Dear Indic Wikimedia Community members,
As part of the Indic Languages initiative of India
Programs<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…>,
I have been having detailed discussions with a wide range of Indic language
wikipedians for the past few weeks. These discussions have been to build
the understanding, provide insight, and explore opportunities to expand
Indic language projects. The end result of these discussions is to help
identify language communities with whom we can collaboratively design
pilots to drive our projects.
These discussions have been conducted on IRC, one-on-one, group voice
conversations, as well as through email questionnaires.
Over the next few days, I am going to share a series of these with you.
The intention is to give you a sense of the kind of perspectives that
exist within the overall Indic community, to share ideas and to generate
discussion on potential ideas. Please note that I have edited the
discussions to preserve confidentiality as well as to remove any
particularly personal comments that might have been shared.
Please do let me have your views on these discussions and do please join
the debate on the talk page or on this mailing list or offline to me.
For today, I am sharing the discussions with the *Assamese
community<http://as.wikipedia.org>
*. The summary of this discussion is placed at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…
Assamese wikipedia community is a tiny but vibrant community - that is
slowly building itself. There is huge opportunity given that Assamese is
spoken by more than 1.3 crore people. As we all know, there was not much
progress in Assamese wiki community till recently. But now the situation is
slowly changing after the arrival of few dedicated users. And in this
early stage, Assamese community show very promising potential. I remember
discussing the importance of preparing a small FAQ in AS Wiki to help the
new users. In no time few community members prepared a good FAQ
page<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%87…>for
the Assamese wiki. I am sure with the arrival of such dedicated users
Assamese wiki is going to make good progress.
Inviting your active participation in these discussions (either on talk
page or in this mailing list).
Warm Regards,
Shiju Alex
I've been using Google Talk and thought you might like to try it out. We can use it to call each other for free over the internet. Here's an invitation to download Google Talk. Give it a try!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ramkishan bhise has invited you to sign up for Google Talk so you can talk to each other for free over your computers.
To sign-up, go to:
http://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?service=talk&sendvemail=true&skip…
Google Talk is a downloadable Windows* application that offers:
- Free calls over your computer anytime, from anywhere, and for as long as you want
- A simple and intuitive user interface for sending instant messages or making calls--no clutter, pop-ups or ads
- Superior voice quality through just a microphone and computer speaker
- Fast file transfers with no restrictions on file type
After signing-up, download Google Talk and sign in with your new Google Account username and password.
You can then begin inviting anyone you want to talk to for free.
Google Talk works with any computer speaker and microphone, such as the ones built-in to many PC laptops today,
as well as with wired and wireless headsets and USB phones. Google Talk also works across all firewalls.
Google Talk is still in beta. Just like with Gmail, we're working hard to add features and make improvements,
so we might also ask for your comments and suggestions periodically. We appreciate your help in making it even better!
Thanks,
The Google Talk Team
To learn more about Google Talk before signing up, visit:
http://www.google.com/talk/about.html
(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them into the address bar of your browser).
* Not a Windows user? No problem. You can also connect to the Google Talk service from any platform using third-party clients
(http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html).
Hi,
Some time back I was looking for some drug information (which was in my
doctor's prescription).
Then I was thinking why that information was not there in wikipedia.
I found few wonderful sites which gives that kind of information.
http://www.mims.com/index.aspx?Ctry=INhttp://www.nlm.nih.gov/http://www.webmd.com
I searched on google for information on a drug prescribed by my doctor.
collected lots of info from various sources and added to wikipedia. And I
was hoping I can add few more drugs when ever I visit a doctor. later my
article was deleted quoting advertising of my own product.
I was thinking some kind of wikiDrug would help in understanding
composition, use, side effects of each drug.
Incubation of such project would be helpful.
I found the following website which use wikipedia's logo too. I am sure
this is nothing to do with wikimedia foundation project. (see the copyright
in the bottom)
http://wikidrugs.org/
It is imitation of wikipedia.
--
Thanks & Regards,
A.Radha Krishna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Arkrishna
Dear friends,
My presentation on the state of WikiProject India on English Wikipedia in
WikiConference 2011 has been uploaded to Slideshare.
http://t.co/3B1MZWT7
Please note that there is a change in the ratio I mentioned earlier, I had
mistakenly added the GAs and A classes to the total articles for the
comparison. The Wikipedia ratio I mentioned was 1 in 1,110 and it applied
to featured articles and lists only. IT seems I had added all the FA, FL,
GA & A class articles to get the sum 240 & its ensuing ratio which
Icalclated wrongly as 1 in 374. It is actually 1 in 1198.32, which is worse
than the Wikipedia average.
The changes have been made in the speaker notes with disclosure and
transparency.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
*A total of 240 articles, i.e. One in 374 articles, better than the WP
average of 1 in 1,110, but not so good that we congratulate ourselves -
remember that we are a coordinated, focussed WikiProject. (Stricken text
which was spoken by me in the Conference, is erroneous )
A total of 75 articles are of featured quality, which makes it 1 in
1198.32, which is worse than the Wikipedia average.*
Hi,
We are happy to announce a Translation sprint on 26th November 2011 at
SICSR between 10 am to 5 pm.
These are the activities in the sprint:
To work on the translation of MediaWiki and MediaWiki extensions used by
Wikimedia for a few hours. (and have some nice chats while doing that :-) )
These translations are done at https://translatewiki.net .
There will also be some discussions related to the topic. We will also have
some session similar to FUEL (www.fuelproject.org)
5 people from the Wikimedia Foundation technical team (Siebrand, Niklas,
Amir, Gerard, Santhosh and Alolita) will be coming for the sprint.
It is not necessary that you should have technical knowledge about
mediawiki or translatewiki but that will surely help. Your (Indic) language
skills are also required for the event. People interested in FUEL
activities are also welcome.
So, do join us for the sprint.
Here are the details:
Date: 26th November 2011
Venue: 3rd floor at SICSR (this might change if we have HUGE response :-) )
Time: 10 am to 5 pm.
Thanks and regards
-Sudhanwa
~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!
web: www.sudhanwa.com blog: www.sudhanwa.in
Twitter: sudhanwa Check on FB, Linkedin for more.
* Did you know a lot of useful things were done at the Mediawiki India
Hackathon see notes[1] . Thanks to all who made it happen and successful.
I am writing about one of the tiniest piece(literally some 10 lines of
code) of work done on Day 1 of the hackathon. After the initial interest on
@DYKIndia[2], Arunmozhi[3] and myself started working on the DYKAPI[4]
sometime back with the aim of creating a "perfect" API so that app
developers can consume it. We are still far away from that perfect state,
but as of now it gives a very random fact from 40k + facts stored. So I
thought I would do a txtweb plugin to the current API, so that one could
use it as a "stumble upon" on SMS to get random facts and browse to beat
boredom.
So please try out the didyouknow txtweb app by sending "@didyouknow" as an
SMS to 09243342000 and check it out.
There is lot more that can be done and much more scope for more such tools
with Wikipedia Zero etc,So if you are interested and have some time, do
ping me, I will keep you engaged with work!. I would also write a detailed
blogpost on wikimedia.in soon which Arjuna has been requesting me for a
while.
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011/Schedule_notes#Notes
[2] http://twitter.com/DYKIndia
[3] http://www.arunmozhi.in/
[4] http://github.com/tecoholic/dykapi
--
Regards
Srikanth.L
