from:"Bala Jeyaraman"

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [WMIN-Members] 2000+ books nationalized by The Government of Tamil Nadu released in Public domain

2016-01-13 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Excellent work. This was a major irritant (the definition of "nationalised
work") in commons. Congratulations and thanks to all who made this possible.
On Jan 13, 2016 4:30 PM, "Ravishankar Ayyakkannu" 
wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> The Government of Tamil Nadu has declared all books that have been
> nationalized so far and all books that will be nationalized in future will
> be released under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
> license , when their
> copyright has not already expired according to  Indian Copyright Act, 1957
> and Indian Copyright Rules, 1958.
>
>
> Nationalization of books written by eminent people who have worked for the
> development of Tamil language and society is a pioneering scheme by Tamil
> Nadu Government where copyright is acquired following due procedure and the
> books are declared nationalized for public usage.
>
>
> The Government of Tamil Nadu first acquired rights for the works of Poet 
> Subramania
> Bharathi  in 1949 and
> announced his works as nationalized in 1963. Since then it has nationalized
> 2000+ works written by 100+ authors.
>
> In order to make these books fully available for public usage globally, it
> is essential that these books are available under a free content license.
>
> An official letter announcing this can be seen at
>
>
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tamil-Nadu-Nationalized-Books-Public-Domain-Declaration.jpg
>
> This announcement was made possible owing to the collaboration between
> Tamil Virtual Academy, Global Tamil Wikimedia Community and Wikimedia India.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ravi
>
>
> --
> Disclaimer: The Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) is an autonomous entity
> with no direct control over the Wikipedia project and other websites hosted
> by the Wikimedia Foundation, USA.
>
> This mail is sent to the members of the Chapter as part of the official
> communications between the Chapter, its Executive Committee and the members.
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> .
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Chennai Wikimeetup 6

2013-05-28 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

The event went very well. About 70-80 people from various open source /
open content communities attended the sessions over two days. Apart from
the usual benefits, Tamil Wikipedia has gained an important tool -
automated front page maintenance. The code for this was written using Lua
by Surya Prakash under the guidance of Yuvipanda.  If other wiki projects
want to make use of this, it is available at
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Main_page. Please get in touch with
Surya if you need any help.

A special shout out to Dwarak and team of Mozilla India, for making this
excellent event happen. We hope to have more such open weekend events in
Chennai regularly.

Reports, slides, pictures and thoughts are available at the following links

1) http://ta.wikipedia.org/s/2u3b
2) https://www.facebook.com/events/152064334973643/155602711286472
3) https://picasaweb.google.com/102002010785949271518/OpenWeeekendsDay1
4) http://www.flickr.com/photos/dtsdwarak/sets/72157633728520541/
5) https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sk8abb4irbcy2xx/GbCMxHE5p

regards
Bala Jeyaraman


On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi all,

 Chennai Wikimeetup 6 is happening on 26 May 2013. Besides the usual intro
 session on Wikipedia, there will be intro sessions on Wikidata,
 Translatewiki, Bots in Wikimedia projects and a photography tutorial.[1][2]
 The meetup is a part of the two day Open Weekends event organised by
 Mozilla India and supported by Indian Linux Users Group and Wikmedia
 India.[3] The Wikimedia part will be concentrated on Sunday (26 May).

 *Venue*: Railsfactory, Sedin Technologies Private Limited, # 38/39, 3rd
 Floor, White's Road, Royapettah, Chennai (Near Sathyam cinemas)
 *Time*: 26 May, 10 AM - 1 PM
 *Facebook page*: https://www.facebook.com/events/152064334973643/?ref=25

 If you are planning to attend please do consider filling up the sign up
 sheet -
 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uDJLNWY2ZFKvrTc20QdzzeVogj5mAc8KB4aUKrz3qqs/viewform(for
  easing up the security process at the venue)

 regards
 Bala Jeyaraman
 Executive Council Member
 Wikimedia India

 ==Refs==
 [1] http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Events/Open_Weekends
 [2] http://ta.wikipedia.org/s/2u3b
 [3] https://reps.mozilla.org/e/open-weekends/

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimedia India - April report

2013-05-24 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Dear all, Greetings from Wikimedia India ! Here is the activity report for
the month of April. Organisational Updates

*Membership:*
Membership count as of 30 April is 59.(Does not include members who are in
the 90 day grace period for renewal)

*Donations:*
During April we received INR 11,010 as donations from 3 individual donors.

*Meetings:*
WMIN Secretary Karthik Nadar and Executive Council member Pranav Curumsey
represented WMIN at the Wikimedia Chapters Conference at Milan. Karthik
also attended the WLM International Committee meeting which took place
along the sidelines. Pranav attended the WCA meeting on our behalf (as our
representative Karthik was at the WLM Meeting).
Community Special Interest Groups Events Conducted / Supported

- April 6, 2013 : Gujarati Wikisource I anniversary celebrations,
Mumbai
- April 9, 2013 : Wiki Academy, CGG Hyderabad
- April 10-11, 2013: Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam, Hyderabad
- April 21, 2013: Wikipedia Introduction, Collabnet Chennai

Upcoming

A round-up of Wikimedia events, academies and initiatives around the nation
are updated here http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Events.
Media coverage

- Telugu Mahotsavam 2013
coveragehttp://telugu.oneindia.in/feature/general/2013/photos-telugu-wikipedia-mahotsavam-115045.html
- Telugu Mahotsavam 2013
coveragehttp://telugu.oneindia.in/news/2013/04/04/andhrapradesh-wikipedia-mahotsavam-on-april-11-114656.html

Grants Funded

1. Telugu Mahotsavam 2013 support grant.

We look forward to your continued support and active participation.

Best,
On behalf of Wikimedia Chapter (India)
Karthik Nadar,
Secretary.
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Chennai Wikimeetup 6

2013-05-21 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

Chennai Wikimeetup 6 is happening on 26 May 2013. Besides the usual intro
session on Wikipedia, there will be intro sessions on Wikidata,
Translatewiki, Bots in Wikimedia projects and a photography tutorial.[1][2]
The meetup is a part of the two day Open Weekends event organised by
Mozilla India and supported by Indian Linux Users Group and Wikmedia
India.[3] The Wikimedia part will be concentrated on Sunday (26 May).

*Venue*: Railsfactory, Sedin Technologies Private Limited, # 38/39, 3rd
Floor, White's Road, Royapettah, Chennai (Near Sathyam cinemas)
*Time*: 26 May, 10 AM - 1 PM
*Facebook page*: https://www.facebook.com/events/152064334973643/?ref=25

If you are planning to attend please do consider filling up the sign up
sheet -
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uDJLNWY2ZFKvrTc20QdzzeVogj5mAc8KB4aUKrz3qqs/viewform(for
easing up the security process at the venue)

regards
Bala Jeyaraman
Executive Council Member
Wikimedia India

==Refs==
[1] http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Events/Open_Weekends
[2] http://ta.wikipedia.org/s/2u3b
[3] https://reps.mozilla.org/e/open-weekends/
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimedia India: March report

2013-04-05 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Dear all,
Greetings from Wikimedia India !
Organisational Updates

*Membership:*
Membership count as of 31st March is 168.

*Donations:*
Wikimedia India's first ever fundraising effort concluded on 31 March 2013.
During March we received INR 22,100 as donations from 10 individual donors.
This brings the total amount raised through the fundraiser to INR 26,120.
The EC sincerely thanks all our donors and other well wishers.

*Grants:*
Wikimedia India's grant application for program support during Q1 2013 was
accepted by the WMF. Our report for the previous bootstrap grant has also
been accepted by the WMF.

*Board Meetings:*
The EC did not meet in person in March.
Community Special Interest Groups

- Rohini Lakshané was elected as SIG chair for GenderGap projects in
India.

Events Conducted / Supported

- Chennai Wiki Meetup #5
- Women's day edit-a-thon
- Wiki Women's Workshop by FSMK WMIN, Jyoti Nivas College Bangalore
- Wikipedia Women's workshop, Bangalore
- Chennai Mathematical Institute Workshop and contests
- Wikipedia Workshop for Women by FSFTN WMIN, Chennai
- Wikipedia introduction, Ranade Institute Pune
- Gujarati Wikisource first anniversary celebrations, Ahmedabad
- Gujarati Wikisource first anniversary celebrations, Junagadh I
- Gujarati Wikisource first anniversary celebrations, Junagadh II

Upcoming

A round-up of Wikimedia events, academies and initiatives around the nation
are updated here http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Events.
Media coverage

- Malayalam Wikipedia takes a gender
turnhttp://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-03-05/thiruvananthapuram/37469373_1_prominent-women-active-editors-parvathy-omanakuttan.
*The Times of India*.
- World wide wiki women’s web dot
comhttp://www.timescrest.com/society/world-wide-wiki-womens-web-dot-com-9981.
Times Crest.
- `ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾಹಿತಿ: ಸ್ತ್ರೀಯರ ಪಾತ್ರ ಇರಲಿ' http://goo.gl/NSssJ (in
Kannada).
- महिलांचा सहभाग वाढवण्यासाठी विकीपिडियावर
एडिट-अ-थॉन!http://www.loksatta.com/mumbai-news/wikipedia-celebrate-international-womens-day-75560/(Wikipedia
organises Edit-a-thon specially for women to celebrate
international women's day)
- Sakal, Mumbai edition about 10 years of Marathi
Wikipediahttp://epaper.esakal.com/Sakal/31Mar2013/Normal/Mumbai/MumbaiToday/page4.htm
- 5. Kannada Prabha
(kn)http://archives.kannadaprabha.com/pdf/1032013/3.pdf

Grants Funded

1. Gujarati Wikisource First Anniversary
celebrationshttp://wiki.wikimedia.in/Grants/Gujarati_Wikisource_1st_Anniversarygrant.

We look forward to your continued support and active participation.

[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikipedia Workshop for Women, Chennai

2013-03-29 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

The Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu (FSFTN) is organising a  Wikipedia
Workshop for Women in Chennai. Wikimedia India is supporting this event in
an advisory capacity.

*Location*: Systems Lab, Computer Sciences Department, IIT Madras
*Date *: 31 March, 10 AM - 3 PM
*Organiser *: Anupama Srinivas, FSFTN
*Facebook page* : https://www.facebook.com/events/470510356338296/
*Events page*:
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Wikipedia_Workshop_for_Women,_Chennai

regards
Bala Jeyaraman
Executive Council Member
Wikimedia India
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikipedia workshop at Chennai Mathematical Institute

2013-03-26 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

Wikimedia India is conducting a Wikipedia workshop at Fiesta 2013, the
annual student fest of Chennai Mathematical Institute on March 30,
2013.[1]  We are also supporting two  Wikimedia themed contests at the same
fest : 1) Wikilinks - a wikipedia clicking game 2) PixElite - a photography
contest [2]

==Links==
[1] http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Events/CMI_Fiesta_2013
[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:PixElite

regards
Bala Jeyaraman
Member, Executive Council
Wikimedia India
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Status of membership applcation to Wikimedia India Chapter

2013-03-16 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Niraj,

1) Your application had the option renewal checked and the member id
space left blank. That is the reason you received such a mail. And that
mail also clearly stated that you could send in another application. From
your current mail I understand you have made a mistake while filling the
form. In such cases WM IN cannot correct forms filled by members. Please
send a fresh application form.

2) We don't publish membership information in a public forum. Members are
free to self identify themselves, but we refrain from doing so unless they
wish us to. Yohann sent a mail to this list and Srikanth pointed him to the
correct avenue to address his query. This is not us being callow. This is
us being professional.

3) There are established channels of communication (memb...@wikimedia.in)
to where you can direct your membership related queries. That is where WM
IN EC members or the Executive Manager can reply to you in an official
capacity. We would have been more than happy to clarify your queries.
Please direct any future queries there.

regards
Bala Jeyaraman
Executive Council Member, Wikimedia India
On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Anirudh Bhati anirudh...@gmail.comwrote:


 On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 6:23 PM, Niraj Suryawanshi 
 niraj.suryawan...@gmail.com wrote:

 We would be glad if anyone can help us over this and not by someone who is
 callow enough to say The India mailing list isn't exactly a place to ask
 such questions as it'd be a privacy violation.


 Niraj, no personal attacks, please.

 Anirudh

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Status of membership applcation to Wikimedia India Chapter

2013-03-16 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Niraj,

1)You sent a form with renewal option ticked and membership ID field
empty.  We were unable to process it and replied saying the membership form
is incomplete, and please resubmit a complete form with member ID. From
your current mail to the India list (your reply to yohann), I understood
your mistake was not leaving an incomplete member ID field but ticking
renewal instead of new.

2) No the EC does not process all the membership forms. The Executive
Manager at Bangalore usually does this work. But the EC does share the
workload whenever possible. In your case (and all the other forms the
Wikipedia Pune Club handed over to Sudhanwa), I was involved in processing
because I was at Bangalore at that time and was helping our manager with
the processing work. That is the reason I am able to respond to this mail
personally. If you had directed these queries in a reply to the mail from
memb...@wikimedia.in mail id, this would have been cleared up easily and
quickly.

3) As indicated in the official communication, you can submit a complete
and correct membership application again. Or if you want to take back your
application and want us to return your money, then mail to the members id
in detail and we will take care of it. This is the last time I will reply
to you on this issue in this list. This is a public community mailing list
and not the chapter's administrative channel. Please direct your queries
there.

regards
Bala Jeyaraman
Executive Council Member
Wikimedia India.



On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Niraj Suryawanshi 
niraj.suryawan...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hello Bala Sir,

 A very good sunday morning,


 1)

 Can I get a reference regarding From your current mail I understand you
 have made a mistake while filling the form, which mail exactly to be
 precise?

 Or is it the case that the exec council inspects all the incoming
 applications and that is why Sir you are in a position to understand the
 mistake?

 Lets consider it sorted for a while and as stated by the mail I received

  Hello Mr. Suryawanshi,

 We have received your membership application found it to be incomplete
 with the following field(s) missing:

 1. Current membership no.

 We are therefore not in a position to accept this application and are
 unable to process it. *This does not stop you from making a fresh fully
 completed application in the future.*

 Thanking you,
 Wikimedia India Chapter 

 here I'm indicated to apply freshly for the same.

 Is there any way I can get a refund of the reg. fees which I had submitted
 with the form, in the given case where my form is denied?
  I would be more than glad if at all there is a way that I could get the
 same.

 please kindly revert me to the concerned email address.


 2)

 Sir I wished the applicants would receive a email about their application
 status, since Mr. Yohann didn't get one and that's the exact reason why he
 was compelled to ask a question.

 In my case as I did get an email, and it would have been a case showing
 extreme proficiency if the finances were considered regarding refund.





 Regards  Thanks,

 Niraj Suryawanshi http://www.facebook.com/niraj12
 Pune Institute of Computer Technology | Wikipedia Club 
 Punehttps://www.facebook.com/WikipediaClubPune
 8149920120 | [hidden 
 email]http://user/SendEmail.jtp?type=nodenode=4999620i=0


 On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Bala Jeyaraman [via Wikimedia] [hidden
 email] http://user/SendEmail.jtp?type=nodenode=4999620i=1 wrote:

 Niraj,

 1) Your application had the option renewal checked and the member id
 space left blank. That is the reason you received such a mail. And that
 mail also clearly stated that you could send in another application. From
 your current mail I understand you have made a mistake while filling the
 form. In such cases WM IN cannot correct forms filled by members. Please
 send a fresh application form.

 2) We don't publish membership information in a public forum. Members are
 free to self identify themselves, but we refrain from doing so unless they
 wish us to. Yohann sent a mail to this list and Srikanth pointed him to the
 correct avenue to address his query. This is not us being callow. This is
 us being professional.

 3) There are established channels of communication ([hidden 
 email]http://user/SendEmail.jtp?type=nodenode=4999596i=0)
 to where you can direct your membership related queries. That is where WM
 IN EC members or the Executive Manager can reply to you in an official
 capacity. We would have been more than happy to clarify your queries.
 Please direct any future queries there.

 regards
 Bala Jeyaraman
 Executive Council Member, Wikimedia India
 On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Anirudh Bhati [hidden 
 email]http://user/SendEmail.jtp?type=nodenode=4999596i=1
  wrote:


 On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 6:23 PM, Niraj Suryawanshi [hidden 
 email]http://user/SendEmail.jtp?type=nodenode=4999596i=2
  wrote:

 We would be glad if anyone can help us over this and not by someone who

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Status of membership applcation to Wikimedia India Chapter

2013-03-16 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi Yohann,

Wikimedia India is not an informal organisation. We are a registered
society in Karnataka, India. We need to comply with all the formal
processes and regulatory bindings that entails. We need to make sure all
our documents including membership forms are properly processed and
compliant with all the regulatory requirements we have. This is not red
tape, this is being compliant with the law. Failing to do this will lead to
audit failures which inturn will have repercussions in our smooth
functioning. We cannot alter membership applications on our own - even it
is one single box. When we processed Niraj's application we promptly
replied to Niraj saying we cannot process it, clearly indicated what was
missing in it and asked him to resubmit a completed form.

regards
Bala


On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 9:42 AM, Yohann Thomas yohan...@gmail.com wrote:

 On the status of niraj's application, i dont agree with bala
 Just because he ticked one wrong box does not mean
 that his application should be rejected.

 This is equivalent to red tapism  might discourage other
 ethusiatic people to join the chapter.

 I am not saying the decision is wrong but could be avoided.

 Respectfully,

 Yohann Thomas
 Wikipedia Club Pune
  yohan...@gmail.com


 On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote:

 Niraj,

 1) Your application had the option renewal checked and the member id
 space left blank. That is the reason you received such a mail. And that
 mail also clearly stated that you could send in another application. From
 your current mail I understand you have made a mistake while filling the
 form. In such cases WM IN cannot correct forms filled by members. Please
 send a fresh application form.

 2) We don't publish membership information in a public forum. Members are
 free to self identify themselves, but we refrain from doing so unless they
 wish us to. Yohann sent a mail to this list and Srikanth pointed him to the
 correct avenue to address his query. This is not us being callow. This is
 us being professional.

 3) There are established channels of communication (memb...@wikimedia.in)
 to where you can direct your membership related queries. That is where WM
 IN EC members or the Executive Manager can reply to you in an official
 capacity. We would have been more than happy to clarify your queries.
 Please direct any future queries there.

 regards
 Bala Jeyaraman
 Executive Council Member, Wikimedia India
 On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Anirudh Bhati anirudh...@gmail.comwrote:


 On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 6:23 PM, Niraj Suryawanshi 
 niraj.suryawan...@gmail.com wrote:

 We would be glad if anyone can help us over this and not by someone who
 is
 callow enough to say The India mailing list isn't exactly a place to
 ask
 such questions as it'd be a privacy violation.


 Niraj, no personal attacks, please.

 Anirudh

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Chennai Wiki meetup 5

2013-03-10 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

The event went well. Around 25 wikimedians and non-wikimedians attended the
meetup. The meetup opened with an Introdcution to Openstack by Yogesh
Ghttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Eternaltyroaction=editredlink=1.
The Wiki part was next. Surya Prakash. S. A gave a presentation on the
state of the Tamil Wiki projects. Then I introduced the Wikimedia India
Chapter and its activities. There was a long question and answer session on
Wikimedia's copyright policies, creative commons licenses, personality
rights, notability criteria in various wiki projects. We hope to have
regular meetups in Chennai in the future.

