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
_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l