a member [yet].
 Naveen was more than ready to sign the MoU much before I informed Nitika.
 I am NOT claiming travel amount from the Chapter as I feel there is NO
 justification in me claiming INR 395 [275+120 Kovai-Tiruchi-Kovai], from a
 Voluntary Non profit organisation, especially when I made so many mistakes
 and errors before, after and during the T'palli event.
 The India Chapter has always been supportive of the Community, whether
 they're members or not.
 Naveen, as an EC member of the Chapter was the first person to offer
 support to me for setting up the Coimbatore community.
 Apart from this, the India Chapter has been the only body [in India, the
 Chair of the UK chapter offered his support] that has supported me for my
 QR Pedia ideas.
 I hope this clarifies everything.

 On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 parakara.gh...@gmail.com wrote:

 Tinu,
 Someone from the Chapter, [I DO NOT want to name him] told me so.
 I do not want to take the matter furtheer because I travelled at my
 expense. I am NOT claiming it from the Chapter.
 Good Day, Cheerio.
 --

 On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 4:01 PM, CherianTinu Abraham 
 tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:

 Dear Srikanth,
  Who told you that your travel expenses for NITT
 will not be reimbursed since you are not a chapter member ? Don't spread
 false accusations !
 Didn't Naveen say that your travel expenses related to NIIT,  even
 before you are traveling to Trichy?

 Regards
 Tinu Cherian

 On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 parakara.gh...@gmail.com wrote:


 This was the sole reason I went to Trichy, [at my expense, There is
 some ambiguity, there too, I was told that the Chapter would reminburse my
 travel amount, later was told that since I'm not a member, it wouldn't be
 possible, whatever be the case, I don't care, I still had fun].



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 --
 Regards,
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
 Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on February 12th.
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
 Aliens invaded Tamil Nadu, left their Spacship and now it is a Toll
 Plaza.
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IVRCL-Vijayamangalam-Toll-Plaza.JPG




 --
 Regards,
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
 Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on February 12th.
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
 Aliens invaded Tamil Nadu, left their Spacship and now it is a Toll
 Plaza.
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IVRCL-Vijayamangalam-Toll-Plaza.JPG


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] India Program: Community Monthly Report: Feb 2012

2012-03-08 Thread Shiju Alex


 IEP volunteers


This is another branding going on  to side line wikipedia editors. Remember
once a person start editing in Wikipedia they are wikipedians.  But here we
are branding and sidelining them to prove our POV.

I have seen members (both in this list and in other lists)  using the words
outsiders, non-xyz language speakers, non-xyz city people to sideline few
community members (especially if they are newcomers).  See now I am side
lined as an *ex-volunteer* so that the interested parties can prove their
POV.

For me that is not an issue since my wiki contributions are not depending
on these branding and I will continue my volunteer contribution. The
community atmosphere in Indic wikis is entirely different especially when
it comes towards treatment towards new users.

But when new members joining wiki if they are branded and sidelined how
will community grow for any language. From my experience with Malayalam
wikipedia, I must say Indic wiki communities perform better in this aspect.
When a user start editing in wiki, we must value their wiki contributions,
not by their association or non-association with any
organization/groups/individuals.


Shiju

(Again this mail is sent as a current volunteer of Malayalam wiki projects)




On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 2:05 AM, Sudhanwa Jogalekar
sudhanwa@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi,

 Let me take the focus of discussions back to the report/s where it all
 started.


 On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Hisham his...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 
 
  On Mar 7, 2012, at 1:38 PM, Pradeep Mohandas wrote:
 
 
  In retrospect, I also understand the need for seperating the Foundation
  activities as well. I think it is best to either go for total seperation
 of
  community, chapter and Office or have general statements.
 
 
  The work that India Program is doing is integrally embedded in community
  building.  This means we work directly with interested community members
  across the world and with the Chapter.   I don't think a total
 separation is
  either practical or advisable.  We should obviously avoid taking the
 option
  of general statements - and we need to find a suitable island in
 between.

 I was going through the report and also saw another page here:

 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Outreach_Sessions/Feb
 that gives listing of outreach sessions by IP.

 Another page by chapter also shows outreach reports. It is on the main
 page of wiki.

 IP and Chapter are having more or less similar functions. They do
 similar outreach efforts and have same people in some functions.

 Somehow, the reports from IP as well has chapter has about 9 entries
 each for outreach program and only 2 are common !!

 One of them is the now famous NITT academy and the other one is GNUnify.
 I was surprised to see only the English academy entry in GNUnify that
 was conducted by Ashwin and helped by IEP volunteers. The Marathi
 academy conducted at the same lab immediately after the lunch break is
 not mentioned at all. Also surprising was the entry where Moksh was
 involved. Possibly, it was supported by some IP person.

 General observation is that the report from IP shows the listing where
 only the IP, IEP people were involved and the chapter report mentions
 otherwise.

 This clearly means that there is a disconnect. I dont see any of the
 IEP/IP people joining the Pune community activities (except a few). In
 fact, one of the outreach session (mentioned in the report) by the IEP
 was not even mentioned on any of the lists.

 Possibly, there is some polarisation somewhere and personally I feel
 that it could be in favour of IP; simply because volunteers become
 paid activists there.

 Lets take a very much possible theoretical case(like the NITT, where
 volunteers had bad experiences) where a volunteer goes for conducting
 an academy and is not treated well and has bad facilities of
 lodging/boarding/travel etc. And for the same academy, a person from
 IP is also going and flies to/from the place and lives in a nice
 hotel. In such case, where and how to compare the voluntary work v/s
 paid staff work? The volunteer has spent his time and resouces for
 hardly anything but the staff is being paid for the same activity as
 part of the job.

 Ashwin has hinted about evaluating voluntary efforts. Is there any
 method to do it?

 Community members are same for both- chapter as well as IP. However,
 chapter is answerable to the community even when all the community
 members are not necessarily chapter members. (just a technical point.
 not to be emphasised), Whereas IP may not have any binding on anything
 and still get all kind of funds from WMF.  And also hire people from
 the community for doing the same work people were earlier doing
 voluntarily. Also remember that chapter and the community members do
 their work voluntarily and not get paid for it.

 Well, just to clarify, I am not saying that community members, IP
 staff and IEP volunteers are not doing

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fw: India Program: Community Monthly Report: Feb 2012

2012-03-08 Thread Shiju Alex


 I am still not clear as a small wikipedian, I should contribute to
 Foundation, Chapter, Community.


I would say since you are already contributing to Marathi wikipedia and its
sister projects you continue contributing there. If interested you can
contribute to other WMF wikis also (for example English wiki, metawiki, may
be other language wikis also).

Chapter and other organizational setup are subset of community. Contribute
to if you are interested.  According to me we have enough options available
to contribute.


Shiju

(A Malayalam wikimedia projects volunteer)





On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 2:10 PM, Mandar Kulkarni mvkulkarn...@yahoo.co.ukwrote:

 +1 from my side for Sudhanwa's views.

 I am still not clear as a small wikipedian, I should contribute to
 Foundation, Chapter, Community.

 With Regards,

 Mandar V. Kulkarni
 http://mr.wikipedia.org
  http://mr.wikisource.org
 http://live.wikimedia.in

   - Forwarded Message -
 *From:* Sudhanwa Jogalekar sudhanwa@gmail.com
 *To:* Wikimedia India Community list wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

 *Sent:* Thursday, 8 March 2012, 2:05
 *Subject:* Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] India Program: Community Monthly
 Report: Feb 2012

 Hi,

 Let me take the focus of discussions back to the report/s where it all
 started.


 On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Hisham his...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 
 
  On Mar 7, 2012, at 1:38 PM, Pradeep Mohandas wrote:
 
 
  In retrospect, I also understand the need for seperating the Foundation
  activities as well. I think it is best to either go for total seperation
 of
  community, chapter and Office or have general statements.
 
 
  The work that India Program is doing is integrally embedded in community
  building.  This means we work directly with interested community members
  across the world and with the Chapter.   I don't think a total
 separation is
  either practical or advisable.  We should obviously avoid taking the
 option
  of general statements - and we need to find a suitable island in
 between.

 I was going through the report and also saw another page here:

 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Outreach_Sessions/Feb
 that gives listing of outreach sessions by IP.

 Another page by chapter also shows outreach reports. It is on the main
 page of wiki.

 IP and Chapter are having more or less similar functions. They do
 similar outreach efforts and have same people in some functions.

 Somehow, the reports from IP as well has chapter has about 9 entries
 each for outreach program and only 2 are common !!

 One of them is the now famous NITT academy and the other one is GNUnify.
 I was surprised to see only the English academy entry in GNUnify that
 was conducted by Ashwin and helped by IEP volunteers. The Marathi
 academy conducted at the same lab immediately after the lunch break is
 not mentioned at all. Also surprising was the entry where Moksh was
 involved. Possibly, it was supported by some IP person.

 General observation is that the report from IP shows the listing where
 only the IP, IEP people were involved and the chapter report mentions
 otherwise.

 This clearly means that there is a disconnect. I dont see any of the
 IEP/IP people joining the Pune community activities (except a few). In
 fact, one of the outreach session (mentioned in the report) by the IEP
 was not even mentioned on any of the lists.

 Possibly, there is some polarisation somewhere and personally I feel
 that it could be in favour of IP; simply because volunteers become
 paid activists there.

 Lets take a very much possible theoretical case(like the NITT, where
 volunteers had bad experiences) where a volunteer goes for conducting
 an academy and is not treated well and has bad facilities of
 lodging/boarding/travel etc. And for the same academy, a person from
 IP is also going and flies to/from the place and lives in a nice
 hotel. In such case, where and how to compare the voluntary work v/s
 paid staff work? The volunteer has spent his time and resouces for
 hardly anything but the staff is being paid for the same activity as
 part of the job.

 Ashwin has hinted about evaluating voluntary efforts. Is there any
 method to do it?

 Community members are same for both- chapter as well as IP. However,
 chapter is answerable to the community even when all the community
 members are not necessarily chapter members. (just a technical point.
 not to be emphasised), Whereas IP may not have any binding on anything
 and still get all kind of funds from WMF.  And also hire people from
 the community for doing the same work people were earlier doing
 voluntarily. Also remember that chapter and the community members do
 their work voluntarily and not get paid for it.

 Well, just to clarify, I am not saying that community members, IP
 staff and IEP volunteers are not doing work. They are really doing
 fantastic work and that must to be appreciated. However, all those
 efforts/work has to be taken in various

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] India Program: Community Monthly Report: Feb 2012

2012-03-07 Thread Shiju Alex

I am replying to this mail as a *Malayalam wikimedia community member*.


Fact:  Subhashish, *former volunteer*, and now paid consultant with India
 Programs.


What do you mean by this? I Shiju Alex is a Indic language wikipedian now
close to 6 years. According to Mr. Anirudh (an EC member of India chapter)
I am a former volunteer. is this is the official position of wikimedia
India chapter? As a community member I require an explanation for this.


Shiju Alex

(An Indic language wikipedian)







On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:11 PM, Anirudh Bhati anirudh...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Hisham his...@wikimedia.org wrote:


 Nothing is conducted solely by India Program - and hence I said
 supported.  Everything is conducted by the community - sometimes under
 the aegis of the Chapter and sometimes independently.  The support that we
 have provided varies - from getting the actual event fixed up to providing
 presentation material to interested community members to participating in
 these events.


 Can this be clearly specified in the report?  That is more helpful than
 simply supported.  For instance, when you say Supported the community
 to get a venue in Guwahati University, it would help us understand more if
 you could tell us how.

  On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 12:45 PM, CherianTinu Abraham 
 tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi Pranav,
 In India, it is extremely difficult to hairline separate who has done
 which event. - Chapter, Community and WMF India Programs.


 I agree it's not possible to do that, but it is entirely possible to list
 out the work done in specific.  This enhances our accountability and
 transparency towards the community.


 Let us take the case of the Trichy event, the request came to a community
 member Rsrikanth to the chapter. Nitika was actively involved along with me
 and Naveen. The chapter signed the MoU and supplied some goodies. Nitika
 was actively involved in coaching Sohan, a chapter member and Rsrikanth.
 One must not also forget that both Hisham  Nitika are also chapter
 members.


 Fact: Nitika is a paid employee of the WMF India Programs and is not a
 chapter/community volunteer.



 Another event in Chennai (Jaya eng college) , where Subha led, his travel
 expenses was reimbursed by the Chapter, Subha is a Chapter SIG Chair .. The
 event is supported by Hisham  Nitika too. Subha is also an India Programs
 executive.


 Fact:  Subhashish, former volunteer, and now paid consultant with India
 Programs.



 I actively organize Bangalore Meetups and support several others ..
 Should I be worrying whether I am doing as a chapter member, board member
 or a community member?


 By a matter of principle, chapter and community volunteers are just...
 volunteers.  Paid consultants are hired to executive specific programs, and
 hence the results of their work and reports should be presented with
 clarity.  Simply supporting something does not clarify the extent of
 their involvement.


 As with Assam meetup recently, coordinated by Shiju, some of the expenses
 were met from a personal grant from the Foundation to me  Shiju.

 There was a recent Malayalam Wiki Academy in Bangalore organised by
 Malayalam Community. Some of them are also Chapter members. People like me
 and Naveen actively helped the event ..Are we doing as chapter board member
 or community member? We don't really know.. But we are just genuinely
 helping the movement, with worrying about what capacity we are doing it.


 I don't think it's a good idea to separate the chapter and the community.
  The chapter is a membership-based organization and by definition an
 umbrella organization which represents the community.  There is no reason
 for differentiation as long as it is volunteer work done by a chapter
 member.



 The various academies that we do, some of the requests comes directly to
 the chapter, community or India programs, but each supporting each other in
 different capacities.

 Now Noopur is a GLAM Champion, Chapter member and Delhi SIG Chair and
 also part of Chapter Communications Team. She now also heads the
 Communication  PR for the India Programs.

 As I explained, it is difficult to separate the contributions of
 different entities or individuals for the Wikimedia  movement in India.

 IMHO, we should be only concerned about the outcomes of the event and not
 who gets the credit.


 Even though the possibility of interfacing each other is high for
 different entities and groups of volunteers working in India, there is a
 need for differentiation and it is a question which cannot be avoided.  The
 volunteers who work on their pet-projects while not being associated with
 any of the entities are not expected to be as accountable as (i) the
 chapter which receives or may receive grants from the Wikimedia Foundation
 and donations from individuals and organizations in the country AND (ii)
 the WMF India Programs which is run by multiple paid consultants.

 So I don't see why we

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] India Program: Community Monthly Report: Feb 2012

2012-03-07 Thread Shiju Alex


 Shiju, you and Subhashish have been volunteers but now you are paid
 contractors hired by the Foundation.  Any work you do within the purview of
 your contractual relationship with the Foundation will be work as a paid
 contractor and cannot be deemed to be the same as a volunteer. You can
 continue being volunteers once your contractual assignment is complete.  Is
 that so difficult to understand?


You are totally wrong. That is the difference between your involvement with
wikimedia movement and mine. My involvement with wikimedia movement will be
there *even if this job is not there*. So just DO NOT compare your
wikimedia contribution with mine. As a volunteer I will decide which  all
projects I need to work. Which means I still  continue to contribute to
various wiki projects as a volunteer. I do not want your permission for
that. Who had given you the authority to expel or exclude me from Wikimedia
community?



Let me ask you a basic question. Are you with wikimedia movement for
helping it or for screwing it up. I was going through the replies and your
wiki contributions over the past few months. What is your intention in
being with Wikimedia movement in India.


Shiju Alex

(An Indic language wikipedian)







On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Anirudh Bhati anirudh...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

 I am replying to this mail as a *Malayalam wikimedia community member*.


 Fact:  Subhashish, *former volunteer*, and now paid consultant with
 India Programs.


 What do you mean by this? I Shiju Alex is a Indic language wikipedian now
 close to 6 years. According to Mr. Anirudh (an EC member of India chapter)
 I am a former volunteer. is this is the official position of wikimedia
 India chapter? As a community member I require an explanation for this.


 Shiju, you and Subhashish have been volunteers but now you are paid
 contractors hired by the Foundation.  Any work you do within the purview of
 your contractual relationship with the Foundation will be work as a paid
 contractor and cannot be deemed to be the same as a volunteer. You can
 continue being volunteers once your contractual assignment is complete.  Is
 that so difficult to understand?

 The difference is this: I am an unpaid volunteer who cannot expend the
 same amount of time and energy towards our projects as you are currently
 able to.


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] India Program: Community Monthly Report: Feb 2012

2012-03-07 Thread Shiju Alex


 Let me first explain what he was trying to refer to. He called you a
 volunteer, from the Latin word voluntarius[1], meaning voluntary or
 willing. The noun form [2] describes it as -
 1.One who enters into, or offers for, any 
 servicehttp://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/service of
 his/her own free will, especially when done without pay.


That exactly is the difference of my contribution as a volunteer.  My
contribution to wiki as a volunteer do not depend on the above definition
or my official involvement in WMF or other WMF entities.

On one side few people (for example, Anirudh) are screwing up volunteers
for taking job in WMF; On the other side they themselves criticizing WMF
staff for not being recruited from community. So what is the real intention
of all these discussions?



Shiju

(Again an Indic language wikipedian)


On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi Shiju

 On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 3:09 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

 Shiju, you and Subhashish have been volunteers but now you are paid
 contractors hired by the Foundation.  Any work you do within the purview of
 your contractual relationship with the Foundation will be work as a paid
 contractor and cannot be deemed to be the same as a volunteer. You can
 continue being volunteers once your contractual assignment is complete.  Is
 that so difficult to understand?


 You are totally wrong. That is the difference between your involvement
 with wikimedia movement and mine. My involvement with wikimedia movement
 will be there *even if this job is not there*. So just DO NOT compare
 your wikimedia contribution with mine. As a volunteer I will decide which
 all projects I need to work. Which means I still  continue to contribute to
 various wiki projects as a volunteer. I do not want your permission for
 that. Who had given you the authority to expel or exclude me from Wikimedia
 community?


 Let me first explain what he was trying to refer to. He called you a
 volunteer, from the Latin word voluntarius[1], meaning voluntary or
 willing. The noun form [2] describes it as -
  1.One who enters into, or offers for, any 
 servicehttp://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/service of
 his/her own free will, especially when done without pay.

 I'm not sure what you are reacting to. It is a simple distinction between
 paid and non-paid effort. You were a community member, you still are, and
 you shall remain one until you choose to leave it.

 You are however, currently a paid employee, there is a very clear
 distinction between volunteers and staff. I assure you it exists on en.wp
 and outside India when the senior staff interact and talk about other
 community members, they always use the word volunteers as opposed to
 staff. You can check with this in several hundred of Sue and Barry's
 email if you like. The distinction is paid vs. non-paid, nothing more. This
 extends to community members and beyond.

 There is no reason to be angry over this, it's just terminology and
 possibly a misunderstanding.


 Let me ask you a basic question. Are you with wikimedia movement for
 helping it or for screwing it up. I was going through the replies and your
 wiki contributions over the past few months. What is your intention in
 being with Wikimedia movement in India.


 No one should be asking that question to another community member. I can
 ask you that, you can ask me, it is all a matter of perspective. We are
 only accountable to ourselves, and what we choose to do or say.

 I would ask you to please calm down and don't take this as an offense.
 It's probably just a misunderstanding with terminology that is usually
 applied in these situations.

 Regards
 Theo

 [1]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/voluntarius#Latin
 [2]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/volunteer

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press]: Medianama : Wikimedia India Rolls Out Realtime Search; Supports Indic Editions

2012-03-06 Thread Shiju Alex

*We hope that Wikimedia works on delivering better transliteration
support or improving the results for Indic languages. *

Typing scheme for Transliteration is an issue (for readers) since there is
no standard transliteration scheme for any language. For editors it is not
an issue since they use that in wiki. Providing *help link* to typing
schemes (transliteration/Inscript or other schemes) once a scheme is
selected can be one solution. But the issue here is live.wikimedia is meant
for readers. So they may not really like to go and understand the typing
scheme. So it is a tricky situation.

In addition to the existing typing schemes we can think about providing
more typing schemes to readers (including the google transliteration
option, but not sure that is viable since it is not open source ).

*However, we got accurate results with the Hindi Inscript input option.*

since Inscript uses same layout for all indic scripts if Inscript solution
works for Hindi then it work for all other indic languages including
Kannada.

*
*
On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Tinu Cherian tinucher...@wikimedia.inwrote:

*Medianama : Wikimedia India Rolls Out Realtime Search; Supports Indic
Editions
*

http://www.medianama.com/2012/03/223-wikimedia-india-rolls-out-realtime-search-supports-indic-editions/

*It looks like Wikimedia India has implemented a project by engineering
student Shrey Gokani to roll out an instant search engine of its own at
live.wikimedia.in. The site is under a creative commons license, with the
code dual licensed under GPL and Creative Commons. The Wikimedia Instant
site does appear to have additional functionality over Gokani’s version,
with the ability to choose an Indic Input keyboard, since the service
supports Indic language editions of Wikimedia services.

The search engine works quite similar to Wikilive, another student project
about which, we had written in November 2011. And similar to what we had
wished, Wikimedia Live also covers Wikipedia, Wikitionary, Wikibooks,
Wikiquotes, Wikiversity, Wikinews and Wikisource, and their Indic editions,
in realtime. The site also offers other relevant Wikipedia search results
on the top, followed by a preview of the most relevant Wikipedia article to
the search query.

Indic Language Support: The site allows users to type in queries in 21
Indic languages including Kannada, Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Sanskrit, Bangla
and others. How it works is that the search engine allows the user to
choose the language of his preference, following which he has to choose an
input script which is apt for his language. For instance, if one chooses
Kannada as his preferred language, he has to choose between the Kannada
transliteration option or choose the Kannada Inscript option, however if
you choose Hindi as your preferred language, you will have to select the
sole Hindi Inscript option.

Irrelevant Results? We weren’t too happy with results generated through
Indic language transliteration input, since it delivered wrong results in
most cases when we gave it a spin (we tried it on OS X Lion on Google
Chrome). We hope that Wikimedia works on delivering better transliteration
support or improving the results for Indic languages. However, we got
accurate results with the Hindi Inscript input option.

Similar Portals: Deepanshu Mehndiratta, a second year engineering student
at BITS-Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus, had created an instant Wikipedia search
called ‘Wikilive‘ which allowed users to type in a search query and get
relevant Wikipedia article and topics instantly. WikiInstant and The
Instant Wiki are other portals which allow users to search Wikipedia in
realtime. *

Regards
Tinu Cherian
pr...@wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news

Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes
only. The publisher ( Medianama) of the above news article owns the
copyrights of the article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Annual Report of Indic language wikipedias

2012-03-01 Thread Shiju Alex

 of the world can read and
understand what happened in the respective wikis)

Personally, I think these reports serve multiple purposes.