For a list of attendees and photos, please see the event pages in Tamil and
English Wikipedias.

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Chennai/Chennai5#Report
2) http://ta.wikipedia.org/s/2nlq

regards
Bala

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi all,

 Chennai is having a wiki meetup after a gap of nearly one and half years
 on March 9, 2013 (Saturday). There will be a couple of  short presentations
 on state of the Tamil wiki projects and an introduction of the Wikimedia
 India Chapter. All are welcome. If there are English or any other language
 wikimedians, who want to introduce / talk about their Wiki projects they
 are welcome to do so. (please send me a mail, so that I can plan the agenda
 accordingly). We will be sharing the venue and time slot with Indian Linux
 Users Group - Chennai (ILUGC) who are graciously helping us. People
 interested in open source projects can also attend the meetup. Those who
 are planning to attend please add your name to the meetup page here:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Chennai/Chennai5

 Date  Time : 9 March 2013, 3-6 PM (Wiki specific part starts at 4 PM)
 Venue  :  Classroom No 3, Areo Space Engineering department, Near
 Gajendra Circle, IIT Madras.

 regards
 Bala


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[Wikimediaindia-l] Chennai Wiki meetup 5

2013-03-04 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

Chennai is having a wiki meetup after a gap of nearly one and half years on
March 9, 2013 (Saturday). There will be a couple of  short presentations on
state of the Tamil wiki projects and an introduction of the Wikimedia India
Chapter. All are welcome. If there are English or any other language
wikimedians, who want to introduce / talk about their Wiki projects they
are welcome to do so. (please send me a mail, so that I can plan the agenda
accordingly). We will be sharing the venue and time slot with Indian Linux
Users Group - Chennai (ILUGC) who are graciously helping us. People
interested in open source projects can also attend the meetup. Those who
are planning to attend please add your name to the meetup page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Chennai/Chennai5

Date  Time : 9 March 2013, 3-6 PM (Wiki specific part starts at 4 PM)
Venue  :  Classroom No 3, Areo Space Engineering department, Near
Gajendra Circle, IIT Madras.

regards
Bala
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] User:Shanmugamp7 is now a Global Syspo

2013-01-16 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

congrats shanmugam!.

shanmugam does not ask how many the vandals are
he only asks where the vandals are
;-)

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
rsrikant...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi all,
 Just point out that User:Shanmugamp7 is now a Global Sysop.
 Shanmugamp7 was earlier a Gloabl Rollbacker and  Sysop on the Tamil
 Wikipedia and Mediawiki wiki.
 Here is a link to the RfA which concluded yesterday

 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Steward_requests/Global_permissions/2013-01#Global_sysop_for_shanmugamp7

 --
 Regards,
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan,
 Sathyamangalam-Gobichettipalayam Star Gazers, Coimbatore.

 Please sign this petition for Volvo buses in Coimbatore:

 https://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/the-transport-minister-tamil-nadu-introduction-of-volvo-city-buses-in-the-city-of-coimbatore



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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [WMIN-Members] Wikimedia India Chapter Anniversary

2013-01-03 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Thank you Sudhanwa. I hope I will do justice to the role and keep up the
good work of my predecessors.

regards
Bala

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 11:51 PM, Anirudh Bhati anirudh...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thank you for posting this, Sudhanwa.  It was an absolute pleasure
 serving through my term with the WMIN EC.  I wish the new board best
 of luck with their efforts towards promoting Wikimedia in India and
 supporting the communities of volunteers.

 Kind Regards,

 Anirudh

 On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 12:36 AM, Sudhanwa Jogalekar
 sudhanwa@gmail.com wrote:
  Dear Wikipedians,
 
  The Wikimedia India Chapter was registered with the Karnataka
  Registrar of societies on 3 January 2011. We celebrate our second
  anniversary today :)
 
  Initially, the Chapter Executive Committee consisted of seven founder
  members. Over time, six of these founder members departed from the
  board after each of them made significant and invaluable
  contributions. The Executive Committee now bids goodbye to the seventh
  founder member, Anirudh Singh Bhati. The Executive Committee expresses
  its deep gratitude towards Anirudh for his wonderful contributions
  that have helped build the chapter. He becomes the first person to
  complete an entire term on the Executive Committee of Wikimedia India.
  We wish him well in all his future ambitions and hope he remains
  connected to the movement in some form.
 
  The Executive Committee has unanimously resolved to fill the vacancy
  created by Anirudh’s departure by co-opting Bala Jeyaraman. Bala is a
  distinguished Wikipedian who has been active on English and Tamil
  Wikipedia’s, being an administrator on the latter and was one of the
  organisers of the recently held Tamil Wiki Photo Contest. He will hold
  office until the next general body meeting which would need to approve
  his appointment.
 
  Another important step being taken by the chapter is our first
  fundraising appeal, which will be announced shortly. A lot of people
  may ask why the chapter needs a fundraiser when it has access to WMF
  funding. The answer is, we are still ineligible for FDC (we hope to be
  eligible for the second round of funding in 2013) and would need to
  rely on grants, spending of which is restricted by the WMF. Since
  formation, the chapter has relied heavily on the Executive Committee
  to take on the burden of running the show. In an ideal world, the EC
  would like to take on the role of guiding the chapter rather than
  actually be responsible for operations after two years of
  incorporation, which should be best done by professionals rather than
  volunteers in their spare time.
 
  The chapter has hired an employee (Sowmyan Trimurti, our Executive
  Manager) as well as plans to lease its own office premises in
  Bangalore. For this, we will soon be sharing a plan and will request
  the community for suggestions on the plan. We will also need the help
  of those volunteers who are in a position to support us. It could be a
  small individual donation or in the form of a corporate donation from
  an institution. A small token of support from you could go a long way
  in helping us achieving our goals of furthering the movement in India.
 
  Apart from this, we encourage the community at large to engage with
  the chapter and request our support wherever necessary without
  hesitation for community activities. The chapter has been formed for
  the benefit of the community and we will always try our best to live
  up to the community’s expectations.
 
  Warm regards,
  -Sudhanwa Jogalekar
  President, WMIN
 
 
  !~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!
  www.wikimedia.in
 
  --
 
 

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Welcoming Srikanth Lakshmanan to the i18n engineering team

2012-08-01 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

+1

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Santhosh Thottingal 
santhosh.thottin...@gmail.com wrote:

 Congrats Srikanth!


 -- Forwarded message --
 From: Alolita Sharma asha...@wikimedia.org
 Date: 2012/8/1
 Subject: [Wikitech-l] Welcoming Srikanth Lakshmanan to the i18n
 engineering team
 To: Wikimedia developers wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org


 Hi All,

 Please join me in welcoming Srikanth Lakshmanan as outreach coordinator/QA
 engineer (contractor) in WMF’s Internationalization (i18n) / Localization
 (L10n) engineering team. As the team’s technical liaison, Srikanth will be
 actively reaching out and working with our language communities to get
 feedback on new i18n/L10n features being planned or rolled out to Wikimedia
 sites.

 Srikanth hails from Chennai, India. He has been a Wikipedian since 2006 and
 identifies himself as a wikignome (User:Logicwiki). Srikanth has provided
 language support for Tamil Wiki projects and loves to file bugs (and
 occasionally fix them) when he sees languages are not properly supported.
 Srikanth has recently revived his blogging habit at logic10.tumblr.com.
 His
 other interests include cycling, travelling in buses, playing table tennis
 (aka ping pong). Srikanth is excited to be able to contribute his tiny bit
 in making a sum of all human knowledge more accessible and helping build a
 more multilingual web! Check out some of his work on Tamil scripts and
 consonants at
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Script#Consonants_of_Modern_Tamil

 Srikanth can be reached on email at slakshma...@wikimedia.org or as
 @srikanthlogic on our irc channels including #mediawiki, #wikimedia-dev and
 #mediawiki-i18n.

 Welcome Srikanth! It is great to have you on the i18n engineering team!

 -Alolita

 --

 Alolita Sharma
 Director of Engineering
 Wikimedia Foundation
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimania 2012 scholarships

2012-04-26 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

Wikimania 2012 scholarships have been announced. Indian wikimedians who
have been awarded full/partial scholarships - please enter your details in
the page: http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Wikimania2012  This will be helpful for
mutual help with visa application, travel etc (last year it proved very
helpful)

-
Bala
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Chennai Unofficial Wikimedia Hackathon Report

2012-03-27 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Congratulations yuvi, srikanth and others involved. The amount of
productive work done is simply awesome.

A feature request for future hackathons:

An online tool/gadget/extension for conversion of .wav/.mp3 to ,ogg files
is required. This could be made part of the commons upload wizard itself
(where people click an extra option while uploading a .mp3/.wav file and it
gets saved as a .ogg file).


-
Bala


On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 8:01 PM, Konarak Ratnakar konarak...@live.comwrote:

  Hi guys,
 Congratulations on the success of the Chennai Unofficial Wikimedia
 Hackathon.
 I have two requests.

 1. Can Shrinivasan (or anyone else) provide us with english subtitles or
 english audio of the video that you uploaded on Youtube?
 2. Can Shrinivasan update the Readme file on
 voice-recorder-for-tawictionary / repo?

 Regards,
 Konarak Ratnakar | kondi

 PS: Yuvi Panda that mail I accidently sent you was supposed to be sent on
 this list.

  From: yuvipa...@gmail.com
  Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:47:29 +0530
  To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
  Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Chennai Unofficial Wikimedia Hackathon Report

 
  The Chennai Unofficial Wikimedia Hackathon Report
 
  Apologies for the delayed email. Work ate me.

 
  TL;DR: 13 completed hacks, including 2 core mediawiki patches, 3
  tawiki userscript updates and 2 new deployed tools. It was super
  awesome and super productive!
 
  The 'Unofficial' Chennai Wikimedia
  Hackathon(http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Chennai_Hackathon_March_2012)
  happened on Saturday, March 17 2012 at the Thoughtworks office in
  Chennai. It was a one day, 8 hour event focusing on getting people
  together to hack on stuff related to all Wikimedia projects - not just
  Mediawiki patches.
 
  The event started with us sailing past security reasonably easily, and
  getting setup with internet without a glitch. People trickled in and
  soon enough we had 21 people in there. Since this was a pure
  hackathon, there were no explicit tutorials or presentations. As
  people came in, we asked them what technologies/fields they are
  familiar with, and picked out an idea for them to work on from the
  Ideas List (
 http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Chennai_Hackathon_March_2012/Ideas).
  This took care of the biggest problem with hackathons with new people
  - half the day spent on figuring out what to work on, and when found,
  it is completely outside the domain of expertise of the people hacking
  on the idea. Talking together with them fast to pick an idea within 5
  minutes that they can complete in the day fixed this problem and made
  sure people can concentrate on coding for the rest of the day.
 
  People started hacking, and just before lunch we made people come up
  and tell us what they were working on. We then broke for lunch and
  usual socialization happened over McDonalds burgers and Saravana
  Bhavan dosas. Hacking started soon after, and people were
  concentrating on getting their hacks done before the demo time. And we
  did have quite a few demos!
 
  Demos
  =
 
  Here's a short description of each of the demos, written purely in the
  order in which they were presented:

 
  1. Wikiquotes via SMS
  By: @MadhuVishy and @YesKarthik
 
  What it does:
  Send a person name to a particular number, and you'll keep getting
  back quotes from that person. Works in similar semi-automated fashion
  as the DYKBot. Built on AppEngine + Python.

 
  Status:
  Deployed live! Send SMS '@wikiquote Gandhi' to 9243342000 to test it
  out! Has limited data right now, however.
 
  ---
 
  2. API to Rotate Images (Mediawiki Core Patch)
  By: Vivek
 
  What it does:
  Adds an API method that can arbitrarily rotate images. Think of this
  as first step towards being able to rotate any image in commons with a
  single button instantly, without having to wait for a bot. Patch was
  attached to https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33186.
 
  Status:
  It was reviewed on that day itself (Thanks Reedy!). Vivek is now
  figuring out how to modify his patch so that it would be accepted into
  Mediawiki core. Vivek is also applying to work with Mediawiki for
  GSoC, so we will hopefully get a long term contributor :)
 
  ---
 
  3. Find list of unique Tamil words in tawiki
  By: Shrinivasan T
 
  What it does:
  It took the entire tamil wikipedia dump and extracted all unique words
  out of it. About 1.3 million unique tamil words were extracted. Has
  multiple applications, including a tamil spell checker.
 
  Status:
  Code and the dataset live on github:
  https://github.com/tshrinivasan/tamil-wikipedia-word-list
 
  ---
 
  4. Program to help record pronunciations for words in tawikt
 
  What it does:
  Simple python program that gives you a word, asks you to pronounce it
  and then uploads it to commons for being used in Wiktionary. Makes the
  process much more streamlined and faster.
 
  Status:
  Code available at:
  https://github.com/tshrinivasan/voice-recorder-for-tawictionary.

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Lesson from the past: Photowalks and other events

2012-03-13 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Ashwin,
Thanks for the suggestions. But the contest deliberately kept the entry
barriers low - the contest was for the uploads alone. So we are not
considering any additional behaviour (categorising, clear descriptions,
usage suggestions) for the prizes.

Too add to Srikanth L's points on the tamil wiki media contest, these are
some of the preliminary lessons learnt (the official report will carry the
complete list):

1) The commons admins/maintenance activity oriented users are even more
overworked than en wiki. If we are bringing files there through our
activities, we carry the responsibility to not to overburden them. We
realised this and have formed a team from ta wiki, which is doing the
categorising and adding descriptions. (This team just coalesced on its own,
without any conscious effort on the organisers part and is doing well aided
by commons regulars).[1] Two of us have applied for and got file mover
rights and two more have obtained AWB rights for doing cleanup.
Categorisation is about 90 percent complete now.

We plan to finish the clean up (copyvio tagging / rotating/ cropping /
description / categorising/ watermark removal) for all the files that were
uploaded as part of the after contest efforts.

The priority for us is 1)eliminating copyvio 2)clear filenames/descriptions
3)rotations 4)categorisaton

And do the categorisation using people who are familiar with it in your own
wikis (to avoid redundancy and errors like Beria points out). Dont do
categorisation drives by people who aren't familiar with how and why
categorising should be done.

2) Let contestants know where the images go and what they are used for.
This will earn our wikis more active users. We managed to do this for part
of the contestants - couldnt reach them all. But to my knowledge, ta wiki
has gained atleast half a dozen new users who are using their files and
some are even writing new articles for using their entries. Once they
became involved, they are involving themselves in further activities in
commons too.

3) Of the 15k odd files uploaded as part of the contest 8k are being used
in various wiki projects and counting multiple usage, across all wikis
there are a total of 11k file usage instances.

4) Taking cue from WLM Europe, we are planning a followup message on all
uploaders talk pages (and email if their email facility is enabled)
thanking them and telling them of furthur activities they can take part of.

==Links==
1)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChangesLinkedlimit=250target=Category%3ATamilWiki_Media_Contest

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Noopur noopur.ra...@gmail.com wrote:

Just to add to what Konarak and Ashwin said, I am guilty as charged. We
kept the Category:Ahmedabad_1 to avoid flooding the popular category. It
was decided to serve as the ''maintenance category'' but none of us really
got around to transferring images to the Ahmedabad category or cleaning up.
There are several reasons for this:

1) People started using images from Ahmedabad_1 soon after the event to
make Ahmedabad articles. So, the attention was diverted there.

2) Personally, I was unclear as to whether all these images had to be
migrated because of course some are repetitive and redundant. But, I/We are
no one to judge whose image stays or goes.

3) Since then and since the Tamil Wikimedia contest I have been
contemplating on things:
How can we minimize and optimize image uploads? Can we set parameters in
the contest format so that everyone can contribute but its more diverse in
terms of results? Maybe we should generate a more exhaustive list of items?
Also, are there guidelines for maintenance that we can make (5-7 points) so
that the organizers can follow that up too (just in case they aren't aware
or don't know how to)?

Do let me know what you guys think!
Regards
Noopur

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Konarak Ratnakar konarak...@live.comwrote:

Agreed, I wasn't involved in editing until the Ahmedabad photowalk
happened, else I'd have helped.
I suggest we should segregate the photos in sub categories, while keeping
track of those identical images that should be deleted.

Konarak Ratnakar | kondi
--
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:09:10 +0530
From: ashwin.bain...@gmail.com
To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Lesson from the past: Photowalks and
other events

Yes, Konark. But I do not want to point figures to one event. In my view
all events are culprits.

Imagine the problem of processing 15K images of the Tamil contest - I
shudder to think!

Suggestion : No image should be considered eligible for competition till
it is uploaded with :
* proper description.
* suggested/recommended article for image use or for creation.
* proper categorisation in Commons.

Have volunteers available to help photographers. The photothon should end
in an uploading function where volunteers help in these

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Ads Injected into Wikipedia?

2012-03-11 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

mostprobably adware in his machine. A smiliar report in portugese wikipedia
is here:
http://translate.google.co.in/translate?hl=ensl=ptu=http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%25C3%25A9dia:Esplanada/geral/Spam_na_Wikipedia,_problema_%2810mar2012%29ei=TqlcT9fyMs2rrAe468GlDAsa=Xoi=translatect=resultresnum=5ved=0CE4Q7gEwBAprev=/search%3Fq%3D%2522ads%2Bnot%2Bby%2Bthis%2Bsite%2522%2Binjection%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3D6zj%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26prmd%3Dimvns

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 4:57 PM, Aditya Sengupta apsengu...@gmail.comwrote:

A friend got in touch with me about this. He is currently seeing
advertisements on Wikipedia pages (on all pages except the home page). Here
is a link to a screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/dhKyR.jpg

These advertisements were not visible to him when I asked him to check
through the secure WM server. These advertisements are also not visible to
him on any other web page. To the bottom right of each ad, there is some
text that says, ads not by this site. I've taken a quick look through the
page source he forwarded, nothing looks untoward. His right-click menu does
not appear when he right-clicks on the ad.

He is based out of Mumbai and ISP is Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Ltd.
His IP address is 114.143.88.193 (or was, while he accessed this page; I've
since had him change his IP address since I'm sharing this one). I'm not
sure if this issue is restricted to Mumbai; since the IP address shows up
in Pune when I try to geolocate it (though I understand this is fairly
common).

The link he is directed to when he clicks the ad is this:
http://www.inkfruit.com/combo-landing?utm_source=CMP1002Comboutm_medium=CPMutm_content=combobannerutm_campaign=Combo.
I'm adding this here and copying the founder of Inkfruit since the campaign
data in the URL parameters may help identify the problem (also, I'm not
sure if Inkfruit is aware of this campaign).

I've copied my friend here in case there are further questions he could
help answer.

Could this be a case of DPI by his ISP, or simply malware on his machine?
If it were the former, what would be the legal status of the issue?

