*The Hindu : "The struggles of keeping Kannada Wikipedia afloat"* http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article2909005...
/In the world of online Kannada content, blogs may be thriving but Wikipedia is struggling. The reasons vary from technology barriers to lack of contributors, say Wikipedians.
While there has been a surge in Kannada content in the last two years, contributors to the language have been grappling with technology barriers.
After floundering for years, the Kannada Wikipedia picked up with font availability, said *Hari Prasad Nadig*, a Kannada Wikipedian. The software to add to Kannada Wikipedia is not so user-friendly, and only geeks can edit it properly.
Unlike English, which has a large community, technology issues are glaring in smaller communities. "Growth is slow with respect to technology in smaller communities," he said. The lack of a good Unicode font has been a persisting problem so the reader ends up seeing boxes instead of Kannada text. After trying to write using the 'Thunga' font, which had problems with vowels, besides other bugs, today, 'Kedage' is the most complete font, though issues remain with this one too, Mr. Nadig said.
Besides, various operating systems provide different levels of support for the script. "All these small factors together discouraged people from contributing. It's not that people don't want to use Kannada on the Net. Traffic on the Net is very high; there is Kannada on Facebook and Twitter too," he said.
Another challenge is writing and adding quality content. "The community has to grow if Kannada Wikipedia is to grow," he said. The quality of content also matters. One person adding thousands of 'stubs' on, say, Kannada films, does not help the reader, and in fact, drives them away from the site. Also, Kannada Wikipedia needs "starter" articles, to get people reading before they can start adding content, he said.
In order to grow, Kannada Wikipedia requires an active, organic community, which is not imposed through a catalyst of paid content creators. Once, Google started a tool that had machine-translated content improved by manual translations. Yet the Kannada content was "looking like spam. They (manual translators) didn't understand markup, templates; (it was) all malformed", he said.
An observation about contributors is that people in metros prefer writing to the English Wikipedia though they know Kannada and are tech-savvy. "Bangalore has less than 10 people writing to Kannada Wikipedia," he said.
*Omshivaprakash*, Chair for Kannada Special Interest Group for Wikipedia, said people are not aware that Kannada Wikipedia now has simple tools to add content. He said "Wiki academies" would be set up to train people on adding Kannada content. "Everyone complains that the quality of Kannada Wikipedia is low, but they do not know that they can edit it themselves," he said./
Regards Tinu Cherian press@wikimedia.in http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
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On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Tinu Cherian (Wikimedia India) tinucherian@wikimedia.in wrote:
The Hindu : "The struggles of keeping Kannada Wikipedia afloat" http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article2909005...
In the world of online Kannada content, blogs may be thriving but Wikipedia is struggling. The reasons vary from technology barriers to lack of contributors, say Wikipedians.
Would it be a good idea to list down all the blockers in the form of bugs and thereafter track them via a short URL ? The feedback is valuable enough for the language technologies team at Wikipedia to be able to discuss and assign priorities in terms of approaching solutions.
I guess what I am asking is whether all the issues that the various language communities in India face have been recorded on the bugzilla and, there is a page somewhere which allows anyone interested to track them.
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 11:43, sankarshan foss.mailinglists@gmail.comwrote:
I guess what I am asking is whether all the issues that the various language communities in India face have been recorded on the bugzilla and, there is a page somewhere which allows anyone interested to track them.
If you are asking only about technical issues, many communities do log bugs from time to time. But when they remain open beyond certain period and the person who logged becomes inactive, they go into black hole and there is no one to follow up(even if its fixed, they remain open). But the larger issues are common and pretty much known to i18n team. (like say PDF rendering). I tried cleaning up Tamil related bugs recently which were documented here[1] since 2006, also created a tracking bug[2].
But then as someone else said, "People are just waiting for one more tracking bug to fix those. !" //So tracking bugs don't help beyond a point !
Most, if not all Indic issues would be tagged with i18n keyword on bugzilla.
[1] http://tawp.in/r/3hl [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32578
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