Hoi,
I would love to know more. How do GaneshK and Tinucherian create their articles, do they use maps, do they have maps with all the Indian places on them.. do they have maps with all of them on it.. do they have maps with the names in many countries.. including English.. Do they have maps with articles and or pictures on them.
How does this process of translation work for the other Indian languages? Is there a plan to translate to English as well ??
Thanks,
GerardM--
Hi,
Few related points below.
1. As mentioned above by RSrikanth / Sundar, articles for cities / towns were created by GaneshBot based on census data. Most of them are geocoded i guess. Recently
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kumar_Appaiah_Bot was created to fix coord-missing-articles. Someone can take it up and run regularly to make coord missing articles count to 0. This is very essential and acts as a input to Google maps-Wikipedia layer
2. AFAIK very few Indian articles have a map in the article (Ex:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Salai Urdu version of Tirumala [I uploaded into English, but then someone seems to have removed from English, but looks like a bot translated before that].).This is where OSM-Wikipedia integration could come very handy.City / Town / even Locality articles can have an free map from OSM.I have seen this being case with quite a few articles related to UK.
3. Wikipedia-OSM has a huge scope with
WikiProject Indian Roads . I was trying to get some OSM tiles generated and add to articles for it sometime back but dropped it due to lack of time and also thought it would be a redundant effort if the OSM-Wikipedia integration comes through.
4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coimbatore_Golf_Club has an image of the golf course map from openstreetmap. Great usage of "free maps" beyond navigation which can only be possible with OSM !
5. While any little progress helps us, India still has a huge way to go when it comes to OpenGeoData. Awareness of Openstreetmap has to increase and we need atleast some decent data available for India(which is sadly available only for few sq.kms(?) ) before we can actually use OSM data into Indian articles.
6. For folks interested OSM-India community put up this India specific OSM rendering at
http://openstreetmap.org.in -- Where else in the world we can metered / unmetered / prepaid autos :P
Gerard,
I am not clear on what you are referring as a translation work in the context of OSM-Wikipedia. Are you referring to the need of the localized maps OR need of maps of OSM to be on Indic wikis OR localization of OSM tools like Potalach / JOSM. Thanks.