Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Blog post]: Numerals in Indic languages

This is my personal opinion as an Indic language wikimedian. According to me, Wikimedia community should be following what the speakers of that language use. We cannot force numerals/script through wikimedia projects on the speakers of a language if the speakers of that languages are not even aware about it. That is the reason why few Indic language like Tamil, Malayalam and so on completely moved to Arabic numerals since the respective language speakers do not know the language numerals. But take the case of Kannada. The Kannada speakers are aware about kannada numerals and they use both numeral system in their daily life. So it was easy for Kannada community to stick to Kannada numerals. This will not be possible in Malayalam or Tamil since majority of the speakers of the respective language do not know the respective numerals. So in short Wiki community cannot forcefully adopt a numeral system with out considering the speakers of the language. That is why it was so easy for Assamese and Bangla to adopt the respective numeral. Can Wikipedia be used as medium to introduce language changes or should the If we think from English or European language wikipedias the answer might be No. Here I am answering from the perspective indic language wikipedias. So the answer (according to me) to this question is, *to some extent* Yes. Remember for most Indic languages, Wikipedia is the first unicode website in that respective language. Even though the primary mission of wikimedia is to document things through various projects, for Indic languages knowingly or unknowingly we are brining many revolutionary things for that language in the cyber world. So for Indic language, Wikimedia projects are not just another website in that language. Which means there is some sort of language intervention is happening through the work done by Indic Wikimedians. Over the past 6 years I have seen many of us asking (only we Indians will ask like that) about the relevance of Indic Wikipedias when English Wikipedia is available. I personally met and heard wikipedians itself speaking against it and lobbying for it. But now a days I am able to note that these same people who had criticized the existence of Indic wikipedias now started speaking for it and even slowly started editing on it :) I have seen users who never used an Indic language for their studies earlier, now started studying their mother language just to contribute to the wiki project in their mother language. This trend is going to continue and increase now and we will see more speakers of a language speak and work for their language wiki projects. That is why I told Indic language wiki projects are doing more than "just documenting the things". May I also please ask you to add a Copyright notice on blog(similar to I have asked the chapter blog administrators to add copyright notice at the footer of the blog. I do not have access to that. Shiju On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan &lt;srik.lak(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: > On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Noopur Raval &lt;nraval(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: > >> Hey folks, >> >> Shiju has published an interesting post on numerals in an Indic context. >> It's a really fascinating overview - including how numerals are depicted >> across Indic languages, their use across languages, the policies adopted by >> the various Indic communities, the need for some community decisions to >> take things forward, a bit of Shiju's personal grumble on the fact that >> Hindi film posters are no longer in Hindi :-) and a picture of a Northern >> Railways bed sheet! >> >> Intrigued? Read more on either on meta<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Numera… and >> or the Chapter blog<http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/06/01/numerals-in-indic-languages-indic-wikipedias-2/> >> . >> >> [1] >> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Numerals_in_In… >> [2] >> http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/06/01/numerals-in-indic-languages-indic-wikip… >> > > > Good read. Thanks for the post Shiju. > > Coincidentally I came across Kaplan's blog[1] about digits and numbers > just yesterday. It was a good read, also throws in implementation > (technical + usage) related issues. I would also like to ask Shiju if > Wikipedia community has the right to adopt the say its own numeral standard > without considering the fact that whole world does not use it. Can > Wikipedia be used as medium to introduce language changes or should the > I ask this because we are also having similar debates about language > style[2] (not to be confused with grantha, which is planned to be discussed > later as grantha will have similar factors + additional factors for > consideration.) and if a Wikipedia can introduce a new language style(not > sentence constructs, but new forms of words[again not technical words, but > new words for nouns which are in popular use] on its own without an > external guideline and there are different thoughts. > > Thanks! > > [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/01/24/359347.aspx > [2] http://tawp.in/r/3n4 > > -- > Regards > Srikanth.L > > PS: May I also please ask you to add a Copyright notice on blog(similar to > _______________________________________________ > Wikimediaindia-l mailing list > Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l > >