   - It help the current active community to share with the larger
   community (including retired or not current active editors) all the many
   things that individual volunteers are doing - which gives a sense of
   momentum to a community.
   - It help the community to reach out to the rest of the language
   speakers and tell them about what is happening in their respective language
   wiki
   - It allows other community members to learn from others' experiences -
   and also provides a contact point for any queries they might have.
   - It is very useful for media / PR - because it gives a tangible story
   for the press which is newsworthy and uplifting
   - it documents the editing history of community every year

My main objective behind sharing this is that I know most communities don't
do this.  My guess is that many of them don't know that such a thing is
possible.  Another concern that you might have is whether there is enough
to fill into an annual report.  I think if you just step back and think of
all the many things that are happening in your communities, you would be
amazed by how much is actually taking place.  Even if it has not happened
historically, the increased activity in India over the past few months
should reassure you that there is so much to write about.  In this context,
I would specifically call out the wonderful activity levels of Assamese,
Marathi, Nepali, Odia and Sanskrit as just 5 illustrations of communities
which have load of stories to share.

If you are interested and need some help, please feel free to ask me and I
will help out.

Happy Reporting!

Shiju Alex
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tamil Wiki Media Contest

2012-02-29 Thread Shiju Alex

The fact that 300 volunteers participated in this contest in really an
exciting news. Hope the contest helped to attract many Tamil speakers to
Tamil Wiki projects.

Shiju



On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:

  Hello All,

 The contest is now closed. A total of 15217[1] (5 times our
 expectation[2]) files were uploaded by around 300 contributors. We are
 planning to announce the results by March 25th (Yes, selecting 9 prizes out
 of 15,000 entries is slightly tough task). A detailed report / statistics
 will be available soon. Thanks for your support.

 [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:TamilWiki_Media_Contest
 [2]
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Tamil_Wikimedians/TamilWiki_Media_Contest#Measures_of_success

 Regards,
 Srikanth L

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] The Hindu : The struggles of keeping Kannada Wikipedia afloat

2012-02-22 Thread Shiju Alex

I think there are 3 issues that this newsarticle raises.

The first is the is the desperate urgency for community building.
 Community building is a combination of:

   - increased community communication (in increasing order of importance:
   events, mailing lists, talk pages, meet-ups and village pumps)
   - stronger community collaboration (small wikiprojects starting of with
   even 2 editors and on virtually any topic of interest whether it is a
   subject area like health articles or a task like translate articles
   clean-up)
   - more frequent and impactful outreach (including targeting the most
   suitable audience profile for outreach, combination of classroom  hands-on
   editing experience during the workshop, staying in touch with newbies after
   the session, hand-holding newbies during their first 100 edits and
   integrating newbies into the existing community)
   - reaching out retired editors - which is a particularly severe problem
   in Kannada (and Telugu) because active editor numbers have declined (or not
   grown) over the past 1 year.  This is particularly alarming given the small
   community size.  Also, the reason why these editors retired is not because
   of technology but a whole host of other reasons (including changing
   personal circumstances, lack of an adequate sense of community, lack of
   collabaration inside wiki, lack of pride of projects, over usage of bots,
   and so on.

The second is that while there are very real issues that the Google
translate project created (some of which were outlined below), the biggest
problem is that it focuses on content and not community.  This is a similar
problem to using bots to create content - which has been shown time and
time again to downright harmful to projects and hence to communities.  On
the specific issue of Google translate project, it also represents a solid
opportunity to get existing editors (and maybe some newbies as well) to get
involved with the clean up.  Some editors in Kannada wikipedia have already
started preparatory work on this - and there is great potential in this.
 It is a great way of building the community through collaboration around a
common mission.

The third issue is on technology.  I know that - historically for PCs -
there have been issues around fonts, browsers, OS, and so on.  However, I
think these are becoming less critical as technical developments have
resolved many issues.  (This is evidenced by the increased Kannada presence
in the blogosphere as well as on sites like facebook and twitter.)  Having
said that, editing wikipedia - in any language - does require certain basic
technical comfort especially when one clicks on edit and sees the HTML
mark-ups that pop up.  To that extent, I would suggest that we don't focus
too much on the technical challenges but place all our emphasis on
community building.  According to me technical challenge is not a major
issue for most of the major indic languages (when it come to PCs). And now
it is time for us to come out this excuse and contribute to our own
language wikipedia.

Omshivaprakash is right when he says that too few knew that they can edit.
 To address this, a combination of outreach and press coverage is essential
to convey this message.  On press coverage, it is tempting to put out
stories that a particular language has achieved a milestone (for example,
10,000 article milestone.) is great but the even more useful ones are
stories that mention that anyone can edit, give the very basics of editing,
suggest specific areas where readers might be interested and give them
contact details in case they are interested.

In all this, do keep in mind that readership of Indic language wikipedias
is growing exponentially. The audience is there now!  We need to get the
community built so that the can edit the content.

Thanks
Shiju







On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Ashwin Baindur
ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:


 As a person working in the relevant field, we would welcome Shiju's
 comments on the article, its facts, proposed steps by the editors mentioned
 and what Kannada Wikipedia needs for revival.

 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --



 On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Tinu Cherian (Wikimedia India) 
 tinucher...@wikimedia.in wrote:

  *The Hindu : The struggles of keeping Kannada Wikipedia afloat*

 http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article2909005.ece

 *In the world of online Kannada content, blogs may be thriving but
 Wikipedia is struggling. The reasons vary from technology barriers to lack
 of contributors, say Wikipedians.

 While there has been a surge in Kannada content in the last two years,
 contributors to the language have been grappling with technology barriers.

 After floundering for years, the Kannada Wikipedia picked up with font
 availability, said Hari Prasad Nadig, a Kannada Wikipedian. The software
 to add to Kannada Wikipedia is not so

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Indic language wikipedias - 2011 annual update

2012-02-16 Thread Shiju Alex

Sure Ashwin, I will do that.

Shiju

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 9:52 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

Shiju, I request you to forward this to Wikimedia-in-en. This is also an
Indic language list as such such a generic post will help WikiProject
Indians to be of more relevance to Indic language WikiProjects.

I could forward it myself but I prefer you to do it and add this list to
your language wikipedia email group list.

Warm regards,

Ashwin Baindur
--

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 9:21 PM, Mandar Kulkarni mvkulkarn...@yahoo.co.uk
wrote:

Dear Shiju,

This is an extremely comprehensive and useful report you have shared.
This gives insight for not only for my Indic language but also for other
Indic languages.

I would be happy if we make such analysis every month which will make
sure that we are on right track.

Thanks once again.

With Regards,

Mandar V. Kulkarni
http://mr.wikipedia.org

--
*From:* Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org
*To:* nepaliw...@googlegroups.com; wikis...@lists.wikimedia.org;
Wikimedia India Community list wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
*Sent:* Thursday, 16 February 2012, 12:39
*Subject:* [Wikimediaindia-l] Indic language wikipedias - 2011 annual
update

Dear All,

I have compiled the, statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias
for the year 2011. In this report, my aim is to provide an *analysis* as
well as *my perspectives* on the health of various Indic language
communities as well as the state of various Indic language wikipedias for
the year 2011. (The period of analysis is editor contributions between 2011
January 1 and 2011 December 31). As always, a lot of the data for this
report and analysis are based on the statistical data published at
http://stats.wikimedia.org. Thanks to Erik Zachte for compiling all this
information.

I must also point out that this annual update contains a number of
insights *that are derived not only from this data but directly from
community members* who have shared a very real-world picture.

Read the annual update here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Statistics/2011_Annual_Update

I welcome your comments on this annual update. Please discuss it on the
talk page. You can also reach me at sh...@wikimedia.org

Thanks
Shiju Alex

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Indic language wikipedias - 2011 annual update

2012-02-15 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

I have compiled the, statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias
for the year 2011. In this report, my aim is to provide an *analysis* as
well as *my perspectives* on the health of various Indic language
communities as well as the state of various Indic language wikipedias for
the year 2011. (The period of analysis is editor contributions between 2011
January 1 and 2011 December 31). As always, a lot of the data for this
report and analysis are based on the statistical data published at
http://stats.wikimedia.org. Thanks to Erik Zachte for compiling all this
information.

I must also point out that this annual update contains a number of insights
*that are derived not only from this data but directly from community
members* who have shared a very real-world picture.

Read the annual update here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Statistics/2011_Annual_Update


I welcome your comments on this annual update. Please discuss it on the
talk page. You can also reach me at sh...@wikimedia.org

Thanks
Shiju Alex
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Building the Assamese Wiki Community - Outreach programs during next week

2012-01-23 Thread Shiju Alex

 Regards,

Shiju Alex
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Foundation-l] REMINDER: Wikimania 2013 - invitation to bid

2012-01-23 Thread Shiju Alex

+1 Ashwin.

As far as I know none of the Wiki communities of India (either language or
city) are in a stage to host an international conference. For time being
let us concentrate on building communities and let us gain confidence by
doing some good regional and language specific conferences.

Shiju


On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

 As one intimately involved in the planning and execution of the last
 WikiConference India, we need to have a cold rational thought on this
 process for bidding for Wikimania, not hubris.

 Without prejudice to User:Vibhijain, a bid from Delhi cannot be made
 unilaterally by an under-age editor  who is not in a position to
 execute any of the responsible roles. There should be a requirement
 for each bidding city community to show support and backing. Otherwise
 the bid should be thrown out.

 That Delhi has editors is without question, the real question is does
 Delhi have a strong and united wikicommunity which will be able to
 take on this kind of huge commitment? There are few signs of such an
 established community, not withstanding lot of relatively new editors
 such as Noopur taking up new activities to do which hopefully will
 lead to a strong and vibrant community in the future.

 For the reasons mentioned above, the Delhi bid should be re-examined
 in all seriousness.

 I'm not siding with Mumbai either. In my opinion, we should have a few
 more WikiConferences India before we ask for Wikimania. India needs
 WikiConference Indias, not to host the international community. It is
 akin to the person who has not yet furnished his house or setup his
 residence in a city falling over himself to invite others from
 outside.

 WikiConference India 2011 stretched the volunteer community of the
 nation's Wikipedians and was possible due to the unflinching support
 of so many others not from the city. Which is as it should be. So can
 the country deal with both a WikiConference and Wikimania in the same
 year? I think not. Suppose another city, say Kolkata hosted
 WikiConference India, where would the funds, volunteers attention go?
 I think it is a raw deal for the city hosting the WikiConference. The
 amount of volunteer effort which goes into these is not funny. I think
 around 5000 edits worth of effort of mine went into the Conference.

 WikiConference India 2011 proved to be beyond the resources of Mumbai
 wikipedians alone. If they have bid for Wikimania 2013, can they
 assure the Indian wikipedian community that they can tackle this even
 larger event without extensive external help when they could not
 tackle the smaller?

 If Indian editors are supposed to all join in loyally to support
 Mumbai should it  win the bid, isn't it right that Mumbai ask the
 community's opinion at large first before bidding instead of taking it
 for granted that Indian volunteers will pitch in when needed?

 I do not grudge supporting Mumbai, I identify strongly with it and
 will do whatever I can do to help those wonderful guys, but I strongly
 feel that this light hearted attitude to such serious subjects in fact
 takes the rest of the Indian community for granted.

 My own personal take is let this opportunity go. Let us have
 WikiConferences 2012 and 2013 and bid instead for Wikimania 2014 and
 that year we should not have a WikiConference. 2013 is too early. The
 need of the hour is building strong Indian wikipedias and communities
 not hosting foreigners.

 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --



 On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 7:16 AM, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote:
  Since we have not one, but two bids from India,  I think that is
 important
  to be announced here (I would rather prefer if all of you could work
  together in a single bid, but if is not possible, at least list both
 under
  the right section in the page)
  _
  Béria Lima
  (351) 925 171 484
 
  Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter
 livre
  acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. Ajude-nos a construir
  esse sonho.
 
 
  On 23 January 2012 23:15, Thomas Goldammer tho...@googlemail.com
 wrote:
 
  Dear all,
 
  I want to remind everyone to officially start a bid for the locale of
  Wikimania 2013. All bids made so far are *unofficial* and cannot be
  considered, as long as they are not in the list of official bids on
  this page:
 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2013_bids
 
  The possibility to make an official bid closes at ***January 28, 23:59
  UTC***, this is in less than five days! So hurry up if you want
  Wikimania to happen at your place. :)
 
  Note that you then have two more months to make your actual bid (and
  one more month to refine it). You don't need to have everything
  completely ready by now, so don't worry. :) For now, just create the
  bid page and list it under Official bids. Please don't forget to
  list your organizing team members on

[Wikimediaindia-l] Assamese wikipedia crossed the 1000 article milestone

2012-01-08 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

Assamese wikipedia has crossed the 1000 article milestone yesterday (2012
January 7). Congrats to all Assamese wikipedians who contributed to
this. Started
in 2002 June 2 http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1, Assamese wikipedia
is the first Indic Language wikipedia. Assamese wikipedia will celebrate
its 10th Anniversery this year June.


I remember last year this time Assamese
wikipediahttp://shijualex.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/indian-language-wikipedias-2010-statistical-report/was
having just 300 articles and just one highly active user. The
excellent
efforts put forward by some of the senior community members using various
social networking sites are helping Assamese wikipedia to grow its
community. Now it crossed 1000 article milestone and has more than 10 high
active users. Hope community will be able to add more members to its crew
this year.


Shiju

Consultant, WMF India Programs
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Delhi Wiki Meetup on the 2012 January 15

2012-01-06 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

Delhi Wikimedians are planning to meetup on *2012 January 15* to celebrate
the 11th Anniversary of Wikipedia.

The details of the meetup can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Delhi/Delhi5.  Please
sign uphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Delhi/Delhi5#Signed_up
.

Shiju Alex
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Birthday of Indic language wikipedias

2012-01-04 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear Indic wikipedians

One of the aspects that was raised during the discussions with almost all
Indic language wiki communities was the need to build existing
communities, motivate existing community members, attract new community
members by increasing awareness of projects and communities, and to
celebrate all the possible occasions.

I have a suggestion that can contribute to all of these in some manner. The
suggestion is to celebrate the anniversaries of Indic language wikipedias.
And as you might agree, the first edit date of a wiki is the best *
anniversary* that a community can celebrate.  I have collected information
for the birthdays of each Indic Wikipedia.  This is the day on which the
first edit happened on the respective language wikipedia. (The *Indian
Standard Time* is used while recording the date and time).


I am listing those days below for your reference,

   *Indic Language wikipedia*

*Birthday/Anniversary (Date of first edit)*

*Number of active editors*

*Assamese* http://as.wikipedia.org/

*June 02 (2002-June-02) http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

10

*Nepali* http://ne.wikipedia.org/

*June 03 (2002-June-03) http://ne.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

13

*Punjab http://pa.wikipedia.org/i*

*June 03 (2002-June-03) http://pa.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

3

*Malayalam* http://ml.wikipedia.org/

*December 21 (2002-December-21) http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

93

*Kannada* http://kn.wikipedia.org/

*January 12 (2003-January-12) http://kn.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

20

*Bhojpuri* http://bh.wikipedia.org/

*February 21 (2003-February-21) http://bh.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

0

*Hindi* http://hi.wikipedia.org/

*July 11 http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1 (2003-July-11)
http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

55

*Kashmiri* http://ks.wikipedia.org/

*July 26 (2003-July-26) http://ks.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=5*

1

*Tamil* http://ta.wikipedia.org/

*September 30 (2003-September-30) http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=5*

85

*Marathi* http://mr.wikipedia.org/

*October 20 (2003-October-20) http://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

44

*Gujarati* http://gu.wikipedia.org/

*December 09 (2003-December-09) http://gu.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

11

*Sanskrit* http://sa.wikipedia.org/

*December 21 (2003-December-21) http://sa.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

16

*Sindhi* http://sd.wikipedia.org/

*December 26 (2003-December-26) http://sd.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

5

*Bengali* http://bn.wikipedia.org/

*January 27 http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=6
(2004-January-27)http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=6
*

52

*Urdu* http://ur.wikipedia.org/

*January 27 (2004-January-27) http://ur.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=2*

15

*Odia (Oriya http://or.wikipedia.org/)*

*January 29 (2004-January-29) http://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

10

*Telugu* http://te.wikipedia.org/

*January 29 (2004-January-29) http://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

32

*Pali* http://pi.wikipedia.org/

*July 29 (2004-July-29) http://pi.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=1*

0

*Newari* http://new.wikipedia.org/

*October 01 (2006-October-01) http://new.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=4*

1

*Bishnupriya Manipuri* http://bpy.wikipedia.org/

*October 01 (2006-October-01) http://bpy.wikipedia.org/wiki/?diff=2*

2


This list is available in meta also.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages#State_of_Indic_Language_Projects


I recommend that we use these anniversary dates to do the following

   - Organize a small wikiconfernce or some other major event for the
   respective language wikipedia
   - Organize community meetups to celebrate this
   - Coincide community events around these meetups (such as outreach
   sessions, photo events, or launching specific WikiProjects)
   - Invite press to these meetups and use different platforms to spread
   word about respective language wikipedia.

From the above table we can see that *Assamese* is the first Indic language
wikipedia, and 4 Indic language wikipedias will celebrate *10th
anniversary* this
year (2012). :) So it is time to get prepared for the celebration.

Happy Birthday Celebrations!


Regards,


Shiju Alex
India Programs of Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Summary and perspectives from Discussions with Indic language wikimedians - 2011

2011-12-26 Thread Shiju Alex

What I found one of the key factor behind active communities particularly
Tamil and Malayalam, is the support of Government for the initiative. This
could be a priority area for other Wikipedias as well.

According to my knowledge, World Classical Tamil Conference
2010http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Classical_Tamil_Conference_2010was
the only time Tamil wikipedians and Tamil Nadu Government
collaborated.
During the conference there was an article writing contest which attracted
many people to Tamil wikipedia. Also during the same time a huge repository
of tamil words were donated to Tamil wiktionary. Apart from that, according
to my knowledge, there are no other Govt initiatives. But I should say at
least in the case of Tamil the collaboration was a direct one.

But the case of Malayalam is slightly different. There was no direct
collabration. For Malayalam, the support community received was mainly due
to the personal efforts of IT@School director. IT@school supported most of
the wiki workshops across kerala, sponsored ml wiki CD, and so on. There
were couple of instances when community received indirect support. I have
listed some of those
herehttp://shijualex.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/ldf-keralam-website-and-wikipedia/.
One good thing about Malayalam is the involvement of social organizations
(for example
KSSPhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_Sasthra_Sahithya_Parishad).
This has directly or indirectly helped/helping Malayalam wiki projects. But
even though community tried to directly interact with Kerala government
multiple times (for example, to discuss about Kerala Govt website licenses)
none of them fetched any positive result till now.

So even though both Tamil and Malayalam communities received limited
support it became possible only because some volunteers from the community
were ready do physical outreach programs, meetup, and to talk to people. In
short I should say these all some of the after effects of public outreach
programs. There are many other things related to the outreach of Indic
wikipedias and its benefits, it is not just adding more users to wiki. I
may share that at anther point of time. More important is, to grow Indic
wikipedias some community members need to take some extra effort.

But unfortunately, the community could not be strengthened due to various
issues like access to Internet. computing platform, issues with rendering
and input methods and we ended up with stub articles remaining in the same
state.

That is the case in all Indic wikis which used bots to increase the number
of articles. According to me strength of the community also should grow as
the number of articles grows. If we focus on community growth, articles
numbers will grow as a natural outcome of that. As we already saw it will
not happen the other way round for Indic wikipedias. As one editor pointed
out in discussions, *Users will be attached to a wiki only if they feel
proud about it*. So it is important that we should plan some programs to
retain existing users and attract more new users to Indic wikis. We need to
have some programs to bring back our old editors also.

Shiju

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala arjunar...@gmail.comwrote:

Hi Shiju,

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote:

Dear All,

--cut--

I have now completed sharing initial, introductory, exploratory
discussions with a host of community members from across Indic language
communities. I have shared these for 12 languages
(Assamesehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Assamese/Discussions/2011,
Hindihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Hindi/Discussions/2011,
Tamilhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Tamil/Discussions/2011,
Teluguhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Telugu/Discussions/2011,
Kannadahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Kannada/Discussions/2011,
Nepalihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Neplai/Discussions/2011,
Malayalamhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Malayalam/Discussions/2011,
Marathihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Marathi/Discussions/2011,
Odiahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Odia/Discussions/2011,
Sanskrithttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Sanskrit/Discussions/2011,
Bengalihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Bengali/Discussions/2011,
and
Gujaratihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Gujarati/Discussions/2011
.)

Thanks for the extensive

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Summary and perspectives from Discussions with Indic language wikimedians - 2011

2011-12-26 Thread Shiju Alex


 Ravishankar ravidre...@gmail.com wrote:


Thanks for these great suggestions Ravi.

*1. Active participation of Wikipedians having English Wikipedia experience.
 *


Yes this is very important. Infact I already mentioned this in my second
point (attracting newbies) This is what I wrote:

We must also look at both newbies to editing as well as existing *English
Wikipedia editors* who have inclinations and abilities on Indic languages.
Remember that many Indic editors initially started off in English Wikipedia
and we must actively seek them out. I know some communities - like Marathi
- who look for editors who have Marathi sounding names or edit
Marathi/Maharashtra centric topics and quietly invite them to contribute to
Marathi Wikipedia.


As we can see already few language communities understood the importance of
reaching out to users with English wikipedia experience.

*2. Developing friends of Wikipedia network.*


Yes this is very very important for the growth of Indic wikipedias. In the
previous reply to Arjuna I mentioned about the involvement of Social
organizations. That will directly or indirectly help Indic wiki projects.
One immediate example I can show from ml wiki project is the free licensing
of LDF keralam http://ldfkeralam.org, Kerala State Electricity
Boardhttp://www.kseb.in/,
and Dutch in Kerala http://www.dutchinkerala.com/ website. All those
became possible since friends of Wikipedia or community members were ready
to talk to people outside wikipedia about the importance of such landmark
decisions.

*3. Developing the sister projects.*



A very valid point. Many Indic languages have rich cultural heritage. There
are rich litereacry works in most of them. No need to mention about the
rich vocabulary. We have lot of things to do at least in Wikisource,
Wiktionary, and Wikiquote. Infact from the example of Tamil and Kannada we
have seen the efforts put by community to develop wiktionary. Remember in
Kannada, Wiktionary project is  active even more than Wikipedia. Also in
Malayalam and Sanskrit wikisource is very active. So some communities
already understood the importance of sister projects. Infact what I found
is, we can use sister wiki projects also (especially wikisource and
wiktionary) to develop a wiki community for  a language.

Networking with state and central governments, various educational
institutions, social organizations, and so on are required to grow Indic
wikipedia projects. As mentioned before some extra effort and leadership
role from some community members of each language is required to grow the
community and wiki projects for any Indic language.

Thanks for providing all these suggestions. All these important suggestions
will help us as we try to help various indic language wiki communities.

Thanks
Shiju





On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Ravishankar ravidre...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi Shiju,

 Thanks for the excellent analysis on Indic Wikipedia communities.


  When I consider community building, I think of 5 broad aspects:

1. Editor retention
2. Attracting newbies
3. Community communication
4. Community collaboration and
5. Community celebration

 Based on Tamil Wiki experience, I would like to add few more key points
 that can make a difference:

 *1. Active participation of Wikipedians having English Wikipedia
 experience.*

 While small communities should not enforce all en wiki practices and rules
 as such, active participation of people having English Wikipedia experience
 is a great plus. They can help implement the best practices, clarify on
 wiki procedures, help in technical aspects and act as ambassadors for the
 local wiki. Throughout Tamil Wikipedia's growth, we have had such
 contributors who made immense difference to the project. It is this
 context, I emphasize that awareness about Indic Wiki for people visiting en
 wiki should be increased.
 *
 2. Developing friends of Wikipedia network.*

 Not everyone can contribute to Wikipedia directly even if they know how to
 do it. But they can still support the cause of Wiki. Efforts should be made
 in getting friends in blogosphere, technosphere, media, academia and the
 Government (if possible). These people can be of great help in outreach and
 other logistical help.

