Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018 report at Asomiya Pratidin ePaper- Highest Circulated Assamese Daily

Volunteers from various Indic Wikisource projects took part in a discussion organized by Centre for Internet and society: access to knowledge (CIS:A2K) in Kolkata recently. Dr. Gitartha Bordoloi participated in this consultation on behalf of the Assamese Wikisource which included other Indic languages like Bengali, Odia, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Punjabi, Telugu and Sanskrit. It is worth mentioning here that Wikisource is another important project like Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc operated by Wikimedia Foundation. Anyone can contribute to this wikisource project which stores copyright-free books, plays, lyrics, speeches, translated works etc. Such works are first scanned and digitalized and then converted to unicode so that everything becomes searchable. Assamese Wikisource (as.wikisource.org), started in 2013, so far includes various literary works of Guru Sankardeva and Madhavdev, Jyotiprasad Agarwala, Lakshminath Bezbaroa, Padmanath Gogain Baruah, Chandraprasad Agarwala, Amulya Barua, Dandinath Kalita etc. Measures to popularize Wikisource among masses, increasing numbers of readers and contributors, correct techniques to digitalize a book etc were discussed at the event in Kolkata.

Translated from Assamese by Dr. Gitartha Bordoloi