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tamil Wiki Media Contest

2012-03-01 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Thanks Asaf,

Can we get back to you in three weeks time?. By then we would be finished
with the datamining / statistics and the judging process and will be able
to provide a complete picture for the blogpost. We will be submitting a
full report with statistics and prize winner data for the grant process. So
it would be easy for us work on the blogpost after we have all the data for
report on hand.

regards
Bala

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 12:36 AM, Asaf Bartov abar...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 These are fantastic news!  A tremendous contribution to our mission,
 fueled by volunteer passion!

 I applaud the Tamil community.

 We at the Foundation would love to work with the organizers on showcasing
 this in a post on the Wikimedia Blog; I realize your hands are full right
 now, but we can start discussing this (e-mail me) and preparing for a blog
 post to follow the announcement of the winners.

 Cheers,

Asaf


 On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 12:37 AM, Ashwin Baindur 
 ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

 This is by far the greatest success in numbers we have achieved and shows
 what is possible. What is NOT apparent is the humungous work needed to
 carry out the Project. My earnest congratulations to all
 the participants and wishing this contest has a smooth, hassle-free, happy
 closure.

 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --



 On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Saroj Dhakal lotusnagar...@gmail.comwrote:

 Great Success ! Congrats !


 On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 1:34 PM, Kevin Gorman kgor...@gmail.com wrote:

 Congratulations guys, this is an awesome result.

 
 Kevin Gorman
 user:kgorman-ucb


 On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 11:46 PM, wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote:

  Many congratulations to the Tamil Community for the resounding
 success of this contest (as I understand the contributions are 5x the
 initial target and contributors are 3x the initial target).

 Sodabottle, Logic and team have worked really hard to pull this off,
 hats off to them!

 --
 Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 13:13:20 +0530
 From: shijualexonl...@gmail.com
 To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org; wikit...@lists.wikimedia.org
 Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tamil Wiki Media Contest


 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.com wrote:

  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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 --
 Asaf Bartov
 Wikimedia Foundation


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: [Wikikn-l (kannada wikipedia)] Global Vandalism through IP 212.121.219.1 on Indian territory info

2012-02-01 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Same case was observed and discussed (in VP) in ta wiki too. All the IPs
changes are being reverted now. We cant decide whether this is the case of
someone of replacing their preferred files from commons or deliberately
stirring up controversy

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 11:22 AM, Mrutyunjaya Kar mkr...@gmail.com wrote:

 Same case at Odia wikipedia http://or.wikipedia.org/

 On 2/2/12, Harish mghar...@gmail.com wrote:
  This has been observed and reverted in Kannada wikipedia.
 
  -- Forwarded message --
  From: Tejas jain teju2frie...@gmail.com
  Date: 2012/2/2
  Subject: [Wikikn-l (kannada wikipedia)] Global Vandalism through IP
  212.121.219.1 on Indian territory info
  To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, wikik...@lists.wikimedia.org
 
 
  Some one has done global vandalism through IP
  212.121.219.1
 
 http://toolserver.org/%7Eluxo/contributions/contributions.php?user=212.121.219.1
 on
  Indian territory info.
 
  User's edit list:
 
 http://toolserver.org/~luxo/contributions/contributions.php?user=212.121.219.1
 
  Arunachal pradesh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arunachal_Pradesh and
  Jammu_and_Kashmir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammu_and_Kashmir are
  hatched as disputed.
 
 
  Was there any discussion before these changes?
 
  All the edits on Kannada wiki http://kn.wikipedia.org/ have been
 reverted
  because of following reasons,
 
1. No discussion prior to the changes
2. No references were made
3. Changes done anonymously
4. No change log message
5. No such changes are done on English wiki
 
  If it is sure case of vandalism, changes have to be reverted globally.
 
 
  Thanks,
 
  Tejas jain
  
 
 http://kn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B2%B8%E0%B2%A6%E0%B2%B8%E0%B3%8D%E0%B2%AF:Teju2friends
 
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  --
  Harish
  9740069624
 

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[Wikimediaindia-l] A report on SSN College Academy

2012-01-16 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi,

A Wiki workshop/academy was conducted at SSN College of Engineering,
Chennai on 11 January. It was organised by SSN opensource enthusiasts under
the aegis of the SSN Tamil Club. Me, Srikanth Lakshmanan and Arunmozhi from
the Tamizha FOSS group. [1] 60 students attended the academy.

The academy began at 9 in the morning with a presentation of open web and
open source from SSN opensource enthusiasts. I followed it up with a intro
section on wikipedia and a hands on editing session for about an hour. I
covered the basics of wikipedia, notability standards, five pillars,
copyright issues. I also covered basics of Wiktionary and Commons.  Next
Srikanth took a session on technology behind wikipedia and how the students
could contribute technically to Wiki projects. We broke for lunch at 12 and
reconvened an hour later.

The afternoon session began with a audio recording exercise, where songs of
the Tamil poet Subramania Bharathi  were sung and uploaded to commons.[2]
This served as a hands on exercise to identify the common copyright
problems and which material can be added to Wiki projects without copyright
issues. Public domain, nationalisation, copyright term expiry, threshold of
originality, open source file formats etc were discussed. Next Arunmozhi (
a student of a College of Engineering Guindy and a developer of Tamil open
source software) took a session on the initiatives of the Tamizha group.
After that we went on a photo walk of the SSN campus. We split into two
groups and walked around the SSN campus taking pictures. The images were
uploaded to Commons. [3]. This served as an oppurtunity to explain
copyright issues like freedom of panorama and derivative works. The academy
ended with a vote of thanks from the Tamil Club convener.

Over all it was a highly successful exercise (IMO) and a lot of productive
work was done. The attendees were highly motivated and asked a lot of
pertinent questions which lead to some interesting discussions. They also
gave a few interesting suggestions about improving the usability of Wiki
pages from newbie perspective (Srikanth has already started work on
implementing one of the suggestions).

I would like to thank the organising team (Dwaraka, Harvesh, Jason and
others) for doing an excellent job in organising the event , SSN Tamil
Mandram for its patronage and Wikimedia India Chapter for its help with
swag and printed material (though the quantity was nowhere sufficient :-).
Please ramp up the operation guys).

==Links==
[1]http://thamizha.com/
[2]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tamil_audio_songs
[3]http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SSN_College_of_Engineering
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Reports

2012-01-03 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

awesome tool!!

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 1:59 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 Another interesting site for WP article/edits/user growth analysis (
 thanks Naveenpf for sharing this)

 http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ml
 http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ml/articles/full
 Edits http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ml/edits/365
 Users : http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ml/users/365
 Active Users: http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ml/activeusers/365
 Admins : http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/ml/admins/365


 http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/hi
 http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/hi/articles/full
 http://www.wikistatistics.net/wiki/hi/articles/365


 Replace your language code as needed .

 Even other Wikimedia Projects are available
 http://www.wikistatistics.net/wikimedia

 Regards
 Tinu Cherian


 On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 9:55 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala 
 arjunar...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 7:15 PM, CherianTinu Abraham 
 tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi ,
 In case you haven't seen this :  Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Reports

 *Wikipedia Page Views Per Country* - Overview

 http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerCountryOverview.htm

 Only 1.9 % of traffic for Wikimedia Projects is from India.  ( 13th
 position)

 *Page Views Per Wikipedia Language*

 http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerLanguageBreakdown.htm

 From India :
 --cut--

 Glad to see part of the  stats that I have been waiting for quite some
 time. The # of unique visitors from India is the other part that I hope
 will be included soon.

 Interesting  to see that Marathi tops followed by Hindi, Telugu and
 Kannada.  I found a good % for Kannada coming from China equal to US, which
 seems a bit unusal.  Probably the general distribution for languages,
 also  reflects the distribution of the Indian language speaking diaspora
 across the world.

 Cheers
 Arjuna

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Reports

2012-01-02 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

in absolute terms it will be several times greater than all other indic
language page views put together ..

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 7:34 PM, wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote:

  3.7% in of all English views from India - remember, most major countries
 have loads of English speakers so this is bound to be spread out. Indic is
 much higher as India is the base for these languages.

 The percentage statistics are a bit misleading, if you see actual figures
 in terms of number of views, it will tell you a different story.

  Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2012 19:31:01 +0530
  From: parakara.gh...@gmail.com
  To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
  Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Reports

 
  Only 3.7% visiting EN? Makes my edits relating to India feel
  insignificant and pointless now. :-(
 
  --
  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] Fwd: [WMIN-Members] Wikipedia Takes Mumbai - Is someone doing this already?

2011-12-31 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

FWIW, the prize/incentive model for Wiki takes X has been done before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Montreal

But if you are really going the prize/incentive route, you need to be
prepared to answer a lot of questions, and provide results to justify
involving money . As a coordinator of the the ongoing TamilWiki Media
Contest, i have been facing similar questions. At the end of the day, the
event needs to produce tangible results for wikimedia projects in form of
usable files uploaded to commons.
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Article Feedback Tool v5 : Indian Perspective

2011-12-21 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

rediff/TOI comment board in Wikipedia!!.

If this is added in India articles, we would need a  huggle like first
person shooter for feedback moderation to keep things sane.

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:

 All,

 Some of you might have followed the recent improvement with Artcle
 Feedback Tool v5 (AFTv5) , for those who didnt please read[1]. Even before
 reading the entire page, something struck me. The design is
 strangely synonymous with Indian comment boards. I strongly feel, having
 this on India articles will generate more trash than any feedback and 100x
 load more on editors to cut the junk, moderate etc. If you are not familiar
 with Indian message boards, please read[2] (That was a very tough RS to
 catch which is self mocking given the site's reputation!). AFTv5 is looking
 for feedback, I hope this thread can give some constructive feedback given
 the list audience's familiarity with Indian message boards.

 PS : Am also poking Oliver Keyes to follow this thread.

 [1]
 http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/20/a-new-way-to-contribute-to-wikipedia/

 [2]  http://www.rediff.com/getahead/2007/oct/24sidin.htm

 --
 Regards
 Srikanth.L

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects

2011-12-20 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

*
*
*While testing both Lohit and Utkal has hinting problems in or wp, is that
possible to keep them optional? As of now automatically the default font
changes to Lohit when you open or wp, instead of that is that possible to
make it optional which someone can choose the dropdown?*

Welcome to the club Subha. Finally we have some company :-)

We have been having the same difference of opinion with the i18n team since
late october (whole story in the bug linked by srikanth). It is a POV issue
as Srikanth points out. The i18n team aims to avoid the occurrence of
square boxes in any of the wikiprojects using webfonts. While we feel that
shouldnt occur till quality of default webfont = system font. Especially
for cases like Tamil, where people with system fonts are 9-10x the number
of people who see square boxes (all windows systems post XP SP2 have tamil
unicode support by default and also people are very knowledgeable about
font issues because of  a history of competing encoding formats)

While we still insist on the webfont as non-default option, we are
exploring both solutions Srikanth lists to arrive at the default webfont
with same quality as system font result.  Currently the Tamil community is
a) working with santosh as he tries to improve lohit tamil b) and is
searching for a professional font developer to donate a good quality
webfont ready font under OFL/GPL font exclusion.

You can try either or both of these (or request the i18n for a non-default
webfont feature)

-
Bala
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects

2011-12-14 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

*  Safeguarding from a horrible deployment? Could you please
stop exaggerating things? *

Try deploying this kind of code to english wikipedia and you will find out
our response is extremely mild. A website that is getting million page
views shouldnt be used as a live test bed for a mandatory default feature.
We have been boasting that wikipedia are among the top 5 websites in the
world. Try rolling out this kind of code in any of the top 100 websites as
a  mandatory default feature and see what happens.

*Please be constructive and help us as you were doing*

So stating the truth is being unconstructive?. You could have rolled this
out in phases or as a dark launch as you are contemplating now, done more
testing and saved us all this bitterness and trouble. Instead you decided
to go live on a massive scale without adequate testing in live environment
being accessed by millions of people everyday. What kind of reaction did
your expect?.

I could have been content with stopping the Tamil deployment and went on
with my work. Instead i have spent nearly 20 hours testing other languages
so that this tool gets better. Remember i am a volunteer, taking time off
from my day job to test your code - something you should have done as part
your professional work.


On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Santhosh Thottingal 
santhosh.thottin...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan
 srik@gmail.com wrote:
 
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-i18n/2011-December/000361.html
 
  In order to force them, if you don't test this it may break horribly
  for you when deployed seems way more convincing than no new goodies
  for you.
 
  This attitude of i18n is not only very dangerous for the communities and
  languages but also very unprofessional.

 Please read that mail once again, this was a response by
 Platonides(not an i18n team member) to the comment by Srikanth L .
 Srikanth said:  If people are not interested to join them, they must
 be forced to join
  them(by way of not supporting them/ deploying any component for the
  language) so as to provide better support.

 And now you are saying that it is the attitude of i18n and calling it
 dangerous and unprofessional!  Wonderful Ravishankar.

 . Nothing that breaks
  horrible must ever be deployed. We safeguarded Tamil(Malayalam folks did
  theirs too), we frankly didnt care much for others before the launch.


 Srikanth, While I really appreciate the efforts you and Bala did with
 the testing and reporting bugs, this kind of comments  really
 disappoint us.  You are aware that the we were working round the clock
 to fix all the bugs within hours and we wrote the complete details in
 report.  Safeguarding from a horrible deployment? Could you please
 stop exaggerating things? We did expect bugs when we do this kind of
 large scale deployment with too many languages, browsers, operating
 systems and we addressed each of the bugs within hours. Some of these
 bugs can be only detected when we expose the tool to a larger
 audience. You are aware of that. All the open bugs now present are
 are not in our control - Browser bugs and Fonts bug, we disabled them
 for time being.

 Please be constructive and help us as you were doing. We deserve some
 appreciation for what we are doing.


 -Santhosh

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects

2011-12-14 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

 *I have a feeling
that we'll all be doing this for a long time, so we might as well try
to like each other. :-)*

Amen to that Erik :-).  Me and Srikanth, very much want webfonts to
improve, be expanded to mobile and make for an excellent UX . Thats the
reason we are persisting in testing even though at times it feels we are
butting our heads against a wall.

*It remains to
be seen whether we can get sufficient testing done via opt-in methods
and dark launches, although I'm certainly strongly encouraging
experimentation with both.*

For Tamil, we think we have evolved a suitable balance to achieve this
(apart from Siebrand's dark launch idea). A gradual - less active to more
active wikiproject launch. (explained in the original mail). We adopted
this after our first Narayam launch had to be rolled back due to bugs. It
was a bit time consuming and took longer, but was iterative and extremely
satisfactory

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com
 wrote:

  So stating the truth is being unconstructive?. You could have rolled this
  out in phases or as a dark launch as you are contemplating now, done
 more
  testing and saved us all this bitterness and trouble. Instead you
 decided to
  go live on a massive scale without adequate testing in live environment
  being accessed by millions of people everyday.

 Although, the largest of the Indic language Wikipedias gets about
 1/900th the traffic of English Wikipedia in traffic. [1] I think it's
 appropriate to be a bit more experimental at that scale. It remains to
 be seen whether we can get sufficient testing done via opt-in methods
 and dark launches, although I'm certainly strongly encouraging
 experimentation with both.

 Your comparison with top web properties is flawed alongside another
 dimension: no other top web property has to solve the kinds of
 problems we're trying to solve here with a staff of three
 internationalization developers, one product manager and no QA team
 (!). Although we're larger now than a year ago and the year before,
 and we're still adding engineers and support resources, we have lots
 of big problems to solve in parallel. We don't have the luxury of
 being able to do just one thing extremely well, much as we might want
 to.

 On the other hand, what makes Wikimedia unique is precisely the fact
 that we're all working together to continually improve and fix things.
 In the best case scenario, that's a happy partnership. And as you well
 know, folks like Santhosh, Siebrand, Gerard, Niklas and Amir have made
 tremendous contributions as volunteers, well before being on staff. So
 we should strive for being collegial and forgiving. I have a feeling
 that we'll all be doing this for a long time, so we might as well try
 to like each other. :-)

 I applaud the i18n team for being bold and pushing things forward,
 while also reflecting on the process at this opportune time. I'm also
 grateful to you, to Srikanth and others for being both supportive and
 critical voices along the process, and getting very involved to fix
 things. Improving language support is a huge, daunting undertaking.
 WMF is only one player in this and it'll require continued, joint
 effort from all fronts.

 All best,
 Erik

 [1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN_India/ReportCardIndia.htm
 --
 Erik Möller
 VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

 Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects

2011-12-13 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

 once and
  community was so resistive of Narayam itself and was asking to go back to
  older javascript solution. After that we followed the above process for
  bringing back Narayam on all Tamil Wikiprojects.
 
  We suggest the other communities adopt something similar. We sincerely
 hope
  that the community engagement is improved, not just before deployment,
 even
  from start of development.
 
  [0] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/going-live-december-12-2011/
  [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30506
  [2] http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/World/Tamil
  [3] http://translatewiki.net/wiki/WebFonts_assessment
  [4] http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:Sodabottle/test1
  [5] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32775
  [6] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33024
  [7] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33025
  [8] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33018
  [9] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33027
  [10]
 
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005153.html
  [11] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32942
  [12] http://tawp.in/r/2r1f
 
  --
  Regards
  Bala Jeyaraman  Srikanth.L
 


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

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[Wikimediaindia-l] IEP canceled for the next term

2011-12-12 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi,

I just read from the IEP talk page in en wiki that IEP program has been
cancelled for the next term.
*
I'm also surprised that you think we are ploughing ahead -- we are not. We
canceled the program for the upcoming term so we could focus on fixing the
problems.* - LiAnna Davis, GEP communications manager, WMF [1]

In the same page, i see the first use of the failure word. from the
organisers. (* I don't feel that we can say we've involved the community in
determining why the Pune Pilot failed*). A page full of insights from
interviews conducted with people involved ruminating on why the program
failed has been added.[2] Looks finally we have gotten around to
plainspeak and learning from mistakes. (I believe these interviews are
separate from Tory Read's report, which is due on Jan 15.)

It would have better if we had been informed here too, instead of having to
dig through talk page discussions. Since IEP discussions have taken all
over the place, please take care to make important announcements like this
are made in all places where previous discussions have taken place - meta,
en wiki project page, india list and INT noticeboard in India.

==Links==
1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3AIndia_Education_Program%2FAnalysisaction=historysubmitdiff=464252111oldid=464169635
2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Analysis/WMF_interviews
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] IEP canceled for the next term

2011-12-12 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi Pradeep,

Here is the CCI page for IEP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contributor_copyright_investigations/Indian_Education_Program

This page lists all known IEP students and their contribs. A CCI checker
needs to go through the diffs provided, compare with the ref/google it and
see whether it is copyvio or not. Take a look at CCI instructions and the
various notations used and start with a small contrib to begin with. CCI
people are usually helpful and correct new participants.

regards
Bala

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Pradeep Mohandas
pradeep.mohan...@gmail.com wrote:

hi Bala,

Could we also have some idea on how we can help with the cleanup that
was needed? Is there a category in which these articles are placed so
that we can clean-up the articles?
I have heard about the clean-up being needed and felt that I could
offer some assistance.

warm regards,
Pradeep
User:Prad2609
Handheld

On 12/12/2011, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,

I just read from the IEP talk page in en wiki that IEP program has been
cancelled for the next term.
*
I'm also surprised that you think we are ploughing ahead -- we are
not. We
canceled the program for the upcoming term so we could focus on fixing
the
problems.* - LiAnna Davis, GEP communications manager, WMF [1]

In the same page, i see the first use of the failure word. from the
organisers. (* I don't feel that we can say we've involved the community
in
determining why the Pune Pilot failed*). A page full of insights from
interviews conducted with people involved ruminating on why the program
failed has been added.[2] Looks finally we have gotten around to
plainspeak and learning from mistakes. (I believe these interviews are
separate from Tory Read's report, which is due on Jan 15.)