 *3. Developing the sister projects.*

 For small communities, developing Wikipedia to a useful stage ( 100K
 articles of decent quality) is a very long term and intensive process. But,
 with some meticulous planning, the sister projects like Wiktionary,
 Wikisource can be scaled with less effort. When these projects grow, they
 in turn bring visitors and contributors for Wikipedia. They will also serve
 as a reference source for citations and vocabulary. This is one solution
 for the chicken and egg problem of building content to get contributors Vs
 having contributors to build content. This is also one are where formal
 entities like WMF and the chapter can help the community to network with
 academic and

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] StatisticsBot for closer look on Indic numbers

2011-12-26 Thread Shiju Alex

Srikanth,

Good work. And thanks for sharing.

Since in this we are calculating edits per day, new users per day, new
articles per day, and so on, I feel it will be good if those details are
displayed instead of the current total edits/users/articles. In fact for
daily analysis that data is more valubale than total edits/users. I know
for developers like you it is just one line of code. But for non-developer
users like me it makes big difference. :)

Also is is it possible to get the data of number of users who do at least 5
edits per day. I know that makes sense only for very active wikipedias. But
still it is a good metric I suppose.

Thanks once again for sharing this.


Shiju


2011/12/26 Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com

 Hi all,

 ar:User:OsamaK had developed a pywikipedia based bot to collect daily
 stats[1] and has been running for over 2 years. I had just translated it
 and started running for Tamil wikipedia here[2]. I am now looking
 ApiSandbox[3][4] to build queries which will get more data(Bot activity,
 number of users with atleast 1 edit on the day,anon edits etc) which might
 be useful to log and keep track on daily basis.let me know if some other
 parameter might be useful to collect.

 Feel free to run this on your Indic wiki project and observe the numbers
 :) This can help notice sudden spikes on any parameter on day-day basis and
 help relate to some event (outreach / real world events)

 Thanks to Osama for the base code, the english version of which is
 available here[5]. Please feel free to fork and and add to it :)

 [1] http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/مستخدم:OsamaK/إحصاءات/ديسمبر_2011
 [2] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics/December_2011
 [3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ApiSandbox
 [4] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox
 [5] https://gist.github.com/b37a1d07888597f7c9ac

 --
 Regards
 Srikanth.L

 PS : This entire thing was a by-product of Bala's Doha visit when he
 interacted with Osama in the Arabic wiki convention and got to know of
 this. Apparently Bala learnt this from Osama and he learnt about wmf grant
 process from Bala :)

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikimedia-in-blr] [Wikimedia-IN-AMD] Welcoming Subhashish Panigrahi

2011-12-22 Thread Shiju Alex

Congrats Subhashish.


Shiju


On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 8:22 PM, Subhashish Panigrahi psubhash...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Thanks a lot for all of you for your good wish, I'd love to take up this
 new responsibility and take active part in expanding this great vision
 across the country.

 Love
 Subha


 On 22 December 2011 19:55, N Rana - EC Lists nli...@euranuscorp.comwrote:

 **
  Thank you Hisham and congratulations Subhashish! Myself, Nilesh Rana, a
 new entry in the list, a wiki-enthusiast from Ahmedabad. Was quite a
 delight and motivating to learn about Subhashish. Keep it up and all good
 wishes from here...

 Kindest regards and season's greetings to everybody.

 Nilesh

 - Original Message -
 *From:* Hisham his...@wikimedia.org
 *To:* wikimedia-in-...@lists.wikimedia.org ;
 wikimedia-in-...@lists.wikimedia.org ; India Mailing list for
 Wikimedians / Wikipedians in  from 
 Bangalorewikimedia-in-...@lists.wikimedia.org;
 wikimedia-in-...@lists.wikimedia.org ;
 wikimedia-in-...@lists.wikimedia.org ;
 wikimedia-in-...@lists.wikimedia.org
 *Cc:* Subhashish Panigrahi psubhash...@gmail.com
 *Sent:* Thursday, December 22, 2011 6:27 PM
 *Subject:* [Wikimedia-IN-AMD] Welcoming Subhashish Panigrahi

  [cross-posting to reach pan-India; apologies if you have got it from
 some other mailing list.]

 Hi Folks,

 As you might be aware, the Consultant, Team Support position is to be
 filled as part of the India Programs team.  (
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-September/004251.html.)


 I am really pleased and excited to announce that Subhashish Panigrahi has
 agreed to join as Consultant, Community  Program Support.

 Some of you might know Subhashish (or Subha as he's also called.) He is
 all of 23 and a wonderful Wikimedian from Odisha.  He has a BE in
 Biotechnology from Sapthagiri College of Engineering, Bangalore.  He has
 worked for about 1 1/2 years in business development and is currently based
 in Bangalore.  He's been an active Wikimedian since a friend of his
 attended a Wikipedia 10th event in Bangalore in January and told Subha
 about Wikipedia.  Subha then spent considerable time - quite a bit of it in
 Shiju Alex's living room apparently :-) - learning about Wikipedia.  Since
 then, he's been on fire!  He's helped the Bangalore community organise the
 monthly meet-ups, been a central figure in building community  momentum
 for Odia Wikipedia and has conducted outreach programs for Odia projects
 back home in Odisha as well as in Bangalore. He's also been helping out
 other projects and communities; a couple of weekends ago he was in Chennai
 conducting a WikiAcademy there.  He is a fantastically inspiring example of
 a complete outsider being welcomed into the family, having his hand held in
 his growth as a newbie, charging forward taking responsibility  ownership
 and then spreading his skills  knowledge to others. He is also one of the
 sweetest human beings I have ever met. He is a perfect example of the
 Wikimedia Dream.

 His interests (outside of Wikimedia) are cooking, graphic design and
 handwriting analysis.  (I bet most of you who know Subha don't know that
 last bit about him.  So the next time you see him, show him your writing
 and get him to reveal your deep dark secrets!)  He has also been
 involved with campaigns for social work during the floods and cholera
 outbreak in Odisha and been involved with a Odisha community organisation,
 eOdissa.com http://eodissa.com/.

 Originally, the Consultant, Team Support position (
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs#Team_Structure)
  was
 to manage the back-end aspects of India Programs (basic accounting, basic
 personnel management, office administration, travel support, expense
 statement management, logistics support for the community, etc.) I have
 been looking at the actual work load involved and I do not think this is a
 full time role.  The functions listed are essential and need to be done -
 but there is an opportunity to improve the richness of the position and
 it's value to the community.  I'm therefore proposing that the Consultant,
 Team Support be redesignated to Consultant, Community  Program Support.
 I envisage this position to have about 1/3 of time spent on the back-end
 work listed above but 2/3 of time can be very productively utilised
 supporting community efforts - such as helping community building 
 outreach and supporting community-led initiatives.  An important
 consideration I have for this redesignation is after looking at the
 specific skills that Subha brings to the table; I want to make sure that he
 has the required space to realise his potential and to support the
 community and movement.

 Subha will of course continue to pursue his personal voluntary work for
 and as part of the Wikimedia community.  The one question that he
 emphasized during the selection process was whether he would retain the
 flexibility to continue to pursue his

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Translation request - An Indic wikipedian's appeal

2011-12-21 Thread Shiju Alex

I suggest to keep it as Rs.100, Rs.500, Rs.1000...

Since those figures are shown as sample amount, meaningful figures like
100/250/500/100 will serve the purpose.


Thanks

Shiju

2011/12/21 రహ్మానుద్దీన్ షేక్ nani1o...@gmail.com



 On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:23 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 parakara.gh...@gmail.com wrote:

 That's odd. I saw it in Indian Rupees today afternoon.

 What were the Indian equivalent values?

 On 12/21/11, Netha Hussain nethahuss...@gmail.com wrote:
  Malayalam done!
  Shouldn't we seek the donations in INR? As for now, the en. version of
 the
  appeal asks the donations be given in dollars.
 
  Regards
  --
  Netha Hussain
  Student of Medicine and Surgery
  Govt. Medical College, Kozhikode
  User: Netha Hussain
  *nethahussain.blogspot.com
  swethaambari.wordpress.com*
 
 
 
  On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Jayanta Nath jayanta...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
  Bengali too!!
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 --
 Regards,
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
 Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore

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 --
 Rahimanuddin Shaik
 నాని
 ॥రామానుజార్య దివ్యాజ్ఞాం వర్ధతామభివర్ధతాం॥


 A new address for ebooks : http://kinige.com


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] ONE simple step to double or triple visits to Indic Wikipedias

2011-12-20 Thread Shiju Alex


 Currently, the landing page for www.wikipedia.org (wikipedia.comredirects to
 wikipedia.org) lists the ten largest Wikipedia projects.  Apart from the
 English Wikipedia, the rest of the projects are practically useless for
 most of us in this country.  Replacing the foreign language projects (for
 Indian IPs) with Indic language projects will help drive more traffic.



I think this is a very good suggestion. I remember  seeing many of friends
using wikipedia.org to reach English wikipedia. Replacing the current
non-english wikipedias with Indic wikipedias (for Indian IPs) can also be
one of the solution. It will definitely catch the attention of a few
percentage of Indian readers.

Shiju





On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Anirudh Bhati anirudh...@gmail.comwrote:

 Most of the visitors on Wikipedia end up there through search engines.
  But there is another group which attempts to access Wikipedia directly by
 typing in www.wikipedia.com or www.wikipedia.org in the address bar of
 their browsers.

 Currently, the landing page for www.wikipedia.org (wikipedia.comredirects to
 wikipedia.org) lists the ten largest Wikipedia projects.  Apart from the
 English Wikipedia, the rest of the projects are practically useless for
 most of us in this country.  Replacing the foreign language projects (for
 Indian IPs) with Indic language projects will help drive more traffic.

 Yours sincerely,

 Anirudh Bhati

 +855 975 529 803
 Skype: anirudhsbh



 On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 4:59 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 parakara.gh...@gmail.com wrote:

 I agree with Ravi.

 On 12/20/11, Ravishankar ravidre...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  This is a really useful discussion and there's a powerful idea.  I
 agree
  with Ravi that there is an opportunity to build awareness and traffic
 to
  Indic language sites.  While we are already seeing considerable
 readership
  of Indic languages, there's clearly a lot more that can be done to
 support
  this and also to help build Indic language communities.  I also hear
  Theo's
  point that it didn't work last time, or maybe wasn't adequately
 measured.
 
  I'd like to suggest that - even as the technical challenges are
 resolved -
  to explore this.  The first step would be finalise what the objectives
 are
  (e.g., is it basic awareness building of the existence of Indic
 language
  projects or to is it to drive readership of these projects or is it
  encourage more active participation in these proejcts?)  The next stage
  would be to test different banner/notice/page design options and figure
  out
  the most appropriate solution (in the same systematic way that the WMF
  fundraising team tests banners and optimises the ones that work best.)
  If
  you see value and you think we need resources for this, I'm happy to
 see
  what we can do about it.  (Maybe see if any of the fundraising team's
  people are free after the fundraiser to help with the analytics for
  determining what might work best?)
 
  What say?
 
  hisham
 
 
  +1.
 
  Instead of saying it won't work, we have to think how to make it work as
  the ultimate goal of increasing awareness about Indic projects should
 not
  be neglected !
 
  Ravi
 


 --
 Regards,
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
 Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Mailing list is created for Assamese wiki projects

2011-12-19 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

A mailing list is created to facilitate the discussions about Assamese wiki
projects.

The URL is https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-as

Kindly subscribe if you are interested in Assamese wiki projects.

Shiju Alex
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Narayam updates

2011-12-15 Thread Shiju Alex

I am not sure whether it is really required to post these changes
every week here, because not every one is interested in reading the
code changes. I hope the code review page helps to find out all the
changes for an extension/component

That is true. Community is definitely NOT interested to know the technical
details of all the updates.

But these type of changes (like the change in shortcut key) which affect
the typing habit of users needs to be communicated to commuity (here Indic
wikimedians), at least in this list.

How you know

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 2:14 PM, Santhosh Thottingal
santhosh.thottin...@gmail.com wrote:

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 1:34 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com
wrote:
Shortcut key on Mac :- Refer bug[1] for details, in summary the shortcut
key
is now dynamic based on browser / OS combination so that the shortcut
works.
Control+G is new shortcut on Mac largely. This was done during Hackathon.
//Surprise surprise, more Indic users on mac :)

Small correction, this fix was not done during hackathon, but before
that. And for Opera in OSX, shortcut is control+command+m.

There are more bugs reported by others and the software keeps changing,
so
If you want to follow Narayam in close detail, subscribe to the feed[3].

i18n team,
Some of us know, you push i18n patches every Monday. Can you also give a
feed for recent changes in patch *every week*, so we could see if
something
relevant to us changed in the patch and test so that we may not miss any
regression caused and be quick to report issues. I know wikitech wiki has
the logs somewhere on deployment(forgot now), but a plain text feed will
help and save much time for many folks.

We post the i18n deployment notes in Mediaiwiki-i18n list , one or two
days before deployment.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n

Gerard blogs about the deployment , see
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/going-live-december-12-2011/ and
he plans to do this blog post for every deployment.

If anybody is interested particularly in some extension, they can
follow all the commits to that path in subversion For eg:

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Code/MediaWikipath=%2Ftrunk%2Fextensions%2FWebFonts
gives all the code changes happened in webfonts.

Another way to find out planned revisions for i18ndeploy is looking at
this tag:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/tag/i18ndeploy

To those communities which don't have any input method solution :-
Please invest some time, the returns are really great. Juniad / i18n team
will help you get Narayam.

Happy to help.

-Santhosh

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Bengali wiki community

2011-12-13 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

As part of my discussions with Indic language Wikipedians I spoke with few
members of Bengali wiki community.They have shared their editing
experiences, their vision about Bengali wiki projects, and other related
topics. I have summarized the discussion in meta wiki. It is available
here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Bengali/Discussions/2011

As you know most of the current active editors of Bengali Wikipedia is from
Bangladesh. Bengali wikipedia has close to 50 active editors as on 2011
Octoberhttps://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-october-2011/
. Over the years I got opportunity to work closely with Bengali wikipedians
for various programs (Newsletter, developing typing solution, and so on are
some of them). I remember Tinu and I closely worked with Jayantha to
conduct a wiki workshop in Kolkata.

There are a couple of very interesting features I noticed about Bengali
community. First of all, even though it is a small community, it is very
evident from the tone and content of the discussions that it is a very warm
and welcoming community. The second aspect I noticed is that there are
frequent community meet ups (though in fairness, there are many more
happening in Bangladesh than in India) and there is a reasonably good
response to these meet ups. Meet ups are a really useful way of community
building because it helps people connect and collaborate. Common to all
Indic languages, there is a strong gap of awareness about the existence of
Bengali projects and the need is felt to get media press coverage to
promote this.

In the context of the Kolkata Book Fair, one very interesting point that I
found about Tanvir is, he cam to know about Wikipedia at a similar book
fair in Dhaka! I wish West Bengal wikipedians all the very best in the
Book Fair so that we can introduce and invite newbies to the Bengali
wikipedia. We need to figure out a practical way of improving the
collaboration between Bengali wikipedians in Bangladesh and in India. I
felt very sorry when Tanvir couldn't attend WikiConference due to some VISA
issues.

Read the discussion at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Bengali/Discussions/2011

Shiju
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Indian Language wikipedia Statistics – 2011 October

2011-12-12 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

I am sharing the statistical report of Indian language wiki projects for
the month of 2011 October.  It is available here.
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-october-2011/


Some interesting facts that I discovered this month are:

   - Nearly *4.3 crore* readers are there for all Indic language
   wikipedias!  This number is huge and increased by nearly 1/3 in just 1
   month! So Indic wikis has huge reader base.
   - Marathi wiki community has increased its active editor base by nearly
   33% in just 1 month.
   - Sanskrit wikipedia has been amongst the shining stars of *all* Indic
   language wikipedias in terms of adding new articles (12 new articles every
   day in October) and edits per article (nearly 18 edits across all articles,
   old and new.)

You can find more interesting facts from the report at
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-october-2011/


Shiju
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wiki communities - Kannada

2011-12-12 Thread Shiju Alex


  Hindi, sadly is scaring them away.


Srikanth, do you have any specific example/experience that made you to say
so?

 Shiju

On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 5:51 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
parakara.gh...@gmail.com wrote:

 Agree with Logic. Each community differs in every way. Needs, usage,
 exposure and more. Each community, while running on a common backend,
 must have a different frontend. Tamil is doing its best from what I've
 seen to be different and get new editors. Hindi, sadly is scaring them
 away. Kannada must ensure new editor retention.

 On 11/12/2011, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com wrote:
  On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 04:18, Jessie Wild jw...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 
  I just got off the phone with a wonderful woman who works for EDC India
  who was asking me how she could participate in Kannada Wikipedia
 editing.
  Obviously I can just direct her to the homepage of kn-wiki, but is there
  somewhere she could go to get some coaching to begin? She's never edited
  before, but is fluent in English too and wants to increase the
 educational
  content.
 
 
  The answer is above. I think communities must use front page much more
  effectively. There are many communities which don't update front
  page regularly, still keep it similar to English Wikipedia, wasting(IMO)
  some space. Instead, they could redesign front page to allocate
 significant
  space for attracting newbies.
 
  --
  Regards
  Srikanth.L
 

 --
 Sent from my mobile device

 Regards,
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
 Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Mailing list for Gujarati wikipedia is created

2011-12-11 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

A mailing list is created to facilitate the discussions about Gujarati wiki
projects. The URL is
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-gu

Kindly subscribe if you are interested in Gujarati wiki projects.

Shiju Alex
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wiki communities - Gujarati

2011-12-10 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

As part of my discussions with Indic language Wikipedians I spoke with
Dhaval Vyas from Gujarati wikipedia. Dhaval has shared his editing
experiences, his vision about Gujarati wiki projects, and other related
topics. I have summarized the discussion in meta wiki. It is available
here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Gujarati/Discussions/2011


Gujarati wikipedia has more than 21,000 articles now. Gujarati wiki
community is slowly making its presence among Indic wiki communities. Though
the current community strength is small (15 active users), veteran users
like Dhaval have started conducting various outreach programs to spread the
message about Gujarati wiki among Gujarati speakers. Community is working
on to enable Narayam in Gujarati wikipedia and soon community will have
their own mailing list also.  Hope all these efforts will bring in more
active users to Gujarati wikipedia.


Kindly read the experience of Dhaval at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Gujarati/Discussions/2011

Regards
Shiju
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wiki communities - Marathi

2011-12-08 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

As part of my discussions with Indic language Wikipedians I spoke with few
Marathi wikimedians (Abhay, Mahitgar, and Mandar) also. All of them are
highly experinced wikimedians. They their editing experiences, their vision
about ml wiki projects, and other related topics. I have summarized the
discussions in meta wiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Marathi/Discussions/2011

For the past few years I got the opportunity to interact and with
highly experienced wikimedians of Marathi wikipedia like Abhay, Mahitgar,
and Sankalp. The ideas they had shared about Indic wikis had defintely
helped when Indic wikipedians came together for some of the common
projects.

The focus that Marathi wikipedians given to mediawiki translation at
Translate wiki had inspired many other Indic language wikipedians. Many of
them contributed to the interface translation of Hindi and Sanskrit wikis
also.

Right now Marathi wikipedia has close to 35,000 articles, and about 40
active editors.

During and beyond WikiConference, it has been really inspiring to see the
increase in the activity levels across many communities in the country. In
particular, Marathi community have been exploring opportunities and
formulating plans to drive community growth and project quality.
WikiConference gave a big boost to the Marathi community because of the
increased profile of the projects, especially the press. To illustrate,
between September and October 2011, the number of active editors increased
from 31 to 40. It will be really important to keep us this momentum and to
translate this into sustained community building for a small but vibrant
community.

Community is working very hard to make Wikisource a reality for Marathi.
Hope that will happen soon.

I am personally very optimistic that Marathi is at an inflection point -
and this the right time to make concerted efforts at community building to
realize this opportunity.

Kindly read the experience of Marathi Wikimedians at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Marathi/Discussions/2011

Regards

[Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wiki communities - Malayalam

2011-12-07 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

As part of my discussions with Indic language Wikipedians I spoke with few
Malayalam wikimedians also. Malayalam wikimedians spoke about their editing
experiences, their vision about ml wiki projects, and other related topics.
I have summarized the discussions in meta wiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Malayalam/Discussions/2011

Malayalam with more than 3.5 crore speakers is one of the 22 scheduled
languages of India. Malayalam is primarily spoken in the Indian state of
Kerala. There are some very interesting features of Kerala, from a
Wikimedia perspective. It has amongst the highest rates of literacy in the
country. It also has a (relatively) high Internet reach. Unlike most
states, there is (relatively) lower urban rural divide in Kerala. In fact,
the term rurban is sometimes used to refer to the state.

I have been personally associated with Malayalam Wikipedia for the past 5
years and it has been a labour of love for me. Along the way, I have seen
this community growing from just 3 active editors to more than 90 active
editors now.

There are 2 particularly compelling chapters in the Malayalam Wikimedia
story. The first is the huge importance and concerted efforts made for the
community development. Personally, I think community development is the
single most important aspect for the growth of Indic wikimedia projects and
it is inspiring to see how this community has adopted it. Another really
noteworthy feature is the efforts made to retain existing editors.
Malayalam Wikimedia has done this very successfully by starting
interesting Wikiprojects on specific subject areas.

Personally I had associated with lot of ml wiki outreach activities. When I
looked at the statistics recently, I found community had conducted more
than 20 wiki workshops across 14 districts of Kerala. Then offline CD
release, photo events, numerous non-offfical wiki workshops that are
happening as part of blog meetings, introducing ml wiki projects during the
meeting of various social organizations, there are so many things happening
around. The involvement of government organizations and social
organizations is another noteworthy thing.

The activism in sister projects (Wikisource, wiktionary, and Wikiquotes) is
also noteworthy. I have seen sister projects (especially wikisource)
getting more attention than wikipedia and school students are involved in
adding content to wikisource.

Malayalam wikimedians have achieved a lot and there are lessons for the
other indic language communities from what the community had done.
However, there is so so much that still needs to be done to build the
community, improve the quality and size of articles, and increase the reach
of ml wiki projects.

