Dear All,
Today I am sharing you the summary of discussions I had with Odia wiki (
http://or.wikipedia.org/) community. It is available here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_…
Odia is a shining example of how a wiki project can be revived and build a
community around it, if few wonderful users with a vision for building free
knowledge in their mother language arrive in their mother language wiki.
Odia wikipedia was started in 2002. In fact it is one of the first Indic
language wikipedia. Nothing much had happened in Odia wiki till 2010
December. But the progress made by Odia wiki project (
http://or.wikipedia.org/) during the past one year is note worthy and it is
an example that can be replicated in some of the inactive Indic language
wikipedias. Odia was having just 600 articles (which were created over the
past 8 years) and no active users at the start of this year. Now 10 months
later, it has close to 1600 articles and 10 active users. The online and
offline outreach initiatives took by Odia wiki community for building the
community is showing positive result.
I was actively involved in the community building for Odia wikipedia. I
still remember the day (2011 January 15) when I introducted Odia wikipedia
and Odia tying tool (developed by Junaid) to an Odia speaker (Ashuthosh
Kar) during Wiki X celebration at Bangalore. Through him very soon we got a
wonderful wikipedian (Subhashish) who is leading the efforts for Odia wiki
now. Initially Subhasish and I used to meet at my home and work on the
basic things for Odia wiki. I remember us working on the Odia wikipedia
logo, FAQ booklet, Translate wiki, and so on. Soon Odia got more members to
the team through the few Odia wiki workshops happened at Bangalore. Along
with workshops, Odia wikipedians translated the FAQ booklet to Odia and
took efforts to integrate the Odia typing solution to Odia wikipedia. Later
with the support of Dhanada Mishra (the chairman of Human Development
Foundation (http://www.hdf.org.in/)) and a young student Odia wikipedian
Srikanth Kedia a wiki workshop is conducted at Bhubaneshwar. Odia
wikipedians from Bangalore are doing an excellent job and now many of them
are participating in Wikimedia India chapter activities also.
Odia wiki community is effectively making use of various social networking
sites to reach out to Odia speakers.
Odia wiki project picked up not because Odia has got huge speaker base,
high literacy among Odia speakers, access to computers, or any thing else;
it become active only because it has receieved the right volunteers who
have passion and vision of developing a wikipedia in their mother language.
We need similar volunteers for each Indic language wikipedia.
Requesting you to place your comments on the talk
page<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/I…>
.
Regards
Shiju
This is a letter to all Indian editors of the English Wikipedia requesting
discussion, cooperation and help.
Recently I was asked to give a three to four minute presentation on the
state of WikiProject India on English Wikipedia for the session on state of
Indic Wikipedias at the recently concluded WikiConference in Mumbai. At
first I thought nothing about the matter, but as I was compiling the
report, I came across statistics which would horrify any of us.
To begin with, as of time of writing this post, WikiProject India has a
total of 90,021 articles. This is a very large number and second only to
Hindi Wikipedia's 100,588 articles. Since all these English articles cover
only India or some aspect of its geography, history, culture or its people,
this set of 90,000+ articles is important to all Indians, representing the
largest core of knowledge about India on any Wikipedia project.
But all of this is not high quality stuff. User:Svick on English Wikipedia
provides a useful service to WikProjects on English Wikipedia. He provides
a WikiProject-wise listing of articles which have improvement tags such as
{{unreferenced}}, {{cleanup}}, {{copyedit}} and so on. In his report for
WikiProject India, at the following url:
http://toolserver.org/~svick/CleanupListing/CleanupListingByCat.php?project…
you will find that of the 79435 articles in this project which were
assessed by Svick, a total of 52077 articles or 65.6 % are marked for
cleanup, with 86271 issues in total. These are tagged with 82 different
types of tags, the most populous being :
* Articles with unsourced statements (6815)
* Articles lacking reliable references (1989)
* Articles needing additional references (4840)
* Articles lacking sources (8970)
* BLP articles lacking sources (1297)
* Articles needing cleanup (2751)
* Articles containing potentially dated statements (9317)
* All articles needing coordinates (14571)
* Articles to be expanded (1020)
Besides this, there are 40,338 articles unassessed for importance and
20,527 for quality, making a backlog of 60,865 assessments.
In addition, of the 90,000+ articles, there are 43,843 stubs and 10,986
start class articles. All these need to be developed in time also.
Besides these are a very large number of cryptic articles, articles
pertaining to India but not tagged on the talk page with the WikiProject
banner. The articles themselves sometimes need more cleanup tags than are
marked at present.
You may have read Sven Manguard's special opinion editorial in the Signpost
some time ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-10-31/Opinio…
wherein he has drawn attention to the hundreds of thousands of articles
needing cleanup and improvement on Wikipedia as a whole. That is exactly
the issue with WikiProject India, as of now.
To me it appears that - Something needs to be done URGENTLY.
My own suggestion is that this can easily be tackled if all of us do a
little bit every day. Many hands make light work. There are about 450
active editors listed on the WikiProject members page. If each of us
decided to do just one cleanup task each day, then we can do away with
1,64,500 odd problems in a year. Over time, these issues will fall to
negligible levels.
Please reply to this thread with your views. Firstly, do you agree with me.
