Just a small piece of history of the Global Wikipedia movement, see below mail thread. Thought to share it here also.
For those who are wondering about the origin of Indic / Indian subcontinent language Wikipedias, here it is.
*2002* *June*: *Assamese*,*Punjabi*, *Nepali*, *Oriya( Odia)* *December* : *Malayalam*
*2003* *February: Bhojpuri May: Marathi June: Kannada July: Hindi, Kashmiri September: Tamil December: Telugu, Gujarati, Sanskrit, Sindhi*
*2004* *January: Bengali, Urdu, Sinhala*
Regards Tinu Cherian
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com Date: Wed, May 11, 2011 at 4:43 AM Subject: [Foundation-l] happy birthday, Wikipedias To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Tomorrow (May 11) is another anniversary date: it's been 10 years since the first group of non-English Wikipedias came online. Originally with spelled-out names rather than language codes, these sites were:
catalan.wikipedia.com chinese.wikipedia.com esperanto.wikipedia.com french.wikipedia.com deutsche.wikipedia.com hebrew.wikipedia.com italian.wikipedia.com japanese.wikipedia.com portuguese.wikipedia.com spanish.wikipedia.com russian.wikipedia.com
(from http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-May/000116.html)
The idea of having Wikipedias in multiple languages came from Jimbo in March 2001 ( http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-March/000048.html); note that the original German Wikipedia was actually set up at that time, making it the second-oldest Wikipedia. Though the idea of using two-letter domain codes was first raised then, after the above sites were brought online in May there was further discussion, and the sites were switched to two-letter codes a few days later: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-May/000132.html.
Happy tenth birthday, Wikipedias! (and many more!) May all of our language editions flourish.
-- phoebe
-- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *
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