It would have better if we had been informed here too, instead of having
to
dig through talk page discussions. Since IEP discussions have taken all
over the place, please take care to make important announcements like
this
are made in all places where previous discussions have taken place -
meta,
en wiki project page, india list and INT noticeboard in India.

==Links==
1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3AIndia_Education_Program%2FAnalysisaction=historysubmitdiff=464252111oldid=464169635
2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Analysis/WMF_interviews

--
Pradeep Mohandas
How Pradeep uses email - http://goo.gl/6v1I9

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Dr. Sengai Podhuvan 's Appeal to Fund raising banners

2011-12-12 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

 *800+ articles in ta.wiki*

Yes through his account he has about 850 articles. The actual number is
much more - near 1000 i think - as during his newbie days, he used to edit
logged out often.

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 4:06 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi all,

 Just in case, you had missed Dr. Sengai Podhuvan's Appeal to Fund raising
 this year.

 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011#Dr._Sengai_Podhuvan_Appeal_December_10.2C_2011


 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/L11_1209_DS/en/US

 ( This appeal is shown only in US so far and may come to India users very
 soon).

 I was so privileged to have met him personally at the Chennai Wikimeetup2
 way back in Nov 2010.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Chennai/Chennai2

 Many others would have met him at Wikiconference Mumbai and he was also
 awarded Special mentions from Jury for NWR 2011

 Sengai Podhuvan contributes primarily to Tamil Wiki, with more than 9700
 edits ( 97% edits to Article main-space itself).

 http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Sengai+Podhuvanlang=tawiki=wikipediahttp://toolserver.org/%7Esoxred93/pcount/index.php?name=Sengai+Podhuvanlang=tawiki=wikipedia


 I was also told he has started over 800+ articles in ta.wiki ( somebody
 correct me if i am wrong).  ( http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/pages/ isn't 
 working
 for me)


 Regards
 Tinu Cherian

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] On the spot Chapter membership.

2011-12-05 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

+1 for recruiting more Wikipedian members.

I am one of those Wikipedians who hasn't become a member of the chapter
because i am hesitant to get involved in chapter politics and fear of being
forced to follow the agenda set by people who know nothing about Wikipedia
(except perhaps talking about it). I am sure there are more wikipedians
like me who are just observing what goes on from the sidelines. It is
people like us who need to be prodded and dragged to become chapter
members.(I will send in my membership application soon).

Getting non-wikipedians to sign up and increasing the numbers will
eventually lead to an organisation completely out of tune with the
Wikimedia movement. Numbers for numbers sake is not the road we should
take.  As Srikanth R pointed out, there are a lot of  people who would love
to take control. I believe such a thing did happen once before and the
chapter was forced to send legal notices to dissuade it.  Recruiting
numbers for numbers sake might well lead to such a situation again. And
when that happens chapter will become yet another talk only organisation
completely irrelevant to what Wikipedia actually is.

So lets not put up any barriers for membership but at the same time, lets
not advertise chapter membership to completely new people by going on
membership drives in outreach events.

-
Bala

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 7:19 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:



 On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 19:01, CherianTinu Abraham 
 tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 I am very much in favour of ( sincerely wishes so) the active community
 members being part of the chapter and its leadership and taking the chapter
 is next level. The chapter will have lose its relevance unless the
 community takes control of it and shape its future.

 Word.

 I keep iterating this often,  May I ask to kindly remove the notion that
 Chapter = EC. Each one of us has an equal responsibility ( and opportunity)
 to take it forward and drive the chapter.


 With the very same intent, I opened up the thread, which EC has not opened
 / made much progress, so that we can do something to have more members who
 are informed and involved. I would like to point reply of R Srikanth. There
 are many such folks on the list, beyond it on various wikis in the silent
 contributors category who do not like to be a chapter member and this
 could be one of the reason. Instead of reaching to events and getting
 membership and at some stage tell the world chapter is X members strong,
 Chapter must put in more efforts in getting more members of community as
 its members and this thread can very well be a start.

 Having said that, when our founding members drafted the MoA, the chapter
 membership was made open to any Indian who is above the 18 years of age. We
 didn't want to say No to anyone who is coming forward to join the chapter.
 We wanted it to be open and inclusive, we wanted to set no barriers for
 anyone to join, anyone who is genuinely interested and enthusiastic , just
 like in Wikipedia


 It is one thing to say No to anyone who is interested / but barriers to
 join, another thing to give out forms, ask them to fill up and canvass its
 just 100 Rs saying you can be chapter member without letting them know what
 it is.


 --
 Regards
 Srikanth.L

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikipedia XI 2012

2011-12-03 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

*I thought this is similar to a photowalk, where people instead of
meeting in a room go around and take pics. I stand corrected.

*The execution would be simple but needs a bit of spade work before and
after, especially with copyvio detection. New editors usually misunderstand
copyright policies and upload stuff that isnt their own work and it results
in commons being overloaded.

Similarly if you a customised upload wizard, categorising and tagging with
templates can be done automatically and will lower the burden on
uploaders.  Customisation of the upload wizard is easy but can be done only
by an admin in commons. Tanvir did it for us (go Tanvir!), so knowing a
commons admin eases things..


On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:

 On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 10:53, wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote:

  Changing the topic since I felt Arnavs idea might be applicable on a
 national level. Wikipedia completes 11 years in January 2012 (January 15th
 if my memory serves me right). Last year there were 97 meetups nationwide
 to celebrate Wikipedia 10. How about having a National Wikimedia Photo
 Scavenger Hunt in India to celebrate Wikipedia 11?

 Im hoping something like this can tremendously increase photos from India
 to Commons.


 There were 97 events on paper. I cannot recollect reading more than 10
 reports. Practically we could say the number would have been around 20.Lets
 leave that aside.On the scavenger hunt, Tamil community already has one for
 3 month long duration[1], we are also planning for Central Sitenotice for
 Indian IPs for 3-4 days in January. You could replicate the same, but be
 sure to add volunteer support based on the scale, otherwise it cant
 sustain,will have difficulties (Hey, didnt you learn that from
 WikiConference! :D)

 Steps required for photo scavenger hunt.

 1. Customize Upload Wizard, test it.
 2. Create help documents, FAQs / videos. [2][3]
 3. Create PR using media / social media.
 4. Monitor for copyvios, tag them manually post verification.

  -- We are still on process to learn more -- :D

 The above activities took us around 30-45 days by a small community.

 [1] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest
 [2] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Upload_tutorial_twmc1.ogv
 [3] http://tawp.in/r/2rvn

 --
 Regards
 Srikanth.L

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Mullaperiyar Dam article on English Wikipedia - Collaboration sought

2011-12-01 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

check with resource request project . there might be someone who has access
to them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Resource_request

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:49 PM, Pradeep Mohandas 
pradeep.mohan...@hotmail.com wrote:

  hi,

 A few of the interesting articles written about the Dam were by Major
 (later Colonel) John Pennycuick, considered the Chief Engineer of the
 Dam. He wrote about his for the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1897. The
 edition can be found here.[1] The edition contains chapters on the
 Diversion of the Periyar and The Periyar Tunnel followed by discussion
 and correspondences on the same. I really wish we did more stuff like this
 in 2011, but that is a different discussion.

 Interestingly, these articles - dated to 1897 (!!!) are pay-walled. Each
 of the article I mentioned above costs GBP 18!

 Help is needed on trying to get these articles so that they can inform the
 Wikipedia article now under Collaboration of the Month. I am hoping to
 write to the UK Wikimedia Chapter and the Institution of Civil Engineers,
 UK to see if copies of these can be obtained. Does anyone on-list see any
 possibility of getting a copy otherwise?

 warm regards,
 User:Prad2609

 [1] - http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/issue/imotp/128/1897

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

2011-11-30 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

*One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are
part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people
who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and
interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language
communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more
people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
automatic transliteration  It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*

As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even a
tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your
assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the
Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live
in India).  How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your
description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on
Mediawiki?.

Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100 people.
This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of time
because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.


On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen
gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hoi,
 During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari. He
 did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to read
 the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the difference
 in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we looked at words
 that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ... Amir taught
 himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a linguist.

 Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue I
 met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me
 cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their
 culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn
 to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.

 They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles;
 English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of
 their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would
 welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read
 and start reading the literature of their culture.

 One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they are
 part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the people
 who work on our technology. We need people who are technically capable and
 interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our language
 communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many more
 people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
 automatic transliteration  It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
 also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
 of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.
 Thanks,
   GerardM


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

2011-11-30 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

*Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture in good faith. He has made
some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May I request that we please
discuss maturely without getting offended? We need to not only AGF but be
CIVIL also.*

Unfortunately Gerard's attempt at understanding resulted in a official
wikimedia blog post and might result in WMF taking a path that has a
potential to damage indic wikis badly. He has written this from his
position as a WMF employee.  If tomorrow this translates this into official
WMF policy, we cant stop the clock back. We know this from previous
experience from the i18n team.


On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

 The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread
 distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down
 any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture
 in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May
 I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need
 to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made
 politely.

 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --


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

2011-11-30 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

+1 with Ravi

*For example, a year back a wrong proposal was sent to Unicode consortium
that wanted Grantha script being encoded in Unicode but at the expense of
damaging Tamil language in long term.

*The incident Ravi mentions came about because of a similar situation -
faulty understanding by external organisations that failed to consult with
native language communities. Led to months long discussions, wasting
everyone's time - just because the unicode consortium didnt pause to check
with the stakeholder community.

*Language in India and a citizen's involvement with his language is
complex, diverse and many times unusual or interesting.*

+1 to this too. In India where various hues of linguistic nationalism are
dominant (especially in the south for languages like Tamil) and language
heritage is long and linguistic pride is fierce, a WMF blogpost with such
words and one that suggests at changing how language should be used has the
potential to turn into a long drawn out and ugly dramafest.  when i said
burnt in effigy in the earlier mail, i meant it literally - the passion
that language generates in this part of the world is such.

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:35 PM, Ravishankar ravidre...@gmail.com wrote:

 Ashwin,

 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Ashwin Baindur 
 ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

 The aggressive/offended tone in a couple of posts on this thread
 distresses me. I humbly request that all respondents may please tone down
 any agression you may feel. Gerard is trying to understand Indian culture
 in good faith. He has made some assumptions that he is keen to explore. May
 I request that we please discuss maturely without getting offended? We need
 to not only AGF but be CIVIL also. The same points can also be made
 politely.


 Every time there is a difference of opinion, some one starts this be CIVIL
 message. I don't feel anything un-CIVIL in anyone's message. So, please
 don't distract the TOPIC.

 Srikanth,

 //You need to work with someone who knows the language to the purest of
 its form, knows it in and out, and also knows technology. I doubt you'd've
 come across MANY of those at either WCI or the Hackathon.//

 While I agree with your view that even people not well versed in one
 language can donate their technical skills, it is important that the
 project as a whole takes in to account the views of people who know the
 language well.

 For example, a year back a wrong proposal was sent to Unicode consortium
 that wanted Grantha script being encoded in Unicode but at the expense of
 damaging Tamil language in long term. The Central Government passed it to
 Unicode consortium and it was about to approve it. Only at the last moment
 could we intervene and after months of discussion and wasting precious
 hours by both Sanskrit scholars and Tamil scholars + Technocrats, the
 proposal was held. If only Unicode consortium or Central Government had
 asked for the opinion of learned scholars of language, this situation could
 have been avoided. So, while lack of proficiency in a language need not be
 an impediment for technical contribution, we should not assume that it is
 enough for projects of varying nature.

 Ravi


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Creation of mailing list for co-ordination of Indian Wikipedians on English Wikipedia.

2011-11-29 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

+1 to Tinu,

If more traffic starts hitting the list regarding en wiki articles (like
yesterday), a separate list is an absolute must.

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Srikeit srik...@gmail.com wrote:

 +1 to what Tinu said.

 Regards

 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Anirudh Bhati anirudh...@gmail.comwrote:


 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 12:31 PM, wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote:

  I agree with Pradeep - there are already too many lists, the last thing
 we need is to follow another for WP:India. Why cant we just continue on
 wikimediaindia-I?


 +1

 We should wait for significantly more traffic on discussions around
 India-related articles on the English Wikipedia before considering the
 creation of a new mailing list.

 anirudh



 --
 From: tinucher...@gmail.com
 Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:18:30 +0530
 To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Creation of mailing list for
 co-ordination of Indian Wikipedians on English Wikipedia.


 My first preference goes for something on the lines of  wikimedia-in-eng ,
 basically a list for the Indian Wikipedian community contributing to
 en.wiki and other English Wikimedia projects.

 wikiproject-india-en  was in case there is much opposition to oh ,
 we  already have a English Wikipedia list   :)

 Either of the name, I am personally ok, the purpose remains the same :D

 -Tinu Cherian

 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:57 AM, Ashwin Baindur 
 ashwin.bain...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hmmm, my stand has been that the union set of english Wikipedians in
 India with WikiProject India article space also forms another genuine indic
 language community - especially since English is the secondary official
 language of our nation. In that case. the community must have a list of its
 own.


 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --


 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:13 AM, Subhashish Panigrahi 
 psubhash...@gmail.com wrote:

 IMO  wikiproject-india-en speaks for itself and would be good.

 regards
 Subha

 On 30 November 2011 05:50, CherianTinu Abraham tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 While wikimediaindia-l is the main mailing list of Wikimedia Community
 in India, a larger discussion of English Wikipedia/ns in India or
 WikiProject India on en.wiki is out of scope on wikimediaindia-l and its
 subscribers. While most of the Indian language Wikipedia have
 their separate mailing lists, co-ordination  collaboration among the
 Indian Wikimedians contributing to English Wikipedia has become the most
 difficult. English Wikipedia mailing list wikien-l is too boarder scope
 of discussing them.
I am aware that we have too many lists, but it is expected as the
 community grows in size and creation of separate lists is justified as long
 as we have enough activity on/around it. I am of the opinion that
 India-related content and community of Indian Wikipedians on English
 Wikipedia is as equally important to grow as Indic language Wikipedias.

 In this context, I would propose the creation of a wikimedia-in-eng or
 wikiproject-india-en mailing list.

 Regards
 Tinu Cherian

 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 1:07 AM, Ashwin Baindur 
 ashwin.bain...@gmail.com wrote:

 Agreed in principle with Pradeep, but let some talk of content take
 place here. I'm sure the majority of wikimedia-l readers do not have WT:IN
 on their watchlist.


 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --


 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 12:56 AM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
 parakara.gh...@gmail.com wrote:



 On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 12:18 AM, Pradeep Mohandas 
 pradeep.mohan...@hotmail.com wrote:

  I think the list should be used more as a helpful pointer and as much
 discussion as possible should be done on Wikipedia itself. I think there
 are more lists than Wikipedians can handle and more time is spent on the
 lists than on editing Wikipedia, which is what we're primarily here for.


 +1.


 warm regards,
 Pradeep

 User:Prad2609

 --
 Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:14:00 +0530
 From: parakara.gh...@gmail.com
 To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [[Brian Horrocks]] not an Indian FA


 I agree more with Swaroop, but since the English wikipedia is picking
 itself up and dusting itself again, we may want one.
 --Re,

 On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 9:58 PM, Swaroop Rao raul.swar...@gmail.comwrote:

 Good idea, but then, shouldn't we be using 
 WT:INhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk%3aINfor these? :)


 Swaroop Rao
 (MikeLynch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3aMikeLynch)






 On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 21:47, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

 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.com wrote:

 Is that what you

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] IEP Pilot - Preliminary Analysis

2011-11-28 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Somethings vital that are missing:

1) How many regular editors were required to clean up the articles. How
many reverts/cleanup edits were required to clean up after the IEP students.
2) How many admin actions/interventions were required - warnings, blocks,
mergers, deletions, AFDs
3) How many regular volunteer hours were spent on this project.
4) How much did the new page patrollers (NPP) backlog increase because of
IEP
5) How much did the copyright cleanup investigations (CCI) backlog increase
because of IEP
6) How long is it going to take to clean everything up. What do the NPP/CCI
project members feel about the extra workload.
7) What was the impact on the existing en wiki community. How their
attitude towards such a program has been damaged.

A supplimentary question:
Are kudpung, moonriddengirl, fluffernutter, Voceditenore, spacemanspiff et
al being interviewed?

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 5:01 PM, sankarshan foss.mailingli...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Nitika ntan...@wikimedia.org wrote:

  We want to collate data points to be able to analyze and draw out trends.
  Here is an example of data that we're trying to dig out (and this is
 just a
  sub-set of a preliminary list)

 Sharing the entire list of data points would be a nice thing to have.
 If it is possible.

  What's the amount of data that students have added to Wikipedia? What's
 the
  amount of data that got reverted? What's the net amount of information
 that
  the students have added on Wikipedia?

 The above should lend themselves to instrumentation and should be
 somewhat trivially available.

  How many students edited articles outside of their in-class assignments?

 This is an interesting and non-trivial question. Which prompts me to
 ask - why would you want to track this ?

  How many student's got warnings on their talk pages? How many students
  corrected their errors after these warnings?
  How many students got blocked? / How many students got blocked more than
  once?

 Again, the above should be easily instrumented. At least, the initial
 nature of the questions look that way.

 --
 sankarshan mukhopadhyay
 http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] IEP Pilot - Preliminary Analysis

2011-11-28 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Ram,

The points i raised need to be asked and they are missing and i am raising
them. This isnt about negative/positive tone. Any project that causes a
three month long clean up effort involving hundreds of regular editors
needs to document how much time and effort it is costing and what is its
impact on the regular functioning of the project. Without that there is no
real learning, especially when the program execs are seeking to repeat it.

-
Bala


On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Ram Shankar Yadav 
ramshankarya...@gmail.com wrote:

 Dear Bala,
 I'm  glad that you came up with few more questions but most of them are in
 negative tone.
 We would love to have few questions from you pointing on few of the good
 things as well.

 Please don't mind, it's not personal.

 Thanks,
 Ram


 On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote:

 Somethings vital that are missing:

 1) How many regular editors were required to clean up the articles. How
 many reverts/cleanup edits were required to clean up after the IEP students.
 2) How many admin actions/interventions were required - warnings, blocks,
 mergers, deletions, AFDs
 3) How many regular volunteer hours were spent on this project.
 4) How much did the new page patrollers (NPP) backlog increase because of
 IEP
 5) How much did the copyright cleanup investigations (CCI) backlog
 increase because of IEP
 6) How long is it going to take to clean everything up. What do the
 NPP/CCI project members feel about the extra workload.
 7) What was the impact on the existing en wiki community. How their
 attitude towards such a program has been damaged.

