Give special importance to blogs in your regional language while you try to reach out to people . There you got the people who are are already familiar with typing in the respective regional language (and unicode of course).
 
Thanks
 
Shiju Alex
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Shijualex
 

 
On 1/20/08, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline@gmail.com> wrote:
And my concern for Assamese ,Oriya , Punjabi   wikis remains

 

Your concern about the above wikies are true (especially about Oriya and Punjabi wikies). Infact, Oriya and Punjabi wikies are the first indian language wikies. But even after 5 years, the article count in those wikies is below 1000 and the number of registered users is hardly 100.

Certainly at least we can share best of each wikipedias aproaches and I am realy pleased to know Malyalam WIkipedia is well above 4400 membership ,I am quite interested in knowing how did they achive this .
 
In Malayalam wikipedia we made use of all the opportunities to popularise the malayalam wikipedia and its sister projects. 

We tried to reach maximum numer of people. We got help from regional language newspapers. We used the regional language blogs to reach to out to people. That is the reason why we got more users.
 
Give importance to other wiki projects also when you are reaching out to people. Especially include wikisource and wiktionary in the priority list. There are lot of people who are not interested in wikipedia but are very much interested in projects like wikisource and wiktionary. Both these wikies are going to be the online backbone for each regional language. Wikipedia itself can use wikisource as a reference library. 
 
Try to make understand the regional language newspapers about moving to unicode for their online edition. That will really help wikipedia. Most of the Malayalam newspapers are now planning to move to Unicode. Some online portals are already moved.
 

In malayalam hardly anyone uses Baraha for transleteration. We use varamozhi, keyman or some other customized tools.

In the long run it is not good to give too much importance to transliteration tools for inputing the text. An experienced user must be able to use inscript tool which is integrated in all operating systems. In malayalam I have seen people using their own custom keyborad layouts also for inputting the text apart from the inscript and transilteration.
 
 
Regards
Shiju Alex
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Shijualex

 


On 1/20/08, Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia < mahitgar@yahoo.co.in> wrote:

I am just interested in sharing positive steps which we can learn from each other.Realy what motivated me in writing about the issue were not article race comparison.The fact is I am just concerned with growth of all Indian Language Wikipedias.I did not compare any wikipedia with Mr wiki which I belong to because I am well aware of Mr.Wikis limitations too.

Certainly at least we can share best of each wikipedias aproaches and I am realy pleased to know Malyalam WIkipedia is well above 4400 membership ,I am quite interested in knowing how did they achive this .

 

And my concern for Assamese ,Oriya , Punjabi   wikis remains.

 

 

Thanks and Regards

--- On Wed, 16/1/08, Hari Prasad Nadig <mail@hpnadig.net> wrote:

From: Hari Prasad Nadig < mail@hpnadig.net>
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Lower user and edit count of some Indian wikis
To: mahitgar@yahoo.co.in, wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Wednesday, 16 January, 2008, 12:20 PM


On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 20:28 +0530, Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia
wrote:
> It is quite ununderstandable why Wikipedias like Kannada Language
> wikipedia and Gujrathi and Malyalam language wikipedia are so slow
> given the fact that literacy levels and IT exposure in respective
> states is quite OK and they are immensely contributing to India
> centric articles on English wikipedia in big way.
> 
> Important regional Languages Assamese ,Oriya , Punjabi  wikipedias are
> lagging behind like nothing.
> 
> Besides we need to look after now sort of extinct but important old
> languages wikipedias Sanskrit and Pali
> 
> Main chalange is not how to increase their article or edit count but
> statisticaly self sustainable website service has to achieve  menimum
> 3000 membership mark from respective languages so website keeps
> getting adequate content and how do we do that?
> 

I don't know what to make out of your first statement, really. It would
be stupid to say what you've said. 

It might sound rude, but it would be nice if you do some homework before
writing vaguely like this. 

None of the wikis you have mentioned are "slow". They have much
better
ratio of quality content to stubs which is what the projects need in
order to grow. An infinite array of stubs isn't going to motivate new
visitors to become editors. Instead, it might just do the opposite.

Literacy levels or IT exposure has nothing significant to do with how
respective language Wikipedias are faring. 

The challenge of motivating more visitors to become editors has to be
addressed with a much different approach. There are technical barriers.
There are differences in culture that affect the way the projects are
received by the native speakers of each language. But I'd rather not
discuss that in a thread that started with some poorly formed
observation. 

  - h.p.


Save all your chat conversations. Find them online.
_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l