Dear Wikimedians from India.

For those who do not know me, I am a staff member of http://translatewiki.net, a project where most of the translation of MediaWiki is done. MediaWiki is the software used by all wikis of the Wikimedia Foundation. There is more to translatewiki, but I hope you may discover that later.

I have made an analysis of the localization of MediaWiki and its extensions with regards to use by the Wikimedia Foundation. I have done this with a scope of the 50 languages with the most speakers in the world[1]. As India is an enormous country, with a long history, it is no surprise that many languages are spoken by a lot of people.

For India the following languages make the top 50 of most spoken languages in the world: Hindi (3), Bengali (10), Gujarati (34), Kannada (33), Malayalam (39), Marathi (17), Nepali (43), Oriya (42), Punjabi (15), Sindhi (37), Tamil (28), Telugu (20), and Urdu (29). Some of these languages have a fair level of localization (Telugu and Hindi are doing OK, but not excellent), but many others have very poor localization (Oriya and Urdu are doing particularly bad)[1].

As I do not speak or read any languages that are not in a Latin, Greek or Cyrillic script, and live in the Netherlands, it is hard for me to crowd source translators for these languages. I am in dire need of structural help in that area. Having Wikimedia India formed is something I recognize as an enormous opportunity for getting the localization level of languages spoken in India to a higher level. It will enable more users to experience and enjoy the freedoms that we as Wikimedians try to create and provide.

Please help me help in getting India's languages gain more ground and availability in the Wikimedia universe. Ideally I would like some kind of an ambassador from your community to spread the word and focus on getting more and more localization done for languages spoken in India. If you are interested in contributing as a translator, please visit translatewiki.net. If you are interested in investing time on a higher level, please contact me on-wiki, on this list, or by private e-mail so we can work something out. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Siebrand Mazeland translatewiki.net staff

[1] http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Project:MediaWiki_localisation_in_the_50_most_ spoken_languages [2] http://www.mediawiki.org