[Wikimediaindia-l] Press coverage: Konkani writers resolve to form all-India forum at JKS conference

[Nitika Tandon]

Konkani writers resolve to form all-India forum at JKS conference

http://www.daijiworld.com/news/news_disp.asp?n_id=192381

Mangalore, Oct 1: Jagotik Konknni Songhotton (JKS) organized an All-India 
Konkani Writers’ Conference on Sunday, September 29 at Kalaangann.

As many as 78 Konkani writers from Goa, Kerala, Maharashtra and various regions 
of Karnataka, attended the conference.

The conference was organized with the intention of bringing together writers of 
all the five scripts of Konkani and also to probe the possibilities of forming 
an All-India Konkani Writers’ Forum.

Roy Castelino, treasurer, JKS, welcomed the gathering. The secretary general of 
JKS, Eric Ozario, explained the purpose of the conference and the need for 
forming an All-India Konkani Writers’ Forum. Tomazinho Cardozo, ex-speaker of 
the Goa Assembly and president, JKS, spoke about the injustices done to writers 
in the Roman script.

Dr Pratap Naik, Konkani activist, spoke of the progress in the writ petition 
filed in the Goa bench of the Mumbai high court, seeking rectification of the 
Official Language Act of Goa, to include the Roman script.

Valerian D’Souza, Marcel D’souza and Eric Ozario explained the progress in the 
writ petition filed in the high court of Karnataka against the Sahitya Akademi, 
seeking equal treatment to all scripts of Konkani.

Nitika Tandon, programme manager, The Centre for Internet & Society, spoke 
about Konkani Wikipedia and the need for the participation of the Roman and the 
Kannada script writers.

The conference resolved to form an All-India Konkani Writers’ Forum, which 
would protect the interest of Konkani literature and Konkani writers of all 
scripts. An ad-hoc committee was formed to discuss and decide upon the 
immediate steps to be taken towards the formation of the Forum.

A book compiling short stories written by Kevin D’Mello, Karkala, titled 
‘Chondda ani Gorbh’, was also released on the occasion.

Victor Mathias conducted the proceedings of the conference.


Thanks
Nitika

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[Wikimediaindia-l] Coverage: Goa University Partners CIS India To Build Konkani Wikipedia

[Nitika Tandon]

Goa University Partners CIS India To Build Konkani Wikipedia

http://www.medianama.com/2013/09/223-goa-university-partners-cis-india-to-build-konkani-wikipedia/

The Goa university has entered into a three year memorandum of understanding 
(MoU) with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani 
Wikipedia, reports navhindtimes.
As part of this partnership, Goa University will be uploading the four volumes 
of Konkani encyclopedia and the Konkani wikipedia is expected to be available 
in six months. It appears that the partnership with CIS India includes 
processes such as scanning, digitization, and creating articles as per 
requirement of Wikipedia. CIS India has also called out for volunteers for a 
period of three months to help them digitizing the Konkani encyclopedia.

This is quite notable since most of the development in digitizing documents in 
Indian language did not include Konkani language, which is spoken in western 
coast of India. Besides, since the university will upload the Konkani 
encyclopedia on Wikipedia, it will allow users to search through texts. Most of 
the digitization projects just scan the books and upload the pages in image 
format, which makes it difficult to search or perform any kind of data related 
query.

Last year in May, Wikipedians were digitizing Indian language, out-of-copyright 
texts online, trying to address the comparative paucity of Indic language texts 
online. Wikisource is a repository of documents and archived material that 
serves as a reference source for Wikipedia, and a means of improving access to 
information sources. Of the 64 languages Wikisource is available in, 8 are 
Indian: Tamil (stats), Malayalam (stats),Telugu (stats), Kannada (stats), 
Sanskrit (stats), Marathi (stats), Bengali (stats) and Gujarati (stats). Note 
that most of these Indian language Wikipedia’s receive active contribution from 
CIS India under its CIS-A2K program.

Wikipedia had recorded 43.5 million pageviews in Indian language wikis, as of 
October 2011. In June 2013, the Hindi language Wikipedia had received monthly 
pageviews of 7.8 million, Tamil language Wikipedia had received 5.2 million 
pageviews, among others. So there’s clearly a demand to access information in 
local languages.

That said, while more languages are being added to the list, it should be seen 
that the articles in these languages do not contain just one or two sentences. 
According to an analysis by Shijualex.in, many articles posted under Indian 
language Wikipedia were under 2kb, indicating that it contained only couple of 
sentences.


Thanks
Nitika___
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[Wikimediaindia-l] Active editors for Kannada Wikipedia reaches 41

[Pavanaja U B]

Active editors for Kannada Wikipedia reaches 41 and number of very active
editors to 7. Both the figures are highest ever for Kannada Wikipedia.
Thanks to all those who made it. 
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryKN.htm 
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaKN.htm


Thanks and regards,

Pavanaja

U.B. Pavanaja, MSc, PhD

Programme Officer   - Indian
languages,

Access to Knowledge program

The Centre for Internet & Society

 

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