Kindly read the experience of Malayalam Wikimedians at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Malayalam/Discussions/2011

Regards

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [OT] Government will now prefer ‘hinglish’ words over Hindi translation

2011-12-06 Thread Shiju Alex

In fact this is very much on-topic. A discussion regarding this topic is
going on in Hindi
wikipediahttp://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%A1%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE:%E0%A4%9A%E0%A5%8C%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B2#.E0.A4.B9.E0.A4.BF.E0.A4.A8.E0.A5.8D.E0.A4.A6.E0.A5.80_.E0.A4.AA.E0.A5.8D.E0.A4.B0.E0.A4.AF.E0.A5.8B.E0.A4.97_.E0.A4.95.E0.A5.87_.E0.A4.B2.E0.A4.BF.E0.A4.8F_.E0.A4.B0.E0.A4.BE.E0.A4.9C.E0.A4.AD.E0.A4.BE.E0.A4.B7.E0.A4.BE_.E0.A4.B5.E0.A4.BF.E0.A4.AD.E0.A4.BE.E0.A4.97_.E0.A4.95.E0.A5.87_.E0.A4.A8.E0.A4.8F_.E0.A4.A8.E0.A5.80.E0.A4.A4.E0.A4.BF-.E0.A4.A8.E0.A4.BF.E0.A4.B0.E0.A5.8D.E0.A4.A6.E0.A5.87.E0.A4.B6also.

Shiju


On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 6:06 PM, sankarshan foss.mailingli...@gmail.comwrote:

 I realize this is a bit off-topic for the list. The intent is to put
 forth the always present tussle between classical usage and colloquial
 one. I haven't managed to dig out the circular though.
 /sankarshan
 
 http://www.firstpost.com/india/government-will-now-prefer-hinglish-words-over-hindi-translation-148557.html
 
 In a bid to overcome problems posed by difficult Hindi words,
 Governmenthas asked section officers to use their ” hinglish”
 replacements foreasy understanding and better promotion of the
 language.
 The order issued by the Rajbhasha unit of Ministry of Home Affairs
 wasrecently re-circulated in various offices after it was
 officiallymentioned that such puritan use of Hindi generates
 disinterest among masses.
 The circular recommended that difficult Hindi words can be replaced
 withEnglish alternatives in Devanagari script for official work.
 Citing examples, Department of Official Language at Home Ministry
 said‘misil’ can be replaced with file, ‘pratyabhuti’ with
 guarantee,‘kunjipatal’ with keyboard and ‘sanganak’ with omnipresent
 ‘computer’.
 It also advocated use of popular Hindi words and English alternatives
 tomake the language more attractive and popular in offices and masses.
 “Whenever, during the official work, Hindi is used as
 translatinglanguage, it becomes difficult and complex. There is an
 urgent need tomake changes in the process of English to Hindi
 translations.Translations should carry expression of the original text
 rather thanword-by-word Hindi substitute,” the circular said.
 It said use of popular words of Urdu, English, and other
 regionallanguages should be promoted in official correspondence. Pure
 Hindishould be for literary purposes while practical ‘mixed’ version
 for workpurposes.
 It said it is better to use English terms in Devnagri script than
 totranslate them in pure Hindi.
 --
 sankarshan mukhopadhyay
 http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wiki communities - Kannada

2011-12-05 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

As part of my discussion with Indic language Wikipedians I spoke with few
Kannada wikipedians. I have summarized the discussion in meta wiki. It is
here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Kannada/Discussions/2011

Kannada with more than 4 crore speakers and is one of the 22 scheduled
languages of india. Kannada is primarily spoken in the Indian state
Karnataka.

Kannada Wikipedia has a very interesting heritage. This is the community
that started Wiki outreach programs in India. In fact, the first Indic
wiki workshop that I am aware of was organized by HPN way back in 2004! A lot
of interesting things happened for a while and there was a time when Kannda
has a vibrant 40+ strong community.

However, off late, things appear to have slowed down and the number of
active editors is on a relative decline. Having said that, the seeds have
already been sown in this community and I am confident that with a little
nurturing, we can see activism in Kannada wikipedia coming back. I am
basing my optimism on Kananda Wiktionary -where the community has taken it
to the 2nd largest wiktionary in the country. There is much activism
happening around kannada wiktionary. In Kannada wikipedia I got opportunity
to interact with high prolific editors like User:Radhatanaya who is
silently doing wonderful job.

Kannada wikipedia has more than 11,000 articles now and kannada wiktionary
has whopping 1,50,000 entries (making it the second biggest Wiktionary
among Indic language wiktionaries).

Kindly read the experience of Kannada Wikimedians at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Kannada/Discussions/2011

Regards
Shiju
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] FW: [Wikipedia-l] Creation of new language - Ahirani

2011-12-02 Thread Shiju Alex

Ahrinai is one of the languages of Khandeshi languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khandeshi_languagesgroup.


I assume Ahirani language is eligible for a test wiki in Wikimedia
incubatorhttp://incubator.wikimedia.org.
It has valid ISO code also. May be Gerard or some one else from LC can
provide more details.

Please follow the instructions documented by Kundan in the last few slides
of this 
PDFhttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_wikimedia_Communities_of_India_2011_November.pdfto
create a test wiki in Wikimedia incubator.

Shiju



On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Jayanta Nath jayanta...@gmail.com wrote:

 Oh!  779,000 (1997) speakers !

 http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ahr
 http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=ahr
 --
 With Warm Regards,
 *Jayanta Nath*
 Calcutta,West Bengal





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[Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wiki communities - Nepali

2011-12-01 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

Today I am sharing the experience of the Nepali Wiki community.

As part of my discussion with Indic language Wikipedians I spoke with
Nepali wikipedians also (Rajesh pandey, Bhawani Gautham, and Saroj Dhakal).
You know all of them since they are active in India list also. Please read
their experiences with the Nepali Wiki projects here.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Nepali/Discussions/2011

Nepali with more than 16 million speakers world wide, has more than 3
million speakers in India. Nepali is one of the 22 scheduled languages of
india. The speakers of Nepali are distributed across India, even though a
more concentration of speakers of Nepali language is in North Eastern
India.

From the English Wikipedia article about Nepali language:

In India, there are a large number of Nepali-speaking people. There are an
estimated 500,000 Nepali speakers in Sikkim (where Nepali is the official
state language.) In Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri districts of West Bengal,
there are about 1,400,000 Nepali speakers. In North-East India (states of
Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura, Mizoram and Arunachal
Pradesh), there are several million Nepali speakers. A considerable number
of Nepali-speaking people are also present in many Indian cities such as
Kolkata, Delhi, Bangalore, Visakhapatnam, Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

At the recently concluded WikiConference a Nepali Wikipedian, Saroj Dhakal,
gave us a wonderful overview of Nepali Wikiprojects. I just noticed that
most of the active contributors of Nepali wikipedia are staying in India.

Kindly read the experience of Nepali Wikipedians at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Nepali/Discussions/2011

Inviting your comments on the talk page.

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India

2011-11-30 Thread Shiju Alex

Ravi shankar said:

 If your ambition is to teach the mother tongues for the convent educated
 minority English speaking Indians through a Wiki project and then make them
 contribute in Indic language Wikipedias, it may never happen. I am not even
 sure if it fits inside Wikipedia's mission.



Yes. that is true.  I do not forsee such a thing happening for Indic wikis.
:)


Is Gerard is trying to convey the idea of *Mother Language illiteracy?
*Remember
by illiteracy of a language, we mean the inability *to read or
write*(rather than speaking) that specific language. I must say Mother
Language
illiteracy is rising in Indian cities and in some states (for example,
Kerala).

In fact if you go through the discussions that I am sharing with you (about
different language wiki communities), many Indic language wikipedians are
also raising the same concern.



Shiju









On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen 
 gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote:


 The one thing I have come to understand is that many native speakers of
 Indic languages are effectively illiterate in their own language. The
 combination of highly educated people being functionally illiterate had me
 talking with many people. Given the structure of the Indic scripts, it is
 possible for me to learn to read the text; it will get me as far as
 pronouncing something I do not know the meaning of. For native speakers it
 must be not that hard at all when they surmounted the challenge of learning
 to read and write English already.


 Dear Gerard,

 I am intrigued by this, yet struggling to understand what you mean here.

 Do you mean that many educated people can speak their own language, but
 not read or write it? (because they communicate in English instead). If so,
 that is probably true - but is that what you mean?

 For example, my mother tongue is Bengali - I speak it much more than I
 read or write it (even though I can read and write in Bengali), since I
 usually read and write in English. However, there are many people in India
 who have the opposite experience eg who not just speak, but also read and
 write in indic languages.

 Cheers
 Bishakha


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India

2011-11-30 Thread Shiju Alex

Sharing a news also (related to Mother language illiteracy).

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2008011357590300.htmdate=2008/01/13/prd=th;

Shiju

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

Ravi shankar said:

If your ambition is to teach the mother tongues for the convent educated
minority English speaking Indians through a Wiki project and then make them
contribute in Indic language Wikipedias, it may never happen. I am not even
sure if it fits inside Wikipedia's mission.

Yes. that is true. I do not forsee such a thing happening for Indic
wikis. :)

Is Gerard is trying to convey the idea of *Mother Language illiteracy?
*Remember
by illiteracy of a language, we mean the inability *to read or write*(rather
than speaking) that specific language. I must say Mother Language
illiteracy is rising in Indian cities and in some states (for example,
Kerala).

In fact if you go through the discussions that I am sharing with you
(about different language wiki communities), many Indic language
wikipedians are also raising the same concern.

Shiju

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Bishakha Datta
bishakhada...@gmail.comwrote:

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen
gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote:

The one thing I have come to understand is that many native speakers of
Indic languages are effectively illiterate in their own language. The
combination of highly educated people being functionally illiterate had me
talking with many people. Given the structure of the Indic scripts, it is
possible for me to learn to read the text; it will get me as far as
pronouncing something I do not know the meaning of. For native speakers it
must be not that hard at all when they surmounted the challenge of learning
to read and write English already.

Dear Gerard,

I am intrigued by this, yet struggling to understand what you mean here.

Do you mean that many educated people can speak their own language, but
not read or write it? (because they communicate in English instead). If so,
that is probably true - but is that what you mean?

For example, my mother tongue is Bengali - I speak it much more than I
read or write it (even though I can read and write in Bengali), since I
usually read and write in English. However, there are many people in India
who have the opposite experience eg who not just speak, but also read and
write in indic languages.

Cheers
Bishakha

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [[Brian Horrocks]] not an Indian FA

2011-11-29 Thread Shiju Alex

I think what Srikanth meant is, creating a separate mailing list for
English wikipedians from India to discuss their topics of interest. I too
think that is a good idea.

Shiju


On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 9:42 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

 Is that what you mean, Srikanth?

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_India/Recognized_content

 I was also not aware till Pranav dhowed me the link today.


 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --


 On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 parakara.gh...@gmail.com wrote:

 Ashwin,
 I think the Indian English community needs a list of it's own.
 Re,

 On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 I found TinuCherianBot had mistakenly made Brian Horrocks, a British
 Army general unconnected with India except for his birth, as part of
 WikiProject India, a false positive. Sorry guys, he has nothing to do with
 us. We are now down another FA.

 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --

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 --
 Regards,
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
 Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore


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[Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wiki communities - Telugu

2011-11-28 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

As part of the India Programs of
WMFhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages
I
am having discussions with wikipedians across various Indic languages. I
already shared the summary of the discussions I had with the
Assamesehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Assamese/Discussions/2011
,
Hindihttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Hindi/Discussions/2011,
Sanskrithttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Sanskrit/Discussions/2011
and
Tamilhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Tamil/Discussions/2011wikimedians.
Thank you all for continuing the discussions in meta wiki and
in mailing lists.

Today I am sharing the summary of the discussions I had with Telugu wiki
community members. It is available here.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Telugu/Discussions/2011

Among Indian language wikipedias, Telugu wikipedia is the first Indian
language wikipedia that caught the attention of other Indic language
wikipedians in 2006 itself. I remember reading about Telugu Wikipedia and
the activities of Telugu wikipedians in many online forums during
2006-2007. Following are some of the blogposts published that time.

http://telugutanam.blogspot.com/2006/09/telugu-wikipedia-crosses-1.html(News
about Telugu wikipedia crossing 10,000 articles - 2006 September)
-

http://crossroads.veeven.com/2007/06/26/telugu-wikipedia-reaches-3-articles/(News
about Telugu wikipedia crossing 30,000 articles - 2007 June)
-

http://crossroads.veeven.com/2007/09/10/3000-members-in-telugu-wikipedia/(News
about Telugu Wikipedia having 3000 registered users - 2007 September)

In technical front also Telugu wikipedia was showing the way for other
Indic language wikipedias. Telugu wikipedia is one of the first Indic
language wikipedia to integrate a typing solution into wikipedia. Even
though much activism happened during 2006-2008, the community was not able
to keep that tempo and increase the community size.

Also among Indian language wiki communities, the concept of *Community
Newsletter http://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/వికీపీడియా:తెవికీ_వార్* came out
first from the Telugu wiki community. Community already published 5 or 6
editions of Telugu wiki Newsletter. Remember still no other Indic language
wiki community has a community newsletter.

Soon Telugu wikipedia will cross 50,000 articles, the third Indic language
wikipedia to cross that milestone. l Hope Telugu wikipedians will make use
of that opportunity to add more members to its community. Telugu wikipedia
has roughly 30 active editors now.

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikipedia-OR] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wiki communities - Odia (Oriya)

2011-11-28 Thread Shiju Alex

would you like to keep the same content in OR WP as well, so new users who
are not familiar with meta also can read them?

Of course. Please feel free to reuse the content and share it with all who
are not familiar with meta.

And we all are looking forward to having one more session with you, based
on my learning I want to share few things on which we will work forward.

Sure. We shall schedule another meeting.

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Subhashish Panigrahi
psubhash...@gmail.com wrote:

Thanks a lot Shiju for the summary, would you like to keep the same
content in OR WP as well, so new users who are not familiar with meta also
can read them?

And we all are looking forward to having one more session with you, based
on my learning I want to share few things on which we will work forward. I
think new year is approaching and it's time to set a milestone for 2000
article by new year!

Cheers
Subha

On 29 November 2011 11:54, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote:

Dear All,

Today I am sharing you the summary of discussions I had with Odia wiki (
http://or.wikipedia.org/) community. It is available here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Odia/Discussions/2011

Odia is a shining example of how a wiki project can be revived and build
a community around it, if few wonderful users with a vision for building
free knowledge in their mother language arrive in their mother language
wiki.

Odia wikipedia was started in 2002. In fact it is one of the first Indic
language wikipedia. Nothing much had happened in Odia wiki till 2010
December. But the progress made by Odia wiki project (
http://or.wikipedia.org/) during the past one year is note worthy and it
is an example that can be replicated in some of the inactive Indic language
wikipedias. Odia was having just 600 articles (which were created over the
past 8 years) and no active users at the start of this year. Now 10 months
later, it has close to 1600 articles and 10 active users. The online and
offline outreach initiatives took by Odia wiki community for building the
community is showing positive result.

I was actively involved in the community building for Odia wikipedia. I
still remember the day (2011 January 15) when I introducted Odia wikipedia
and Odia tying tool (developed by Junaid) to an Odia speaker (Ashuthosh
Kar) during Wiki X celebration at Bangalore. Through him very soon we got a
wonderful wikipedian (Subhashish) who is leading the efforts for Odia wiki
now. Initially Subhasish and I used to meet at my home and work on the
basic things for Odia wiki. I remember us working on the Odia wikipedia
logo, FAQ booklet, Translate wiki, and so on. Soon Odia got more members to
the team through the few Odia wiki workshops happened at Bangalore. Along
with workshops, Odia wikipedians translated the FAQ booklet to Odia and
took efforts to integrate the Odia typing solution to Odia wikipedia. Later
with the support of Dhanada Mishra (the chairman of Human Development
Foundation (http://www.hdf.org.in/)) and a young student Odia wikipedian
Srikanth Kedia a wiki workshop is conducted at Bhubaneshwar. Odia
wikipedians from Bangalore are doing an excellent job and now many of them
are participating in Wikimedia India chapter activities also.

Odia wiki community is effectively making use of various social
networking sites to reach out to Odia speakers.

Odia wiki project picked up not because Odia has got huge speaker base,
high literacy among Odia speakers, access to computers, or any thing else;
it become active only because it has receieved the right volunteers who
have passion and vision of developing a wikipedia in their mother language.
We need similar volunteers for each Indic language wikipedia.

Requesting you to place your comments on the talk
pagehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Odia/Discussions/2011
.

Regards
Shiju

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikisa-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wikipedias - Sanskrit

2011-11-26 Thread Shiju Alex

This is another notable thing that needs to mention about Sanskrit Wiki
community. During the past 2 months lot of
progresshttp://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:RecentChangeslimit=500days=60translations=onlytrailer=%2Fsais
made in the translation of system messages in Translate wiki. I am
sure
community will soon take up the Wikisource related translations also.

Now sa-wiki community is keen on enabling Proof read extension, Deja vu and
other wikisource related extensions on Wikisource. One issue that we face
is, most of the Indic wikipedians have not worked much on this. (ml
wikipedians done few of those wikisource stuff with your (John Vandenberg
)support). Of course community require the support
from experienced wikimedians l since not much progress is made in the
sister language wiki projects in most of the Indian languages.

Shiju

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 10:20 AM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:

Sanskrit Wikisource needs translators.

There are about 60 messages which are needed before Wikisource can
start doing quality work

https://sa.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%A6%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%A6%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%8D#Changes_needed_in_wikisource

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote:
Dear All,
As mentioned in the last two mails, as part of the Indic Languages
initiatives of India Programs, I have been having detailed discussions
with
a wide range of Indic language wikipedians for the past few weeks. I
already shared the summary of the discussions I had with with
the Assamese
and Hindi wikimedians.
Today I'm sharing a summary of the discussions I had with the Sanskrit
wikipedians. It is available here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Sanskrit/Discussions/2011
I must say the progress made by Sanskrit wiki projects in the past 2
years
is marvelous, especially considering the fact that its speaker base is
too
low (compared to the rest of the 20 indic languages having wikipedia).
The
amount of activism is Sanskrit wikisource is also very high. I am sure
Sanskrit wiki community is the one wiki community that is going
to utilize all the sister projects at its fullest.
Sanskrit wiki workshops are happening all over the country. Today I
attended
a Sanskrit wiki workshop in a Sanskrit institution at New Dellhi. In
Delhi
itself Sanskrit wikipedians are planning many other Sanskrit wiki
activities. With so many volunteers involved in the projects I am sure
Sanskrit is going to make good progress.
Inviting your comments on the talk page.
Regards,
Shiju Alex
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Sharing insights and experiences from Indian language wikipedias - Assamese

2011-11-23 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear Indic Wikimedia Community members,

As part of the Indic Languages initiative of India
Programshttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages,
I have been having detailed discussions with a wide range of Indic language
wikipedians for the past few weeks. These discussions have been to build
the understanding, provide insight, and explore opportunities to expand
Indic language projects. The end result of these discussions is to help
identify language communities with whom we can collaboratively design
pilots to drive our projects.

These discussions have been conducted on IRC, one-on-one, group voice
conversations, as well as through email questionnaires.

Over the next few days, I am going to share a series of these with you.
The intention is to give you a sense of the kind of perspectives that
exist within the overall Indic community, to share ideas and to generate
discussion on potential ideas. Please note that I have edited the
discussions to preserve confidentiality as well as to remove any
particularly personal comments that might have been shared.

Please do let me have your views on these discussions and do please join
the debate on the talk page or on this mailing list or offline to me.

For today, I am sharing the discussions with the *Assamese
communityhttp://as.wikipedia.org
*. The summary of this discussion is placed at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Assamese/Discussions/2011

Assamese wikipedia community is a tiny but vibrant community - that is
slowly building itself. There is huge opportunity given that Assamese is
spoken by more than 1.3 crore people. As we all know, there was not much
progress in Assamese wiki community till recently. But now the situation is
slowly changing after the arrival of few dedicated users. And in this
early stage, Assamese community show very promising potential. I remember
discussing the importance of preparing a small FAQ in AS Wiki to help the
new users. In no time few community members prepared a good FAQ
pagehttp://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%87_%E0%A6%89%E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%A4_%E0%A6%B9%E0%A7%8B%E0%A7%B1%E0%A6%BE_%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A7%B0%E0%A6%B6%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%AE%E0%A7%82%E0%A6%B9for
the Assamese wiki. I am sure with the arrival of such dedicated users
Assamese wiki is going to make good progress.

Inviting your active participation in these discussions (either on talk
page or in this mailing list).

Warm Regards,

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Upload the presentations

2011-11-22 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

All the presentations from the *State of Wikimedia Communities of India*
session are merged (including the below presentation by the English wiki
community of India) and the combined PDF is uploaded to Commons. It is
available here :
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_wikimedia_Communities_of_India_2011_November.pdf

As you all know this was the first get together of Wikimedia communities of
India. It is really nice to understand that we are able to bring together
more than 15 Indian wiki communities.

Following are the Indian Wiki communities communities participated in the
State of Wikimedia Communities of India session (Name of the presenter is
also given)

1. Assamese - Swati Singh
2. Bengali - Jayantha Nath
3. English - Ashwin Baindur
4. Gujarati - Dhaval Vyas
5. Hindi - Shiju
6. Kannada - Swaroop Rao
7. Malayalam - Vishwaprabha
8. Marathi - Mandar Kulkarni
9. Nepali - Saroj Dhakal
10. Odia - Subhashish
11. Sanskrit - Swaroop Rao
12. Tamil - Srikanth Lakshmanan
13. Telugu - CB Rao
14. Indian Language Wikipedias in Incubator - Kundan Amithab

Urdu, Punjabi, Nepal Bhasha, Pali, Sindhi, and Bhojpuri language wiki
communities couldn't participate in the State of Wikimedia Communities of
India session either because community is not active, or a community
member didn't participated in WCI, or the community were unable to send a
presentation slides. But I am sure as we move forward situation will change.

Thank you all for contributing to this great show of Wikimedia Communities
of India.

Shiju

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 12:04 AM, Ashwin Baindur
ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

My presentation on the State of WikiProject India on English Wikipedia has
been uploaded to Commons.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:State_of_Indic_Wikipedia_presentations_2011

Warm regards,

Ashwin Baindur
--

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 10:57 PM, Jayanta Nath jayanta...@gmail.comwrote:

Done!

With Warm Regards,
*Jayanta Nath*
Calcutta,West Bengal

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] On the issue of the maps...

2011-11-21 Thread Shiju Alex

And there is an en wikipedia article also on this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BJP_youth_wing_protest_against_Wikipedia%27s_map_of_India


Shiju


On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 ... there has been *much* coverage in the Indian media and many of the
 stories have comments too.


 http://news.google.co.in/news/story?q=wikipedia+india+mapsum=1ie=UTF-8ncl=dYiSYZZMUhLrt7MQ1nIuCccQPfsCMhl=enei=vC7LTsvbDovtrQems_DbDAsa=Xoi=news_resultct=more-resultsresnum=6ved=0CF8QqgIwBQ

 Even from Jimmy!
 http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-11-18/news/30415009_1_wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-maps

 And others: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2640098.ece


 http://dailypioneer.com/nation/21404-bjym-men-protest-against-inaccurate-indian-map-on-wiki.html

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot

2011-11-12 Thread Shiju Alex

Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is,
about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to
contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of
them editing the articles on the same topic.

The reason I am telling this is, In India (in general) it is not the
students who are deciding the course (and career) that they want to
study/pursue. Parents, relatives, and community around them decide that. So
even though the student's interest may lie in a specific area, he might be
studying a different course.

