Wikipedia
Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization. This foundation also runs several other sister projects of Wikipedia. At Vigyan Ashram, we primarily work on three major Wikimedia projects: Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, and Marathi Wikipedia.
Wikisource is a free digital library. The books available on it are in Unicode format, making them easily searchable. The first step in this process is releasing books under a copyright-free license. These books are then added to the Wikimedia Commons project. Anyone can download these books and use them freely and openly.
Work done by Vigyan Ashram in Wikimedia projects:
Over the past five years, authors working in various fields—or their heirs—have released the rights to their literature. Additionally, some social organizations have made their reference material freely available. In this way, we have processed nearly 90,000 pages of literature and completed the necessary steps to integrate them into the Wikisource project.
Once added to Wikisource, a Python-based OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process is run to convert these books into Unicode text. We learned how to run these OCR tools and have successfully completed OCR for over 61,000 pages.
We received some initial training for this work at Vigyan Ashram, and to learn more, we were given the opportunity to participate in workshops organized by Centre for Internet and Society – Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) in cities like Bangalore, Ranchi, Kolkata, Delhi, Pune, Visakhapatnam, and Mumbai. Through this, we are now connected with people from various states and language communities.
