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CIS-A2K//Work plan July 2014 - June 2015/Making the Santali Wikipedia Live

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Introduction

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Santali is an Indian indigenous language in the Munda subfamily of Austroasiatic languages. Around 6.2 million living in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal speak Santali. Majority of its speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Odisha, Tripura, and West Bengal. [1] Santali is written in Ol Chiki, Roman and Devanagari script.

About the Project

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Santali Wikipedia is in incubation since September 2010. Currently Roman script is used as there is no free licensed Ol Chiki font available . There are totally 30 articles contributed by 19 editors over time.[2] This project aims to make Santali Wikipedia into a live project. Towards this CIS-A2K will undertake two major activities. First, it will address the technical challenges facing the Santali script and will work towards bringing out a free Ol Chiki unicode font. Second, it will cultivate a small group of enthusiastic Santali editors who could contribute regularly to the Santali Wikipedia project. The project will be based at Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) which is home to about 20,000 tribal students out of which about 1,000 students speak Santali as a native language.

Work done so far

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  • Preliminary interactions with Santali speaking students at KISS to know their knowledge in reading and writing in Santali using Ol Chiki.
  • Discussion with Google webfont project about free font project.
  • Preliminary survey on potential resources (Textbooks, other literary books in Santali).

Challenges

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  • Native speakers of Santali (students at KISS for this project) are conversant but do not have formal reading and writing skills in Santali.[3]
  • KISS library currently has hardly any book written in Ol Chiki script.
  • Santali Wikipedia incubation project has articles in only Roman script. None of the current operating systems have Ol Chiki support.
  • Though there are few fonts created by the Wesantals project there is no free licensed Unicode font. So, webfont support can not be provided.[4]

Implementation Plan

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Development of Free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font

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Plan:
To facilitate a project for developing a free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font.

Execution:

  1. Facilitating development of an OFL Ol Chiki font.
  2. Testing of the font by native speakers and getting bugs fixed.
  3. Liaison with Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team for webfont support.

Projection:

  1. One free licensed Unicode Ol Chiki font to be made available.
  2. Making available one free licensed Ol Chiki Webfont on ULS.

Reviving Santali Wikipedia incubator project

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Plan:
To cultivate a community of enthusiastic Santali Wikipedia editors at KISS.

Execution:

  1. Creating a group of faculty and students to contribute to Santali Wikipedia
  2. Organize training workshops. One per month.
  3. Finding educational resources in Santali
  4. Regular mentoring and support

Projection:

  1. Santali Wikipedia training to about 80-100 Santali students of which 10-15 could turn in to active contributors
  2. To result in 100 new articles on Santali Wikipedia

Budget

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Expenditure Item FDC Support (INR) FDC Support (US$) Other Sources and in kind Support (INR) Other Sources and in kind Support (US$)
1 PO x 10% * 82,560/- 1,335.89 - -
Travel and Stay ** - - 100,000/- 1,618.08
Research and typeface design 100,000/- 1,618.08 100,000/- 1,618.08
Volunteer Support 25,000/- 404.52 25,000/- 404.52
Events/Meet-ups/Workshops 20,000/- 323.62 50,000/- 809.04
Consumables/Printing/Stationery/Swag 20,000/- 323.62 - -
Total 247,560/- 4,005.72 275,000/- 4,449.72

* 10% of Subhashish Panigrahi's time as Program Officer, who will anchor this plan at CIS-A2K
** Expenses incurred by the CIS-A2K program team towards executing the plan.

Notes

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