 A supplimentary question:
 Are kudpung, moonriddengirl, fluffernutter, Voceditenore, spacemanspiff
 et al being interviewed?

 On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 5:01 PM, sankarshan 
 foss.mailingli...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Nitika ntan...@wikimedia.org wrote:

  We want to collate data points to be able to analyze and draw out
 trends.
  Here is an example of data that we're trying to dig out (and this is
 just a
  sub-set of a preliminary list)

 Sharing the entire list of data points would be a nice thing to have.
 If it is possible.

  What's the amount of data that students have added to Wikipedia?
 What's the
  amount of data that got reverted? What's the net amount of information
 that
  the students have added on Wikipedia?

 The above should lend themselves to instrumentation and should be
 somewhat trivially available.

  How many students edited articles outside of their in-class
 assignments?

 This is an interesting and non-trivial question. Which prompts me to
 ask - why would you want to track this ?

  How many student's got warnings on their talk pages? How many students
  corrected their errors after these warnings?
  How many students got blocked? / How many students got blocked more
 than
  once?

 Again, the above should be easily instrumented. At least, the initial
 nature of the questions look that way.

 --
 sankarshan mukhopadhyay
 http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] People of stature unhappy with own articles

2011-11-27 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Yes there is. direct them to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AUTOPROB#Problems_in_an_article_about_you

But they shouldn't be expecting wikipedia to do a whitewashing / PR fluff
job on it. Sometimes, if they are actually trying to remove negative
material about them  (and there is a ton of it in RS) it leads to a
backlash and more gets added to the article. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striesand_effect)


On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 11:30 AM, wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote:

  Hiya,

 Me and a couple of others have been contacted by a couple of people of
 stature having Wikipedia articles about themselves recently about the
 articles having derogatory and inaccurate information about them. Is there
 any procedure set which such people can follow to have an admin look into
 their page?

 Kind Regards,



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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Noteworthy Wikimedian recognition and Jury mention

2011-11-24 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

can we get a common (approved by chapter) barnstar/medal.userbox that could
be place in the award winner's user page. I was talking to one today and he
said he would like something solid to show that he indeed get a recognition
from the chapter.

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

 Vide discussions amongst jury members, userbox has been placed on the
 award-winner's user page (Bhadani)on English Wikipedia and all nominees
 from WikiProject India on English Wikipedia have been given a Barnstar of
 National Merit.

 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --


 On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Arun Ramarathnam arunra...@gmail.comwrote:

 Dear Wikimedians,

 On behalf of the jury for the NWR 2011http://wiki.wikimedia.in/NWR_2011,
  thank you all for you active participation and your nominations of
 contributing Wikimedians for the recognition.

 We shared the details during Day 3 of the WikiConference India. The
 updated deck is shared for your reference,

 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/NWR_2011_and_Jury_mention_V1.0.pdf

 Let us applaud all the 41 
 nominationshttp://wiki.wikimedia.in/NWR_2011#Nominations. They
 are fantastic contributors and a great inspiration. We salute their passion
 and commitment to contribute and develop educational content under a free
 license http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:free_content.  We should
 celebrate everyone of them.

 I would like to thank the entire Jury
 http://wiki.wikimedia.in/NWR_2011#The_Jury personally for their time
 and efforts toward the NWR 2011 exercise.

 This is the first year for the NWR 2011 and we have tried our best to
 make this exercise participative. Next year we hope to do even better. We
 welcome everyone's inputs to make this even process better next year.

 The intention of this exercise was to Discover, Document, Recognize and
 Share the contributions of prolific Wikimedians. As you will appreciate
 this is an ongoing process. We hope we taken a small step in that direction.

 Thank you.

 regards
 Arun
 On behalf the NWR 2011 Jury http://wiki.wikimedia.in/NWR_2011#The_Jury



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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Wikimedia-in-chn] Input methods extension Narayam enabled on Wikimedia Commons and more on input methods and web fonts

2011-11-24 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Agree with Srikanth on WebFonts. We at the Tamil Wiki projects have already
tried the webfonts out and found the Lohit Tamil - the font available via
webFonts extension has serious readability/rendering issues in most
operating systems (most except Redhat Linux).  It is a big step backwards
in usability for those who have better system fonts (which in Tamil  is
like 85-90% of the reading public). The i18n team is not giving the option
of  making the system font default. It is either webfonts with Lohit (or
other faulty fonts) as default or no webfonts at all. [1][2] So in case of
Tamil, the community will not ask for the webfont extension, until we have
a bugfree freely licensed font.

Our advice to the other communities is to thoroughly test this in all
operating systems and then decide if the font webfont extension is offering
as default is worth forcing everyone to switch. In fact please discuss
anything that the i18n team is offering thoroughly and test it before going
for a rollout. Because once the rollout is complete, your control is lost
and you will be entirely at the mercy of the i18n team about any changes [1]

My request to the i18n team is to discuss with the stakeholder communities,
well before you start developing new extensions. Talk with us Give us a
feature road map and develop software to suit our requirements and needs.
And please dont go for one-size-fits-all solutions.  As of now, the inverse
is happening. We are being given products and enhancements without our
consultation. Any request to roll back/change is met with refusal [3]. As
demonstrated in the case of Lohit-Tamil and Webfonts, it took a face to
face meeting at Mumbai Hackathon and comparing the font rendering in
different machines, before an i18n member would admit there was an issue.
Before that i18n team was casually dismissing our concerns without
listening to what we were saying.[2]  In Tamil Wiki webfont  case we were
lucky that we had a Hackathon happening shortly and Srikanth was there to
raise the issue in person with Santhosh and the Lohit developer (Redhat).
If this is the case with Tamil where we were fortunate enough to have a
developer amongst ourselves, untested rollouts of extensions are going to
cause more serious issues in relatively undermanned wikis. Though the
development is done in good faith, it cant get live without user testing /
quality acceptance.

I hear there are more such extensions in the pipeline from the i18n team.
My sincere request to you guys is this - talk to your end users (us) before
you plan the features and develop them.  Requirements gathering from users
is supposed to be the first step of any software development. Instead of
waiting for feedback until you are ready for deployment and then arguing
about the feedback, getting early
feedback will everyone save time.[1]  The WMF features team did the same
type of mistakes with Feedback tool, image filter, Wikilove and the AC
Trial. They appear to have learned from the community reaction and have
hired Oliver Keyes to engage with the community on such issues. [4] You can
atleast talk to us and find out what we actually require before forcing us
to accept what you got or/and trying to convince us that it is good for us.

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31936
[2]
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/11/freely-licensed-fonts-are-ugly-now-what.html
[3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32257
[4] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/255518

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 6:34 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:

 On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 18:03, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) 
 smazel...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 Dear all,

 As requested at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Mumbai last weekend by
 Srikanth, and also in bug 32619[1], *Narayam* was just *enabled* on 
 *Wikimedia
 Commons*. I hope you find it useful.


 Thank you!! :) It will be put to good use lot of Indic wiki users who are
 regular to commons.


 During the hackathon we had a lot of help in adding more key mappings to
 Narayam[2], and we are right now at the Red Hat offices in Pune working
 together with their localisation team for Indic languages to verify and get
 feedback for more Indic languages. The recent work may be deployed next
 Monday (28/11), but it could also be delayed a week. The complete Wikimedia
 Localisation team is travelling home this weekend, and we haven't reviewed
 all the code yet, hence the possible delay.


 Am particularly excited on the *On screen keyboard*[1] done by Abhijeet
 Pathak which will be of great help. Some UI changes / testing may be
 needed, but on-screen keyboard will be amazing especially for people who
 are new to the typing even phonetically.


 Another *exciting feature* we are planning on deploying and enabling on
 many Indic language projects to increase accessibility, and that we would
 like to have your feedback[3] on is *WebFonts*[4]. Many languages do not
 have proper fonts easily

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Tamil Wiki Media Contest

2011-11-23 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Ramesh,

The files that are uploaded as part of the contest are in the category
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:TamilWiki_Media_Contest

This cat gets automatically added, when the special upload wizard is used.
If you want to directly upload to commons or use other tools like
commonist, please add this category to the files

Regarding template,

We have a {{TamilWiki Media Contest}} template. But we have not designed
this to be added automatically to the files. (as a deliberate decision ).
If this template is added to the files, then the category too gets added
automatically.

-
Bala
On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Ramesh N G rames...@gmail.com wrote:

The recent addition on the upload progress is really awesome.
Not deviating the thread,
I am happy to participate in this contest.
Do we have some categories, template in commons to identify the medias
which are getting added to the contest?

User:Rameshng

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Srikanth Lakshmanan
srik@gmail.comwrote:

Hi Eric,

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 22:44, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:

This is wonderful, good luck. Please let us know about your experience
with Upload Wizard.

I noticed that Upload Wizard isn't fully localized into Tamil yet. Any
Tamil speaker can help localize it on translatewiki.net. These are the
missing translations:

Thank you!. As Bala had mentioned, Upload Wizard is really useful. Though
the entire extension is not translated completely the interface for end
user is translated [1]. There was a issue of extension lacking feature to
add Upload Wizard campaign editors flag to normal users and a fix was
made available[2] , but commons community needs to create a community
process around it though. We managed to set it up through Commons admin
(Thanks Tanvir!). Having Narayam on commons might help a bit and I have
discussed with Siebrand already at hackathon, probably we might discuss
more on the bug[3] and get a solution if its possible.

[1]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UploadWizardcampaign=twmcuselang=ta
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31903
[3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32619

--
Regards
Srikanth.L

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

2011-11-14 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

*we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly
speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without
that coordination chances of success are quite low.  *
*My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if
Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you approached
them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure story
but even you were a part of this sinking ship.*

Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and
apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is.  I had no clue the OA role
involved going through every edit and do the student's work.  IEPs mails
did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's
homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up.

So get this straight - IEP had no clue what Online Ambassador's did in the
PPP. They just used the term in IEP and recruited a bunch of volunteer
editors expecting them to cleanup after the students. This is not an issue
of miscommunication, this is an issue of ignorance. The IEP didnt know what
OAs do. It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the
students.  (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in
both programs - MikeLynch).

,* I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator came
forward and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc

*Another wrong fact.  An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to
point Hisham and  group in the right direction in early september when
things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl,
where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful
QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff
quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and
there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.

And why exactly do you need Indian community to help?. The newbie editors
were getting plenty of help from the global community.  You dont need a
specific nationality editor to come and tell the students what to do and
what not to do.  A student who doesnt listen to Do not copy paste
instruction coming from a American editor is not going to care if the
instruction came from an Indian editor.


On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Ram Shankar Yadav 
ramshankarya...@gmail.com wrote:

 +1 Srikanth!

 Hey Folks!

 I'm Ram and I'm one of the CA's worked closely with CoEP and SSE. I would
 like to share my views on this most discussed topic, coz the term FAIL is
 quite thought provoking, and now everyone has an opinion and I respect
 that.

 As a Campus Ambassador(CA) we faced the heat on ground and nobody can feel
 the pain like us when we heard the discontinuation of IEP in CoEP coz we
 gave our personal time physically and virtually in every possible way to
 make this program a success, and I promise we'll keep doing that.

 My views on IEP:

 1. *Wikipedia India Education Program(IEP) for a CA* : The whole idea of
 this program like everyone knows is to get more editors, but we have our
 own set of challenges in the age of Facebook. What a bunch of CAs have done
 in as short span of 5 months can't be done in a couple of months by
 existing Community(local or global), coz we touched the students(1000+)
 personally,  we had the experience of interactions with Faculty and
 Directors.

 Our only aim was to tell them(students) that Wikipedia is cool, and
 indeed we did that! in the way we taught wikipedia to them. Few things
 which we tell our students in our Wiki Sessions:

- Writing on Wikipedia will give you global audience, 400 million
unique visitors
- It will improve your Writing, Critical Thinking and Collaborative
skills
- It will add a bullet point to your resume and hence better placements
- Lastly it will also give you marks if you follow the given deadlines


 Yes, I agree that we have seen setback coz of the copyvios, but I totally
 agree with Srikanth coz this was due to the scale and numbers.

 2. *Faculty Involvement* : It is one of the weak link in IEP, though they
 knew the importance of this program, but they have their own set of
 obligations/mindset, and we always felt that not all the faculty members
 are tracking the students and their articles. We have some exemplary Profs
 who are so much involved that they reached every student's talk page and
 wrote message on it, and on the other side few never opened the course page
 itself!

 Lesson for us is to enroll only those who are really interested and track
 them as well, drop the course if they are not putting effort as required,
 but this scenario was different 6 months back, coz no one knew about this
 program, and yes we did enrolled a few inactive faculty coz they showed
 interest but never lived up to the expectation.

 3. *Online Ambassadors* : As Hisham already told that we got very late
 engagement of our OAs in this program as well as the

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

2011-11-14 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

 fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful
 QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff
 quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and
 there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.*

 - Accept my apologies for not able to recall few Indian Admins who tired
 to help us, but if you see the big picture, the whole scene was dominated
 by editors from abroad. We needed your help and support when these folks
 were pointing fingers on Indian Education System. One more thing, after the
 first few instances of copyvios we reached out in person and took 35+
 sessions in various classes but even after putting that effort few of them
 kept doing the copy-paste for last minute submissions.

 *And why exactly do you need Indian community to help?. The newbie
 editors were getting plenty of help from the global community.*
 *- *By Indian community I mean people like you and me and others you
 are either reading or replying this thread, guys we surely needed your
 support at the forefront.


 We never denied the fact that we have failed in certain areas but that
 doesn't mean that overall program is a failure or dead.

 We believe in learning from our mistakes and happy to do new ones to
 learn better.

 Cheers,
 Ram



 On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote:

 *we never got the support which was required from an OA. Honestly
 speaking there was no interaction between OAs and CAs and without
 that coordination chances of success are quite low.  *
 *My only point here is to all the OAs in this discussion is that if
 Hisham/Nitika has not set the expectations right, why didn't you approached
 them, then and there! Anybody can come and comment on this failure story
 but even you were a part of this sinking ship.*

 Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and
 apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is.  I had no clue the OA role
 involved going through every edit and do the student's work.  IEPs mails
 did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's
 homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up.

 So get this straight - IEP had no clue what Online Ambassador's did in
 the PPP. They just used the term in IEP and recruited a bunch of volunteer
 editors expecting them to cleanup after the students. This is not an issue
 of miscommunication, this is an issue of ignorance. The IEP didnt know what
 OAs do. It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the
 students.  (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in
 both programs - MikeLynch).

 ,* I can't recall a single instance when an Indian Administrator came
 forward and found a copyvio/poor editing, etc

 *
 Another wrong fact.  An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to
 point Hisham and  group in the right direction in early september when
 things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl,
 where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful
 QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff
 quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and
 there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.

 And why exactly do you need Indian community to help?. The newbie
 editors were getting plenty of help from the global community.  You dont
 need a specific nationality editor to come and tell the students what to do
 and what not to do.  A student who doesnt listen to Do not copy paste
 instruction coming from a American editor is not going to care if the
 instruction came from an Indian editor.



 On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Ram Shankar Yadav 
 ramshankarya...@gmail.com wrote:

 +1 Srikanth!

 Hey Folks!

 I'm Ram and I'm one of the CA's worked closely with CoEP and SSE. I
 would like to share my views on this most discussed topic, coz the term
 FAIL is quite thought provoking, and now everyone has an opinion and I
 respect that.

 As a Campus Ambassador(CA) we faced the heat on ground and nobody can
 feel the pain like us when we heard the discontinuation of IEP in CoEP coz
 we gave our personal time physically and virtually in every possible way to
 make this program a success, and I promise we'll keep doing that.

 My views on IEP:

 1. *Wikipedia India Education Program(IEP) for a CA* : The whole idea
 of this program like everyone knows is to get more editors, but we have our
 own set of challenges in the age of Facebook. What a bunch of CAs have done
 in as short span of 5 months can't be done in a couple of months by
 existing Community(local or global), coz we touched the students(1000+)
 personally,  we had the experience of interactions with Faculty and
 Directors.

 Our only aim was to tell them(students) that Wikipedia is cool, and
 indeed we did that! in the way we taught wikipedia to them. Few

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

2011-11-14 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

sorry to disagree Ashwin,

This has to be dragged out. These guys are just not getting it. They just
dont have the knowledge nor  they willingnes to listen to criticism. They
are just deflecting criticism by calling [[WP:CIVIL]] and crying personal
attack.  I am not going to spend time posting in the other thread, when
the opening mail preempts any attempt at criticism by citing NPOV and CIVIL.

If they are going to run yet another similar program without getting what
went wrong in the first place - they are bound to make the same mistakes
again. The cost will be borne by the wiki community - us. The paid
consultants will move on to other jobs, the campus ambassadors will have
another role to put in their resumes- but it is wikipedia and us
wikipedians who will pay the price.

A pilot program that leaves a gigantic mess requiring three months of clean
up effort from hundreds of regular editors needs some honest and harsh
criticism.

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Ashwin Baindur
ashwin.bain...@gmail.comwrote:

 We have had a lot of responses and recriminations on this issue. In the
 light of all that has happened, please let us stop our grousing. Hisham has
 opened a new thread, and accepted full responsibility. That is the end of
 the blame-game as far as anybody is concerned. All of us are inviolved and
 all of us are both innocent and blameworthy, including and especially me. I
 know I should have done more.

 Let us bring this thread to a close. Let all posts now be in response to
 his new thread only and couched in positive terms and offering useful
 suggestions or fresh input.


 Warm regards,

 Ashwin Baindur
 --


 On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Ram Shankar Yadav 
 ramshankarya...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi Bala,

 *Oh yeah. Do everything wrong and then blame the OA. Hisham, Nitika and
 apparently you are clueless what an OAs role is.  I had no clue the OA role
 involved going through every edit and do the student's work.  IEPs mails
 did not specify that the expectation about OA role was doing the student's
 homework. If you had made this clear, i would have never signed up.*

 - We are not putting blame on anyone. If Hisham and Nitika were clueless
 why didn't to step-up and asked them about the expectations. One more thing
 when you are starting something new don't expect people will start reaching
 you from the Day1, we need to build a relationship and get their faith that
 we are here to help you, and it's going to be great learning experience.
 Tell me how many times did you reached out to students, even if you did and
 they didn't responded don't loose the faith, they are new to this
 environment just help them to take baby steps.

 *It imagined them to be janitors who would cleanup after the students.
 (Dont believe me?, ask the other Indian guy who was an OA in both programs
 - MikeLynch).*
 - First of all I didn't like the way you put this statement, if helping
 someone by teaching them the right way is some kind of low grade job for
 you, then I can surely say you are a misfit here! Just imagine you are
 trying teach a kid to write, they will definitely mess it up by drawing
 mangoes and bananas, and when you clear the slate you don't call it
 janatorship, coz you know what you are doing, and having faith that the kid
 will learn by doing mistakes eventually.

