Dear All,
The first Odia Wikipedia Workshop was conducted in CIS, Bangalore on 2011 March 06. Here is a brief report about it.
Wikimedian Shiju Alex had took initiatives to organize this first workshop of Odia wikipedia. 4 Odia Wikipedians from Bangalore (Ashutosh kar , Ansuman Giri, Subhashish Panigrahi and Satyaranjan Mohanty and 2 Odia wikipedians from Cuttack (Srikant Kedia and Sambidhan Mohanty- through Skype) attended in this workshop.
The workshop was conducted in 2 sessions. More details below.
Session 1: (Introduction to Wiki, Wikipedia and sister projects, Wikimedia Foundation, and Odia Wiki projects)
In the first session, a brief introduction about Wiki, Wikipedia, and WMF were given. Shiju also explained about the sister projects of wikipedia and how they are different from each other. The first session helped participants to understand about the current status of Odia wiki projects.
In Session I, he also explained about the:
Participants asked numerous questions which helped them to understand the current status of Odia wiki.
Session 2: (Wiki editing session)
Session 2 was a wiki editing session. Participants came up with several questions making the session very live. The recently integrated typing solution of Odia wikipedia designed by Malayalam Wikipedian Junaid was also demonstrated by Shiju. Technical difficulties faced by common users were discussed.
General Discussion
The major reasons for the low activity in Odia Wikipedia (even though it is one of the first Indian Wikipedia started way back in 2002) was discussed. Literacy rate, access to computers, and so on are given as some of the reasons. Citing the example of Punjabi wikipedia, Shiju explained that the literacy rate and activity in wiki are not related. Their might be different reasons for each language community for its low wiki activism. Computer literacy, awareness about free knowledge and culture, access to internet and computers, support from government are some of the reasons cited. Added to that are the poor support for Odia in computers, lack of awareness that our computers are suitable for Odia, lack of typing solutions, are some of the reasons put forward and discussed.
Idea of using articles from Odia Encyclopedia (‘Gyanamandala’ by Binoda Kanungo), using Maps, Manuals, Books could be used for developing Wikipedia, Wikimapia, WikIBooks and WikiSource, etc were dicussed.
We discussed about prioritizing the tasks and finding out various important tasks that needs to be completed in Odia wikipedia. We already started working on some of these. We also decided to conduct awiki workshop in Odisha very soon.