Author Archives: noopur28

Wikimania 2012: India – Nepal community meet up!

Posted on by

Wikimania is the annual conference for all Wikipedians across the globe! Every year hundreds of participants from different countries come together to deliver talks, presentations and discuss the Wiki projects they contribute to. Wikimania 2012 was held in Washington D.C and was attended by 1,400 people approximately. You can read more about it here.

While at Wikimania, we all had a small India – Nepal team meet up. Here is a brief summary of what we discussed. All the Indian and Nepali Wikimedians were enthusiastically gathered by Malayalee Wikipedian Viswa Prabha in the ballroom.

Wikimania community meet up at the Ballroom

Since it was an informal meet up, we had the opportunity to discuss anything and everything! It was awesome to see Wikipedians of all ages, from various places in India and Nepal, all coming together to discuss the stuff they were doing! Actually, the first team meet happened on the plane itself – somewhere above Russia!

From mobile to Indic languages, GLAM, outreach in states of India, OCR for Indian languages to some ideas that could make communication between communities and entities easier as well as IEP, we truly learned the best practices that have been tried and tested by fellow community members.

OCR for Indic languages:
Kul, Viswa Prabha, Dr Rajasekhar and Ganesh from the Nepali community had discussions on whether OCR could be integrated and functional for Indic language Wikiprojects since that would make the work a lot easier for many editors. Viswa Prabha is currently working on something and his energy is really infectious!
Anyone interested can take lead for their communities as well. This would also help the Malayalam education program in its next phase to get more student editors on Wikisource.

Reviving Offline/CD project:
Harriet, who has been involved with OLPC was also present and asked questions about the offline/CD initiative and whether the project had an India specific section. It was suggested that although there is no scalable tech solution to filter content appropriate for children depending on their age groups, it could be done manually depending on the age group we’re looking at.

Announcement page:
By this time we all agreed that there are so many small and big projects are happening across communities! Bishakha suggested there should be a more central place to list out new announcements and more importantly contact details of people who can help out with various activities. This could be done on Meta ideally.

Wikimedian Viswa Prabha at the meet up!

Using social media to keep vandals at bay!
There was a brief discussion on how social media can be utilized more effectively. Viswa Prabha weighed in saying how these social network platforms could be avenues to deal with vandalism as well as diverse discussions while keeping Wikipedia related discussions focused on talk pages.

GLAM national coordinator:
Wikimania had a panel discussion on GLAM coordinators following which it was also discussed whether India community or chapter should have such a position in order to guide and coordinate and help out new folks who want to start GLAM projects. Similarly, for WLM or such photo events, I do recall there being a talk for valid press cards that could be given to SIGs to help folks out in case of police trouble.

Outreach:

Last but not the least, Yuvi suggested how hackathons could be an excellent way of outreach (citing the Bangalore and Chennai examples). Nitika also gave an update on the British Council Wikiclubs. User:Rangilo_Gujarati who was also present there has volunteered to help with the British Council in Pune.

It was heartbreaking to see that a lot of our fellow members could not make it due to visa problems but hopefully, we’ll have bigger meetups soon!  A special mention to Viswa Prabha for winning the Raffles! Let us hope that these ideas and problems discussed at the team meet help us solve them and start newer, bigger projects!

 

Kerala hosts WikiSangamolsavam: first Indic Wikiconference!

Posted on by

Of the 20 Indic language Wikipedia projects, the Malayalam Wikipedia (ml.wikipedia.org) is one of the most vibrant. With about 35 million Malayalam speakers, it is the biggest Indic language community with over 100 Wikipedians. The latest feather in their cap is the recently concluded WikiSangamolsavam conference on April 28-29, 2012. WikiSangamolsavam, a two day event organized in the city of Kollam, was the first Indic language Wikipedia conference ever and witnessed over 100 participants from different parts of the state and country.

A veteran Malayalam Wikipedian, Viswa Prabha, recalls, “Every year, many editors from Malayalam Wikimedia Community attend Wikimania, the annual conference of Wikimedians. Inspired by the activities at Wikimania a few active Malayalam Wikimedians though of planning a similar conference in Kerala.” Many Malayalam Wikimedians also participated in WikiConference, 2011 Mumbai, after which the idea of organizing a conference was put forward in mailing lists, Facebook group, and other discussion forums. Since Wikimedians from Kollam took up the initiative the venue was chosen as Kollam.

Over 30 Malayalee Wikipedians were involved in different stages of organizing the conference like managing the venue, food, accommodation, financial resources, registration etc. What was proposed as an idea in 2009 took 3 years to materialize, but rightfully so into a wonderful experience! “The event celebrated the achievements of the Malayalam community, planned new projects as a community and welcomed more Malayalees to the community. E-malayalam, free and open knowledge, copyright and cyber-freedom were the highlights of the conference this year”, said Kannan Shanmugam, a teacher based in Kollam.