 *Another wrong fact.  An Indian admin called spacemanspiff who tried to
 point Hisham and  group in the right direction in early september when
 things started to go wrong (it was in the talk page of Moonriddengirl,
 where fluffernutter went to help with copyvios). He even designed a helpful
 QA page which Hisham did not use. Disgusted with the IEP attitude, Spiff
 quit trying to help. The whole issue could have been stopped right then and
 there if the warnings of multiple editors and admins had been heeded.*

 - Accept my apologies for not able to recall few Indian Admins who tired
 to help us, but if you see the big picture, the whole scene was dominated
 by editors from abroad. We needed your help and support when these folks
 were pointing fingers on Indian Education System. One more thing, after the
 first few instances of copyvios we reached out in person and took 35+
 sessions in various classes but even after putting that effort few of them
 kept doing the copy-paste for last minute submissions.

 *And why exactly do you need Indian community to help?. The newbie
 editors were getting plenty of help from the global community.*
 *- *By Indian community I mean people like you and me and others you
 are either reading or replying this thread, guys we surely needed your
 support at the forefront.


 We never denied the fact that we have failed in certain areas but that
 doesn't mean that overall program is a failure or dead.

 We believe in learning from our mistakes and happy to do new ones to
 learn better.

 Cheers,
 Ram



 On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 11:27 PM, Bala

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

2011-11-13 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Sue,

*A number
of schools have participated in the pilot phase of the IEP. My
understanding is that the project has been mostly successful, except
for one school, or set of schools, at which there were serious
problems with plagiarism that, despite repeated efforts, the team
couldn't get resolved.*

The project has not been mostly successful by any measure.  There were
only three schools in the program - of them one (SNDT)  has only one class
of 10. The rest came from the College of enginering Pune (COEP) and the
symbiosis school of economics (SSE) . Both produced huge amounts of
copyvio. On Nov 2, Hisham went to COEP to shut down (or postpone it for a
month, whatever happened). But SSE students continue to edit (and produce
more copy vios) till now.

A program, that has wasted tens of thousands of manhours of hundreds of
regular wiki editors cant be called successful by any stretch of
imagination. It is a an abject and complete failure.

Please do not call this a success and ignore the havoc it has wrought on
en wiki. As long as the foundation and program refuses to acknowledge the
truth, there is little chance of any lessons being learnt.






On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 On 13 November 2011 08:46, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 
  On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com
  wrote:
 
  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.
 
  This is related to something I've been thinking about.
 
  As conceived, the IEP and its parent the PPP (pardon the acronyms), were
  about contributing to wikipedia, about learning how to contribute, and
 about
  having fun while learning.


 Hi Bishakha,

 This is a bit of a derail from your e-mail, but I wanted to clarify
 your use of the past tense (they *were* about contributing). I think
 the thread title here may be creating some confusion about what has
 actually happened. That, or else I may be confused myself :-)

 The PPI (or PPP, LOL) is indeed over. It concluded with the completion
 of the Stanton grant requirements, and has now evolved into the GEP,
 the Global Education Program. The IEP as I understand it is not over:
 contrary to the subjectline of this thread, it hasn't died. A number
 of schools have participated in the pilot phase of the IEP. My
 understanding is that the project has been mostly successful, except
 for one school, or set of schools, at which there were serious
 problems with plagiarism that, despite repeated efforts, the team
 couldn't get resolved.

 The plagiarism problems were serious, and after their efforts to fix
 them didn't work, Hisham and Barry shut down that stream of the
 project. It was a hard decision to make, but I expect there's general
 agreement that it was the right decision. But the project itself is
 not over. Although, the pilot phase might be over: I'm not sure about
 that.

 I'm just clarifying this point because I think it would be good for
 everybody here to have the same basic understanding of what happened.
 And if I'm wrong, somebody might please just correct me :-)

 Thanks,
 Sue




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 415 839 6885 office
 415 816 9967 cell

 Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail

2011-11-13 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

*That's one way of looking at it.  Another way would be that an editor
(in this case who happened to be a student) contributed content to an
article.  It would (almost routinely) reviewed by other editors who
coudl/would improve it or point out issues.  One of the aspects that the
better students have fed back to us is the value of the collaboration with
the global editing community.*

Hisham, i was an online mentor for seven students in the PPP in the
previous sem. I have done this before. I am normally a patient newbie
helper. I help tens of newbies every day in Ta and en wiki. But if you make
it an obligation for me to check through the edits of forty odd guys, who
turn in assignments and are only angling for marks in their courses,  you
are turning me off. You heard what another OA surya had to say about this .

You are looking at OAs as full time employees - they have a job to do, why
not do it. Remember this is a volunteer project and we volunteers have
only X amount of time to donate to wikipedia, OAs have other interests in
Wikipedia - being a OA isnt supposed to take up all my wikitime. I
certainly did not sign up for following every edit of a COEP student who
shows no sign of actually wanting to voluntarily contribute to Wikipedia or
any sign of learning. My onwiki time is better spent elsewhere.

This is the biggest difference between my PPP experience and IEP
experience. In the former i had 7 mentees, who asked me for help, when they
ran into trouble, listened to what i had to say, were basically competent,
produced workable quality content. I was happy to improve their content as
the workload was manageable.  In the IEP, i had 40, who never asked me
anything (instead i am expected to go through their edits). But could be
seen arguing with people who tag their content for copyright violation,
adding the same copyvio content after being reverted multiple times.
Getting their CAs to plead with admins if they get blocked.

So for the next phase do not design a OA as someone who will track every
edit of a student and correct all his mistakes - Such a thing might be
possible with one on one mentoring, but even then it routinely fails in the
regular adopt a editor arrangements that happen in en wiki. But with five
or seven students (forget about forty) it is impossible for me to log in
daily, check if they have edited, check out the diffs, cross check for
copyvio and then give him/her a feedback.


On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Hisham hmun...@wikimedia.org wrote:


 On Nov 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote:

 Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its
 *Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by
 the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on
 their own.

 +1.  with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for
 the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame
 everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved


 My view is not driven by political correctness but I do want to avoid
 generalising all students and all faculty.  Just take a look a the user
 talk and article discussion pages and it's immediately apparent that quite
 a few students and teachers wouldn't deserve blame.  Many students did make
 mistakes - but they made the same mistakes that many newbies.


 So here is what is to be done:

 1) *Keep the number low* -


 Agree and we need to work on how we select the colleges and faculty and
 classes and students.

 2) *Penalise those who copy paste*


 This is something that can (and should) be led by the faculty.  Some
 teachers have shown the way on how this can be done.


 3) *The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. *


 Clearly the student:CA ratio needs to be reduced significantly. ...but did
 you mean students:CA 5:1 or 1:5?

 Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not
 handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador.
 But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised,
 that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work.


 That's one way of looking at it.  Another way would be that an editor (in
 this case who happened to be a student) contributed content to an article.
  It would (almost routinely) reviewed by other editors who coudl/would
 improve it or point out issues.  One of the aspects that the better
 students have fed back to us is the value of the collaboration with the
 global editing community.



 hisham



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[Wikimediaindia-l] The Finalised Program Schedule for WCI 2011

2011-11-13 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

The finalised program schedule for the Wiki Conference India 2011  has been
put up in Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Programs
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail

2011-11-12 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its *Most*.
Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even by the
brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do on their
own.

+1.  with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for
the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame
everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved

In my four years of college, i copy pasted almost every single assignment
given to me. I did not know it was wrong and wouldnt have cared if someone
from outside pointed it to me. The attitude i saw from the IEP students is
exactly the same. Unless the students are penalised for plagiarism by being
failed in the course, they are not going to change the behaviour. And how
many of your professors in indian education were concerned that you were
copy pasting your assignment. (None of mine cared - i can say with
confidence that is the same case in 99% of the cases in India now)

So no amount of increasing the number of campus ambassadors, their
training, etc would help unless there is a stick involved - How many times
did the campus ambassadors tried to tell students not to copy paste?. How
many of the students heeded the warning. This issue was raised in Late
August. There were two whole months to hammer in the message and it didnt
work out. Why? there were no serious implications for the students
involved. There is a conversation in Srikanth's en wiki talk page, where a
student tries to weasel out of copyvio by giving every excuse in the book -
he did not correct his behaviour, but instead tried everything to get the
copyvio he added approved.

Those who got blocked weaseled, whined and pleaded for an unblock but in
many of the cases reverted to the previous behaviour, when they thought
they could get away with it. They are socking and trying to remove cleanup
comments from the IEP page . Without a no-nonsense approach, you will
only gets repeats of such behaviour.

So here is what is to be done:

1) *Keep the number low* - The next round should have less than 50
students. No classwide / collegewide  blanket programs. Make this a
interested students only program.  We have clearly demonstrated there is
no manpower to handle anything more.  We have about exhausted the goodwill
of the en wiki community. If this repeats, you are looking at a wholesale
blocks for the students and IP addresses.

2) *Penalise those who copy paste*  -  either they should be failed by
their professors. If the professors dont care, drop the program and stop
going back to that institution. Wikipedia is a work in progress, we dont
need plagiarism by Indian students to shore it up. We are not that
desperate.

3) *The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. *Anything more seems to
non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error
correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the
IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program
essentially wanted to me to do the students' work.

Go back to the drawing board. Dont start with 1000. not even a 100, start
with a 50.
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Transliteration tool for Sanskrit wiki

2011-10-18 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

hello harish,

It is easy now to add the narayam typing tool for devanagari by filing a
bug/request  in Bugzilla -
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/

But first initiate a discussion in sanskrit wikipedia and obtain community
consensus. You will need to show that the community wants the installation
of the tool, while filing the request.

-


On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 8:27 PM, 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?

 --
 Harish


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Feedback please: Logo concepts for India Hackathon

2011-10-06 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

”we have had the discussions here:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-September/004547.html

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote:

 The rendering of Mumbai in devanagari is incorrect so that needs to be
 fixed.

 // Thanks, but we have had enough mails on this issue which became
 uncontrollable, for the interest of those who dont want to get spammed,
 request everyone to keep votes / discussion to the respective thread / talk
 page


 Where have we had those discussions? I'd like a link please.

 Theo

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Feedback please: Logo concepts for India Hackathon

2011-10-05 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

The rendering of Mumbai in devanagari is incorrect so that needs to be
fixed.

// Thanks, but we have had enough mails on this issue which became
uncontrollable, for the interest of those who dont want to get spammed,
request everyone to keep votes / discussion to the respective thread / talk
page



On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Alolita Sharma alolita.sha...@gmail.comwrote:

 Erik - thanks for posting these logo concepts.

 The rendering of Mumbai in devanagari is incorrect so that needs to be
 fixed.

 My vote on designs: 4 or 3.

 It would also be great to get other suggestions from the local Mumbai /
 India community.

 With best regards,
 Alolita



 On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote:

 As GerardM noted the other day, we're planning a hackathon adjacent to
 the WikiConference in Mumbai.

 We'd love feedback on some logo ideas that one of our designers put
 together, particularly with an eye to picking a design that resonates
 with the largest number of people without triggering any particular
 sensibilities. As noted, ignore the script -- these are just concepts,
 and we're looking for feedback on the visuals at this stage:

 http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011/Logo_concepts

 Any comments are welcome -- there's a comments section below each logo
 concept.

 (If you'd like to add your own suggestion, please do so!)

 Thanks!
 Erik


 --
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 VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

 Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [WikiConference-India 2011] Spamming India list with Conference Discussion -- Moderation notice

2011-09-29 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Dear all,

Here is a message from our list moderator Srikanth:

 I have put myself on moderation to avoid spamming while replying just
because lot of people want to copy india list on discussion. I may not mail
the list till the Wiki conference ends or please expect delays in mails i
need to send. I apologise for my actions



On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 8:01 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi,

 Apologies to India list members on failing to act on spammers for sometime.
 I have put members who violated the warnings [1][2] . People who have been
 put on moderation are in bcc of this mail and list is available here for
 anyone to search and find[3]. These members will be removed from moderation
 post conference on requesting wikimediaindia-l-owner@lists.wikimedia.orgthat 
 they will abide by notices by list admins on spamming etc. On a serious
 note, let me work on some list guidelines on put them soon, I know this
 again was pending on me and I thought all of us are mature doing without
 one, but then its better to have one.

 [1]
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-September/004482.html
 [2]
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-September/004484.html
 [3]
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-September/date.html#start

 --
 Regards
 Srikanth.L

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikipedia in TN text books

2011-09-27 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

English wikipedia articles are listed in the Further reading sections of
lessons in science text books of the recently implemented Samacheer Kalvi
(uniform education) syllabus in Tamil Nadu. A few examples are : Standard 7
science (lesson 11) Standard 8 science (lessons 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11 and 13).
The text books can be downloaded from
http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/Std8.htm.

(Hattip: Ta. wikipedian Theni Subramani who discovered this and posted in ta
wiki VP)

-
Bala
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Report on ILUGC wikipedia stall

2011-09-22 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

unfortunately we dint bring any cameras. But the ILUGC people had, i will
ask for photos from them

My personal impression : (i was there for the last couple of hours)  The
stall was a couple of tables with a hand made banner. We didnt have any
handout material as this was organised in very short notice. IMO The BIG
advantage wikipedia stall had was the attitude - Surya treated every visitor
as a potential wikipedia editor and gave them the full pitch and took them
through various wiki projects within a short period of time.


On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Pradeep Mohandas 
pradeep.mohan...@gmail.com wrote:

 hi,

 Do you have any pics of the stall? It would be nice to see it. Might give
 others idea on how to do such a thing themselves?

 warm regards,
 Pradeep Mohandas

 On 21 September 2011 23:03, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi all,

 The Chennai Linux user's group celebrated the Software Freedom Day (Sep
 17) by organising free software demo stall exhibition at Madras Institute of
 Technology campus, Chennai. (http://wiki.ilugc.in/index.php?title=Sfd2011).


 They gave space for a Wikipedia stall in that exhibition and  S. A. Surya
 Prakash (http://tawp.in/r/1nmq) from Tamil Wikipedia  ran the stall. He
 was assisted by open source enthusiast Arun Mozhi (
 http://www.arunmozhi.in/). They introduced wikipedia and other
 wikiprojects to the exhibition visitors through out the day. The Wikipedia
 stall was adjudged the best amongst the 20 odd stalls in the exhibition and
 Surya was given a prize by ILUGC.

 The Tamil report is at : http://tawp.in/r/2n3f


 regards
 Bala

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Copyright Violations by (some) Students: Wikipedia India Education Program

2011-09-12 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hisham

Thank you for taking this seriously and for the prompt action . This had the
potential to become a serious PR disaster for India in general and
thankfully the actions taken seem to have stemmed the copyvio issues for
now.


On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:47 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi Gautum

 On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 Hi Theo:

  I beg to differ Gautum. Since, it was made part of the curriculum this
  almost constitutes as cheating. I am not sure about lofty first world
  standards but

 You seem to have missed this:

 Yes, it is important to explain why copyvivos are important (and from
 an academic, plagiarism point of view too) but the bigger issue if
 intellectual honesty.


 Copyright violations aren't only important from an
 academic plagiarism point of view but also legal and ethical, you seem to be
 only focusing on text based violation in Academia maybe. Commons users and
 admins spend the better part of their time educating themselves and dealing
 with these violations from different countries not because of some honesty
 issues but real legal ones.Violations more often than not, can lead to court
 cases, damages and expose the project to liability.
 I never really distinguished what Media I was referring to in regards of
 Copyright violation, in case of Video and Music, you might want to read
 different variation of DMCA, along with the take-down notices that WMF has
 already complied with located here[1]. For images, I can attest to spending
 several hundred hours talking on IRC and looking for copyright terms of
 different countries to comply with. It is something people I know take very
 seriously. I am not sure if Intellectual honesty means ethics in this
 context but I would disagree if that is what WMF and other Wikipedians would
 be concerned about, it's really the legal liability that they expose WMF and
 projects to. Maybe Hisham can clarify.


  Second, if we don't uphold the WMF policies (they are actually project
  policies, not the foundation's) in an officially sanctioned and financed
  program, then who will?

 Again, you are raising a straw-man here. I did not say do not respect
 copyrights. I said that the current actions were overblown. We might
 disagree on this but I do carry an activists perspective here and
 respect your position and what the WMF has to do to limit liability
 too.


 As I saw it, you stated that copyright violations are no big deal,
 especially in India and the more important thing is being honest
 (Intellectually) when someone plagiarizes or something to that effect.
 Correct me if I based my assumptions wrong or if this straw-man is alive.

 If you read my comment again, I never allege that you said not to respect
 copyrights. I was referring to your perception of this issue being overblown
 and not as important. I also did say, these issues are more important when
 it is the WMF at the helm conducting these programs.

 I am well aware of your position as a open-source book publisher and a
 Creative commons hero along with someone I respect, that was why I found
 your position very surprising on this issue.

 Also, Hi Hisham, Nice to see you avoided replying to my comment alone. ;)

 Theo

 [1]http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Category:DMCA
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Notices on Tamil Wikipedia

2011-09-12 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Would love to see the data - particular sitenotices to spikes in
contributions.

Gah! we haven't done a systematic recording as we werent prepared for it (we
werent sure how this thing would turn out). If you would accept
eyewitness/anecdotal impressions, the following happened: (Take with many
pinches of salt and heavy skepticism)

1) The first  if you see an error, correct it anon notice sort of doubled
anon edits. It is a small base number, so i dont think we can infer anything
statistically from this - every day about 10-15 anon edits used to happen in
Ta wiki (out of a total 600 manual non-bot edits). It increased to around
30-40  a day when this notice was up.

2) The this guy edits X, you can edit too campaign has increased the
number of editors who have made 1 edit in the past 30 days from 200-210
to 250-260

3) The nominate your article for DYK has gained five new DYK contributors
with nearly 50 new dyk nominations in three weeks. (Earlier it was a ghost
town, with only two-three of us involved in DYK maintenance).

4) Again by my impression we are suddenly seeing new persistent contributors
- not driveby's - people who stick around beyond the first experiments and
who actually ask questions and try more and more new things.  If i were to
hazard a guess, we have gained about 5 new contributors in the past month
alone who have done more than 100 edits.

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:05 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 You know, this is pretty awesome. It's an idea I hadn't even thought
 of till I read it here.

 Would love to see the data - particular sitenotices to spikes in
 contributions.

 Thank you.

 Best,

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




 On 12 September 2011 16:38, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.com
 wrote:
  Hello all,
  Untill July, Site notice in Tamil Wikpedia used to give only prominent
 links
  to Fonts / typing tutorial / Village pump. Occasionally when
  meet-ups/workshops happen, we would announce them. We thought to put this
  system into good use and we are already seeing positive results.
 
