Anirudh,

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Anirudh Bhati <anirudhsbh@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.com redirects 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_Kolkata directly. 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