New subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] [WMIN-Members] [Press] : Times of India : " Wikipedia boom in Marathi, Malayalam and other desi languages"

2 Aug 2013

I believe the i18n team has been working on this for quite a while. Do note
there are several tools [built in] for typing in Devnagari with Keymanweb
and Narayam being the ones I am aware of.

On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Yogesh Khandke &lt;yogesh_khandke(a)yahoo.com&gt;wrote;wrote:

...
  I've done Wikipedia workshops at TISS Mumbai and
at Ahmednagar , the
 former with PhD students and the later with undergraduates,  the bottleneck
 was the great difficulty in typing using Devnagari.

 Can anything be done to address the issue?

   ------------------------------
  *From:* Abhijeet Safai &lt;abhijeet.safai(a)gmail.com&gt;
 *To:* wmin-members(a)googlegroups.com
 *Cc:* Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia. <
 wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;gt;; press(a)wikimedia.in
 *Sent:* Friday, 2 August 2013 10:51 AM
 *Subject:* Re: [WMIN-Members] [Press] : Times of India : " Wikipedia boom
 in Marathi, Malayalam and other desi languages"

 Great to know!

 On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 10:59 AM, CherianTinu Abraham <
 tinucherian(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

 *Times of India : " Wikipedia boom in Marathi, Malayalam and other desi
 languages"*

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/internet/Wikipedia-boom-i…

 *A vibrant vernacular Wikipedia seems to be taking root in India. In the
 last eight months, the number of Wikipedia entries has grown substantially
 in 20 Indian languages, says a study by the Bangalore-based Centre for
 Internet and Society (CIS).

 Wiki, the world's largest online encyclopaedia where anyone can write and
 edit articles, didn't have much content in vernacular till a few years ago.
 According to the study, Wikis in Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi have
 added thousands of new articles on various subjects from September 2012 to
 April 2013. A few of these pages were viewed more during this period.
 Marathi, which had 30 lakh page views per month previously, had another 10
 lakh visitors, while Bengali Wikipedia had 14 lakh page views.

 While Malayalam Wiki took the top position with an enviable team of 100
 plus editors, the number Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit editors came down.
 "Marathi has 40,000 articles. But most editors in Mumbai prefer to work on
 English. Pune has more Marathi editors,' says T Vishnu Vardhan, programme
 director, Access to Knowledge project at CIS.

 "In the last two years, the demand for knowledge in Indian languages has
 grown as we have moved to the motto of 'roti, kapda and internet'," says
 Vardhan.

 One of the reasons for growth is that many browsers now support Indian
 language scripts. But this was not the case in early 2000. Though many
 wanted to read and type in their own language, there was no browser
 support, says Shiju Alex, blogger and Malayalam Wiki editor. Moreover,
 many didn't know how to type in their mother tongues.

 But once Indian languages were encoded in Unicode, the fonts became
 accessible. "There was no need to write Malayalam in English and people
 started blogging in their mother tongues," says Alex. According to Vardhan,
 communities with better literacy rates seem to have taken the lead online.

 "Telugu Wiki is stronger as internet penetration in Andhra Pradesh is
 higher than in places where Bhojpuri or Assamese is spoken."

 As with most online language initiatives, the Wiki movement was also
 fuelled by the diaspora. Tinu Cherian Abraham, a former board member of
 the Wikimedia India chapter, talks about how an NRI's love for Malayalam
 kick-started the project.

 But now there are many Wiki foot soldiers in India, including a blind
 editor of Hindi Wikipedia and an elderly contributor from Kerala whose
 passion for free knowledge has helped him forget his ailments. *

 Regards
 Tinu Cherian
 press(a)wikimedia.in
 http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news

 Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes
 only. The publisher ( Times of India ) of the above news article owns the
 copyrights of the article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.

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Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [WMIN-Members] [Press] : Times of India : " Wikipedia boom in Marathi, Malayalam and other desi languages"