Is there a problem or am I sensationalising the case? What exactly are the
issues and how do we resolve them. Can we as Indians rise to the challenge
and bring down these backlogs to manageable levels. Please give us any
ideas, inputs, insights or critiques that may occur to you.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
Hi All,
A new prototype site http://wikilive.in/ has been developed by an Indian
student Deepanshu Mehndiratta, a second year engineering student at
BITS-Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus has come up with a real time live search
srvice for Wikipedia. As of now it works only for English Wikipedia
(Probably the team might not be aware of the other language Wikipedias, esp
Indic Wikipedias), but it has potentials to be a useful tool, especially
live preview of multiple pages from Wikipedia at a time without opening
them in multiple windows. In fact if you are logged in to Wikipedia then
it'll be just like opening any Wikipedia page under one header. My personal
opinion about this site is good overall though there are many more features
could be added. First of all, the no of article names it shows is just 5/6
(which is very less). Hope, the developers get some feedback from
Wikipedians to enhance their site.
regards
*
ସୁ ଭା ସି ସ ପା ଣି ଗା ହି
**
S u b h a s i s a P a n i g a h i
**
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia Odia (Oriya) mailing list
wikipedia-or(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-orfacebook.com/OdiaWiki
Tweet @OdiaWiki
*
Forwarding email to the Wikipedia India list. Im hoping Shiju/Kundan can help this person.
Kind Regards,
> From: deepak_sapkale(a)hotmail.com
> To: wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2011 11:08:57 +0530
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Creation of new language - Ahirani
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I am Deepak Sapkale, 27 year old software engineer, currently working at L & T Infotech. I had attended Wiki Conference India 2011 and was really inspired to create new language which is spoken in my native town. The language is called "Ahirani" . The script of Ahirani is "Devanagari" which used for Hindi and Marathi languages.
>
> Please advise me, how can I proceed with this one.
>
> Regards,
>
> Deepak Sapkale
> contact no, home: +91-022-21717690
> mobile no: +91-9920997888
>
> Home is behind
> The world ahead.
> And there are many paths to tread.
> Through shadow,
> To the edge of night
> Until the stars are all alight
> Mist and shadow
> Cloud and shade
> All shall fade
> All shall...fade.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
The list of English equivalents of articles in Malayalam CD forwarded by
Santhosh Thottingall.
:)
Thanks, Santhosh
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Santhosh Thottingal <santhosh.thottingal(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2011/12/2
Subject: Re: List of articles of the 500 article Malayalam Wikipedia CD
To: Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com>
Cc: wikiml-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, Shiju Alex <shiju(a)wikimedia.org>, Cherian
Tinu Abraham <tinucherian(a)gmail.com>, Rahul Deshmukh <
rahuldeshmukh101(a)gmail.com>, Mandar Kulkarni <mvkulkarni23(a)gmail.com>,
"Jogalekar, Sudhanwa" <sudhanwa.com(a)gmail.com>, Mahitgar From Marathi
Wikipedia <mahitgar(a)gmail.com>
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> I wanted to request if someone could kindly provide me with a list of the
> English names of the 500 articles.
Attached file contains all the mappings from Malayalam wiki article
names to English articles. In case the article does not exist or not
having interwiki links, it is given as UNKNOWN.
List created using a small python script using pywikipedia.
Thanks
Santhosh
Heya all,
I was searching the Android Market, when I stumbled upon this app:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.practicalapps.android.wallpaper.w…
It's called Picture of the Day Wallpaper
>From the market page:
Beautiful daily photos from Wikimedia Commons scroll across your desktop.
Live Wallpaper which displays the Picture Of The Day posted by Wikimedia
Commons, an public domain media file repository
(commons.wikimedia.org<http://www.google.com/url?q=http://commons.wikimedia.org&usg=AFQjCNFNTovbfl…>
).
Each day a different glorious image from the Wikimedia Commons image
library is automatically downloaded and added to the scrolling rotation of
the last six images.
A convenient shortcut to the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day webpage
is provided on the initial application and preferences screens. A
preference setting is also provided to control the image scroll speed and
position of the image title.
To install this animated wallpaper, launch the application icon or
long-click on your phone's desktop, then select Wallpapers, then select
Live wallpapers.
*All images are credited to NASA (NASA.gov)*
That last line worries me a bit. Are all photos credited to NASA,
irrespective of who uploaded it?
OR
Are all photos of the Day by NASA, thereby giving others no chance for a
front page visit?
--
Regards,
Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
Hallo from the very cold Amsterdam :)
Apologies for spamming your inboxes but I am at the second GLAMcamp here
and we're discussing a LOT of interesting things here. Especially if you
are an open+tech+tools+culture junkie, you can follow discussions on
#iglamsterdam. Do tune in :)
Tot ziens
Noopur
--
Noopur Raval
Student
Arts and Aesthetics
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Ph: 9650567690
hi,
The recent release of the film Dam 999 made me want to read up on the Mullaperiyar Dam in Kerala around which this film is shot and there are contrarian claims as to whether the film is about this dam or not. However, the article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullaperiyar_Dam - seems to have become a venue for both sides of the controversy to raise their points.
I have created a section on the talk page aimed at improving the article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mullaperiyar_Dam#Improving_Mullaperiyar_D…. Request help from English language Wikipedians to improve this article.
Thanks in advance,
warm regards,
Pradeep Mohandas
User:Prad2609
Hoi,
I have been privileged to have been at the Wikiconference India, the Mumbai
hackathon and the Pune translation sprint. For me personally it was great
to see the activity in the many communities. I have learned a lot and I am
sure there is much more for me to learn.
The one thing I have come to understand is that many native speakers of
Indic languages are effectively illiterate in their own language. The
combination of highly educated people being functionally illiterate had me
talking with many people. Given the structure of the Indic scripts, it is
possible for me to learn to read the text; it will get me as far as
pronouncing something I do not know the meaning of. For native speakers it
must be not that hard at all when they surmounted the challenge of learning
to read and write English already.
I wrote on the Wikimedia blog some of the points I came up with. What I
would like from you is your comment.
Thanks,
Gerard
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/28/7983/