Agreed on all points, and I see some parts where we could collaborate and start putting together stuff. If I'm reading this right, here are the potential projects that might be done:

1. A default mediawiki installation bundle (MW + A bunch of Extensions)

2. A default 'templatekit' (Commonly used templates from enwiki / other wikis)

3. Better 'levels' of information/deetail on the Manual

Perhaps we could start doing internal hackathons (online, with experienced people from the India MW community pitching in) to do these things? These won't be workshops, but online events for us to get stuff done. Thoughts?

Semantic Mediawiki is a lot of fun (despite a few performance problems that prevent it from being used on large wikis). Nischay is a contributor for SMW from India, but I don't think he's on this list yet. I'll forward this to him and see what we can do about that too!

Thanks!

P.S. I'll forward this to mediawiki-l in a while, since I think it is relevant there too.