Allowing students to edit in a topic that they like will bring in more
original content. But the issue with this methodology is, the role of
Professors might be reduced, and the role of CA and OA might be increased.
And I am not sure how the

But this methodology is adopted very successfully in Kerala using School
wiki http://schoolwiki.in. But we may say, that is school children and
they are not mature enough for wikipedia editing. Again that is our
misconception. In general, personally I am more interested to target school
students (high school and Plus 2) than college students. School children
are fantastic. It is true that most of us under estimate them. But to see
the successful result from India, see the young and wonderful wikipedians
we have in Malayalam wikipedia and wikisource.

*Note: *Please note that I am replying to this thread as a Malayalam wiki
community memeber.

Shiju







On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Swaroop Rao raul.swar...@gmail.comwrote:

 That's true Arjun, there is a lot of interest in this program in many
 colleges, and this is going untapped. No, its not dead for sure. It was a
 pilot, and it didn't come out pretty; no issues, that's how we learn. I
 think that one thing we learnt is that the US model may not work out well
 for India, so we need to develop an India specific model for this (That's
 what we've been trying to do in these previous mails actually I guess).

 Swaroop Rao
 (MikeLynch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MikeLynch)


 Steering Committee member, United States Education Program





 On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 23:36, Arjun mangol arjun.man...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hey all,

 I refuse to believe it dead as of yet. There's yet a lot of avenues that
 haven't been explored. My personal suggestion was that let IEP establish a
 Wikipedia Club in every college in Pune to begin with, that would inculcate
 new, interested members who have a genuine passion for the project. Such
 clubs could meet every second Sunday, hold guest lecs, set a quota for a
 certain no. of articles to be created by the Pune chapter and so on by the
 members, teach its members better editing skills, and spread the knowledge.
 The CA training prog that I attended was a hell lotta fun and I wish many
 of my friends get the feel of it too.

 These clubs would be managed by all the 'veteran' CAs and newer ones if
 needed as and when. IEP would be the umbrella organisation to it all, and
 we can focus a lot more on quality of articles rather than the sheer no. of
 editors and rampant copyvio-ing done as a consequence by the newbies. Give
 it thought. My friends in many colleges throughout India were literally
 jealous that I was a part of it. Let's not let it go unnoticed that there
 is genuine interest spread in pockets throughout the country.

 - Arjun

 On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:18 PM, Arnav Sonara sonara.ar...@gmail.comwrote:




 hi,

 It was a pilot and hence I guess was meant to die at some point.

 First up, to the Campus Ambassadors, you guys showed a lot of courage
 in taking up and then following through on your commitment of being Campus
 Ambassadors through the length of this Pilot. I hope the team will also
 speak to the  Ambassadors whilst doing the post-mortem so future programs
 have the benefit of their experience. The same also goes to the India
 Programs team that initiated this project.


 Thanks to all of you, yes this was a Pilot, but at no point I see it
 dying.  Its just that we have taken a pause right now to learn from the
 findings and ll come back all prepared and with the help of you all we ll
 try to gain new heights again.


 --
 Thanks
 Arnav (ricku).
 (User:Rangilo_Gujarati)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rangilo_Gujarati


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Indian Language wikipedia Statistics – 2011 September

2011-11-11 Thread Shiju Alex


 If you can put this on some wiki page on wikipedia english or else on
 wikimedia India,  that will give some official status and
 authenticity.


In fact I was working on the wiki version. It is placed in meta wiki now.
Here is the link.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages/Statistics/2011_September

Thanks for reminding me about the wiki version

Regards
Shiju

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 4:11 PM, Sudhanwa Jogalekar
sudhanwa@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi,

 If you can put this on some wiki page on wikipedia english or else on
 wikimedia India,  that will give some official status and
 authenticity.

 Please consider the same alongwith keeping the article on your own blog.

 Regards

 -Sudhanwa

 On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote:
  Dear Wikimedians,
  I have compiled the statistical report of Indian language wikipedias for
 the
  month of 2011 September. It is available
  here:
 http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics-2011-september/
 
  Shiju
 
 
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [WikiConference-India 2011] Noteworthy Wikimedian Recognition

2011-11-08 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear Wikimedians

Please note that the link for submitting the nominations is here:
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/NWR_2011

Shiju



On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Arun Ramarathnam arunra...@gmail.comwrote:

 Dear Wikimedians,

 Please submit your nominations at the following url:
 http://wiki.wikimedia.in/NWR_2011

 Please send in your nominations.

 Thank you.

 regards
 Arun


 On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Arjuna Rao Chavala 
 arjunar...@gmail.comwrote:

 Dear Wikimedians,

 The traction for Wikimedia projects and content in Indian languages (and
 Indian content in English) has been growing over the last decade thanks to
 the passion and tireless contributions of  several Wikimedians. We are
 getting set for WikiConference India 2011 which is around the corner.  The
 Wikimedia Chapter Executive Committee (EC) and the Conference organising
 team thought it is appropriate to  recognize the most noteworthy
 contributors to Indian language projects and Indian content in English
 during the conference.

 Arun Ramarathnam and Naveen Francis from the EC are leading this
 initiative. The  process for the recognition has been prepared and a well
 diversified  Jury is identified. Details of the process and the Jury are
 enclosed for your perusal.

 I would like to appeal to all of you to spare few minutes to think of
 fellow wikimedians who made a significant difference over the first decade
 of Wikimedia movement and nominate them for the recognition.

 Further communication on the wiki based nomination form would follow from
 the Jury. Please spread this communication  across other relevant lists and
  participate enthusiastically and help make this initiative, the first
 collective effort to appreciate stellar contributions from the community a
 success.


 Cheers

 Arjuna Rao Chavala

 President, Wikimedia India

 ***


 Noteworthy Wikimedian Recognition

 The Recognition

 Wikimedia projects have been active in India for a few years and the
 journey has been exciting (Wikimedia Chapter First Annual 
 reporthttp://wiki.wikimedia.in/File:WMIN-AnnualReport2010-11.pdf,
 Gautam John's 
 articlehttp://gkjohn.posterous.com/thoughts-on-wikipedia-in-indiaand 
 Wikimedia
 Foundation 
 articlehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_India_Chronicles_%28150dpi%29.pdf).
 This has been made possible by the contributions of hundreds of Wikimedians
 across various Wikimedia projects. WikiConference India 2011 is the first
 conference and largest congregation of Wikimedians in India across
 Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia India chapter Executive committee
 believes it would be befitting to use this opportunity to recognize
 noteworthy contributions of some of the best contributors to our projects.

 The objective of this recognition is to appreciate Wikimedians
 (contributing to India focused projects) from across Wikimedia projects and
 languages for their contributions.

 The nomination process

- Any Wikimedian can nominate any other wikimedian of their choice
for the recognition (preferred). Self nominations are also allowed.


- Nominees for the Recognition should have made significant
contributions to Wikimedia India projects or the movement. Contributions
include  content,  Outreach and contributions in any other form.
- Nominations should be  through  a filled Nomination form on the 
 Wikimedia
India wiki http://wiki.wikimedia.in/.
- Incomplete nominations will not be considered.
- The jury's decision would be final.



 Eligibility Criterion

 Any wikimedian other than current Members of the Wikimedia India
  Executive committee, members of the Jury,  Wiki Conference India Office
 bearers, staff/contractors of the Wikimedia foundation  or anyone paid
 directly for their time/effort by Wikimedia organisations  are eligible for
 these recognitions.

 The Jury

 Jury constitution
 The chapter has constituted a Jury with members from the Chapter
 Executive committee, Wikimedia Foundation India office, Conference
 organisers and Community and other key stakeholders.

 Jury composition

1. Achal Prabhala
2. Arun Ramarathnam
3. Ashwin Baindur
4. Bishaka Datta
5. Hisham Mundol
6. Jayanta Nath
7. Naveen Francis
8. Pradeep Mohandas
9. Shiju Alex



 Jury's role and responsibility
 The role of the jury will be to select Wikimedians for the recognition
 from the nominations made.

 Key dates

- Announcement of call for nominations  to community: 9th Nov 2011,
Wednesday.
- Last date for nomination submission:13th Nov 2011, Sunday
- Finalisation of Jury decision:17th Nov 2011, Thursday



 The  Recognition ceremony

 The Chapter Executive committee will conduct a formal recognition
 ceremony in the WikiConference 2011 to recognise the winners. The winners
 would be given a certificate/citation.
 ***


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wiki Academies in Indic Languages.

2011-11-05 Thread Shiju Alex

Here is the link to the Wiki academy brochure.
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/File:WikiAcademy.svg

The text of this document need to be translated to various languages.

Naveen,

Create a page in chapter wiki and place there only the text (in English)
that needs to be translated . Then request community support for
translating that text to various languages. Once this is done create one of
us need to produce the brochure in various languages.

Another way of doing the translation is using the SVG translate. Since the
source file is in SVG, SVG translate is the best way.
http://toolserver.org/~jarry/svgtranslate/

Use that tool and translate the svg file,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/WikiAcademy.svg to
various languages.

Once translation done let one of us do the typesetting and release the
brochure in various languages.
Shiju



Shiju



On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 2:26 PM, Debanjan Bandyopadhyay
debast...@gmail.comwrote:

 Naveen,

 Send me, I'll try to translate into Shudh Bengali. Need some time due to
 exams which will get over tomorrow. But will be travelling from Monday to
 Tuesday. So can't help before Wednesday.

 --
 Regards,
 Debanjan*

 - Lets make this world a better and more informative place*


 On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 9:48 PM, Naveen Francis navee...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi all,

 Can anyone help me to translate the Wiki Academy Brochure to Indic
 languages ?

 Thanks,
 Naveen Francis

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[Wikimediaindia-l] On how Google irreparably wounded Kannada Wikipedia

2011-10-24 Thread Shiju Alex

Here is a blogpost from Hari Prasad Nadig about the after effect of Google's
Translation project in Kannada wikipedia.

http://hpnadig.net/blog/2011/10/22/how-google-irreparably-wounded-kannada-wikipedia/755



Shiju
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: Naveen Francis is elected as Secretary

2011-10-18 Thread Shiju Alex

Congrats Naveen



On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Vickram Crishna
vvcris...@radiophony.comwrote:

 Wonderful. Nice to have the community reaching out to you when you're far
 from home :-), more incentive to come back asap.

 On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 1:48 PM, CherianTinu Abraham 
 tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hearty Congratulations and Best wishes, Naveen.

 Regards
 Tinu Cherian

 -- Forwarded message --
 From: Arjuna Rao Chavala arjunar...@gmail.com
 Date: Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 10:21 AM
 Subject: [Wikimedia-IN-Exec] Naveen Francis is elected as Secretary
 To: wmin-memb...@googlegroups.com
 Cc: Wikimedia India EC wikimedia-in-e...@lists.wikimedia.org


 Hi,

 I am glad to announce that Naveen Francis is elected as Secretary of the
 Wikimedia Chapter. Please join me in congratulating Naveen.

 Thanks
 Arjuna Rao Chavala
 President, Wikmedia Chapter.



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 --
 Vickram
 Fool On The Hill http://communicall.wordpress.com

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Transliteration tool for Sanskrit wiki

2011-10-18 Thread Shiju Alex

As Srikanth mentioned, Sanskrit wiki projects (http://sa.wikipedia.org) is
one of the first Indic language wiki (along with tamil and Malayalam) to
implement the integrated typing tool. So the feature Harish asked is already
there in Sanskrit wiki projects.

Should we run site notices with these screenshots on these communities to
 increase awareness.


I assume it is a good idea to run site notices. But before that we need to
implement the tool (Narayam) in most Indic language wikis. As of now it is
implemented only in Tamil, Malayalam, and Sanskrit. And the Assamese wiki
community is in talk with developers to implement Narayam in Assamese wiki.
For all other Indic languages (Odia, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali,
Telugu, Gujarati, Pujnabi) the tool need to be implemented. Some of the
above communities are using the old tool developed by Junaid, but that need
to be replaced. And for that support from respective community is most
required. For languages like Punjabi the community need to help developers
to develop transliteration scheme itself. For the rest of the languages the
current tool need to be upgraded to Narayam.

We shall run site notices once we finish few more languages. Or we shall run
site notices in those wikis where tool is already implemented, may be after
the wiki conference  (we have so many site notices these days :) )


Please write to me off-list at sh...@wikimedia.org, if any language
communities need assitance regarding this.


Shiju







On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:



 On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 20:27, Harish mghar...@gmail.com wrote:

 Sanskrit Wikipedia is not having transliteration tool as in most other
 Indian languages. Since the script is Devanagari, the same code used in
 Hindi wiki can be reused. Can anybody please enable it?


  Infact Sanskrit was one of the early communities to adopt Narayam (before
 Tamil). Please see the below screenshots for Tamil, you similarly have
 Input Method dropdown at top of page near Username / Login link. Please
 hover over it, you would get a dropdown to choose the transliteration
 option. (Control-M) is the keyboard shortcut to turn it off / on.

 Gerard / Santhosh / Junaid / Shiju,

 Should we run site notices with these screenshots on these communities to
 increase awareness. Tamil wiki projects have a link to typing help on
 sitenotice and that page contains relevant help. I think it would be better
 if you ask bug filers to make sure they run sitenotices on wiki post
 enabling Narayam to spread awareness.

 http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tamiltyping1.JPG
 http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tamiltyping2.JPG

 --
 Regards
 Srikanth.L


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[Wikimediaindia-l] Using Wikimedia Mailing lists

2011-10-02 Thread Shiju Alex

Changed the Subject line.


Arjuna and I were discussing the below issue that Beria pointed out.

But as Arjuna said, some of the important features like searchability of
archives, stats, and so on  are missing in the mail man. As per my
understanding this is one of the reason given by Telugu and Marathi wiki
communities for not moving to Wikimedia list. I am just wondering whether it
is possible to include these features in mail man. At least the search
option which is very vital for groups is a must for wikimedia lists.

Shiju

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Béria Lima berial...@gmail.com wrote:

 *Sorry, I did not notice it. BTW, Telugu wikipedia  team  uses
 teluguw...@googlegroups.com.*


 Why isn't a normal mailing list? Create a bug for it (here are three
 examples: creation of 
 Wikiconference-indiahttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29487,
 creation of 
 Wikimedia-blrhttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24454and 
 creation
 of wikiml-l https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15012)
 _
 *Béria Lima*
 http://wikimedia.pt/(351) 925 171 484

 *Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter
 livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. É isso o que
 estamos a fazer http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Nossos_projetos.*


 On 2 October 2011 04:18, Arjuna Rao Chavala arjunar...@gmail.com wrote:



 On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 7:31 PM, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 I will suggest forwarding to respective language wiki mailing list, in
 addition to city mailing lists to reach the target audience.


 Arjuna, This is already done. The mail is sent to various Indic language
 lists also.

 Sorry, I did not notice it. BTW, Telugu wikipedia  team  uses
 teluguw...@googlegroups.com.

 Cheers
 Arjun


 Shiju

 On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 7:18 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala arjunar...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 Shiju,


 On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 6:59 PM, Shiju Alex sh...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 Dear Indic wikimedians,

 Thank you very much for the welcome messages and for making me feel at
 home.

 Over the past few years I have interacted with many of you for the
 various Indic Wiki related activities and we have done many successful
 projects. Thank you very much for all those wonderful projects. Now when 
 we
 are moving to a different phase of growth of Wikimedia in India, I request
 more support from your side.

 To get started we shall together develop a plan for Indic language
 wikis and design few pilot projects to gain learnings to drive growth. I
 propose to develop this plan collaboratively and openly - in true wiki
 style.  This will include focused Indic language meetups, virtual 
 meetings,
 desk research and constantly synthesizing the findings from all of these
 into learnings.  These learnings will then flow into pilots that we will
 implement and review and learn from.


 For this purpose, I will be using the following page
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages.
 It is very preliminary right now - but will keep updating it.  The page 
 will
 give you a flavor of the kind of process and methodology I plan to use - 
 and
 also give you a hint of the end output.  However, I stress that is nothing
 more than a stub right now. So please provide your suggestions.

 --cut--



 Nice to see the detailed approach.
 I will suggest forwarding to respective language wiki mailing list, in
 addition to city mailing lists to reach the target audience.

 Best wishes

 Arjun




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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Indic Languages: Shiju Alex

2011-10-01 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear Indic wikimedians,

Thank you very much for the welcome messages and for making me feel at home.


Over the past few years I have interacted with many of you for the various
Indic Wiki related activities and we have done many successful projects.
Thank you very much for all those wonderful projects. Now when we are moving
to a different phase of growth of Wikimedia in India, I request  more
support from your side.

To get started we shall together develop a plan for Indic language wikis and
design few pilot projects to gain learnings to drive growth. I propose to
develop this plan collaboratively and openly - in true wiki style.  This
will include focused Indic language meetups, virtual meetings, desk research
and constantly synthesizing the findings from all of these into learnings.
These learnings will then flow into pilots that we will implement and review
and learn from.


For this purpose, I will be using the following page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages.
It is very preliminary right now - but will keep updating it.  The page will
give you a flavor of the kind of process and methodology I plan to use - and
also give you a hint of the end output.  However, I stress that is nothing
more than a stub right now. So please provide your suggestions.

I will be in touch soon and regularly on the next steps and I will keep you
constantly posted on progress - both positive and whenever we face setbacks.

The task is huge.  The potential is even more massive.  I will need a lot of
your help.  I invite and welcome and urge all of you to contribute to this
process - during physical meetups, in virtual meetings, one-on-one
conversations or meetings, on the talk page to the Indic Languages page and
in any and every manner that you can imagine.


As part of the India Programs of WMF, my official ID is sh...@wikimedia.org.
You can reach me anytime regarding any WMF's Indic wiki related topic.


Thanks
Shiju






 On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 7:24 AM, Hisham his...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 cross-posting to reach pan-India; apologies if you have got it from other
 mailing lists.

 Dear All

 As I had mentioned in a previous posting (and as was so touchingly
 welcomed by so many of of you), Shiju Alex is joining us to lead our Indic
 Languages initiatives.  In this mail (
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-July/003845.html),
 I had indicated that he would join around September-October.

 I'm really pleased to inform you that he has now joined India Programs (on
 September 24th.)

 Indic Languages is an important priority for us - and Shiju intends to
 start work on this urgently.  He'll be in touch shortly on this matter.

 Welcome aboard, Shiju!

 Warmest Regards,

 hisham



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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] or.wiktionary.org

2011-09-27 Thread Shiju Alex

Good work Odia Wiki community. Hope Odia Wikisource will also up very soon

Shiju

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 7:29 AM, Subhashish Panigrahi psubhash...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Thanks a lot Gerard, Santhosh and team, my heartfelt thanks to all the
 language committee members for your kind support and I promise the Odia
 Community will keep up the effort to improve the two projects and finish the
 rest translations and get started with the other projects.

 Thanks again.
 rgds
 Subha

 On 28 September 2011 06:26, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hoi,
 I am really pleased to inform you that the Oriya Wiktionary is the first
 project ever to be officially re-enabled for editing. The Oriya community is
 working really hard to make their projects a success. They are noticing that
 the usability is improving as a consequence of the obligatory localisation
 that they have to do. Once they are done, the language committee will assess
 if a Wikiquote can be created as well.

 The exception that was made to open up the Oriya Wiktionary was given
 because there is a Wikimeet in the near future and we do want to give their
 community more of a reason to be happy with their hard work.
 Thanks,
  GerardM

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [WMIN-Members] Report on First Wiki Academy organised by Wikimedia Chapter

2011-09-13 Thread Shiju Alex

This is great. Hope more wiki workshops will follow.

Shiju

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 13 September 2011 15:28, Achal Prabhala aprabh...@gmail.com wrote:

  This is amazing - congratulations to you and Gautam.

 I had almost nothing to do, really.

 All credit to Arjuna, Ansuman and OmShivaprakash.

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] WikiConference India 2011 - Call for Participation

2011-08-30 Thread Shiju Alex


 Can you temme how to edit... I dont find any links to edit my submissions.


We will be able to help you only if you provide details of the submission.
For example, *title of the submission*.

Shiju

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Adethya Sudarsanan
adethyas...@gmail.comwrote:

 Thanks for your response,

 Can you temme how to edit... I dont find any links to edit my submissions.


 Thanks,
 Adethya

 On 30 August 2011 15:11, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com wrote:



  On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 15:08, Adethya Sudarsanan adethyas...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 Hi,

 can we edit our submission ? I made a submission and now I want to add
 some more points to it ?

 Is it possible?

 Thanks in advance,
 Adethya


 Sure, Anything before 23:59:59 tonight IST

 --
 Regards
 Srikanth.L

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Hindi Wiki crossed 1 lakh Article milestone

2011-08-30 Thread Shiju Alex

Good news and congrats.

So Hindi became the first Indic language wikipedia crossing the 1 lakh
article mile stone


Shiju



On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:53 PM, Surya Prakash suryasalem2...@gmail.comwrote:

 Congratulations for the contributors  readers  Hindi community. :)


 *$U®¥∩*
 http://goo.gl/RoMyo.com http://FirefoxSurya.blogspot.com
 http://about.me/suryaceg



 2011/8/30 mayur mayur...@gmail.com

 Dear all,
With about 50,000 registered user, 250 active users ,
 14 million edits and a depth of 
 34http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B6%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B7:StatisticsHindi
  Wikipedia crossed 1
 lakhs 
 articleshttp://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B6%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B7:Statisticsmilestone
  today.

 Regards
 (User:Mayur)

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] 3rd Bangalore Odia Wiki Meetup- Odia Wikipedia reaches 1500 articles

2011-08-29 Thread Shiju Alex

Good work Subhasish and other Odia wiki community members..

*Wikipedia for Odia Literature:* An event which is created to uplift the
 presence of Odia language and literature in Wikipedia, chronological
 documentations and media files collection.

Next step would be requesting for Odia wikisource.

Hope you will be  able to rope in more new users from the Odisha state
through various outreach programs.

Shiju


On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Subhashish Panigrahi psubhash...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Hi folks,

 Good morning from Odia Wiki Community.

 Yesterday we had a small meetup to celebrate the *1500 articles
 Celebration *attended by 6 old and 1 new Wikipedians.

 Agenda:
 *Current status:* The substantial growth and the initiatives taken to
 improve the status of Odia Wikipedia was discussed. Odia Wikipedia was
 dormant for almost 8 years which just started reviving itself in the
 beginning of this year and made a leap of almost 1000 well written articles
 in this short span with the bandwidth of a small community with less active
 members. Bangalore was the stepping stone for the revival of Odia
 Wikipediahttp://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AC%89%E0%AC%87%E0%AC%95%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%AA%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%A1%E0%AC%BC%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%86:%E0%AC%AE%E0%AD%87%E0%AC%B3%E0%AC%A3/%E0%AC%AC%E0%AD%87%E0%AC%99%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%97%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%B3%E0%AD%81%E0%AC%B0%E0%AD%81/%E0%AC%AC%E0%AD%87%E0%AC%99%E0%AD%8D%E0%AC%97%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%B3%E0%AD%81%E0%AC%B0%E0%AD%81%E0%AD%A7and
  in the 3rd
 Bangalore Wikipedia 
 Meetuphttp://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AC%89%E0%AC%87%E0%AC%95%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%AA%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%A1%E0%AC%BC%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%86:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore3we
  have celebrated 1500 articles.
 *
 Projects:*
 Discussion regarding 2 ongoing projects.
 *Odia loves 
 Wikipediahttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Odia_loves_Wikipedia
 :* An event in Commons to bring out media files uploaded by Odia Wikians.
 This event has reached 351 media files.