  Starting July we introduced Please correct errors, you too can edit.
 There
  was a significant jump in anonymous edits in the weeks that followed.
 After
  discussions, we planned to showcase faces of Tamil Wikipedia.
  The idea was to put a notice featuring a picture, brief profile on
 editing
  topics and suggesting one to start creating articles[1]. The short
 profile
  showcased the diversity of editors across region / age /
 interests.Putting
  faces of Tamil Wikipedians into sitenotice was not a big effort since we
  already had profiles of people featured on main page. We just needed to
  summarize them into a couple of lines. We have got atleast 10-15 new
  contributors ( 50 edits and continuing) through this exercise. One
 editor
  who came in after this drive is editing prolificly and already has 2000
  edits now in ~ 2 months and is now being featured on the main page :) We
 had
  more new users signing up as registered users. We roll over 4-5 banners
 over
  a parser code during each campaign, so that people dont get the same
 banner
  all the time.
  Now we have separate notices for logged in / anonymous users. While
  anonymous users get Contribute campaign with faces of tamil wiki with
  Anonnotice[2], logged in users get messages about policies / help pages /
  talk pages / DYK etc with help of Sitenotice[3]. DYK nominations has seem
 a
  jump off late with 100+ entries coming in from contributors who didnt
 know
  about it after the notice. We plan to introduce policies of Wikipedia
 slowly
  through these notices, so editors who come in are aware of them. At
 present
  we lack extensive help pages, and plan to expand them as part of this
  exercise which will also improve help pages coverage in parallel.
  There was a posting related to same on the list way back in Nov / Dec
 2010
  regarding Contribute Indic campaign[4] central notices by Salmaan, We
 find
  these localized notices too work well and might be a good idea for other
  Indic wiki's to try it out.
  [1] http://defn.me/r/ta/2gav
  [2] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki:Sitenotice
  [3] http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediawiki:Anonnotice
  [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Contribute_Indic
  --
  Regards
  Srikanth.L
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] You can't copy-paste this homework

2011-09-10 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

A question - how hard is it to write a bot that runs contributions
through Google and flags it based on the degree of match and whether a
footnote exists or not?

One such bot existed called corensearchbot which used yahoo to flag
copyvios. But yahoo changed its terms of service and it had be to stopped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-09-05/Opinion_essay

last week in a conversation in jimbowales talk page in en wiki, jimmy said
he and coren were talking to google to allow this free of charge or
something and something good is to be expected in the near future (i am not
sure, i might be mangling his meaning).


On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 10 September 2011 14:51, Swaroop Rao raul.swar...@gmail.com wrote:

  The subject of the mail is a bit ironic actually ;) Anyway, I guess the
  copyvios should be ironed out once Online Ambassadors step in.

 Now that you mention it... I wonder if they were trying to be sardonic.

 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 Bala Jeyaraman

Here is the link to your presentation
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011/Submissions/Wikipedia_and_Social_Media._How_to_increase_the_utility_and_prominence_of_Wikipedia_using_Social_Media

You can edit using the edit button at the top and change the contents

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Adethya Sudarsanan
adethyas...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi,

 This is the title of my presentation.

 Wikipedia and Social Media - How to increase the utility and prominence
 of Wikipedia using Social Media

 Thanks,
 Adethya

 On 30 August 2011 20:35, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote:

 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.com wrote:

 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] 3rd Bangalore Odia Wiki Meetup- Odia Wikipedia reaches 1500 articles

2011-08-29 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Good work subhashish,

Have you thought about organising article writing/participation contests?.
It is a good way to attract new participants.

regards
Bala

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:43 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 Thank you, Subhashish, for the report.

 Really great to see the growth of a Wikipedia once the community
 becomes active.

 Best,

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




 On 29 August 2011 14:41, 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 Wikipedia and in the 3rd
  Bangalore Wikipedia Meetup we have celebrated 1500 articles.
 
  Projects:
  Discussion regarding 2 ongoing projects.
  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 and 37 images in Commons.
 
  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] Online Volunteers needed for India Loves Wikipedia - Outreach

2011-08-28 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi Gautam,

I have uploaded eight India impressions 2011 images correctly tagged in
flickr to commons. The related  category is
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:India_Impressions_2011

Will upload the rest, once the licences change to CC

regards
Bala

On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 28 August 2011 10:56, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote:

  Unfortunately most of the indiaimpressions2011 images are not tagged CC
 BY
  SA. Cant upload them from flickr to commons as the review bot will reject
  and delete them. I will upload the few that are tagged correctly, but the
  rest have to be changed by the uploaders.

 I'll pass on the word, Bala.

 Thank you.

 Best,

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

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Online Volunteers needed for India Loves Wikipedia - Outreach

2011-08-27 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi,

I am already doing this for India loves wikimedia using Bryan's Flickr to
Commons tool (http://toolserver.org/~bryan/flickr/upload) - It is one of
the easy ways to transfer flickr images to commons using the flickr upload
bot. I have identified a few photo streams which are CC BY SA compatible and
uploading them (after checking they are not already in commons).

If you come across any photostreams that have been uploaded to flickr as
part of India loves wikimedia, please let me know and i will start the
uploading.



On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Tanvir Rahman wikitan...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hello,

 I think this is a place I can offer my help although I am not related to
 the India chapter or anything related to it. But as a Commons administrator
 and OTRS memeber [1], I hope I am eligible for this job. I am usually
 willing to help whenever I can.

 Regards,
 Tanvir Rahman
 Wikitanvir on Wikimedia

 [1]
 http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUserslimit=1username=Wikitanvir

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Online Volunteers needed for India Loves Wikipedia - Outreach

2011-08-27 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Gautam,
Unfortunately most of the indiaimpressions2011 images are not tagged CC BY
SA. Cant upload them from flickr to commons as the review bot will reject
and delete them. I will upload the few that are tagged correctly, but the
rest have to be changed by the uploaders.

regards
Bala

On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 10:20 AM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 28 August 2011 10:17, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote:

  If you come across any photostreams that have been uploaded to flickr as
  part of India loves wikimedia, please let me know and i will start the
  uploading.

 http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=indiaimpressions2011

 They are supposed to be under a CC-BY-SA license.

 http://takshashila.org.in/events/india-impressions-photography-competition/india-impressions-photography-competition-rules/

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Translation Help for WikiConference India

2011-07-20 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

I can help with the tamil translation. let me know where to do the
localisation/translation.

regards
Bala

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:45 PM, wheredevelsd...@hotmail.com wrote:

  **Kindly forward this to other language/city lists that you are a part
 of**


 Just to follow up, we have received offer for help with translation to
 Hindi, Telegu, Sanskrit and Kannada thus far. We still need help with all
 the other indic languages and request volunteers to come forward. Kindly
 contact Theo or myself privately if you can help.

 Kind Regards,

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Translation Help for WikiConference India

2011-07-20 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Glad to be of help (coudnt resist as the subject was very interesting). I
will start work on updating the ta wiki article using the expanded en wiki
version. I smell a potential main page article for ta wiki :-)



On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 8:40 PM, Fae fae...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi,

 The Tipu's Tiger English article is at
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipu's_Tiger. A Bengali version would be
 fantastic.

 It is currently in 13 different languages which you can see listed in the
 languages side-bar. As this is the key case study for the VA we would love
 to have as many languages as possible and some of the current stub class
 language variations double checked for accuracy, for example Welsh needs
 some help. The English version is currently nominated for a DYK and has an
 outstanding GA nomination (strong hint to :en regulars).

 Cheers,
 Fae
 --
 http://enwp.org/user_talk:fae
 Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/faetags


 On 20 July 2011 15:35, Jayanta Nath jayanta...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi
 Please give me the link, I want to translate in Bengali


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Free surf Wikipedia on MTS MBlaze ?

2011-07-04 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

only for content coming from en.wikipedia.org. If there are commons images
downloading they are chargeable :-)

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 6:06 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 Is this true?
 Free surf Wikipedia on MTS MBlaze ?

 http://www.telecompaper.com/news/mts-india-offers-mblaze-in-eight-additional-karnataka-towns
 Wish we could convince other Internet service providers too.

 Regards
 Tinu Cherian

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Google's Indic Wikipedia translation project closing down

2011-06-21 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Great, now in ta wiki we are stuck with the task of correcting a 1000 crappy
large articles. No wonder they showed little interest in correcting or copy
editing and always wanted to push for more new articles. They must have had
an internal target of X words or so for gaining experience for the machines.
Once that was done they have closed up shop.

You can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent
and include many more untranslated words

If this is the officially admitted state of an alpha release, imagine the
quality of the articles this project created using beta versions.
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Delhi Chapter

2011-06-05 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

.As of now we Observed that whole Wikimedia and Chapter Activities are
Concentrated towards South India

I dont get how Delhi wikimedians got this impression. From what i can see,
the chapter is still taking its baby steps and hasn't done anything in
particular. Only after the chapter starts functioning in full gear, we can
judge whether it is biased toward one region.Saying it has a south bias is
premature.

You are conflating the work of South Indian wikimedians who are associated
with the chapter (or are just active in india mailing list) with the chapter
itself. I say, be patient,give the chapter time to function and then judge
its actions.

-
Bala
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Delhi Chapter

2011-06-05 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 10:02 AM, sankarshan foss.mailingli...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com
 wrote:

  I dont get how Delhi wikimedians got this impression.

 Perhaps using the phrases Wikimedians in Delhi, as opposed to Delhi
 Wikimedians would be a good start.

  ok will do so in the future.


 --
 sankarshan mukhopadhyay
 http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Regarding Postage Stamps upload in Commons

2011-04-28 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi Subhashish,

Stamps are Indian govt works and retain copyright for 60 years after issual.
So image of any stamp issued after 1951 cannot be uploaded to commons. It
should be uploaded to the local wiki with a fair use rationale. (and under
fairuse, a stamp cannot be used to identify the subject like a infobox
picture, it can only illustrate the fact that a stamp was issued on the
subject and the line should be in the text for that to happen)

regards
Bala

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 4:08 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?

 *
 ସୁଭପାSubhashishPanigrahi
 ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Regarding Postage Stamps upload in Commons

2011-04-28 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Yes it applies to coins as well. Anything from  pre 1951 India is in PD.
Anything post 1951, GOI has the copyright.

But even for old coins, if you take a photo of a single coin you cant claim
copyright and add a CC SA 3.0 license (its like taking a photo of a old
painting and claiming copyright). it has to be added with a PD licence.

But i believe if you take a photo of an arrangement of coins (two and more),
it becomes a  new creative work and you can claim copyright as the
photographer (i am not sure on this, just recollecting what i read in old
deletion discussions in en wiki and commons). Please confirm with editors
like moonriddengirl in en wiki (who are much more familiar with tricky
situations like this)

-
Bala

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
rsrikant...@gmail.com wrote:

 Bala,
 I had a question.
 Does this apply to Coin as well?
 I have a bunch of coins of 1862, 1900, 1907, 1919, 1941, and one of Post
 Independence.
 I want to know if this is a problem.
 Also, can I licence it under the standard Creative 
 Commonshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Creative_Commons Attribution-Share
 Alike 3.0 Unported http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en,
 which I use for all my photographs?
 --Regards,
 Srikanth Ramakrishnan


 On 28 April 2011 21:16, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote:

 The date of issual needs to be mentioned in the summary. Rest looks fine.

 On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 5:29 PM, Subhashish Panigrahi 
 psubhash...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks a lot for the info.

 Here are the two pics. 
 *1http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stamp_on_Madhu_babu_%28Madhusudan_Das%29.jpg
 *and 
 *2*http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madhu_babu_%28Madhusudan_Das%29.jpg
 If there is any issue with the license and other details pls help me.

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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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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] 1 user. 20 hours. 300 articles

2011-04-28 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

I would like to add, that the user in question, asked the community's views
(well in advance), that if it was ok to undertake such an effort. And there
were other editors (including me), constantly checking, proofing,
recategorising and maintaining the articles created. This was no slapdash
effort. As the articles concerned were start class, we were able to monitor
them easily. At least seven persons were involved in this effort - this was
no slap dash mass article creation spree.

It was a community effort and the tamil wiki community (which is very
conservative when it comes to article size and bulk creation) was
unanimously behind this effort. I dont know whether we will be able to
duplicate it again, but we will certainly be encouraging such cooperative
work in the future.

-
Bala

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 10:08 PM, Holalkere Laxmivenkatesh 
hrl.venkat...@gmail.com wrote:

 Creating 300 articles in 3 weeks... such news should make us
 to introspect ; surely should not be encouraged !

 Once the news used be like this.  Dr. Modi performed many eye
 operations ... In my opinion although Dr. Modi was a great eye surgeon, and
 a great soul-still as for the Eye Operations are concerned he might have not
 made justice to his profession. This job is not like crushing sugar cane
 crop !

 The above views are mine. I don't care whether any one agrees or not !
 -Venkatesh

 On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 9:51 PM, Ravishankar ravidre...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi,

 Tamil Wikipedia added another 1,000+ articles in the last 3 weeks.

 Behind this is a remarkable story of 1 user who created 300 articles
 organically in 20 hours.

 P.M.Puniyameen ( http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:P.M.Puniyameen ) from
 Srilanka is a retired academician, prolific writer and independent
 journalist. He started contributing to Tamil Wikipedia from November 2010.
 In the short span of 5 months he has added 2000+ articles.

 He set himself a target creating 200 articles on 20th April but ended up
 creating 300 articles in 20 hours. He was helped by his wife, daughter and
 two colleagues in typing the articles which were mainly info based articles
 on cricketers, small magazines. Earlier, he even created articles from his
 bed when he was in a medical rest.

 Thought of sharing this story as it is inspiring to see people working
 with so much dedication, mobilising people and resources for Wikipedia.

 Regards,

 Ravi

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Toolserver has its Internationalisation

2011-04-07 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

X!'s edit counter is a very useful tool (and nice to look at).  Tamil
wikipedia has started using X!'s edit counter like en wikipedia does - a
footer is present in all user contribution pages listing links to X! /
Soxred's edit counter / pages created counter. (haven't translated/localised
it yet though)

regards
Bala


On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan rsrikant...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Dear Gerard,
 X!'s  edit counter is an edit counter [HOSTED on the Toolserver], that we
 use to check our number of edits.
 http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/
 Maybe you can read thru it and understand why some people care about it.
 Regards,


 On 7 April 2011 17:42, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hoi,
 While it seems nice that something is localised somewhere, it is the lack
 of a common infrastructure that makes the Toolserver in many respects quite
 awful. In many respects Toolserver tools do not survive one of the open
 smell tests; is it possible to see the code and is it possible to submit a
 patch and get it implemented.

 For many of the Toolserver tools there is no shared repository.
 Effectively this denies the possibility of best practices. The relevance of
 the new Toolserver internationalisation is that any tool worth its salt is
 welcome and with an almost daily update of localisations its use will be
 improved.

 Srikanth, it is not even clear from your message what the X! edit counter
 is, why we should care. I am quite happy to blog about it once best
 practices are established.
 Thanks,
   GerardM


 On 7 April 2011 12:50, Srikanth Ramakrishnan rsrikant...@gmail.comwrote:

 Just to inform you guys that translation for X!'s edit counter is being
 done on En.wikipedia.org
 Regards,

 On 6 April 2011 20:53, Tanvir Rahman wikitan...@gmail.com wrote:

 Great step indeed. Many thanks to Krinkle. Toolserver tools are being
 used frequently. And I would like to announce that Bengali is the first
 sub-continental language to complete the translation 100%. :D

 On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 04:05, Gerard Meijssen 
 gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hoi,
 I am really happy to announce that the first Toolserver tools can now
 be localised at translatewiki.net. Thanks to the hard work of Krinkle
 the first tools make use of the Intuition messaging framework. People 
 who
 know Toolserver, will know that there are many useful tools that help
 understand, manage, experience Wikimedia projects.

 With these first Toolserver tools available now for a few hours, the
 first localisations have been added and the first languages have already
 complete localisations at twn. The messages will become available at least
 at the same rate as the MediaWiki messages (typically every day) so
 localisation is an extremely effective way of making Toolserver an
 environment that is accessible to people who speak your language.
 Thanks,
   GerardM

 https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Toolserver
 http://toolserver.org/~krinkle/TsIntuition/#tab-about

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[Wikimediaindia-l] 1 million edits in Hindi wikipedia !

2011-03-29 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hindi wikipedia has reached 1 million (10 lakh) page edits some time in the
past week, becoming the second indic language to reach that mile stone
(malayalam made it first on January 22)

Congratulations to all Hindi wikipedians

regards
Bala
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[Wikimediaindia-l] A tale of two workshops

2011-03-07 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AA%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%AA%E0%AF%80%E0%AE%9F%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AF%E0%AE%BE:%E0%AE%AE%E0%AE%BE%E0%AE%B0%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%9A%E0%AF%8D_5,_2011_%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AA%E0%AF%8D_%E0%AE%AA%E0%AE%9F%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%9F%E0%AE%B1%E0%AF%88_%E0%AE%AA%E0%AF%81%E0%AE%A4%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%A9%E0%AE%BE%E0%AE%AE%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%AA%E0%AE%9F%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%9F%E0%AE%BF

What i took away from these two workshops is this - urban students have more
exposure to internet, but (as is the norm) distracts them from doing
anything productive. Rural students haven't been corrupted yet by social
media and other shiny things, but are very very shy in coming forward to do
new things.

regards
Bala Jeyaraman
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] (OT) On the importance of Unicode

2011-02-23 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

On input methods - is there anything of a best practice or even a
Government notification about an input standard?

In Tamil Nadu, the govt recommends and endorses the Tamil 99 keyboard
layout.

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:12 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.comwrote:

 Even though Central Government has adopted Unicode as the encoding
 standard, the case is not the same with most State Governments. As far as I
 know only few state goverments (Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Kerala,...) had adopted
 Unicode standard. Many are still in the ASCII era.

 On input methods - is there anything of a best practice or even a

 Government notification about an input standard?


 I haven't seen any notification regarding this yet. But InScript is
 officially/unofficially adopted as the default input scheme. That is why it
 is part school syllabus in some states.



 On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 9:54 AM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 Two things I meant to add:

 1. The eGov standards body for India has recently notified Unicode
 5.1.0 as the default standard for all eGov applications henceforth.
 (Sadly, their website is DoA - http://egovstandards.gov.in/) I am
 hopeful that this will be the start of some initiative within
 Government and would, hopefully, spread.

 A cache of their Approach Paper on Localization is here:


 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e28QCFBDI-cJ:egovstandards.gov.in/standards_localisation_app+india+egov+standards+unicodecd=2hl=enct=clnkgl=insource=www.google.co.in

 And a cache their Character Encoding Standard For Indian Languages is
 here:


 http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=vq=cache:dYxnM6D7IMQJ:egovstandards.gov.in/egscontent.2009-12-29.6248244073/at_download/file+india+egov+standards+unicodehl=engl=inpid=blsrcid=ADGEESgxDT6JyHRlgWfR2TKYHKRGeAM5PigxzZAPyo2M1d6rxGnOC3sQ0S5XVDVVvPL_t5ZKmui0ghMMO63q2hZMT_WeJq0WH5FnEFYFioh7EZ_Uzj8XPnvVMatGZ4vO9kv6RXJZM56esig=AHIEtbQnDd2Gy29vyy97FnvAw2g4hN3cqQ

 2. On input methods - is there anything of a best practice or even a
 Government notification about an input standard?

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://social.prathambooks.org/

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikimedia.IN the news - Mumbai Hindustan Times, 13th Feb 2011

2011-02-16 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

a minor goofup

That would be the photo caption, which sends sundar all over Kerala :-)

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 7:51 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 I posted a text version of the article earlier.

