Dear All,
Odia is a shining example of how a wiki project can be revived and build a community around it, if few wonderful users with a vision for building free knowledge in their mother language arrive in their mother language wiki.
Odia wikipedia was started in 2002. In fact it is one of the first Indic language wikipedia. Nothing much had happened in Odia wiki till 2010 December. But the progress made by Odia wiki project (
http://or.wikipedia.org/) during the past one year is note worthy and it is an example that can be replicated in some of the inactive Indic language wikipedias. Odia was having just 600 articles (which were created over the past 8 years) and no active users at the start of this year. Now 10 months later, it has close to 1600 articles and 10 active users. The online and offline outreach initiatives took by Odia wiki community for building the community is showing positive result.
I was actively involved in the community building for Odia wikipedia. I still remember the day (2011 January 15) when I introducted Odia wikipedia and Odia tying tool (developed by Junaid) to an Odia speaker (Ashuthosh Kar) during Wiki X celebration at Bangalore. Through him very soon we got a wonderful wikipedian (Subhashish) who is leading the efforts for Odia wiki now. Initially Subhasish and I used to meet at my home and work on the basic things for Odia wiki. I remember us working on the Odia wikipedia logo, FAQ booklet, Translate wiki, and so on. Soon Odia got more members to the team through the few Odia wiki workshops happened at Bangalore. Along with workshops, Odia wikipedians translated the FAQ booklet to Odia and took efforts to integrate the Odia typing solution to Odia wikipedia. Later with the support of Dhanada Mishra (the chairman of Human Development Foundation (
http://www.hdf.org.in/)) and a young student Odia wikipedian Srikanth Kedia a wiki workshop is conducted at Bhubaneshwar. Odia wikipedians from Bangalore are doing an excellent job and now many of them are participating in Wikimedia India chapter activities also.
Odia wiki community is effectively making use of various social networking sites to reach out to Odia speakers.
Odia wiki project picked up not because Odia has got huge speaker base, high literacy among Odia speakers, access to computers, or any thing else; it become active only because it has receieved the right volunteers who have passion and vision of developing a wikipedia in their mother language. We need similar volunteers for each Indic language wikipedia.
Requesting you to place your comments on the
talk page.
Regards
Shiju