 *Wikipedia for Odia Literature:* An event which is created to uplift the
 presence of Odia language and literature in Wikipedia, chronological
 documentations and media files collection. This is running in both in the
 Wikipedia as well as Commons. Under this event Odia Wikipedia has attained 131
 articles in Odia Wikipedia http://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odia_sahitya and
 37 images in 
 Commons.http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Odia_literature

 *Further plans:*
 The next target was set up with attaining 500 more articles to beat
 Gurumukhi Wikipedia which presently has 2003 articles as both of these
 Wikipedias took birth in the same time.

 We also have discussed to discourage creation of stubs without taking care
 of them for further expansion, creation and used of templates, categories,
 good citaions.

 Plans for more outreach programs by collaborating the Odia literature
 departments of several known colleges and universities was also talked of.

 Wikipedians debated how Wikipedia could be a fair and reliable source and
 at times how much beneficial it'd be when most of today's generation are
 moving out of books and internet has become a repository of unending
 knowledge and its regional context when an ancient language like Odia is
 considered, whether or not it is needed to work for Wikipedia, or find any
 better alternative.

 Thank you all for reading. Expecting your valuable feedback and comments

 *
 ସୁଭପାSubhashishPanigrahi
 ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] WikiConference India 2011 - Call for Participation

2011-08-29 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

Today (*2011 August 30*) is the last day to submit program proposals for
WikiConference India 2011. Details regarding this is available at: *
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participation
*

Please make sure you submit your program proposals (in case you are not
submitted it already) if you wish to speak/present a topic in WikiConference
India 2011.


Thanks
Shiju Alex

(For Program Committee, WikiConference India 2011)

*NOTE:* Program submissions not related to Wikipedia or Wikimedia movement
will be rejected. Also we will not accept program proposals after end of day
today.











On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

 Dear All,

 We have only 4 more days for the Program submission. Last date is August
 30.

 Please submit your program proposals before the due date at *
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participation
 *


 Shiju Alex



 On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:57 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

 Dear All,

 The Call for Participation for WikiConference India 2011 is open now.

 Details are available here: *
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participation
 *
 Few guidelines that you need to keep in mind before submitting the
 proposal are available on this page. The guidelines are only meant as a
 pointer to help speakers and is not expected to be exhaustive. You can
 submit talks within all aspects of Wikimedia even if the topic is not
 specifically included on that page. ''' Be Bold.'''

 Few wikimedians had provided their wish list regarding WikiConference
 India 2011 here:
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2011/ProgramsYou 
 can use that also as reference while submitting the proposal.


 *Important: *Please forward this mail to all the relevant mailing lists,
 in case I missed any list.


 Regards
 Shiju Alex
 For WikiConference India 2011, Program Commitee





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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] On creating an Indian Wikisource

2011-08-26 Thread Shiju Alex

Can't we use the existing Wikisources (available in different languages
including English) for the same?

Or, Gautham, are you proposing something else?

Shiju



On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 So here's a question - given that there is much content that is out of
 copyright in India but not necessarily in other parts of the world, is
 there any sense in looking to create an Indian Wikisource for content
 that is out of copyright here?

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] On creating an Indian Wikisource

2011-08-26 Thread Shiju Alex


 Sreejith's point is what I was wondering about. Is there value in
 this? Something that the Chapter might consider?


So what you propose is not a new project, but to have servers in India for
the projects with India related content? Infact most of the projects,
including commons and meta, have India related content.

I am not sure how much this will help. But do we have servers outside US
now?



On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 Shiju and Sreejith:

  Currently Wikipedia projects are hosted in US and all media files
 uploaded
  to these projects should be copyright free in the source country of
 origin
  and also in US.
  If we need to upload media files out of copyright in India but still
  copyrighted in US, I am afraid, the servers need to be hosted in India.

 Sreejith's point is what I was wondering about. Is there value in
 this? Something that the Chapter might consider?

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] On creating an Indian Wikisource

2011-08-26 Thread Shiju Alex


 Specifically a WikiSource server
 of sorts, hosted in India, exclusively for content that is out of
 copyright in India only.


As far as I know, *the content that is that is out of copyright in India
now* can be uploaded to the existing wikisources.

Can you cite some examples for which this is not possible?

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 26 August 2011 12:52, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote:

  So what you propose is not a new project, but to have servers in India
 for
  the projects with India related content? Infact most of the projects,
  including commons and meta, have India related content.
  I am not sure how much this will help. But do we have servers outside US
  now?

 Not for India related content, Shiju. Specifically a WikiSource server
 of sorts, hosted in India, exclusively for content that is out of
 copyright in India only.

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] On creating an Indian Wikisource

2011-08-26 Thread Shiju Alex


 The best example is Gandhi

 Many of his works, and translations of them, are not public domain in
 the United States.

 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Mohandas_K._Gandhi

 http://www.wikilivres.info/wiki/Mohandas_K._Gandhi


In this case, much content that reside in many Indic language wikisources,
few images in Wikimedia Commons, and may be some works in English wikisource
are also against US copyright law. So how can we overcome this issue?

I think this issue is applicable to more countries, not only India.



On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 1:11 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com
 wrote:
  Specifically a WikiSource server
  of sorts, hosted in India, exclusively for content that is out of
  copyright in India only.
 
  As far as I know, the content that is that is out of copyright in India
 now
  can be uploaded to the existing wikisources.
 
  Can you cite some examples for which this is not possible?

 The best example is Gandhi

 Many of his works, and translations of them, are not public domain in
 the United States.

 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Mohandas_K._Gandhi

 http://www.wikilivres.info/wiki/Mohandas_K._Gandhi

 --
 John Vandenberg

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] On creating an Indian Wikisource

2011-08-26 Thread Shiju Alex


 By hosting a WikiSource outside of the US and in the jurisdiction of
 the country.


This is not limited to Wikisource. Wikimedia Commons is definitely in the
list, and may be some other projects also.



On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 26 August 2011 14:21, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote:

  In this case, much content that reside in many Indic language
 wikisources,
  few images in Wikimedia Commons, and may be some works in English
 wikisource
  are also against US copyright law. So how can we overcome this issue?
  I think this issue is applicable to more countries, not only India.

 By hosting a WikiSource outside of the US and in the jurisdiction of
 the country.

 - Gautam

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] WikiConference India 2011 - Call for Participation

2011-08-26 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

We have only 4 more days for the Program submission. Last date is August 30.


Please submit your program proposals before the due date at *
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participation
*


Shiju Alex



On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:57 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

 Dear All,

 The Call for Participation for WikiConference India 2011 is open now.

 Details are available here: *
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participation
 *
 Few guidelines that you need to keep in mind before submitting the proposal
 are available on this page. The guidelines are only meant as a pointer to
 help speakers and is not expected to be exhaustive. You can submit talks
 within all aspects of Wikimedia even if the topic is not specifically
 included on that page. ''' Be Bold.'''

 Few wikimedians had provided their wish list regarding WikiConference India
 2011 here:
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2011/Programs You
 can use that also as reference while submitting the proposal.


 *Important: *Please forward this mail to all the relevant mailing lists,
 in case I missed any list.


 Regards
 Shiju Alex
 For WikiConference India 2011, Program Commitee




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[Wikimediaindia-l] Visually challenged people and Indic language wikipedias - Video

2011-08-22 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear Wikimedians

I would like share an unusual story (unusual - especially for Indic language
wiki communities) that Malayalam wiki community had faced few months back.

In the month of February 2011, I had received an SOS call from a school
teacher (Satyasheelan) who is teaching at the Government School for the
Blind in the Kasargod
districhttp://www.webelmediatronics.in/brlads/directory_Kerala.htmt
of Kerala. Satyasheelan was seeking Malayalam wikipedian's support to fix
few issues that he and his students faced with few Malayalam alphabets when
they read Malayalam wikipedia using a speech synthesizing software called
eSpeak http://espeak.sourceforge.net/. His phone call was surprise to us
since Malayalam wikimedians were not aware that visually challenged people
are using Malayalam wikipedia. (We were aware about the existence of a
software by Santhosh (named Dhawni http://dhvani.sourceforge.net/) to read
unicode Malayalam (and other Indic languages also) which is in its early
stages of development). So Satyasheelan's call was surprising.

After his phone call few Malayalam wikipedians (Junaid, Thachan Makan, and
I) contacted Jonathan Duddington http://sourceforge.net/users/jonsd, the
primary developer (?) of eSpeak, and we worked with him to fix the issues
for Malayalam that Satyasheelan had pointed out. Jonathan fixed the issues
pretty fast and later Satyasheelan informed us that now they are able to use
Malayalam wikipedia without any issues.

Later while we were planning for the 4th Malayalam wiki
meetuphttp://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%AA%E0%B5%80%E0%B4%A1%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%AF:%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%BF_%E0%B4%AA%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%B0%E0%B4%B5%E0%B5%BC%E0%B4%A4%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%A4%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%B8%E0%B4%82%E0%B4%97%E0%B4%AE%E0%B4%82/4(2011
July 11) at Kannur, we decided to invite Satyasheelan to conduct a
session, since Malayalam wikimedians liked to hear the experience of
students of Blind school (using Malayalam wikipedia). But when Satyasheelan
came for the meetup we were surprised and taken aback when we learnt that
Satyasheelan is also a visually challenged person. Few of the his colleagues
(who are also visually challenged) also attended the meetup. Satyasheelan
was accompanied by his son, Nalin.

The meetup was attended by more than 80 Malayalam wikipedians. Few photos
are available
herehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Malayalam_Wikimeetup_4_-_Kannur_11Jun2011.
We are happy that Bishaka, Hisham, and Tory were kind enough to join us for
this meetup. There were various programs conducted as part of this meetup
(the report of the meetup is available at various locations (in Malayalam)).
Definitely the highlight of the meetup was the demonstration by
Satyasheelaman. So this mail is about that.

Malayalam wikimedian Ajay Kuyiloor took extra efforts to record
Satyasheelan's session. We are sharing an edited version of this session
assuming that this information will help other Indic language wiki
communities.

The video of Satyasheelan's session is available here: *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1T3HeBTvU* The duration of the video is
around 9 minutes. We specially thank Ajay Kuyiloor, Girish Mohan, and Jithin
who worked on this video. We admit the low quality of video since we were
not prepared for such a session. Inconvenience due to this is deeply
regretted.

Malayalam community is welcoming your comments regarding this story so that
the discussion regarding this will benefit rest of the Indic wiki
communities also. We are actually humbled by the fact that work we do in
wikipedia is reaching out to people from all wakes of life.

*NOTE:* Satyasheelan specially thanked Malayalam wikimedians for creating a
special navigational
templatehttp://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%AB%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%82:%E0%B4%85%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%B7%E0%B4%B0%E0%B4%AE%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%B2%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%B8%E0%B5%82%E0%B4%9A%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95_%28%E0%B4%B8%E0%B4%AE%E0%B4%97%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%B0%E0%B4%82%29for
reaching out easily to wikipedia articles. I still remember in 2008
when
Malayalam wikipedia user:Sadhik Khalid
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%89%E0%B4%AA%E0%B4%AF%E0%B5%8B%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%A4%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%B5%E0%B5%8D:Sadik_Khalidcreated
this template, some of us had doubted the need of such a template. Our doubt
was, why such a template is required when users can reach out to articles
easily using serach box. Now to our surprise we understood this template is
very much useful for the visually challenged people (whom we never thought
about before).

Video of Satyasheelan's session is available here:*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1T3HeBTvU*

Thanks

Shiju Alex
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] WikiConference India 2011 - Call for Participation

2011-08-07 Thread Shiju Alex

Yes, that is a good suggestion. I am fine with renaming the page.

I kept the name *Call for Particpation* following the footsteps of wikimania
:)


Shiju


On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 11:19 PM, Sudhanwa Jogalekar
sudhanwa@gmail.comwrote:

 Looks like Call for Participation in the title is misleading to many.

 It is supposed to be call for papers (for speakers) and not call for
 attendees registration.

 Most of us know this properly, but considering lot of students will be
 checking it out, it is possible to mislead them as mentioned in the
 other mail by the student.

 Looks like we have to give some more clarity on the web page.

 Regards
 -Sudhanwa


 On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 10:26 AM,  wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote:
  Hi Pranjali,
 
  The registration for the conference is yet to begin, there will be an
  announcement on the same shortly. We appreciate your patience in this
  matter.
 
  If you wish to help in any way please email details on how you can help
 to
  pradeep.mohandas (at) live.com.
 
  Kind Regards,
 
 
 
  
  Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2011 22:31:40 +0530
  From: pgsa...@gmail.com
  To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
  Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] WikiConference India 2011 - Call for
  Participation
 
  hello sir,
  i am a bit confuse about it ...
  i am a SYBSc IT student from mumbai
  i want to attened this conference
  will you please guide me any in which way i can help this cause?
  -pranjali sanap
 
  On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 12:23 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com
  wrote:
 
  Dear All,
 
  Please submit your proposals here:
 
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participation
 
  Kindly ensure that your proposal is on a topic related to Wikimedia. We
 have
  received quite a few proposals which are off-topic.
 
  But we are expecting lot of submissions from experienced wikimedians
 soon.
  Please note that the last date of submission is August 30.
 
  Shiju
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:57 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com
  wrote:
 
  Dear All,
 
  The Call for Participation for WikiConference India 2011 is open now.
 
  Details are available here:
 
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participation
 
  Few guidelines that you need to keep in mind before submitting the
 proposal
  are available on this page. The guidelines are only meant as a pointer to
  help speakers and is not expected to be exhaustive. You can submit talks
  within all aspects of Wikimedia even if the topic is not specifically
  included on that page. ''' Be Bold.'''
 
  Few wikimedians had provided their wish list regarding WikiConference
 India
  2011 here:
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2011/ProgramsYou
  can use that also as reference while submitting the proposal.
 
 
  Important: Please forward this mail to all the relevant mailing lists, in
  case I missed any list.
 
 
  Regards
  Shiju Alex
  For WikiConference India 2011, Program Commitee
 
 
 
 
 
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 web: www.sudhanwa.com  blog: www.sudhanwa.in
 Twitter: sudhanwa Check on FB, Linkedin for more.

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[Wikimediaindia-l] WikiConference India 2011 - Call for Participation

2011-08-01 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

The Call for Participation for WikiConference India 2011 is open now.

Details are available here: *
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Call_for_Participation
*
Few guidelines that you need to keep in mind before submitting the proposal
are available on this page. The guidelines are only meant as a pointer to
help speakers and is not expected to be exhaustive. You can submit talks
within all aspects of Wikimedia even if the topic is not specifically
included on that page. ''' Be Bold.'''

Few wikimedians had provided their wish list regarding WikiConference India
2011 here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_India_2011/Programs You
can use that also as reference while submitting the proposal.


*Important: *Please forward this mail to all the relevant mailing lists, in
case I missed any list.


Regards
Shiju Alex
For WikiConference India 2011, Program Commitee
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Welcome to the India Team! : Shiju Nitika

2011-08-01 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All

Thank you very much for welcoming me to the new role.

First of all I am extremely sorry for responding to this mail very late. For
the past few days I was traveling and my access to internet was
intermittent.

I'm really excited with this new assignment. As you all know over the past
few years Indic wiki communities had done (either individually or through
collaboration with multiple wiki communities) many great things. I was lucky
enough to be part of some of these assignments.

Due to the efforts of various Indic wiki community members, most of the big
language wikis are active now. With more than 40 Indic language wikis I know
the task is not going to be easy. But I am sure with the support from the
respective language speakers we can together do many great things.

I look forward to work closely with all of you and requesting your support
for the same.

Warm Regards,

Shiju Alex

On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 10:54 AM, BalaSundaraRaman sundarbe...@yahoo.comwrote:

 Congrats Shiju and Nitika! I look forward to a good acceleration of wiki
 growth in India with your participation.

 Regards,
 Sundar

 That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium
 for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.
 - George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

 --
 *From:* Arun Ramarathnam arunra...@gmail.com

 *To:* Wikimedia India Community list wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 
 *Sent:* Saturday, July 30, 2011 11:23 AM

 *Subject:* Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Welcome to the India Team! : Shiju 
 Nitika

 This is great news.
 A warm welcome and best wishes to Shiju and Nitika in their new roles.
 Regards
 Arun
 On Jul 29, 2011 1:42 PM, CherianTinu Abraham tinucher...@gmail.com
 wrote:
  Congratulations to Shiju and Nitika.
 
  It has been great working along with Shiju, closely for years now and I
  don't have to tell that how much he deserves this. I wondered how he gets
  time to really work with ABB with all his wiki activities ;) and I am
 sure
  that this position would help him concentrate on one thing he is really
  passionate about.
 
  Welcome on-board, Nitika ! Looking forward to work with you too.
 
  Best wishes again to both Shiju and Nitika !
 
  Regards
  Tinu Cherian
 
 
  On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 12:41 PM, Hisham Mundol hmun...@wikimedia.org
 wrote:
 
  Hi Folks,
 
  I'm really pleased to send out this email welcoming the first 2 new
 members
  of the India Programs team. Just before I introduce them, I thought I'd
  share with you the background of their selection.
 
  *Context*
 
  As you might be aware, the Foundation had decided to undertake a
 catalyst
  operation in India to promote the growth of the community and projects
 here.
  The team is expected to be a small, nimble 5 person group. We had put
 out
  2 job postings - for Indic Initiatives and for Participation. (Please
  refer:
 
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-May/003007.html
 )
  We posted them on linkedin and on the Indian FOSS community list as well
  as announcing them on various Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.
 
  The response was wonderful. 110 applications for Indic Initiatives and
  nearly 175 applications for Participation. These were short-listed to 10
 (3
  for Indic Language and 7 for Participation.) These were a mix of
 existing 
  previous Wikipedians, Wikipedia newbies and open source advocates.
 
  In June, the shortlisted 10 were interviewed and further down-selected
 to
  4. These 4 were then further interviewed by a group of other staff
 members
  from the Foundation. I am pleased to inform the community of the final
  selected 2.
 
  *Shiju Alex - Indic Initiatives*
 
  Most of you already know Shiju. For those who don't, Shiju is a
 long-time
  Wikipedian [User: shijualex] and is active on Malayalam Wikipedia,
 English
  wikiprojects and Wikimedia Commons, as well as Wikisource and offline.
 He
  has been passionately involved with the establishing and building of
 Indic
  language Wikipedias. He's participated in a series of outreach
 activities
  and is also (jointly) undertaking a grant from the Foundation for
 outreach
  across India. He's a regular member of the Bangalore community.
 
  Shiju is from Palakkad, Kerala and is married with a 2 year old baby. He
  currently works as a Senior Technical Writer with ABB in Bangalore.
 
  Even those of you who know him might not know the following 2 things
 that I
  was lucky to discover during the selection process. Shiju is an MSc in
  Physics with a specialisation in Astronomy and Astrophysics - and he
 retains
  a deep interest in anything astronomical. Feel free to quiz him
 vigorously
  on this! He also enjoys trekking and misses his time in Pune where he
 could
  be up  close the gorgeous Sahyadri Hills.
 
  Shiju is going to lead our work on promoting Indic language projects
 across
  India. The challenges are enormous - from technical constraints to low

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: Please change it - Indian Maps on Wikipedia

2011-07-25 Thread Shiju Alex


 since its still just another English Wikipedia POV dispute and thats


Even though the topic of this mail is not limited to enwiki, the above
statement is true.

But unlike other Indian language wikiproject wikipedians, English
wikipedians from India still doesn't have a common forum (apart from the
wiki project India page in en wiki which is not used by many users) to
discuss various topics related to them. I feel it is a good idea to start
another mailing list  exclusively for discussing topics related to en
wikipedians from India. It will help to bring togther all people from India
who are interested in en wiki projects.

Shiju




On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 2:29 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:

 On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 14:10, CherianTinu Abraham 
 tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 My only intention was to ask the community on how to handle such mails or
 request.

 -TC


 Point such people to appropriate places like discussion pages , notice
 board (oops, it cant handle more NOW,but yes ideally). IMO bringing content
 disputes to mailing list, chapter is slightly Off Topic ish / doesnt serve
 purpose, simply because they are not governing any content. Its totally
 different thing if a Wikipedian asks for opinion / comes out of a media
 post, even then list isnt the ideal place,it only calls for more trolling
 since people arent obliged to stick to values which when broken can get a
 block on wiki.[Refer Socio Cultural relevance of Sanskrit Wikipedia blah
 blah some months back]. [[On a seperate note, we havent framed a block
 policy for the list, but I presume day is not far when we may be in need of
 it]]

 The audience of the list is so spread over that it might be spammy even to
 discuss a largely relevant issue like this, since its still just another
 English Wikipedia POV dispute and thats it where as list is for Discussion
 of Wikimedia Projects in India.

 My 2 paisa.

 --
 Regards
 Srikanth.L

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikiml-l] Kerala Govt - Encyclopedia - ‘Kerala Vijnanakosam’

2011-07-18 Thread Shiju Alex

Sarvavijnanakosam is NOT a new project. Sarvavijnanakosam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarvavijnanakosamis the encyclopedia project
of *Kerala State Institute of Institute of Encyclopaedic
Publications*http://www.sarva.gov.inand it is published from late
1970's. The license of this encyclopedia is
changed to a free license in 2008 and Malayalam Wikipedia reuses content
from this expert written encyclopedia.

Kerala Vijanakosam is a new project of *Kerala State Institute of Institute
of Encyclopaedic Publications* http://www.sarva.gov.in/ and its aim is to
provide encyopedic information about all the topics related to Kerala. We
can term it as a sub set of Sarvavijanakosam. It is good to have such
projects since at a later stage when the license is made free we can reuse
the content.:) The web edition of this project is not in wiki format. We are
yet to see how content evolves for this new project.

Any way it is nice to have such projects from various organizations, since
all of them will finally get integrated to malayalam Wiki projects :)

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 4:24 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

After Kanaja from Karnataka , Here comes the new
Kerala Government attempting to make its own online encyclopedia.

http://keralaitnews.com/e-governance/110-e-governance-/2755-kerala-vijnanakosam-and-sarvavijnanakosam-logs-onto-cyber-space

I heard that this project is budgeted for 1 crore Indian Rupees.

Wonder if these project people know about Malayalam Wikipedia and it is
also powered by Unicode.

Regards
Tinu Cherian

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Updating the logo of Indian Language Wikipedias

2011-07-07 Thread Shiju Alex

Logo of Hindi wikipedia (http://hi.wikipedia.org)  is also updated.


Shiju Alex


On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

 Dear Indic language wikipedians,

 The logos of some of the Indic language wikipedias are updated recently.
 Following are those wikipedias:

- Marathi - http://mr.wikipedia.org/
- Kannada - http://sa.wikipedia.org/
- Sanskrit - http://kn.wikipedia.org/
- Odia (Oriya) - http://or.wikipedia.org/

 Among this, the Odia wikipedia logo is updated yesterday and is done by a
 new wikipedian. Thanks to Subhashish who started editing in Odia wikipedia
 recently. He had done a wonderful job.

 The logos for the following language wikipedias still need to be updated.