Takeaways from the conference? As Netha Hussain, a medical student and Wikipedian points out, “The high point for me was the parallel Wiki Vidyarthi Sagaman (Wiki students’ meet) where school students were taught to edit Wikipedia. Among the 100+ participants of the conference, a few new editors got valuable insights about Wikiprojects from the paper presentations and discussions during the conference. The existing editors got to meet their friends/fellow Wikimedians whom they had only known online. The paper presentations and discussions brought up new ideas that could be worked upon in the future to enrich ml-Wikipedia’s content. At a larger level, partnerships were explored with IT@School (a government initiative) and Wiki activities were highlighted in the local as well as national media.”

Barry Newstead, Chief Global development officer at the Wikimedia Foundation who also attended the conference, wrote in his blog post, “What was encouraging about my visit was that I saw that this isn’t some naive dream…The Malayalam community served as a real inspiration. Over the past 4 years, they have built a passionate community that has expanded their Wikipedia from 5,700 to 23,000 articles.”

The journey hardly rests at the conference. In the week immediately after the conference, there were meet-ups in 3 different towns – Thrissur, Palakkad and Thiruvananthapuram. Also, community members have been working on initiatives around GLAM and education – and have collaboratively developed proposals for both. Preliminary meetings have already started with a number of museums and a proposal has been submitted to the Keralam – Museum of History and Heritage. Discussions have been initiated with the IT@Schools department of the Kerala government and a formal proposal to introduce Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool in the 7th – 8th standard will be submitted shortly.

As Shiju Alex, Indic language consultant for Wikimedia Foundation articulates, “These are people who contribute to Wikipedia to share free knowledge but also to keep traditions alive and preserve the language they love. This movement requires young and old, teachers, doctors, engineers, linguists, researchers, writers, bloggers, lawyers, photographers and students. I hope what has started with the conference infuses new enthusiasm in the community and takes it to new heights!”

Postcard from the Tamil community

Posted on by

The Tamil community recently conducted a hugely sucessful Tamil Wikimedia Contest (TWMC).   This was organized by User:Sodabottle along with User:Logicwiki, Natkeeran, Kalaiarasy, Sanjeevi Sivakumar and a dozen other community members.
The story of TWMC began when Sodabottle attended Wikimania ’11  and had been requested by a long-standing Tamil wikipedian, Natkeeran, to scout for ideas and resources to support Tamil projects. Sodabottle suggested a media contest supported through a grant, as an article writing contest had already been done the previous year. He recollects, with a wry smile, that he initially thought a photo/media contest would take less time and effort!
Sodabottle discussed the idea with Natkeeran and after brainstorming with a couple of other community members, Logicwiki and Kalaiarasy, they initiated an RfC on the Tamil Wikipedia village pump.  There was  unanimous backing from the community.. In these two weeks, what started out as a simple proposal: “Shall we have a Media contest this year?” was fleshed out with the suggestions of over a dozen contributors. Subsequent discussions on prize money, type of prizes, outreach strategy and a host of other operational details were put on the project page after which the grant application was made.
Volunteers were going to be required and this presented both a unique challenge and great opportunity for Tamil.  The Tamil Wiki community is spread across continents and timezones and to reach out to everyone, coordinators with specific skill sets were chosen across diverse geographical locations. Although the number of coordinators was limited to 5 to keep the project manageable, more volunteers pitched in at every stage. Logicwiki provided extensive technical support throughout the event.

Winner entry from TWMC

Indeed, Tamil Wikipedians from countries as far off as Malaysia and Australia spread the word in their respective countries!
TWMC has been an avenue for many MediaWiki enthusiasts to chip in as well. T. Shrinivasan, an open source enthusiast and convener of the Chennai Linux User’s group., who developed a brand new Open Source tool for easier uploading of images.
What was TWMC’s biggest feat then? Sure, it generated 15,000 files from a total of 307 contributors and some new tools? It was also important for community mobilization – the brilliant way in which a community took every step, small and big together, overcame hurdles through team solutions and managed to connect with people across the planet. Incredibly, this was done over 3 long months!

Another winner entry from TMWC

Further, two long time editors returned from their Wiki breaks to help and four new regular editors are contributing to Tamil Wikipedia!  TWMC is also an excellent example of sustained outreach since newbies were given an opportunity to contribute easily and from there explore other facets of wiki projects. It was also a wonderful opportunity to get professional photographers to use Commons and upload their work on it. The community (Tamil and others) now uses more than  8000 images on different projects.  A Norwegian user has used images from this contest in Norsk Wikipedia.

On prizes he adds ,“ A contest and prizes are just the right attraction to stop people from leaving after a look over and goad them into doing something concrete.” He cites his own example of how he started contributing to Tamil Wikipedia only because of an article writing contest. Although he didn’t win a prize there, it lured him and he has been a regular editor since then. Sodabottle’s got a few tips on Commons “Commons, like any of our projects”, says he, “is undermanned.” So, it is crucial to have your own maintenance workforce for any media contest. Massive  effort is require to copyvio check, tag, template, move and categorize  in such volumes. He also suggests a Media wiki extension to help similar  initiatives.

