CIS-A2K/Reports/CIS-A2K Quarterly Report 2/Kannada

CIS-A2K

CIS-A2K (Centre for Internet and Society - Access to Knowledge) is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape.
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Overview

CIS A2K's partnership with Christ University is a major achievement for Kannada Wikipedia which was inked in November 2013. A major outcome of this partnership was the creation of 10 video tutorials on editing Kannada Wikipedia which was produced in the Green View Studio of the Christ University. The videos showcase different editing scenarios and the voice-over is rendered by a Kannada student. Echo notifications were implented in Kannada Wikipedia during this period. Kannada Wikipedia celebrated its tenth anniversary on November 17, 2013 at National College, Basavanagudi, Bangalore. Universal Language Selector was implemented for Kannada Wikipedia during this period.

CIS A2K's Kannada plan can be seen on this page.

Key highlights

Christ University Partnership - CIS-A2K signed a MoU with Christ University, Bangalore, to run the Wikipedia Education Program for UG students. Language students of the UG courses (BA, BCom, BSc, etc) wrote articles in Indian language Wikipedias as part of their Continuous Internal Assessment process. The Indian language Wikipedia has to match with the language they have selected for their course. The languages were Kannada, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu. About 500 students who had selected Kannada as their language of study wrote articles in Kannada Wikipedia. The process started from November 2013 and went up to February 2014. The project on Kannada Wikipedia is here. A major outcome of this project was the creation of 10 video tutorial lessons on editing Kannada Wikipedia. The design of the videos were done, scripts were written and the production was done at the Green View Studio of Christ University. Students of Christ University acted and gave voices for these videos. These videos are available in Commons.

Echo Notifications - Wikimedia implemented Echo Notifications in Kannada Wikipedia during this period. This was taken to the Kannada Wikipedia community. Translations of the strings into Kannada was done for the notification messages and other UI elements. Kannada Wikipedia community was informed about the implementation of Echo Notifications. Community was also involved in the translations.

ULS - Universal Language Selector is a big boon to Indian language Wikipedias. It was implemented for Kannada Wikipedia during this period. Translations of the strings were done. Kannada community was informed about the implementation and was also involved in translations. There were some minor bugs in the initial release which was reported by CIS-A2K and was fixed soon. Kannada Wikipedia community appreciated the availability of ULS and is very happily using it now.

Tenth anniversary and edit-a-thon - Kannada Wikipedia celebrated tenth anniversary on November 17, 2013 at National College, Basavanagudi, Bangalore. Kannada Wikipedians along with the general public attended the event. The press also participated. The event was well covered in the media. On account of the program a edit-a-thon was conducted. The project page on Kannada Wikipedia is here.

Outreach program - Kannada Wikipedia outreach program was conducted during the Alvas Vishwa Nudisiri event at Moodabidre, near Mangalore. About 25 persons participated. Out of these 13 persons participated in the hands-on workshop on editing Kannada Wikipedia.

Total editors

Total number of editors went up from 415 to 442 during this quarter amounting to an increase of 27 editors. For comparison the numbers for the same period last year are 326 to 335 with an increase of 9 editors. There is an obvious improvement in the development of Kannada Wikipedia community.

Active editors

The number of active editors for Kannada for the first month was 39, 43 for second month and 56 for the third month. This shows a sustained growth during this period. This could be also due to the fact that students of Christ University partnership just begun editing during this period. For comparison the numbers during the same period last year were 16, 22 and 18 respectively.

No. of articles

The total number of articles in Kannada Wikipedia went up from 15623 to 16120 during this quarter amounting to an increase of 497 articles. For comparison the number went up from 12600 to 12900 which is an increase of 300.