Collaborative Projects
Wikipedia is a project written by volunteer editors and run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization. This foundation also manages several other collaborative projects under the Wikimedia umbrella. At Vigyan Ashram, we primarily work on three key Wikimedia projects: Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, and Marathi Wikipedia.
Wikisource is a free digital library. Since the texts here are available in Unicode format, they are easy to search and access. The first step in contributing to this project involves ensuring that the books are copyright-free. These books are then uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons project, where anyone can freely download and use them.
Contributions by Vigyan Ashram
Over the past five years, authors and their heirs, as well as several social organizations, have willingly released the copyright of their literary and reference materials. As a result, Vigyan Ashram has processed and prepared over 90,000 pages of such content. After uploading these books to Wikisource, the next step involves converting the text into Unicode format using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). We learned how to run Python-based OCR scripts and have successfully processed over 61,000 pages to date.
Training and Collaboration
We received initial training for this work at Vigyan Ashram. To further enhance our skills, the Centre for Internet and Society – Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) provided us with opportunities to participate in workshops held in cities like Bengaluru, Ranchi, Kolkata, Delhi, Pune, Visakhapatnam, and Mumbai. This experience has enabled us to connect and collaborate with contributors from various states and linguistic backgrounds across India.
