[Wikimediaindia-l] ONE simple step to double or triple visits to Indic Wikipedias

[Ravishankar]

Anirudh,

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Anirudh Bhati <anirudhsbh at gmail.com>wrote:

> Most of the visitors on Wikipedia end up there through search engines.
>  But there is another group which attempts to access Wikipedia directly by
> typing in www.wikipedia.com or www.wikipedia.org in the address bar of
> their browsers.
>
> Currently, the landing page for www.wikipedia.org (wikipedia.comredirects to
> wikipedia.org) lists the ten largest Wikipedia projects.  Apart from the
> English Wikipedia, the rest of the projects are practically useless for
> most of us in this country.  Replacing the foreign language projects (for
> Indian IPs) with Indic language projects will help drive more traffic.
>

+1. Great idea.

Pradeep,

//Perhaps somebody here has already brought this up, but you can now switch
languages on Commons using a drop down menu. You can spot the drop down
just below the Village Pump link. There is also a helpful site notice, that
suggested I read Commons in British English :)..//

This is also neatly done. I chose Tamil interface and closed the window.
After a while I came back to see
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Takes_Kolkatadirectly.
It remembered my earlier preference and gave me a notice that I
can also see in Tamil.

While we are looking for a similar notice based on IP / availability of
Indic interwiki links, giving interface language options for en wiki is not
much useful. As Sumana rightly pointed out, we need to alert the users
about the existence of local language Wiki. Most of the major Indic Wiki
projects are online for more than 7 years now. But, 90%+ users who browse
en wiki do not know that they exist :( If they knew about them and chose to
read in English, that is altogether a different issue and can't be solved
technically.

Ravi
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