Hi Shiju,
Good topic, agree on the need for a Embassy page on each wiki. I think it
will be a good idea to setup a page on meta that showcases the best
practices in various Indian language wikipedias. This will be useful for
smaller wikipedias that have limited resources. It can also serve as central
place for discussion. WP:COUNCIL does similar job on English Wikipedia to
help out inter-wikiproject communication.
Regards,
Ganesh
On Jun 25, 2010, at 12:30 PM, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One of the important feature that separates
Indian WikiMedia community
from the WikiMedia communities of other countries is its diversity of
languages. There are at least 20 Indian languages in which WikiMedia
projects are available
Following are those languages.
Assamese (
http://as.wikipedia.org)
Bengali (
http://bn.wikipedia.org)
Bhojpuri (
http://bh.wikipedia.org)
Bishnupriya Manipuri (
http://bpy.wikipedia.org)
Gujarathi (
http://gu.wikipedia.org)
Hindi (
http://hi.wikipedia.org)
Kannada (
http://kn.wikipedia.org)
Kashmiri (
http://ks.wikipedia.org)
Malayalam (
http://ml.wikipedia.org)
Marathi (
http://mr.wikipedia.org)
Nepali (
http://ne.wikipedia.org)
Nepal Bhasha/Newari (
http://new.wikipedia.org)
Odia (Oriya) (
http://or.wikipedia.org)
Pali (
http://pi.wikipedia.org)
Punjabi (
http://pa.wikipedia.org)
Sanskrit (
http://sa.wikipedia.org)
Sindhi (
http://sd.wikipedia.org)
Tamil (
http://ta.wikipedia.org)
Telugu (
http://te.wikipedia.org)
Urdu (
http://ur.wikipedia.org)
(NOTE: Urdu, Nepali, Tamil, and some other languages are official
languages in more than one country.)
All these languages use non-latin scripts and all of them belong either to
Aryan or Dravidian language family. So there are many community related
(for example, advocacy) and computing related issues (for example, script
rendering, usability) that are common to many of these languages. Hence
when it comes to computing and community related issues there are many
solutions that can be shared between different language communities.
But currently, there is no communication happening between different
Indian language wiki communities. Because of this, many wiki communities
are unaware about the wiki activities that is happening outside their
wiki.
Big Indian Language Wikipedias like Tamil, Bengali, Tamil and so on have
overcome many of the issues since they have large user base. But that is
not the case with small Wikipedias like Odiya, Assamese, or some other
smaller wikipedias. The number of active users of these wikipedias is very
less (In some case it is null). Even though it is the duty of the
respective language community to build its wiki community, it may not
happen overnight due to number of reasons. Hence big Indian language wiki
communities can help them to develop a community. For these, we need to
have frequent interactions between different wiki communities. But we
don't have a common forum in each wiki that can be used for these type of
discussions.
Hence I request all Indian language Wikipedias to start an Embassy page in
their respective Wiki. This Embassy page can be used for the inter Wiki
related discussions. Tamil and Malayalam Wikipedia have started Embassy
long back and we have some healthy discussions happening among us both
inside and outside wiki.
Tamil Wikipedia Embassy here:
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%…
Malayalam Wikipedia Embassy here:
http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_embassy
Some other languages like Hindi, Marathi, Telugu also have Embassy.
I request all Indian Language Wiki communities to create such a page in
their wiki that can be used as forum for the type of discussions that I
mentioned above. Some of the best practices that can be followed while
creatinng such a page is:
Appoint some ambassadors in each wiki who are interested in Indian
language inter wiki activities. For Malayalam, we have selected a group of
people selected for these.
Communicate only in English on this page so that different language
Wikipedians can participate in the discussions.
Place a link to the Embassy page on the side bar (Make sure this link is
NOT localized and it is displayed as Embassy itself). Please see Tamil and
Malayalam Wikipedia for example.
May be in future, we can think about having a Indian wiki conference for
the Wikimedians of different Indian languages. That time special emphasis
need to be given to the small wikipedias.
Regards
Shiju
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