Blog posts

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Subhashish Panigrahi

After eight years of effort and outreach, the Tulu language Wikipedia has gone live. Wikimedia contributors play a key role in preserving languages and cultures, and tools like the Wikimedia Incubator help new projects like the Tulu …

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Subhashish Panigrahi, Ting-Yi Chang

Eight years after being created in the Wikimedia Incubator, the Tulu-language Wikipedia is now live as the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia.

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Subhashish Panigrahi

Though not an open source solution, Google's OCR works really well for Odia and other Indian languages. My column in the Odia daily the Samaja that was published last Saturday briefs about how the OCR works and has a step-by-step process to …

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Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda

In light of the complex challenges and threats posed to, and by, the field of information telecommunications in cyberspace, in 1998 the draft resolution in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly was introduced and adopted without a …

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Elisachang

There is no denying that non-English Wikipedias are disproportionally underrepresented in scholarly focus despite the significant role of an open knowledge society can play in smaller linguistic groups – local collaboration and …

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Subhashish Panigrahi

The Wikimedia community has constantly struggled to a) reach out to masses and tell them about their contribution, and motivate people to contribute to the Wikimedia projects. Media plays a very important role in spreading the word about …

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U.B.Pavanaja

India is not much different from the global statistics when it comes to gender gap issues in Wikipedia. Indian language Wikipedias are known to have similar ratio of male to female editors.

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Abhinav Garule, Subhashish Panigrahi

A two-day long train-the-trainer and Mediawiki training programme was organised during May 28-29 in Pune to better capacity of Wikimedians both technically, and outreach and community building.

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Anubha Sinha

In a major international development, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit to strike down the provisions on Digital Rights Management(DRM) in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In this post, I discuss DRMs, the …

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Subhashish Panigrahi

Wiki Conference India 2016, the largest gathering of the contributors of Wikipedia (the multilingual online encyclopaedia) and its sister projects called Wikimedia projects, begins August 5 in Landran, in the Indian state of Punjab.

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Nishant Shah

When it comes to greeting friends on their birthdays, social media prompts are a great reminder. So why does an online message leave us cold?

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Subhashish Panigrahi

Konkani-language Wikipedians on what they think of Wikipedia as a binding factor for native speakers who speak in different variations of the same language and write in different scripts.

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Nishant Shah

My review for Arundhati Roy and John Cusack's new book that captures their encounter with Edward Snowden, 'Things that can and cannot be said' is now out. It's an engaging, if somewhat freewheeling, political critique of the times we live …

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Subhashish Panigrahi

Wikimedia Conference 2016Wiki Conference India 2016 (WCI), the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia, will be held during August 5-7 this year in Chandigarh, India.

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Surfatial

This essay by Surfatial is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. It argues that the internet has created a space for philosophical questioning among contemporary Indian participants which can develop further, despite common …

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Pavan Santhosh

To help Wikimedians learn about essential tools that are used across Wikimedia projects, a tools orientation session was organised during the monthly meetup on July 10 at Hyderabad.

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Asvatha Babu

Our request to ICANN was related to our (mistaken) assumption that Verisign and ICANN had signed an agreement for Root Zone Maintenance and had recently renewed it. In that context we had asked for information such as documents reflecting …

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Asvatha Babu

In order to promote access to the New gTLD Program in developing regions, ICANN set up the New gTLD Applicant Support Program (Program) which seeks to facilitate cooperation between gTLD applicants from developing countries and those …

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Asvatha Babu

Markus Kummer at Public Forum 2 mentioned that ICANN has standards of behavior regarding sexual harassment that are applicable for its staff.

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Asvatha Babu

While researching ICANN and the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG), we came across a diversity analysis report of a public comment section.

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Asvatha Babu

According to ICANN by-laws, ICANN has the responsibility to answer to reconsideration requests filed by those directly affected by its actions.

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Asvatha Babu

At CIS, we wanted a clearer understanding of ICANN’s relationship with the 5 internet registries. The large amount contributed by the RIRs to ICANN’s funding lead us to question the nature of this relationship as well as the payment. We …

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Asvatha Babu

ICANN’s contract agreements with different registries contain a presumptive renewal clause. Unless they voluntarily give up their rights or there is a material breach by the registry operator, their contract with ICANN will be automatically …

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Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda

This paper analyses the report of the Group of Experts and and India’s compliance with its recommendations based on existing laws and policies. Given the global nature of these challenges and the need for nations to holistically address …

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Anubha Sinha

Members of the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are now scrounging the world to include more countries in its fold. The Digital 2 Dozen(D2D) is a bite-sized document which packs the TPP into 24 key tenets. The D2D, …

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Pavishka Mittal

This is the final part of a series of three blog posts, authored by Pavishka Mittal, tracking the engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT in suggesting and shaping the IT industry policies in India during 2006-2016. This post aims to explain the …

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Anubha Sinha

The Centre for Internet and Society sent a letter to Members of Parliament on July 27, 2016 to appeal to re-examine the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

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Asvatha Babu

In March 2014, the National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA) of the United States government announced plans to shift the Internet Assigned Names and Numbers (IANA) functions from ICANN to the global multistakeholder …

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Asvatha Babu

ICANN maintains an internal website accessible to staff and employees. We requested ICANN to provide us with a document with the contents of that website in the interest of transparency and accountability.

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Asvatha Babu

At a congressional hearing on internet governance and progress, then President of ICANN Fadi Chehadi indicated that the number of people working on compliance audits grew substantially—from 6 to 24 (we misquoted it as 25)— in the span of a …