- Assamese - http://as.wikipedia.org
- Bhojpuri - http://bh.wikipedia.org
- Bishnupriya Manipuri - http://bpy.wikipedia.org/
- Divehi - http://dv.wikipedia.org
- Gujarati - http://gu.wikipedia.org
- Hindi - http://hi.wikipedia.org
- Kashmiri - http://ks.wikipedia.org/
- Nepali - http://ne.wikipedia.org
- Pali - http://pi.wikipedia.org
- Punjabi - http://pa.wikipedia.org
- Sindhi - http://sd.wikipedia.org
- Tamil - http://ta.wikipedia.org

 Hope the logos will be updated soon by the respective language community.

 Kindly create a new logo, upload it to commons, and log a bug in bugzilla.
 In case you require any assistance please contact me.

 Shiju Alex




 -- Forwarded message --
 From: Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com
 Date: Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 10:32 AM
 Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Updating the logo of Indian Language Wikipedias
 To: Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia. 
 wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org


 Dear Indic language wikipedians,

 As many of you know the default skin of wikipedias (including that of all
 Indic language wikipedias) is moved to the new Vector skin some time back.
 Please see the below mail that I sent to this list regrading this on *2010
 July 1*.

 As some of you know, along with this update, the logo of wikipedia is also
 updated. The current logo is available 
 herehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/2.0.


 But even though almost 6 months had passed after this major update, only
 Bengali http://bn.wikipedia.org, Malayalam http://ml.wikipedia.org,
 Urdu http://ur.wikipedia.org, and Telugu http://te.wikipedia.org wiki
 communities had took initiatives to update the logo. The logo update is
 still pending for the following Indian language wikis.

- Assamese - http://as.wikipedia.org
- Bhojpuri - http://bh.wikipedia.org
- Bishnupriya Manipuri - http://bpy.wikipedia.org/
- Divehi - http://dv.wikipedia.org
- Gujarati - http://gu.wikipedia.org
- Hindi - http://hi.wikipedia.org
- Kannada - http://kn.wikipedia.org/
- Kashmiri - http://ks.wikipedia.org/
- Marathi - http://mr.wikipedia.org
- Nepali - http://ne.wikipedia.org
- Oriya - http://or.wikipedia.org
- Pali - http://pi.wikipedia.org
- Punjabi - http://pa.wikipedia.org
- Sanskrit - http://sa.wikipedia.org
- Sindhi - http://sd.wikipedia.org
- Tamil - http://ta.wikipedia.org

 Carry Bass (User:Bastiquehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bastique)
 has took initiative to create the new logo for some of the Indian language
 wikis. But for languages like Kannada, Oriya, and so on even that is
 pending. Even if the new logo is created a bug needs to be filed by the
 respective wiki community to change the logo. So for most of the Indian
 wikis both these tasks are pending now.

 I request the respective language  communities to take initiatives to
 create the new logo and file a bug for this update. The guidelines for
 creating the new logo is listed at
 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_official_marks/Word_mark_creation

 Please write to me if any of the language communities require any type of
 support regarding this.



 Regards
 Shiju Alex















 --
 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 06:43:08 +0200
 From: shijualexonl...@gmail.com
 To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Updating the default skin of Indian Language
 Wikipedias

 Hi All,

 As some of you already know, *Usability Teamhttp://usability.wikimedia.org
 * is driving the task of updating the default skin of all WikiMedia
 Foundation wikis to a skin called 
 *Vector*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector.
 English Wikipedia and some other big wikis have already moved to *Vector
 skin* some time back. Apart from the UI, the logo of Wikipedia is also
 updated http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/wikipedia-in-3d/.

 Yesterday (2010 June 30) at 10:30 PM IST, some other wikis (that have
 carried out the formalities required for the UI change) are also moved to
 the new UI. Among this, 3 Indian Language Wikipedias are also there.
 Following are those Indian Language wikipedias:

- Malayalam - http

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] About description of of Wikipedia

2011-06-23 Thread Shiju Alex

Gyanamandala is an IPR of Binod Kanungo Gyanamandala foundation.

Is this is possible? Can some one take patent/trademark for some words of a
language?

Here is my take on this name issue :

The name of our encyclopedia is *Wikipedia*. It is wikipedia in all
languages. In odia it is ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ. Hope there is no issue regarding that
in Odia wiki community.

Now the Odia community is having differences regarding the translation of
the word *Encyclopedia* that is used in the phrase The Free Encyclopedia.
Let us see how this word is translated in other Indian languages:

- Hindi - ज्ञानकोष - *Gnanakosh*
- Marathi - ज्ञानकोश - *Gnanakos*
- Gujarati - વિશ્વજ્ઞાનકોષ - *Vijanakosh *
- Bengali - বিশ্বকোষ - (Jayantha/Tanvir please transliterate, I guess it
is *Vijnjanakosh)*
- Kannada - ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ - *Vishwakosa*
- Telugu - విజ్ఞాన సర్వస్వము - *Vijnjaana sarvasvamu *
- Tamil - கலைக்களஞ்சியம் - *KalaikkaLanchiyam*
- Malayalam - സർവ്വവിജ്ഞാനകോശം - *Sarvavijanakosam*

(as usual Tamil is different :) )

In general, across all Indian languages the words *Viswakosh*/*Gnjakosh*/*
Vijanakosh* are used to represnt the word Encyclopedia. But there will be
one word which might be used more frequently than other words. For example,
in Malayalam the word Gnanakosam and Viswakosam are hardly used to denote
encyclopedia. We use Vijanakosam. Like this each language has some
preference over the words. After all this diversity is the beauty of Indian
languages.

So my suggestion is, use the same word that is used more frequency by Odia
speaking people.

But my appeal

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 5:32 PM, Subhashish Panigrahi psubhash...@gmail.com
wrote:

Here is a reply from one user regarding this.

Sambidhan:As I said earlier Gyanamandala is an IPR of Binod Kanungo
Gyanamandala foundation. IPR includes trademark, copyright design patent.
Gyanamandala is a registered trademark of the foundation, even the
government of orissa refrains from using gyanamandal to describe an
encyclopedia. Secondly what is also important is on which context are you
using the word if you are using the word for a similar product then there
are chances that 2nd party can be sued. Thirdly as far as I know it is
always best to stay away from controversy. Things like this will drag the
whole wikipedia foundation into a controversy which is best avoided and
which the foundation tries to avoid as well. Especially when there are
better alternate available. Fourthly the generic word for describing an
encyclopedia in odia is gyanakosha or biswakosha. Finally majority of the
people as you can see have accepted gyanakosha as the word for describing
encyclopedia and wikipedia is a democratic organisation which goes by what
the majority of the mass wants.

And I asked how could I refer our discussion in WP.

On 22 June 2011 21:59, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.org wrote:

Meaning?

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam

http://social.prathambooks.org/

On 22 June 2011 21:58, Subhashish Panigrahi psubhash...@gmail.com
wrote:
And how could I redirect this to the consensus page saying that this
word
Gyanamandala could be used to describe the phrase?

On 22 June 2011 21:56, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.org wrote:

You should be just fine, IMHO.

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam

http://social.prathambooks.org/

On 22 June 2011 21:54, Subhashish Panigrahi psubhash...@gmail.com
wrote:
Yes Gautam, Gyanamandala is a GENERIC NAME, and there is a book in
the
same name and the word Gyanamandala means Gyana (Knowledge)+
Mandala
(Combination/Base), used in places like Nakhyatra Mandala / Tara
Mandala
(set of stars in the sky).
So, please let me know if the use of this word to describe this
phrase
An
open Encyclopedia is fine?

On 22 June 2011 21:49, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.org wrote:

If I understand correctly, there is a book called Gyanamandala and
you want to use this same name for Wikipedia in Oriya? Is this word
defined in the dictionary? That asked, I highly doubt copyright
protection exists for a word - trademark perhaps but not copyright.

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam

http://social.prathambooks.org/

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] About description of of Wikipedia

2011-06-22 Thread Shiju Alex

I do not think any one can get copyright for the common words of a language.
But not sure.

Gautham, your help required. :)




On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 9:37 PM, Subhashish Panigrahi psubhash...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Well, in that case Khola is more approprite than Magana (Used in the
 context of *Buy 1 Get 1 Free!)*
 *
 *
 *But, my question is about the copyright!
 *
 *
 *
 *Gyanamandala * is a generic Odia Word like Sambada, Samaja,
 Pavithra, etc. Can it be used or not thought there is a book in the name
 *Gyanamandala?*


 On 22 June 2011 21:33, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com wrote:




 On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 21:25, Subhashish Panigrahi 
 psubhash...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi All,

 We are amid of an ongoing description of changing the current description
 of Odia Wikipedia.

 The present description is as below-
 ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ (Odia Wikipedia)
 ଗୋଟିଏ ଖୋଲା ଭାଷାକୋଷ (Eka khola bhasakosa meaning An Open Encyclopedia)


 Before we would go to encyclopedia, I would like to correct about Open.
 It must be free encyclopedia[Free is a word play in English, meaning both
 free in beer and speach] but free as in freedom must be used instead of
 open.

 Regards
 Srikanth.L
 http://srik.me


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Google's Indic Wikipedia translation project closing down

2011-06-21 Thread Shiju Alex

In fact it affected the community growth also. Allowing this type paid
editing is one of the bad things happened in Indic wikis recently.




On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 11:52 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 21 June 2011 23:46, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com wrote:

  So they thought they had enough training for the machines with Wikipedia
  translation feeding a good chunk of data to the machine in these 5
  languages.

 No wonder they say five new experimental alpha languages!

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://social.prathambooks.org/

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Administrative maps of India and states.

2011-06-19 Thread Shiju Alex

For SVG translation, use this tool:
http://toolserver.org/~jarry/svgtranslate/

My suggestion would be, let the respective language community do the
translation. Transliteration may not work work all the time.





On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Naveen Francis navee...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi

 I have done a plain google transliteration for India and Kerala maps to
 hi,kn,sa which is created by Rajesh Odayanchal(
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rajeshodayanchal) using a tool
 http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/svn/branches/2.5.1/editor/svg-editor.html

 This maps were created as a part of Malayalam mapping project.

 If it needs some correction; can you please help ?

 Thanks,
 Naveen Francis

 On 15 June 2011 16:30, Vickram Crishna vvcris...@radiophony.com wrote:

 On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 15 June 2011 03:38, Vickram Crishna vvcris...@radiophony.com wrote:

  In this light, the copyright disclaimer on the Census webpage seems
  completely invalid.

 Vickram - good catch but even the lack of a copyright notice does not,
 per se, mean there is no copyright. Copyright is presumed to be
 granted the moment it has been created.


 Of course, and I am completely in agreement with the sentiments of the
 commons group, who evidently do not want to see Wikipedia get caught up in a
 series of fruitless litigations across the world.

 I was drawing the attention of the list to the fact that the government
 people, who claim copyright for everything the government publishes, despite
 the fact that some of it is commons, are also ether slipshod in the manner
 in which they claim the copyright, or being forthright about the fact that
 some of it, possibly the data itself, is not intended to be copyrighted.

 Now, the disclaimer wording brought to our attention by Abhilash also
 mentions that not everything in the site is copyright, one must look at
 individual listings within in order to see if copyright is claimed therein.

 Naveen would do well to check that the information he wants to scrape in
 order to create his maps is specifically copyrighted, as otherwise it is
 clearly free-to-use, and the copyright disclaimer is very specific about
 this freedom.

 --
 Vickram
 Fool On The Hill http://communicall.wordpress.com

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Foundation-l] Announcement: Selected Books from Malayalam Wikisource on CD released

2011-06-19 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear All,

We completed one week of Malayalam Wikisource offline
releasehttp://shijualex.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/creating-malayalam-wikisource-cd/.
Here is some statistics that we have: (Thanks to Jyothis for compiling this)


Hits to the ISO image : *46,922* (this is just number of hits. This does not
mean that all 46,922 hits lead to complete/successful downloads. We assume
at least 70-80% of those hits would be complete downloads.

   - 3,15,274 hits for mlwiki.in- the site hosting iso image and online
   version of Offline(Yes! :) ) on *June 12.*
   - 4,30,959 on *June 13*th
   - 2,30,985 on *June **14*th
   - 1,04,280 on *June **15*th

Yesterday we have started a torrent link also for the ISO image (
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6477957). So downloads are happening in that
way also now.

Here are the links by which you can access Malayalam wikisource offline
release.

   - iso Image http://www.mlwiki.in/cdimage/mlwikisource.iso
   - Torrent link
   http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6477957
   - Online browsing
   http://www.mlwiki.in/wikisrccd/index.html


Remember, last year the download count of Malayalam wikipedia offline
version 1.0 one week after the release was around 5000.

We found that the interest in Malayalam Wikisource offline is more than that
of Malayalam Wikipedia offline.


Shiju Alex




On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala 
arjunar...@googlemail.com wrote:


 Hi,

 On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 10:31 PM, Jyothis E jyothi...@gmail.com wrote:

 Dear fellow Wikimedians,

 With great pleasure, Malayalam Wikimedia Community announced its 2011 CD
 project Selected Books from Malayalam Wikisource on CD - 1.0 at the 4th
 annual Wiki Meetup in Kannur, Kerala.
 --cut--

 Congratulations!  I am happy at the level of engagement in Malayalam
 community, which contributes to these kind of firsts in off-line access
 year after year.

 Best wishes
 Arjun

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: [cultural-partners] Hurtigruta - another strange video project from Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation

2011-06-17 Thread Shiju Alex


 A station is public property and hence nobody should be able to stop you
 from photographing it.


That is our assumption. Just like that we assume that all Indian/State
Government websites are in public domain since ours is a democractic nation.
But in reality that is not true. Government is imposing restrictions on
various things through copyright law. Refer to the earlier
mails/clarifications sent by Gautham.

See the below site which lists some restrictions regarding photographing
Indian Railway assets.

http://www.irfca.org/~shankie/irphotography/irphotography.htm

From there:

THE OFFICIAL VERSION:

India, it would appear, suffers from a persecution complex. Several places
are considered restricted in India. These include bridges, railroad yards,
railway premises, sheds, workshops, stations and tunnels. These are supposed
to be of military importance.  Officials are very skittish about the whole
thing,  and many of them tend to go overboard in trying to enforce these
restrictions. Its against the law to take a photograph of a train at the
station, yet, you can walk a few metres away, just outside the station
limits, and shoot freely from there. Or from the overbridge just before the
station. Or from the lineside in open country. Which is why we railfans call
these 'idiot restrictions'. But thats another story.

Hence officially, if you are planning on doing some really serious and
extensive railroad photography in India, it is absolutely essential for you
to apply for and acquire a permit. You will need to write to:

The Joint Director of Public Relations, Railway Board,  Rail Bhavan,  New
Delhi-110001,  India.

As far as I know, most of the railway related restrictions are imposed by
Indian railways, not by Central Government. But I couldn't find an official
document related to this.

Now Railway police/authorities are trying to impose this official/unofficial
policy/law through various means.


Shiju





On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
rsrikant...@gmail.com wrote:

 Shiju, what problem can railways have?
 A station is public property and hence nobody should be able to stop you
 from photographing it. It isn't covered under the Official Secrets Act, is
 it? Besides, if there was a problem, then a HUGE bunch of photographs from
 the Commons shouldn't exist. If it were illegal, how come so many films are
 shot in stations and trains?
 If anybody wants, I can get a sample clip of a road, which can be applied
 to rail as well.
 --Regards,



 On 17 June 2011 17:48, Pradeep Mohandas pradeep.mohan...@gmail.comwrote:

 hi,

 I think since what we want to do is videotape a railway route, the
 driver's bogey is more suited to this. I would want to film during day
 time only under good visibility conditions, where possible.

 I think we could give the CC-BY-SA license to the Indian Railways.

 I do not think there'll be too many people to worry about unlike
 Google Street View.

 Another interesting project could be trying to film rivers from source
 to where it meets the sea.

 It'll also be a way to map a few things.

 Great points! Never thought this could be such an interesting
 discussion. Flipcams are great too!

 Pradeep

 On 17/06/2011, Vickram Crishna vvcris...@radiophony.com wrote:
  On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Pradeep Mohandas 
  pradeep.mohan...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  hi,
 
  I understand. But the question is that of access to the driver/guard
  bogey.
  We can either be there or not be there at all. Another issue is that we
  can
  use the video during daytime only.
 
  It's an interesting logistical exercise along with having a free
 video
  tape of all of that length of railway line.
 
 
  Quite apart from the permission of the Railway authorities, please be
 aware
  that we, all of us, have a responsibility not to inadvertently record
 anyone
  without their express permission. This may not be expressed explicitly
 in
  legal terms in India, hence may not cross the line being drawn by the
  Creative Commons partners, but is nevertheless an important distinction
 to
  be recognised whilst undertaking anything as incredibly scaled up as
 this.
  It could be done, in practical terms, by editing all the footage and
  blurring all faces, mostly automatically.
 
  For those who think perhaps this is a sort of googly, please do some
 reading
  on Google Street View, and the judgments of the European Court, aside
 from
  individual countries such as UK and Germany, just for perspective.
 
  I am totally in favour of this project being done, by the way. If enough
  people can be found across the country who have time and access to
 Flips, I
  doubt it would be very difficult to carry out, provided the Railways is
  willing (and it is not illegal) to allow people in the Guard Bogies. I
 have
  seen Flip night recordings, by the way, and do not think this is a major
  impediment either.
 
  With care (for individuals/faces), I think it might even be possible to
 do
  on

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: [cultural-partners] Hurtigruta - another strange video project from Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation

2011-06-17 Thread Shiju Alex

Commons deal these issues in a different way I guess. Let active Commons
users comment on this.

Fortunately foreign nationals have permission to capture images. :)  See
page 13 of the below official document. Especially clause 1.3. :)

http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/uploads/directorate/prd/PR/PR-MANUAL.pdf


Shiju

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 9:16 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
rsrikant...@gmail.com wrote:

 Shiju,
 Does that make any of these two of my photographs on the commons illegal?
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BETL-BMIC-Hosur-_Road-Junction.jpg

 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Garden-City-Skyway-Bridge-KRPuram.jpg
 Also, does the government differentiate between Photography and
 Videography?
 --Regards,
 Srikanth.


 On 17 June 2011 21:12, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote:

 A station is public property and hence nobody should be able to stop you
 from photographing it.


 That is our assumption. Just like that we assume that all Indian/State
 Government websites are in public domain since ours is a democractic nation.
 But in reality that is not true. Government is imposing restrictions on
 various things through copyright law. Refer to the earlier
 mails/clarifications sent by Gautham.

 See the below site which lists some restrictions regarding photographing
 Indian Railway assets.

 http://www.irfca.org/~shankie/irphotography/irphotography.htm

 From there:

 THE OFFICIAL VERSION:

 India, it would appear, suffers from a persecution complex. Several
 places  are considered restricted in India. These include bridges, railroad
 yards, railway premises, sheds, workshops, stations and tunnels. These are
 supposed to be of military importance.  Officials are very skittish about
 the whole thing,  and many of them tend to go overboard in trying to enforce
 these restrictions. Its against the law to take a photograph of a train at
 the station, yet, you can walk a few metres away, just outside the station
 limits, and shoot freely from there. Or from the overbridge just before the
 station. Or from the lineside in open country. Which is why we railfans call
 these 'idiot restrictions'. But thats another story.

 Hence officially, if you are planning on doing some really serious and
 extensive railroad photography in India, it is absolutely essential for you
 to apply for and acquire a permit. You will need to write to:

 The Joint Director of Public Relations, Railway Board,  Rail Bhavan,  New
 Delhi-110001,  India.

 As far as I know, most of the railway related restrictions are imposed by
 Indian railways, not by Central Government. But I couldn't find an official
 document related to this.

 Now Railway police/authorities are trying to impose this
 official/unofficial policy/law through various means.


 Shiju





 On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 rsrikant...@gmail.com wrote:

 Shiju, what problem can railways have?
 A station is public property and hence nobody should be able to stop you
 from photographing it. It isn't covered under the Official Secrets Act, is
 it? Besides, if there was a problem, then a HUGE bunch of photographs from
 the Commons shouldn't exist. If it were illegal, how come so many films are
 shot in stations and trains?
 If anybody wants, I can get a sample clip of a road, which can be applied
 to rail as well.
 --Regards,



 On 17 June 2011 17:48, Pradeep Mohandas pradeep.mohan...@gmail.comwrote:

 hi,

 I think since what we want to do is videotape a railway route, the
 driver's bogey is more suited to this. I would want to film during day
 time only under good visibility conditions, where possible.

 I think we could give the CC-BY-SA license to the Indian Railways.

 I do not think there'll be too many people to worry about unlike
 Google Street View.

 Another interesting project could be trying to film rivers from source
 to where it meets the sea.

 It'll also be a way to map a few things.

 Great points! Never thought this could be such an interesting
 discussion. Flipcams are great too!

 Pradeep

 On 17/06/2011, Vickram Crishna vvcris...@radiophony.com wrote:
  On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Pradeep Mohandas 
  pradeep.mohan...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  hi,
 
  I understand. But the question is that of access to the driver/guard
  bogey.
  We can either be there or not be there at all. Another issue is that
 we
  can
  use the video during daytime only.
 
  It's an interesting logistical exercise along with having a free
 video
  tape of all of that length of railway line.
 
 
  Quite apart from the permission of the Railway authorities, please be
 aware
  that we, all of us, have a responsibility not to inadvertently record
 anyone
  without their express permission. This may not be expressed explicitly
 in
  legal terms in India, hence may not cross the line being drawn by the
  Creative Commons partners, but is nevertheless an important
 distinction to
  be recognised whilst undertaking anything as incredibly scaled

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikimedia-in-mum] [Wikimedia-IN-PUN] Wiki India Conference

2011-06-15 Thread Shiju Alex


 How viable is to release a DVD in 60 days in all languages ?


Not a good idea unless few language communities (at least 6-7) are ready for
the selection, proof reading, verifying image licenses, and so on. Selection
and creation of offline content is not at all a small task. Much effort is
required for it. Also from each language community the support of at least
10 active contributors are required. As of now not many Indic language
communities are ready for it. Also the exclusion of selected articles from
inactive wikis is not a good idea when we are trying for public outreach.

Another possible and easiest option would be  releasing a Commons CD/DVD
that contains copyleft images related to India. Malayalam wikimedians
already done a test release of Commons images along with the Wikisource CD.
The release of such a CD/DVD can be done with less effort.

Shiju



On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Naveen Francis navee...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi all,

 Is there any plan for a DVD of featured articles in all indic languages and
 articles by WP:IND (english wiki) ?
 Releasing DVD will help to increase quality of content in the wiki.

 Shiju/Santhosh,

 How viable is to release a DVD in 60 days in all languages ?




 On 12 June 2011 17:35, Outofindia outofin...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks. Sure!

 Let's have a small core Fund Raising  team that discusses the options
 for fund raisingand we post updates to all others once we agree on
 something.

 Would like  to know:
 1. Is there a budget already?
 2. Will this be fully or partially funded by anyone.
 3. Are we raising funds for the Conference expenses or will we be
 raising funds for the Foundation. I have no views/preferences...just
 like to know so that when we approach possible sponsors we communicate
 correctly.

