Angry with Wikileaks, Indian Union minister for law and justice Veerappa
Moily "lashes against Wikipedia"
".. *Union minister for law and justice Veerappa Moily on Tuesday criticized
WikiLeaks for playing havoc in the democracies of many countries. These are
all products which create instability in many countries, he said.
“Information can also be misleading. There is much controversy over the
website Wikipedia, which is used as a first point of reference for many
people seeking information. Wikipedia authors are anonymous and literally
anyone can post a Wikipedia article on any subject, regardless of whether
they are qualified or know much about the subject,” he said ..*."
Full text on Financial Express newspaper.
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/moily-says-wikileaks-playing-havoc-wit…
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Hi,
Some thoughts on SEO for Indic Wikimedia projects:
1. URL redirects / shortners won't help in SEO. First, search engines may
not index them. Second, they won't give much value for them. So, any design
for URL shortening should keep in mind only the usability aspect.
2. Keywords Meta tag is dead officially.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keyw…
3. Three important text related factors in SEO: content in page, page title,
link anchor.
If you are going to compete for keywords in English or transliterated text,
you will end up modifying the Wikipedia page unnaturally which will annoy
the direct non-search engine reader. So it is best to optimize only for the
native language text.
Some practices in Tamil Wikimedia:
* We include the English name / spelling of the article at the beginning.
Earlier, this helped readers to search within the project. Now, the tendency
is to include the English title only for foreign names and not for
translations.
* One project that could be SEOed is Wiktionary. We changed the page title
of Tamil Wiktionary pages like this: <title>"{{Page title}} tamil word -
தமிழ் விக்சனரி ( Tamil Wiktionary ) - தமிழ் அகரமுதலி / அகராதி - Tamil
Dictionary</title>
So for the page Monkey it would be :
monkey - tamil word - தமிழ் விக்சனரி ( Tamil Wiktionary ) - தமிழ்
அகரமுதலி / அகராதி - Tamil Dictionary</title>
This has some of the natural keywords which people use while searching for
meaning in Tamil and has helped us rank Wiktionary pages well. Other Indic
language Wiktionaries can try this with variations of common keywords used
for meaning search both in English and Tamil.
One sure fire way:
Try getting more natural links from blogosphere for Wikipedia articles.
Plugins like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wikipedia-autolink/ can
help.
( I haven't tested the above yet )
Ravi
Starting a new thread for SEO
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 23:31, Santhosh Thottingal <
santhosh.thottingal(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Srikanth mentioned a valid issue related to search engine optimization
> with Indian wikis. I dont get any result for this query:
> "Malayalam + Mango " to take me to Mango article in Malayalam wiki.
> Because there is no way a search engine can index the word Mango in
> english to the Malayalam wiki page of Mango. Having Mango in URL does
> not help search engines.
> I know some SEO tricks used by Malayalam news portals to address this.
> They use Meta tag efficiently and put english and malayalam keywords
> associated with the article. For eg: a news article about
> Mullapperiyar Dam will contain a meta tag with keywords
> "മുല്ലപ്പെരിയാര് ഡാം, mullapperiyar dam, "
> Some of the news portals even integrated this trick their news
> publishing workflow with custom plugins to CMS systems(like Drupal).
>
> If we want to get people searching in English to our wiki articles, we
> can think about a Meta tag solution - some extension that injects
> keywords to meta tag.
>
> Don't we need to point show ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochi if one search
> for Kochi? atleast within first 10 results?
>
Completely agree with you Santhosh. SEO is as important as outreach (its
online outreach after all). Ravi,Sundar,myself were discussing this on a
dinner after a meetup. But manually adding Meta tags is an additional
overhead on content creators IMHO. If there is some automatic tagging with
interwiki english page category etc(Bot idea ?), its worth a try.
Ravi, can you please add more since you are an expert :)
Regards
Srikanth.L
http://srik.me
Santhosh Thottingal gets commit access to Mediawiki
http://svn.wikimedia.org/users.php
Santhosh is working on web fonts extensions. Webfonts allows webpages to
serve and render fonts from server, instead of relying on the fonts
available in a users' system. This is used either for aesthetics purpose or
for serving content in non-latin scripts where the supported fonts are rare
in computers for eg: Indian languages - Most often users wont have enough
good fonts in systems to see the content properly (they get squares, or
question marks). This readability issue can be solved by webfonts
Congratulations and all the best wishes to Santhosh & his efforts.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
<http://svn.wikimedia.org/users.php>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 6:25 AM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] New committer
To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Extension access:
* Santhosh Thottingal (santhosh): Webfonts extension
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Hi Wikipedians from India,
Are you attending Wikimania 2011 at Haifa, Israel? Did you get
scholarships from the Wikimedia Foundation for attending Wikimania this
year?
Please Add your name in this page so that others can know who all are
travelling from India. It will help organize and get information from each
other.
http://wikimedia.in/wiki/Wikimania2011
Last year, this were only a few attendees and we went through lots of
hurdles . I still remember Bishakha and Achal worked a lot to get our visas
in time.
