Dear WikiMedians,

Mailing list of the wiki projects of a particular language can be used for various purposes. For example, the advocacy of the wiki projects, reaching the members who are not active in wiki, language related discussions, and so on. Usually many members of a mailing list may not be regular visitors of that Wiki. But they will be definitely interested to know about the developments of the wiki projects of their language.

One of the main issue with the advocacy part of the Indian Language Indian Language wikiprojects is the fact that, most of the Wikiprojects still does not have a mechanism to reach the public. Many Indian Language wiki communities still think that the interested users must come to their Wiki and read through all the discussion pages.

But, we should remember that there might be many people outside wiki community who are interested in the news related to the wiki projects of their language. Even though they are not registered or active users in the respective wiki projects, many of them would like to hear news about the wiki projects of their language and share it with others. For this, we can use mailing list. This is one of the most important way of reaching the public.

But it is found that very less Indian Language Wikipedias have a mailing list. Some existing mailing lists are not active or not used effectively. It is surprising to notice that most of the Indian language Wikipedias didn't mentioned about their mailing list in the welcome message (for the new user), even though they have a mailing list. Many of them doesn't know that they can create WikiMedia mailing itself for their language. (Some still use google/yahoo)

A little research in Meta Wiki and on all Indian Language wikis, help me to understand that at least the following languages have mailing lists. (But many of them are not active).

Hindi - WikiHI-l - https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikihi-l also http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/HindiWikipedia/
Kannada - Wikikn-l - https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikikn-l
Malayalam - Wikiml-l - https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiml-l
Sanskrit - Wikisa-l - https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisa-l
Tamil - Wikita-l - https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikita-l
Telugu - WikiTe-L - https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikite-l also http://groups.google.com/group/teluguwiki
Marathi - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mr-wiki/

As you can see from the archives many of these mailing lists are not active.

I request all Indian language wiki communities to use mailing list effectively to reach more users. This is one of the way by which you can build the community. Also, it will help you to easily convey important messages to the users of your language. It is found that the announcements/discussions in the mailing list is used by many to discuss about the wiki projects. This will help you to reach more people.

To create a mailing list for your language wikiproject, first have community consensus (to show that community supports the idea) and log a bug in bugzilla.

Please let me know if missed the mailing list of any Indian Language wikiproject. I am planning to create a project page in MetaWiki to gather all the important information about all the Indian language wikiprojects.

Shiju