(You can read the detailed Tamil Wikimedia Grant report here)

Realizing the Dreams of Communities: 3 years, 6 users, 1000 articles & Counting: The Source of Gujarati Wikisource

Posted on by
Gujarati Wikisource

 Gujarati Wikisource (gu.wikisource.org), the newest addition to the India community’s achievements was launched in March 2012. The journey has been a labour of love of a bunch of passionate Wikipedians – motivated by a deep bond for their language – working together at every step to realise a long cherished dream.

One of these community members, Dsvyas (Dhaval Sudhanva Vyas), is a long time Gujarati Wikipedian and was the inspiration for Gujarati Wikisource. Originally from Ahmedabad, Dhaval has been living in the UK since 2005. He remembers landing up on Gujarati Wikipedia in 2007 only to discover a mere 200 articles. On Google search, he says, while en-wp results showed up in the top 5, Gujarati Wikipedia did not even feature. That is when he resolved to take up the challenge to get Gujarati the attention it deserved. Thousands of miles away from home, he craved for a connection with his mother tongue and homeland even more and found his calling in Wikipedia.

Another familiar name in the community is Sushant Savla. He is an engineer by profession and studied in a Gujarati medium school till 10th grade. This is where his love for Gujarati really developed. In the course of his work, Sushant landed up in Chennai in 2008, far removed from Gujarati speakers. This is where he realized how much he missed his language and culture – and this is when he discovered Gujarati Wikipedia. After a long phase of, as he puts it, “daily talks and monthly arguments with Dhaval,” Sushant ended up translating 200 + articles in Gujarati.

2008 was a good year for Gujarati Wikipedia because it got some of its long term editors Ashok Modhvadia, Satishchandra, Jitendrasinh and Maharshi Mehta too. As Dhaval recalls, the birth of the idea and the urge to have an independent gu.wikisource was due to Maharshi Mehta and Jitendrasinh’s strong passion to have poetry/devotional songs Bhajans on Wikipedia. In late 2008-early 2009, debating whether to keep those Bhajans in Wikipedia, Dhaval suggested getting Wikisource started and moving the Bhajans there. Every time he posted for community help, he received tremendous support from the community.

However, as Sushant puts it, it was really in 2012 when the request for another Indic Wikisource was granted that his ‘Swabhimaan’ (self esteem) button clicked! Dhaval chimes in that no self respecting Gujarati could bear that the gu-wikisource had been in limbo for 3 years. Another contributor, Vyom25 adds, “I had basic knowledge about English Wikisource but Dhaval’s appeal on the mailing lists and the amount of translation done for Gujarati Wikisource got me interested.”

 The big catch was the requirement was to translate a whopping 1500+ messages to Gujarati, before the project could be approved. Sushant marched ahead and translated almost 1300 within 3 weeks! As the project gathered steam in mid March, users Vyom25, Nilesh Bandhiya and Jaishree also joined in for the first book project: ‘Rachnatmak Karyakram’ written by Gandhiji. What started out three years earlier as a dream of a couple of Gujarati Wikimedians has today culminated in 10 members working on gu.wikisource with 1000 articles. 1 book already is already uploaded and there 2 more in the pipeline.

The success of gu-wikisource is a shining example of how individual aspirations and efforts come together in our community. It is also about how they inspire fellow community members who share their love for a language or a project, and are united by a common faith in collaboration.

 This is just the start for the Gujarati community. As Sushant so eloquently put it on the village pump, “અહીં સફર પૂર્ણ નહીં પણ શરૂ થાય છે. હવે સમય છે કે આપણે કંઈ મોટું કાર્ય કરી બતાવીયે.” (The journey doesn’t end here, but begins now. It is time that we show the world what we can achieve.)

The making of live.wikimedia.in

Posted on by

Hello folks, this article is all about HOW the Wikimedia Live search operates and what all things are running in background along with those cool animations. It will be helpful for developers , who wishes to contribute to open-source and improve this application. (Source can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/p/wikig )

So lets get started, assuming that you are conceptually clear with JS and jQuery.

1] There are two variables that are initiated when website gets loaded, namely site and lang. Values of these variables depends on your selection under ‘Select Website’ and ‘Select language’ respectively.

2]  When a user types in the search-box, there is function defined in jQuery which is called at every ‘keyup’ action. This function stores the value of search-box in a variable named svalue . Then a function named ‘loadLinks’ is called internally, having 3 parameters: site, lang and svalue. Using these 3 parameters, an ajax call is placed to OpenSearch API which retrieves the results in JSON format, parses it and formats it into hyperlinks. While all these things are going in background, there are beautiful animations going in foreground (jQuery) for user entertainment.

3] When the search results gets successfully loaded in ‘links’ division, the very first link gets automatically clicked, which calls a function named ‘loadContent’. This functions loads the wiki page corresponding to that particular search value into a division named ‘content’ and activates the loading .gif. When the whole page is loaded, the gif fades off.

4] Beside these main functionalities, there are various other jQuery functions used to enhance the user experience.

All of these hope to provide you a cool live search experience!


(Contributed by Shrey Gokani, the developer)