In the Hindu today, this article appears prominently on the back page of
the main newspaper - congratulations!
On Saturday 09 April 2011 08:12 AM, CherianTinu Abraham wrote:
*The Hindu : "Attempts on to revive Odia Wikipedia"*
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article1629497.ece
/Some people who edit the Odia Wikipedia say that getting a Wikipedia
in the language is an important tool to keep the language alive. At
present, an attempt is on to revive Odia Wikipedia (
or.wikipedia.org
<http://or.wikipedia.org>), one of the earliest Indian language
Wikipedias to be created./
/
/
/Interestingly, the guidance to stoke the Odia Wikipedia is led by
Bangalorean *Shiju Alex*, who edits the Malayalam Wikipedia, while
another Bangalorean, *Subhashish Panigrahi,* translates and creates
templates for the language./
/
/
/While Mr. Panigrahi has spoken about the Odia Wikipedia to 6,000
students across six schools in Bhubaneswar, Mr. Alex, who is
passionate about growing Indian language Wikipedia and writes for the
Malayalam Wikipedia, noticed the low content in Odia Wikipedia. He
scouted for Odia editors in Bangalore and finding no response
initially, he took the initiative to Orissa. On April 3, he helped
organise the second Odia Wikipedia Academy in Bhubaneswar, to bring an
awareness of the Odia Wikipedia among people./
/
/
/The Odia Wikipedia was one of the first few Indian language
Wikipedias to be created. Although started in 2002, along with
Wikipedias in Assamese, Punjabi, Nepali, Oriya and Malayalam, prior
even to the Hindi Wikipedia in 2003 July, the Odia Wikipedia never
grew. It has, to date, only 700 articles./
/
/
/“We have to save Odiya. We have to take the movement online and Odiya
Wikipedia is a vital part of it,” says *Sambidhan Mohanty*, a
Cuttack-based businessman from a family of Odiya writers who studied
in Bangalore./
/
/
/Mr. Mohanty says he appreciates Shiju and Subhashish as they got Odia
speakers involved in Odia. “We came together because of them,” he says./
/
/
/Mr. Mohanty says the main aim is to get people attracted to Odia
Wikipedia, to get more people to speak the language and write in it.
Next is to get the State Government's attention so that Odiya
Wikipedia can be made part of school curricula./
/
/
/A big challenge he sees is the number of Odia dialects. Although the
language has a script, it has six dialects, including Sambalpuri (or
Kosali), Kalahandia and Berhampuri. So even within a small group of
editors, there is a difference of opinion of how a word should be
written (for example, “dharm” or “dharma”)./
/
/
/Mr. Alex says the reasons for the low interest in Odia Wikipedia
might be many including the number of people who speak the language,
the number of people with access to a computer, availability of
required fonts and browsers./
/
/
/A major challenge was the inability, till now, to type in Odiya
within Wikipedia, and the large dependence upon an external tool to
add content. However, now a typing solution has been developed for
Odia so that problem has been resolved to some extent./
/
/
/Mr. Alex says lack of a typing solution within Wikipedia was a
problem that assailed content creation across all Indian languages
(using a non Latin script) on Wikipedia. A big help has been the
typing solution for Malayalam within Wikipedia, which was developed in
2007. The solution has a base, which can be extended to other Indian
languages and was used for creating typing solutions in Tamil,
Kannada, Marathi, Hindi and Bengali WIkipedias through 2010. Other
languages are going on./
/
/
/*Srikant Kedia* has introduced the Wikipedia to at least 35 people./
/
/
/“Now, we need support from the Odia community to test the language.
Now that it has a mature community, I can move on,” says Mr. Alex, who
has given demos of edits in Odia Wikipedia in Bangalore and Bhubaneswar./
Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://www.wikimedia.in/wiki/In_the_news#April_2011
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