India's Software Stories: Preserving code as heritage with Software Heritage, Commons & Wikidata
Authors/Creators
- 1. Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa
- 2. IIIT Hyderabad, Open Knowledge Initiatives (IIITH-OKI)
Description
Slides of the lightning talk India's Software Stories, presented at Wikimania 2026 (Paris, France) on 23 July 2026, in the Lightning Talk Showcase I.
Software is fragile knowledge: as the UNESCO Paris Call on Software Source Code (2019) puts it, source code is part of our shared documentary heritage. The talk shows how three open infrastructures give the world's code stories a permanent home: Software Heritage preserves every publicly available line of source code; Wikidata links it through citable persistent identifiers (SWHIDs, property P6138); Wikimedia Commons holds the human story: people, places, screenshots and video. Indian examples include Lekhini (typing Telugu on any English keyboard), UrduScript, the Slug GPU rendering algorithm and Ezhil, a programming language whose keywords are Tamil words (Q12975625). The talk invites Wikidata editors, GLAM institutions, digital-preservation and FOSS practitioners, and language and Global South communities to document their region's technological and linguistic history through the Software Stories project.
Links
- Video recording (YouTube): youtube.com/live/saeV6bZ7cIk (from 6:58:25)
- Wikimedia Commons: original upload of the slides
- Software Heritage Stories: stories.softwareheritage.org
Third-party images are credited on each slide under their own licences.
Files
Wikimania_2026._India's_Software_Stories_(Super_nabla,_Pavan_Santhosh).pdf
Files
(2.1 MB)
| Name | Size | Download all |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:670169b853421e71965d19c868105d0f
|
2.1 MB | Preview Download |