 The Starting Point should be:
 For The Conf Organising Committee to outline the schedule/programme
 and expected scale.
 I assume it is a 3 day Event

 Once we have that as a base document all other teams can get to work
 around that pale blue print.

 The Fund Raising Team will analyse all the fund raising opportunities
 around the programme and work from there.

 Harriet








 On 6/11/11, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.com wrote:
  Dear Harriet,
 
  Thanks for the very positive note from you. Looking forward to meeting
 you
  sometime. Thanks for the sage advice regarding funding. Looks like you
 have
  mentally become an organiser. We invite you to join the Fund-raising
  committee as it appears to be of keen interest to you.
 
  Warm regards,
 
  Ashwin Baindur
  --
 
 
  On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Outofindia outofin...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
  Count me in to support the Conference in Mumbai and hold the yet to be
  developed bidding processes for next year...there's no time to
  lose...Espcecially since we have dates from Jimmy Wales.
 
  Also FUND RAISING for the event should not be restricted to a
  particular group/city but all incoming funds should be directed to one
  person who heads the finance committee who has a Conference
  Accountthat is transparent.
 
  Fund raising, promoting the event and passing the word around should
  be everyone's effort.
 
  Warm regards
 
  Harriet from Mangalore!
 
 
  --
 
 
 
 
  Harriet Vidyasagar
 
  www.outofindia.net
 
  www.womenofindia.net
 
  INDIA: 91-99011 66276
 
  USA: 1-301-649-2240
 
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Community-Chapter Relations

2011-06-09 Thread Shiju Alex

In fact all of us know the effort and pain took by Mumbai/Pune community to
make arrangements for the Wikimedia India conference. They have reached out
to almost all community members and asked for the support. As per the below
mail they have reached chapter also. The response from chapter is also
listed below :)

Chapter should support the efforts of Mumbai-Pune community; not to
discourage/derail the great work done by a community.

There are many other points listed by Ashwin in the below mail, all those
need to be discussed.



On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 7:33 AM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

 The national chapter recently informed the community about its Membership
 and Community engagement plan -June 2011.

 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-June/003346.html

 In that document, the regulatory framework for conduct of Wikiconferences
 was released.

 http://wiki.wikimedia.in/India_Wiki_Conference_Framework

 Shortly thereafter, a clarification was issued.

 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-June/003378.html

 Members of the community must be puzzled at the need for clarification from
 the Chapter on the issues of its regulatory framework when there was no
 discussion online. This is because the recent announcement of the framework,
 in conjunction with other issues, led to the community believing that the
 chapter had forsaken it.

 A little history - the idea for a Wikiconference was mooted way back in
 March by the Mumbai community and they asked the Pune community to co-host
 it to which the Pune community agreed. As India now has a national chapter,
 we naturally asked for their support more than two months ago.  For more
 than two months they were silent. Yesterday, they responded saying that the
 community was invited to submit their proposal, duly modified as per the
 said framework, and resubmit it for consideration with other bids. The
 cavaliar treatment of the serious efforts put in to date by the communities
 and the contents of the Framework of Regulations were disturbing to the
 community.

 At the face off it, one may just consider the Regulatory Framework as just
 another logical and reasonable document, but its language, text and subtext
 upset the community, in light of Chapter's attitude.

 The first and over-riding issue was the type of language used and its
 indication of the relation between chapter and communities. We all know that
 the Wikimedia Foundation encourages national chapters so that the community
 and creation of knowledge by them is facilitated. However, the language
 herein clearly gives a message - that the Indian chapter is boss and all
 Indian wikimedian communities are subservient to it.

 While that is a great inequity in itself, the community was also aggrieved
 that the framework has been foisted on them without discussion, without any
 attempt to get them to participate and buy in into the plan, without
 community consensus and without any consideration of the community's
 interests. This feudalistic attitude is considered to be an anachronism in
 volunteer driven communities of the 21st Centuries especially in India. So,
 no matter whether the framework is good or bad, sensible or not, the
 approach to the community taken by the chapter is to be firmly objected to
 and resisted.

 The Mumbai  Pune community supports the chapter, and have defended the
 chapter on number of occasions in email discussions. Members of the two
 communities have enthusiastically joined the chapter once membership opened.
 A member of the Mumbai and a member of the Pune community are the first two
 members to join by NEFT and physical cheque. To the best of my knowledge 24
 members from Pune joined the chapter in response to Arjuna Rao Chavala's
 appeal for member ships when he came last month to our Pune meetup.

 We earnestly believe that India needs an active, sympathetic, facilitative
 and supportive chapter. We look forward to heartily cooperating with such a
 chapter - alas, the chapter's latest tune was nothing of that kind. It
 seemed to be indicative of wanting power and to dominate.

 The third issue, were the black provisions of the framework. Each of the
 sentences seemed to imply negative connotations for the community.

 To give you some examples of the black provisions -

 Example one - Finance

 The responsibilities of the Host city team included Fund raising, whereas
 the corresponding responsibility of the Chapter Team was Responsible for
 facilitating financial operations and accountability for finances for the
 event.

 The message conveyed was that the community was responsible for raiising
 funds but only the chapter was allowed to decide how it was spent. No
 commitment of raising monetary support was made by the chapter for the
 event.

 Example two - Logistics

 The responsibility for the Host city team is mentioned as being
 responsible for City logistics in terms of Venue, local

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikimedia-IN-PUN] WikiConference 2011 discussions in Pune meetup on 14 May 2011

2011-05-16 Thread Shiju Alex

Created a page in wikimedia India wiki.
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/wiki/Wikimedia_India_Conference_2011

Requesting all to consolidate the important points regarding this on that
page.



On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:22 AM, wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote:

  Ashwin - Thanks for the update, we very much appreciate having Pune
 on-board. In an event of this sort it is important nearby communities
 collaborate, this improves their relations (unity) and the event outlook.
 Just to confirm - proposed dates are 5,6,7 November (Saturday, Sunday, Bank
 Holiday Monday). Once again, we (Mumbai Community) request maximum
 attendance for Saturdays meet-up where this will be the agenda (21 May 2011
 at office of Pinstorm, Santacruz) - everyone is requested to attend the
 meet.

 Kind Regards,
 User:AroundTheGlobe

 --
 Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 10:34:35 +0530
 From: ashwin.bain...@gmail.com
 To: wikimedia-in-...@lists.wikimedia.org;
 wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org; mr-w...@yahoogroups.com
 Subject: [Wikimedia-IN-PUN] WikiConference 2011 discussions in Pune meetup
 on 14 May 2011


 Hello friends,

 On Saturday representatives of Mumbai Wikipedia Community, Amitabh Kundan
 and Pranav (User:Wheredevelsdare), came over to Pune on 14 My 2011  for
 discussing the forthcoming Wikiconference India 2011 and met up with
 representatives of Pune community, Sudhanwa Jogalekar, Radha Mishra, Suhel
 Bohra, Srikeit, Harshad Gune and Ashwin Baindur. The Wikimedia India chapter
 was represented by Arjuna Rao Chawala (chapter President), the Wikimedia
 India National Office by Hisham Mundol. Bishakha Datta, Trustee, Wikimedia
 Foundation graced the meeting with her presence.

 The Pune Wikipedia Community acknowledged the great honour done by Mumbai
 community in asking the Pune community to co-host the event and promised all
 cooperation. Subsequently in the evening meetup the members of the Pune
 Wikipedia Community were informed about this prosal and the Pune community
 unanimously agreed to particpate and support the venture.

 Pranav gave a presentation on the progress so far - the suggested dates for
 finalisation i.e. 4 to 6 Nov 2011, the proposed venues for the meetup, the
 accomodation, a marquee event featuring Jimbo Wales and a social
 get-together. Also discussed at the meeting were the proposed makeup of
 organising committee, the modalities, likely budget, and other issues. The
 Mumbai meetup where they will discuss these issues is being held next
 weekend. After that we assume the planning will begin in right earnest.

 Kudos to Mumbai community for all the footwork and hard work put in to
 date.

 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikiml-l] [Press]: The Indian Express : 2, 155 images uploaded in record 23 days

2011-05-10 Thread Shiju Alex

According to me these type of issues arise due to the lack of awareness
about copyright related topics among press reporters. I assume the reporter
made this story based on my blog post published at,
http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/malayalam-loves-wikimedia-event-2011-april-report/

In the first paragraph of the blog post I mentioned:

Malayalam wikimedians have organised a photo event from *2011 April 02 –
 25* *to create more awareness about copyleft-licensed images*, wikimedia
 commons, and to attract more Malayalam speaking people to the wikimedia
 movement.



But when the reporter made the story it became:

*the programme ‘Malayalam Loves Wikimedia’ was organised to create awareness
 about copyright-free images, Wikimedia Commons and to attract more
 Malayalam speaking users to the Wikimedia movement.*



We couldn't do much here. And for this story, reporters didn't contacted any
of us. So it is not wikimedian's fault.

Some awareness  programs can be planned for press reporters to address this
issue.


Shiju

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 5:09 AM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 The newspaper had not contacted me or possibly any ml Wikipedians directly
 for this article.

 There is a general misconception, among general public or media folks, that
 the images that are free to use are not copyrighted.

 Aniwar, How do you think we can create a general awareness to all ?

 -Tinu Cherian


 On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Anivar Aravind 
 anivar.arav...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 7:50 AM, CherianTinu Abraham
 tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:

  The 2,155 copyright-free images uploaded are on diverse topics.

 As i mentioned earlier this copyright-free tag coming up with most of
 the reports on wikipedia is frustrating. We need to have a proper
 strategy to address  it. Most of the images uploaded in Malayalam
 Loves wikipedia event are not copyright free


 Anivar

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] About photo upload in Commons

2011-05-02 Thread Shiju Alex

5. If some pictures are available by a State Government portal like
herehttp://www.orissa.gov.in/e-magazine/Orissareview/febmar2005/englishpdf/tportraitoascbp.pdf
is that possible to add them commons?

Not possible as of now since the license of the site is not defined. The
story is same with all Central/State government websites (except few
government department sites of Kerala Government). For us to reuse images
from a site, the license of the site should be PD or some copyleft license.

Shiju

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 1:10 PM, Subhashish Panigrahi
psubhash...@gmail.comwrote:

Hi All,

Here I am again with few queries about uploading pictures in Commons.

Problems:
1. There are many postage stamps available on eminent personalities which
are to be there in Wikipedia, but as post 1951 postage stamps are not in PD
there is no possible way to keep them in Commons, Any solutions for that?

2. There are many pictures available for eminent leaders, and many of them
are photographed before 1951, but the source is not available and so is the
date of issue. So, I was wondering if I can draw them by hand, scan and
using tool make little correction so that they won't violate the copyright.
Please suggest me if you have any better idea. I desperately want to see the
profile of the prominent people with their pictures. And how about uploading
pictures in Flikr? I have seen many pictures uploaded in Commons have the
Flikr link, and they are marked as Copyrighted in Flikr (By the same author,
I am confused, if it is in public domain or copyrighted)

3. If I have a newspaper cutting and I am not sure about the publication
date how can I find a better way than fair usage? Can I sketch by hand
seeing the published picture and upload in Commons instead of uploading in
regional Wiki?

4. If an image is uploaded is wrongly marked as Copyrighted even if the
site is not the actual source of a picture and the original picture is not
available what the picture will be called? PD/Copyrighted?

*
ସୁଭପାSubhashishPanigrahi
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Regarding Postage Stamps upload in Commons

2011-04-28 Thread Shiju Alex

I will answer the first question (regarding stamps)

Here
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madhu_babu_%28Madhusudan_Das%29.jpgis
 a Postage stamp of Madhusudan 
 Dashttp://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AC%AE%E0%AC%A7%E0%AD%81%E0%AC%B8%E0%AD%82%E0%AC%A6%E0%AC%A8_%E0%AC%A6%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%B8which
  was tagged for deletion, Can anyone please help me about this? What's
 the policy for uploading Indian Postage stamps in Wikipedia/Commons?


The deletion tag is appeared because you have used Non-free media
rationalehttp://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Madhu_babu_%28Madhusudan_Das%29.jpgdiff=prevoldid=53687542.
Commons won't permit non-free images. You need to use proper license.

Need to cross the license used in similar stamps.



On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Subhashish Panigrahi 
psubhash...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi everyone,

 Here
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madhu_babu_%28Madhusudan_Das%29.jpgis
 a Postage stamp of Madhusudan 
 Dashttp://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AC%AE%E0%AC%A7%E0%AD%81%E0%AC%B8%E0%AD%82%E0%AC%A6%E0%AC%A8_%E0%AC%A6%E0%AC%BE%E0%AC%B8which
  was tagged for deletion, Can anyone please help me about this? What's
 the policy for uploading Indian Postage stamps in Wikipedia/Commons?

 And recently I have gone through few regional language Wikis where the
 actual facts are changed.
 P.S. the English article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayadeva here and
 the Bengali article 
 here.http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%9C%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BC%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%ACWhen
  the English article clearly states that at the end of the controversy
 historians and researchers have come to an inference that Kavi Jayadeva was
 from Odisha there not a single line which says the same in Bengali
 Wikipedia. In this situation I would like to ask what would be the
 credibility of an article from an user's prospectives, is he going to get
 the right and valid info from a regional Wikipedia?

 *
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] ‘Kanaja’ now accessible for the blind too.. How about wikipedia?

2011-04-26 Thread Shiju Alex

Yes for Malayalam wikipedia and its sister projects. We have users from
blind schools of Kerala reading Malayalam wikipedia and providing us
feedback also.

Two softwares are used by them to access Malayalam wikipedia. One is *
e-speak* and another is *Dhwani*. Recently few Malayalam wikimedians have
helped the e-speak team to make few enhancement in e-speak software.

If some of you don't know, Malayalam wikimedian Saanthosh has developed
text to speech software for Indic languages (Dhawni) long back in 2008.
Santhosh can provide details about it.

Shiju Alex

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Arjuna Rao Chavala 
arjunar...@googlemail.com wrote:


 http://www.deccanherald.com/content/156361/kanaja-now-accessible-blind-too.html
 Kannada encyclopaedic website is accessible for blind.
 How about our Wikipedias?
 Has any attempts been made in the past?

 Cheers
 Arjun

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] ‘Kanaja’ now accessible for the blind too.. How about wikipedia?

2011-04-26 Thread Shiju Alex

The below online version is a nice way to test it for your language.

Remember if Dhwani works fine for Malayalam it is not hard to extend the
same for other Indic languages. In fact it is already supporting most of the
Indic languages. At least the following languages are supported.

   - Bengali
   - Gujarati
   - Hindi
   - Kannada
   - Malayalam
   - Marathi
   - Oriya
   - Punjabi
   - Tamil
   - Telugu

More important thing is, the respective language community need to take some
interest to provide this type of extra features to the speakers of that
language.




On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Anoop anoop@gmail.com wrote:

 Also, online version of Dhvani is avaialble at http://silpa.org.in/TTS

 Note that this module is experimental.


 Thanks


 On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Anoop anoop@gmail.com wrote:

 Dhvani can be found here : http://dhvani.sourceforge.net/


 On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 rsrikant...@gmail.com wrote:

 Shiju,
 Thank you for the software.
 While I couldn't find Dhwani, I believe this is the one for eSpeak:
 http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
 Kindly, verify and if possible please provide the links for Dhwani.
 Thank you,
 Regardsm
 Srikanth R.

 On 26 April 2011 12:19, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote:

 Yes for Malayalam wikipedia and its sister projects. We have users from
 blind schools of Kerala reading Malayalam wikipedia and providing us
 feedback also.

 Two softwares are used by them to access Malayalam wikipedia. One is *
 e-speak* and another is *Dhwani*. Recently few Malayalam wikimedians
 have helped the e-speak team to make few enhancement in e-speak software.

 If some of you don't know, Malayalam wikimedian Saanthosh has developed
 text to speech software for Indic languages (Dhawni) long back in 2008.
 Santhosh can provide details about it.

 Shiju Alex

 On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Arjuna Rao Chavala 
 arjunar...@googlemail.com wrote:


 http://www.deccanherald.com/content/156361/kanaja-now-accessible-blind-too.html
 Kannada encyclopaedic website is accessible for blind.
 How about our Wikipedias?
 Has any attempts been made in the past?

 Cheers
 Arjun

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 Regards,
 ME.
 Wear a Lungi, Support the Movement
  My infrastructure invasion... plus other images
 too.. on Wikimedia Commons. http://bit.ly/d50SIq

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 Anoop


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press]: The Hindu : Now, copyright-free maps of States, districts, panchayats

2011-04-15 Thread Shiju Alex

Yeah this is true. There are many such reports recently.

Among many wikipedians also there is a common misconception that all the
content and images in wikipedia are copyright-free. :)

May be we need to start using the word *Copyleft *to address all the free
licenses. Usgae of words like Creative commons/GFDL and so on may confuse
people who doesn't have much aware about free licenses.





On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 5:22 AM, Anivar Aravind anivar.arav...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 7:43 AM, CherianTinu Abraham
 tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:
  The Hindu : Now, copyright-free maps of States, districts, panchayats
  http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article1697940.ece

 In the last few news reports , the copyright free phrase is
 repeating. This is worrying.
 I think we should try to correct the reporters or try to give an
 explanation about the
 copyright of wiki project content. All the content in wiki projects are not
 copyright free, but uses a permissive copyright or copyleft as its
 is popularly known.

 I think Wiki Activists also need this sensitizations to communicate
 licensing well to reporters  public.

 Anivar

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press]: The Hindu : Now, copyright-free maps of States, districts, panchayats

2011-04-15 Thread Shiju Alex

Dear all,

I would like to share another important topic related to the subject of this
mail. Malayalam wikipedians have started the map
projecthttp://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%AA%E0%B5%80%E0%B4%A1%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%AF:%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%AA%E0%B4%A6%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%A7%E0%B4%A4%E0%B4%BF/%E0%B4%AD%E0%B5%82%E0%B4%AA%E0%B4%9F%E0%B4%A8%E0%B4%BF%E0%B5%BC%E0%B4%AE%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%AE%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%A3%E0%B4%82to
create free-license maps of entire Kerala. Our aim is to create
separate
maps for all the 970 grama panchayats of Kerala. These maps will go upto
ward level.

As some of you already know
User:Planemadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Planemad(Arun Ganesh)
has created maps for most of the Indian States. We are
extending Arun's work by doing the Panchayath level maps.

As of now, almost all the articles about villages of India in English and
Malayalam wikipedia (may be other Indic wikipedias also) are lacking maps
that go to the Panchayath level. Most of the time we are satisfying
ourselves with district level or state level maps.

We want the support from other interested indic wikipedians to extend this
project for the other Indian states. If few more people can join we can
expand this as a Commons project.

You can easily be part of this effort if you have working knowledge in
Inkscape or similar softwares. Please mail me if you are interested to be
part of this project.

Shiju

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

Yeah this is true. There are many such reports recently.

Among many wikipedians also there is a common misconception that all the
content and images in wikipedia are copyright-free. :)

May be we need to start using the word *Copyleft *to address all the free
licenses. Usgae of words like Creative commons/GFDL and so on may confuse
people who doesn't have much aware about free licenses.

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 5:22 AM, Anivar Aravind
anivar.arav...@gmail.comwrote:

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 7:43 AM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:
The Hindu : Now, copyright-free maps of States, districts, panchayats
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article1697940.ece

In the last few news reports , the copyright free phrase is
repeating. This is worrying.
I think we should try to correct the reporters or try to give an
explanation about the
copyright of wiki project content. All the content in wiki projects are
not
copyright free, but uses a permissive copyright or copyleft as its
is popularly known.

I think Wiki Activists also need this sensitizations to communicate
licensing well to reporters public.

Anivar

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Indic Language Wiki Results in Google (With a Chrome Extension)

2011-04-14 Thread Shiju Alex

Yuvi,
It would be great if you develop a firefox extension also for this.

Unfortunately google Chrome's performance is bad with Indic scripts. There
are couple of issues with wiki editing also. Due to this many of us prefer
firefox over chrome.

Shiju

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 12:10 AM, Yuvi Panda yuvipa...@gmail.com wrote:

I've fixed the UI in the Options, and made a newer release (
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gpoogepkjnjfmpijnpaocncdjbedaeeo/
).

Feedback? In particular, I've listed 20 Indic languages as buttons on the
options page, and I don't have enough knowledge to check if they are all
correct! So if someone could check, I'd be grateful :)

Suggestions? What should I prioritize next? I'll monitor this thread, or
you can file issues (https://github.com/yuvipanda/yenWikipedia/issues).

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 7:41 PM, Yuvi Panda yuvipa...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Srikanth (too many Srikanths!). Right now, you can use only one
language at a time. Would links to multiple language wikis be useful?

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan
rsrikant...@gmail.com wrote:

Yuvi,
Is this for one laguage at a time only, or any language, any time?
--Regards,
Srikanth R.

On 14 April 2011 11:18, Vickram Crishna vvcris...@radiophony.comwrote:

I'm forwarding this to an acquaintance in Google, with a request to
include multilingual results as a link in regular searches.

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan
srik@gmail.com wrote:

Great!! What more, this comes on Tamil New year !!

Agree with Sundar that Google must push this from server side. Instead
of spending huge money on translations etc, these efforts actually help
Indic / regional language Wikipedia's

Regards
Srikanth.L

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 10:58, BalaSundaraRaman sundarbe...@yahoo.com
wrote:

Great, Yuvi. Let's all use this feature ourselves and hopefully Google
will take not of it and promote the other language wiki pages in their
search results themselves.

- Sundar

That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a
medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

--- On *Thu, 4/14/11, Yuvi Panda yuvipa...@gmail.com* wrote:

From: Yuvi Panda yuvipa...@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Indic Language Wiki Results in Google
(With a Chrome Extension)
To: Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia.
wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Thursday, April 14, 2011, 12:31 AM

Update: I've now added ability to change language. Just go to
'Options' (from the extensions page) and enter your language code (hi
for hindi, etc). Needs a big UX liftup though.

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:21 PM, Yuvi Panda
yuvipa...@gmail.comhttp://mc/compose?to=yuvipa...@gmail.com
wrote:
I've been working for a few hours on a Chrome extension to add links
to Indic Language Wiki pages when searching in Google. It hooks into
Google's search results, and if it finds an enwiki article (to which
a
tawiki interwiki link also exists), it'll display it side by side.
Screenshot here: http://min.us/mbmIeeUOb8y00p#1

You can test the extension by installing it from here:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gpoogepkjnjfmpijnpaocncdjbedaeeo/

It is open source, and the code is available here:
https://github.com/yuvipanda/yenWikipedia/. You can file issues
here
https://github.com/yuvipanda/yenWikipedia/issues/.

Known issues:
1. Doesn't work when Google Instant is turned on (turn it off)
2. Doesn't work for some country specific subdomains (which don't
have
/search url part. Current solution: use google.com :P)
3. Currently hardcoded to display links to tawiki only (Will have to
build an options dialog to support other languages)
4. Needs a better logo (Help in this department would be highly
appreciated :) )

I think this is one step forward in fixing the search issue -
discovering content in Indic Language wikis is now easier.

Thanks to Srikanth Lakshmanan for alpha testing.

Feedback welcome :)

P.S. I'm also working on a Firefox version of this addon. Stay tuned
:)

--
Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog

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