This year, whoever is attending please add your name and can start helping /
interacting with each other. I have added a small checklist. Please add more
information so that it will help others too.
All the best wishes.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
In case, you are not subscribed to Foundation-l mailing list.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ting Chen <tchen(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 1:48 AM
Subject: [Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear all:
The Wikimedia Board of Trustees just completed its two-day meeting [1]
this weekend in Berlin. We devoted the longest time to discussing
declining trends in editing activity and our collective response to it.
I encourage everyone to review Sue’s March update [2], and the editor
trends study itself [3]. It is a deeply important topic, and each report
is only a few pages long.
The Board thinks this is the most significant challenge currently facing
our movement. We would encourage the whole movement - the communities,
wikiprojects, Chapters, Board, Foundation staff - to think about ways to
meet this challenge. We know many contributors care about this and have
worked on outreach and hospitality in past years. We are considering how
we can help make such work more effective, and ask for suggestions from
the community to this problem now and to invite discussion and
suggestions [4].
Greetings,
Ting
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_meetings/March_25-26
[2] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/March_2011_Update
[3] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
[4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:March_2011_Update
--
Ting Chen
Member of the Board of Trustees
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
E-Mail: tchen(a)wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
For your information.
Yours sincerely,
Anirudh Bhati
00 91 9328712208
Skype: anirudhsbh
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jessie Wild <jwild(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 10:32 PM
Subject: [Wikimedia Kenya] Offline distribution map
To: "The discussion list for the upcoming Wikimedia Kenya chapter." <
wikimediake(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello!
I just wanted to direct your attention to the new offline portal on the
meta-wiki that is to be used to track all offline projects! It can be found
here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline_Projects. The goal is that
this is the place where all the offline materials and lessons learned will
be codified and able to access. So, for example, it would be great to
include the copy of your WfS User Manuel.
In particular, I was hoping you could help with populating a map designed to
capture where all the offline distributions have taken place. See this Google
Map<http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=2004448215665451857…>.
There are a few examples already installed, but for each location we would
basically want to include:
- Number of offline distributions: (i.e., #computers)
- Number impacted: (e.g., # of students + teachers)
- Content: (e.g., "Wikipedia for Schools")
- Language: (e.g., "English")
- Contact: (e.g., "Samson Maosa & Isaac Kosgei" (or usernames))
- Other/Notes: (if applicable)
It would be great if we could have flags for each school the offline project
has been uploaded. If you need help populating the map, please let me know,
and I am happy to send instructions on how to do so.
Let me know what questions you have! And please feel free to contribute to
the wiki in whatever way you think is most valuable: reorganizing, uploading
content, data, etc.
Thanks for your help! Hope you think this is valuable: I think it will be a
great way to organize volunteers, but also a great place to direct partners
to who are interested in learning more information about the purpose of the
project (e.g., Ministry of Education).
Jessie
--
Jessie Wild
Special Projects Manager
Global Development
Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
WikimediaKE mailing list
WikimediaKE(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediake
Just got this from an advocate in Rajasthan High Court. Can the image be
deleted?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: S P Singh <rajawatsurya(a)rediffmail.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 8:33 AM
Subject: National Flag of India
To: arun.planemad(a)gmail.com
Sir
The picture of map of India with the chakra placed in the middle in
wilipedia by you needs the careful study of the following
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IndianStub.png
THE EMBLEMS AND NAMES (PREVENTION OF IMPROPER USE) ACT, 1950
Section 3. Notwithstanding anything contained in any law for the time being
in force, no person of improper shall, except in such cases and under such
conditions as may be prescribed by the use of Central Government, use, or
continue to use, for the purpose of any trade, business, certain calling or
profession, or in the title of any patent, or in any trade mark or design
any name emblems and or emblem specified in the Schedule or any colourable
imitation thereof without the names. previous permission of the Central
Government or of such officer or Government as may be authorised in this
behalf by the Central Government.
EMBLEMS & NAMES (PREVENTION OF IMPROPER USE) RULES 1982
Rule 8. Use of emblems and names contained in the Schedule ?No person shall
use or continue to use, for the purpose of any trade, business, calling or
profession, or in the title of any patent, or any trademark or design, any
name or emblem specified in the Schedule or any colourable imitation thereof
without the previous permission of the Central Government or of such officer
of the Government as may be authorized in this behalf by the Central
Government
(5) The authorship, production, publication, exhibition or transmission by
any medium for academic, artistic, biographical, cultural, educational,
scientific or spiritual purposes with the previous permission of the Central
Government and subject to such conditions as the Central Government may lay
down while granting such permission.
THE SCHEDULE
(see Sections 2 (a) and 3)
3.The Indian National Flag.
16.The names ?Ashoka Chakra? or ?Dharma Chakra? or the pictorial
representation of Ashoka Chakra as used in the Indian National Flag or in
the official seal or emblem of the Government of India or of any State
Government or of a Department of any such Government.
Regards
Surya Pratap Singh Rajawat
--
j.mp/ArunGanesh <http://j.mp/ArunGanesh>