 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-February/002194.html

 ( I couldnt share the pdf version in public, the reporter sent me)

 Btw I did spent quite a time with the reporter educating about Wikimedia/
 Wikipedia in India and a photo shoot in Bangalore :)

 Apart from a minor goofup ( find it ;) ) , the article came out reasonably
 very well.

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

 On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Gautam John gau...@prathambooks.orgwrote:

 On 16 February 2011 14:15, Nikhil Sheth nikhil...@gmail.com wrote:

 
 http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/PUBLICATIONS/HT/HM/2011/02/13/ArticleHtmls/BEHIND-THE-SCENES-AT-WIKIPEDIAIN-13022011018002.shtml?Mode=1

 Nikhil, thanks much for posting this. I must say it's one of the
 better articles I have seen written and what's nice is that it has a
 good pan-India overview.

 The last 18 - 24 months have been quite something, what with the sheer
 quantum of press coverage.

 Thank you.

 Best,

 Gautam
 
 http://social.prathambooks.org/

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[Wikimediaindia-l] India map and indian laws

2011-02-13 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Hi all,

There is a discussion going on at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:India#Map

about compliance to indian laws about representation of India in maps.
According to Indian law it is illegal to show a map that differs from the
official map (which includes, Pakistan controlled Kashmir and the Aksai
Chin).  An editor has raised the concern that using the current map (which
shows only areas administered and not areas claimed) is exposing Indian
editors to legal liabilities and prosecution.

Since the Indian govt has successfully forced organisations like Google and
National geographic to show the official map previously and now the
foundation has plans for an India office, shouldn't this issue be considered
seriously? Should we contacting the foundation legal office about this?

regards
Bala
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Moderation policy on WikimediaIndia-l

2011-02-13 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

I think Bala misread that mail. Somebody asked me to share any Idea
which chapter can run, I said many images originated from India deleted
in commons because there is no proper source or license for many images.
And if we've proper agreement with any museum or art gallery (most of
them are under central or state govts) like Tropenmuseum project, that
will be useful. Once chapter initiate such process, I am sure interested
people will join and take hold.

Oops. sorry about that :-).  I misunderstood that you were asking for
intervention in deletion discussions. My bad.

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 11:30 AM, praveenp me.prav...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi,


 On Monday 14 February 2011 09:23 AM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote:
  Hari,
 
  As the situation has worsened to the levels that EC is now been
  accused of being here for swindling money (auctioning off
  membership) and selective moderation in the mailing list (unfairly in
  both counts IMO), please be blunt and do clear the air without
  niceties. The basic questions raised about EC are the following:

 Actioning off membership is a satiric or exaggerated reply to the mail
 which has an entirely non-related subject (bank account) from original
 thread.

 
  1) Why was the election held without informing others of the agenda
  (the EC answered that it was a required step to formalise the
  organisation per registration rules, )
 
  2) Why was the delay in communication about the 22 Jan meeting (the EC
  answered that as a formal org now, they cannot issue communiques
  without first having the paperwork in place)

 More than that, why no mentioning about Jan 22 meeting and about new
 names in the thread which discussing chapter's transparency (Jan last
 week). I believe chapter do not need to wait until finishing paperwork
 for sharing information with community.

  3) Why were the leadership designations changed among the  EC members.
  (This hasnt been answered as far as i know)
 
  4) Why was Praveen's mail moderated ( clearly answered; because it got
  caught in the spam filters due to an embedded HTML)
 
 
  I am pretty much satisfied with 1, 2 and 4. But 3 hasnt been answered
  and people are now accusing you of being a sekret cabal. I am a new
  member to the list and as someone uninvolved, my humble suggestions to
  clear the air are:
 
  1) Answer no 3 and any other questions people have been asking
  2) Bluntly define the chapter's role - not the MoA/constitution etc
  (people are under the impression that the chapter can get involved in
  deletion discussions in commons)

 I think Bala misread that mail. Somebody asked me to share any Idea
 which chapter can run, I said many images originated from India deleted
 in commons because there is no proper source or license for many images.
 And if we've proper agreement with any museum or art gallery (most of
 them are under central or state govts) like Tropenmuseum project, that
 will be useful. Once chapter initiate such process, I am sure interested
 people will join and take hold.

  3) Get some non EC moderators to the mailing list immediately to avoid
  any appearance of conflict of interest.
 
  regards
  Bala

 Praveen

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Bengali wiki in Dec 2010

2011-02-10 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Thanks Jayanta

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 2:19 PM, jayanta nath jayanta...@gmail.com wrote:

 The Bot WikitanvirBot_Ihttp://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:WikitanvirBot_I
 is redirected  (
 http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/editsummary/index.php?name=WikitanvirBot+Ilang=bnwiki=wikipediahttp://toolserver.org/%7Esoxred93/editsummary/index.php?name=WikitanvirBot+Ilang=bnwiki=wikipedia)
 on December 2010.

 On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 12:14 PM, BalaSundaraRaman 
 sundarbe...@yahoo.comwrote:

 Indicates some heavy maintenance activity. One indicator is that there's
 231% growth in the number of redirects.

 - 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:* Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com
 *To:* Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia. 
 wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 *Sent:* Thu, February 10, 2011 10:58:51 AM
 *Subject:* [Wikimediaindia-l] Bengali wiki in Dec 2010

 I was going through the monthly statistics and found Bengali wiki has had
 114k edits in December!. New articles number has remained steady but the
 edits have spiked 7 times in that month.

 http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaBN.htm

 I am curious. Was there some sort of automated cleanup going on? Can
 Bengali wiki editors enlighten me.

 regards
 Bala


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 Facebook :http://www.facebook.com/jayantanth
 Wikipedia :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jayantanth
 আসুন পাইরেসি মুক্ত ভারত  গড়ি,সবাই মুক্ত সফ্‌টওয়ার ব্যবহার করি [image:
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Bengali wiki in Dec 2010

2011-02-10 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Thanks Tanvir for the detailed explanation. To clarify, i didn't have any
concerns, i was merely curious about the nature of the increased edits as a
7 fold increase isn't something we usually see.

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 3:29 PM, Tanvir Rahman wikitan...@gmail.com wrote:

Hello, I'm the operator of that bot. So, I've something to say on this
concerns. That bot only made redirects. Bengali needs third party keyboard
support to write, also there are keyboard variations. So, in many cases most
of our readers can't write in Bengali while they can see. So, to help our
readers, we decided to make redirects in English titles to the existing
Bengali articles. In an article, the bot looked to the enwiki interwiki link
and made a page on Bengali Wikipedia of that title and redirected that page
to the existing Bengali article. But I know, it supposed to be around 22,000
redirects if I ran the bot like this. But there are questions. I hope you
all know, every articles have different titles to be searched (case
sensitivity, also other names, misspelled names..). For example,
Rabindranath Tagore can be searched as Rabindranath Thakur, Rabindra Nath
Tagore, Rabindra Nath Thakur, Rabithakur, Robithakur.. as so on. It
will take a long time to be done by human. So once, my bot found the en
interwiki, it searched for the existing redirects of that enwiki articles
(since enwiki is far more advanced in this case), and made redirects of that
titles too. In this way readers can be guided to their desired articles
easily. Personally I think redirects are not evil. Even enwiki articles also
have millions of redirects.

Thanks for your understanding.

Regards,

Tanvir Rahman

[[User:Wikitanvir]]
On all Wikimedia projects
[[m:User:Wikitanvir]]
For Wikimedia site matrix

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote:

Thanks Jayanta

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 2:19 PM, jayanta nath jayanta...@gmail.comwrote:

The Bot WikitanvirBot_Ihttp://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:WikitanvirBot_I
is redirected (
http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/editsummary/index.php?name=WikitanvirBot+Ilang=bnwiki=wikipediahttp://toolserver.org/%7Esoxred93/editsummary/index.php?name=WikitanvirBot+Ilang=bnwiki=wikipedia)
on December 2010.

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 12:14 PM, BalaSundaraRaman
sundarbe...@yahoo.com wrote:

Indicates some heavy maintenance activity. One indicator is that there's
231% growth in the number of redirects.

- 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:* Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com
*To:* Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia.
wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
*Sent:* Thu, February 10, 2011 10:58:51 AM
*Subject:* [Wikimediaindia-l] Bengali wiki in Dec 2010

I was going through the monthly statistics and found Bengali wiki has
had 114k edits in December!. New articles number has remained steady but
the
edits have spiked 7 times in that month.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaBN.htm

I am curious. Was there some sort of automated cleanup going on? Can
Bengali wiki editors enlighten me.

regards
Bala

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+91 9836294438
Facebook :http://www.facebook.com/jayantanth
Wikipedia :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jayantanth
আসুন পাইরেসি মুক্ত ভারত গড়ি,সবাই মুক্ত সফ্‌টওয়ার ব্যবহার করি [image:
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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikibasha and code signature

2011-02-07 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Siebrand,

Thank you for the prompt reply . I will file a CR in bugzilla. But under
what topic should i file one? (I don't find Wikibasha listed seperately in
the pick a product to enter a bug page).

And regarding the highly disruptive comment, imagine if everyone (bots and
editors) start doing this. We have had a lot of automated tools before and
none do this signing. If a human editor did the same thing, it will be
considered spamming at worst and insensitive at best. If a bot did it, its
botflag will be removed immediately. I was irritated because the MS
representative Ta wiki people spoke to at the workshop claimed this was a
minor thing.

Tinu,

Thanks for the tip. I did share the concerns directly (with the microsoft
representative) and indirectly (through an edit summary reverting the code
addition in the articles). I will ask Arun for wikibasha contact.




On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 3:20 PM, Siebrand Mazeland s.mazel...@xs4all.nlwrote:

 Hi. Recently i have started contracting for Microsoft Research to be a
 community liason with regards to Wikibhasha.

 I understand your concerns, although I disagree that adding a comment on a
 page after an edit should be considered highly disruptive.

 Please create a change request in bugzilla.wikimedia.org to change the
 inline text comment to some identification in the edit summary. The
 Wikibhasha team at Microsoft research India will take all input very
 seriously.

 Siebrand Mazeland
 M: +31 6 50 69 1239
 Skype: siebrand

 On 7 feb. 2011, at 09:26, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote:

 But i have no idea if Microsoft will actually listen to us.


 If wikibasha is used in your respective wiki's and keeps adding this
 signature, please urge the wikibasha developers to stop this practice.



 It all depends on how active the respective wiki community is. If the
 language wikis have an active community and strong policies then corportaes
 like Google or Microsoft can not overrule that.






 On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 8:16 AM, Bala Jeyaraman  sodabot...@gmail.com
 sodabot...@gmail.com wrote:

 Microsoft's translation tool Wikibasha creates a code snippet like this -
 !-- WikiBhasha v=1 time=2011-2-6:11:20:20:309-- at the bottom of the
 article everytime it is used to edit wikipedia pages. I found this out when
 the MS representative made sample edits to Tamil wikipedia. He claims that
 they need this to track the edits made using wikibasha.

 I believe this practice is highly disruptive because, adding such a
 signature to the bottom of the article is
 a)tantamount to claiming that the entire article is the work of wikibasha
 b) If we allow this practice, then all automated tools will start adding
 their code snippets, bloating the page with useless code signatures.


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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Wikibasha and code signature

2011-02-07 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

I have created the bug report
 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27220

The person it is assigned to now - wikibasha.msr-  is the same person who
brushed it off as a minor issue on Feb 6. :-)

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Siebrand Mazeland s.mazel...@xs4all.nlwrote:

 Wikibhasha should have an entry in the mediawiki extensions category.

 Siebrand Mazeland
 M: +31 6 50 69 1239
 Skype: siebrand

 On 7 feb. 2011, at 11:27, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.com wrote:

  Thank you for the prompt reply . I will file a CR in bugzilla. But under
 what topic should i file one? (I don't find Wikibasha listed seperately in
 the pick a product to enter a bug page).
 
  And regarding the highly disruptive comment, imagine if everyone (bots
 and editors) start doing this. We have had a lot of automated tools before
 and none do this signing. If a human editor did the same thing, it will be
 considered spamming at worst and insensitive at best. If a bot did it, its
 botflag will be removed immediately. I was irritated because the MS
 representative Ta wiki people spoke to at the workshop claimed this was a
 minor thing.
 

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Communication from the Executive Committee regarding first meeting

2011-02-06 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

I too get the same impression as Salmaan - this election is the
formalisation of existing executive members after the registration was
completed. But i do see the designations have changed per the diff here -
http://wikimedia.in/index.php?title=Executive_Committee_Membersaction=historysubmitdiff=1767oldid=1599

Can someone enlighten me when the last election was held? and how long have
the current exec council members have been exec members. The memorandum of
association states the election is to be an annual one, but the memorandum
page in wikimedia.in itself was created only on April 2010. (I am new to the
list and am just curious).

regards
Bala
On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 12:11 AM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote:

Ahh, wasn't the chapter registered less than a month ago Tinu? I don't know
more than half the people from the chapter but I think you're being
awfully presumptuous in claiming that the executive members keep electing
each other. I thought this was the founding group, the registered entity
has been around for less than a month, right or did I miss something?

Regards

Salmaan
User:Theo10011

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 12:04 AM, jayanta nath jayanta...@gmail.comwrote:

* 7 executive members keep electing each other, each time *

Nice observation from Tinu. My observation and comment is same as
below.

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 11:43 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:

Hearty congratulations to Arjuna Rao , Hari Prasad Anirudh Bhati as the
new office bearers of the Wikimedia India chapter. Well deserved best
wishes for the future.

Having said that, this unexpected announcement leaves me with
several unanswered questions. This has to do nothing with any doubts on
the calibre , integrity abilities of new office bearers or the rest of the
committee members. I still personally share a very close cordial relations
with all of the exec comn members, but that doesn't prevent me from asking
lots of questions and concerns as an ordinary Wikimedian like me and it may
be possibly shared by several others in this list.

a) If there was to be a change of the office bearers of the chapter (
decided) on the Jan 22 Exec Comm meeting, why wasn't it announced publicly?
Was there an agenda of election of new office bearers for this meeting or
just happened as a co-incidence ? What were the other decisions taken on
that meeting ? Is there a publicly available minutes of meeting ?

b) How were the new office bearers elected ? Was there an election ? Did
the previous office bearers voluntarily resign and called for a new
election? Was there a vote ? If there was a vote, will it be publicly
shared? What was the need of change of office bearers within few months of
chapter approval or one month of chapter registration ? I thought the term
of the executive committee members and the office bearers was for two years.

I am sorry but I have to say this , IMHO it is not an ethical
and transparent process if the 7 executive members keep electing each other,
each time

c) There were several discussions on this mailing list on the chapter on
Jan 30 th , 2011 [1] [2] ( after the so called meeting) and had mentions of
the current office bearers and none of the executive com members even
bothered to clarify. I remember at least two of the exec members replying to
those threads then.

d) So the new office bearers' elections happened on Jan 22 , 2011 ? And I
wonder what took the chapter several weeks to announce , such a important
change publicly ? Remember this new election happened even without a
publicly announced agenda, before the meeting. How many such elections can
we expect during the current term of the committee?

We already had lots of concerns shared by the community for the lack
of transparency by the chapter and these kinds of things will only underline
them.

If this is the way the chapter intends to operate, I am deeply concerned
and worried about its future.

Regards
Tinu Cherian

N.B.
a) To clarify, I don't intend to run for any office positions for the
chapter. But I may have to even think twice to be part of a body which
clearly intends to work without any proper transparency and works
disconnected from the community, which it supposedly represents.

b) I have always supported the chapter previously in the several
discussions earlier, but this announcement put me really worried and hence
this mail. Anyways, my best wishes again for the new office bearers and the
chapter. Hoping the see more transparent and candid efforts from the chapter
in future.

[1]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-January/001891.html

[2]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-February/001935.html

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 7:23 PM, BalaSundaraRaman
sundarbe...@yahoo.comwrote:

Dear all,

Following the registration of the Wikimedia Chapter, the first meeting
of the Executive

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press] :The Hindu : Konkani Wikipedia bogged down by multiple scripts

2011-02-06 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

which script is being used now? devanagari or kannada?

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:35 AM, CherianTinu Abraham
tinucher...@gmail.comwrote:

 The Hindu : Konkani Wikipedia bogged down by multiple scripts

 http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article1141587.ece


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



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[Wikimediaindia-l] Wikibasha and code signature

2011-02-06 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

Microsoft's translation tool Wikibasha creates a code snippet like this -
!-- WikiBhasha v=1 time=2011-2-6:11:20:20:309-- at the bottom of the
article everytime it is used to edit wikipedia pages. I found this out when
the MS representative made sample edits to Tamil wikipedia. He claims that
they need this to track the edits made using wikibasha.

I believe this practice is highly disruptive because, adding such a
signature to the bottom of the article is
a)tantamount to claiming that the entire article is the work of wikibasha
b) If we allow this practice, then all automated tools will start adding
their code snippets, bloating the page with useless code signatures.

wikipedians who took part in yesterday's carte blanche wiki workshop at
chennai have conveyed this to the representative and have recommended using
the tag in edit summaries instead. But i have no idea if Microsoft will
actually listen to us.

I thought i would inform the wider indic wiki communities regarding this. If
wikibasha is used in your respective wiki's and keeps adding this signature,
please urge the wikibasha developers to stop this practice.

regards
Bala


On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Anoop anoop@gmail.com wrote:

 Almost similar issue with Tulu language also.

 http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/tcy


 On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabot...@gmail.comwrote:

 which script is being used now? devanagari or kannada?

 On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:35 AM, CherianTinu Abraham 
 tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:

 The Hindu : Konkani Wikipedia bogged down by multiple scripts

 http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article1141587.ece


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



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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Google Translation on Indian language Wikipedias Paid editing

2011-02-03 Thread Bala Jeyaraman

In Tamil wikipedia, Google translated articles number 1,240 (barring one or
two which we might have forgotten to tag). This translates to roughly 4.4 %
of the total articles in Ta. wiki. Also about 100 or so of the translated
articles already had stubs/fair sized articles, before google translators
overwrote them.

 Creation of new google articles stopped on August 15, 2010 because of
quality concerns. After an extensive quality review process we reached a
deal with google. In this second phase - we picked the translators and the
topics to be translated. They are done in the translator's user space and
moved to article space only after review by tamil wikipedians. So far 25
such articles have been translated and are waiting in the userspace for the
review to be completed.

Regarding the paid vs non-paid issue, this is one of the major bones of
contention in Ta Wiki. Volunteers get frustrated because paid translators
turn in shoddy work and repeated attempts to train them went nowhere. Now we
have limited the number of new google articles to something we think we can
manage. (25 in the past six months). But the quality still isn't something
what i would call a professional translation. I personally have no great
hopes for this project. It is a distraction and saps valuable volunteer time
and effort which is better spent somewhere else in wikipedia. (personal
opinion, not ta wiki consensus)

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 12:38 PM, sankarshan foss.mailingli...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 12:31 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
 tinucher...@gmail.com wrote:

  Why should regular Wikipedians be motivated to contribute when Google
 pays
  to do the same ?

 Reminds me, in a tangential way, of
 http://stormyscorner.com/would-you-do-it-again-for-free

 --
 sankarshan mukhopadhyay
 http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog

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