WikiPatrika/2011-06/In the news

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Volume 1

Issue 3

2012-05

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DNA / Dainik Bhaskar : "Become Wikipedia's campus ambassador" - May 29, 2011 : DNA interviewes Hisham Mundol , Wikimedia Foundation India Programs on Wikipedia Campus Ambassador pilot programme started in Pune, first of a kind in India. He explains, "We understand that information about India and contributed by people from India are sorely missing from Wikipedia, and we want to change that. The programme is our way of piloting ways to change this."
MyBangalore.com : "Wikipedia aims for World Heritage Site status" - May 28 2011 : MyBangalore.com reports that Wikipedia is applying to UNESCO to earn a spot on one of the world heritage lists and would be the outfit's first digital entity.
The Times of India : "Wiki league" - May 25, 2011 : TOI reports fourth Wikimeetup in Hyderabad. Wikipedian Srikanth Lakshmanan says, “I started by editing a page on my college and went on to write 50 articles on Indian roads. If you spare time to write accurate info about something you like, it becomes a point of reference for the world.”
The Indian Express : "2,155 images uploaded in record 23 days" - May 10, 2011 : The Indian Express documents Malayalam WikiProject ‘Malayalam Loves Wikimedia’ event organised as part of improving the database as well as to attract more Malayalam speaking users to the Wikimedia movement is a big hit. As many as 2,155 copyright-free licensed images have been contributed to Wikimedia Commons within a short period of 23 days.
The Pune Mirror : "Campus Ambassadors" pilot in India - April 19, 2011 : In The Pune Mirror ("Now, you can be a Wikipedia ambassador!"),Hisham Mundol, Wikimedia India Programs, explained that "Pune is India’s education capital and the city has more than two lakh [200,000] students, ... which is why Wikipedia will be starting the programme from here." (The article's positive tone was contrasted by an article in the same paper a few days later that used Wikipedia as an example for the downsides of "crowdsourcing" to ask "Will Google Maps lead people astray, the Wikipedia way?".)
The Hindu : "Now, copyright-free maps of States, districts, panchayats" - April 15, 2011 : An article in The Hindu reported about successes of the "Malayalam loves Wikimedia" project which aimed to enrich the Malayalam Wikipedia with free photos and maps.
The Hindu : "Wikimedia Commons set to reach a milestone" - April 14, 2011 : The Hindu reports that Wikimedia Commons, the multilingual free-content media repository, is poised to reach a of 10 million uploaded files milestone, in which Indian contributors have played a role.
The Hindu : Attempts on to revive Odia Wikipedia - April 09, 2011 : The newspaper reports that some people who edit the Odia Wikipedia say that getting a Wikipedia in the language is an important tool to keep the language alive.The attempt is on to revive Odia Wikipedia (or.wikipedia.org), one of the earliest Indian language Wikipedias to be created. This article was featured on the back cover page, which meant maximum readership.

The New Indian Express: "Odia Wiki caught in a time warp" - April 04, 2011: The New Indian Express reports that Wikimedia Foundation’s Indian chapter started Odia Wiki in 2002 but it has just 10 contributors. Odia Wiki, one of the first in regional languages in India, started with a repository of just 200 articles but the number has not changed much in the last nine years. In order to take the Wikipedia project forward, Odia Wiki activists are now looking for support and explore initiatives in the State. To get more contributors to Odia Wiki, they are holding workshops and meetings in many districts. This article was featured in the state special page of New Indian Express.

India Joins Top Donors Club: The Economic Times (Mar 18, 2011) and The Hindustan Times (March 20, 2011) report that India has become the sixth largest donor to the Wikimedia Foundation in 2010–2011. $193,657 was given to the Wikimedia Foundation by just under 11,000 Indians. Indians donated just under 2% of what the US donated, and made up just over 1% of global donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. The 5 countries donating more than India were the US, Canada, Japan, Spain and the UK, with the US giving over $10m.The Hindu (March 19, 2011) reported that donations in India leapt from the 16th position, contributing $52,156 from 2956 donors in 2009–2010. These amounts do not include donations made by the country chapters of Wikimedia, which also help in local fund-raising.
The Hindu : " An empire without kings " - February 12, 2011: A comment in The Hindu ("An empire without kings") praised Wikipedia as "today's de facto standard for fast and fairly reliable information on the Internet", and compared it to the fictional supercomputer Multivac that answers mankind's questions in Isaac Asimov's science fiction stories.
Bangalore Mirror : Bangalore’s the place for Wiki - January 23, 2011: The Bangalore Mirror interviewed English Wikipedia administrator Tinucherian ; including a look back at 2010, which Tinucherian said "was quite a year for Wikimedia in India".
NDTV : How Wikipedia wooed and won the world - January 12, 2011 - Indian news channel NDTV explained using a short summary of its early history and quotes from German sociologist Christian Stegbauer.