Thank you for your detailed response, Satdeep. I have put the word around myself through a couple of friends who are spreading word in the community, so let us see what we can find.
You make a good point about the potential of the WikiSource aspect of Tibetan language. As we do have a large number of monasteries in India, this is definitely a meaningful and purposeful venture to be undertaken if we can find willing people to do it.
Accordingly, I would like to keep our community doors open for any existing community that we come across and for the community to rise in the future.
Sadly, this unexplored potential is a very common story for languages of South Asia. However, I am confident that if we carry out the effort, we can better the situation than before.
I wish you all the best in your own contribution to WikiSource and GLAM.
Ashwin Baindur (User: AshLin)
On Mon, 9 Aug, 2021, 3:02 pm Satdeep Gill, satdeepgill@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Ashwin,
This has been something of a concern to me as well. I even learnt the Tibetan alphabet at one point in my life. That aside, looking at the activity at Tibetan Wikipedia, there doesn't seem to be anything but certain IP edits and some users creating random pages in English. So, I think it would be safe to assume that there isn't any Tibetan Wikimedia community in India right now.
Looking at the number of manuscripts that are there in Tibetan and have been carefully preserved at various monasteries, I believe digitizing those manuscripts and creating a Tibetan Wikisource might be a great first step of engagement with the community. I see that thousands of manuscripts in Tibetan have been scanned by various organizations such as the Buddhist Digital Resource Center https://archive.org/details/bdrc-palmleafmanuscripts.
If good enough input methods are available to type Tibetan, then I think transcribing these texts on Wikisource can be really useful to the Tibetan community. This is very different from trying to build a Wikipedia. Wikipedia needs to be updated every now and then but on Wikisource, once a text has been transcribed and validated, It would remain useful forever with a scope for improvement such as annotations but the text in itself will have its value, forever.
Best Satdeep
On Mon, 9 Aug 2021 at 13:49, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.com wrote:
Dear fellow Indian Wikimedians,
Would you know if there are Tibetan language (bo) Wikimedia project editors in India? I ask because presently Tibetan is not listed in the set of what we consider language wikimedia communities concerning India.
In India, Tibetic people are found in the regions of Ladakh (Ladakhi and Balti), Spiti valley, Uttarakhand (Bhotiya), Sikkim (Bhutia), and Arunachal Pradesh (Khamba, Lhoba and Monpa people). There are also nearly 100,000 Tibetans living in exile in India since 1959.
(Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_people#In_India)
It is highly unlikely that the Tibetan community, which has the maximum population in Tibet proper, and which uses the Tibetan script for writing the language, would get any support in their homeland. As we have lakhs of Indian citizens of ancestral Tibetic origin who belong to this community and most likely use these Tibetan language (bo) Wikimedia projects in India, we need to look out for them.
Ashwin Baindur (User:AshLin) _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list -- wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikimediaindia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
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