[Wikimediaindia-l] Welcoming Indian users on English wikipedia.to Indic wikis

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

Hi all,

Tamil wikipedians thought of inviting fellow editors of Tamil origin in
English wikipedia and pull them over to Tamil wikipedia. User:Ravidreams
even called it "hijacking editors" funnily. There was some initial success
with editors like User:Sodabottle joining ta.wiki and contributing heavily.
(I too joined it, but that does not matter much), It was decided to invite
experienced English wikipedians of Tamil origin to contribute to tamil wiki.
The advantage being that experienced wiki editors are aware of wiki culture
and its mechanisms and the learning curve for them would just be language
typing skill. So a "Welcome message"[1] was created and it is decided to
post on talk pages. We have started doing this.

Just when i created a template for it, it struck me why not post this to new
users as well along with the usual {{Welcome}} template. There could a user
in remote places trying to edit about his/her village and when we come
across such new users, why not post this welcome to Indic wikipedia message
along with welcome template? (I assume most of us welcome new users with a
welcome template). They might be unaware of Indic wikipedia / might be more
interested in contributing native tongue. So I am just going to try posting
the "ContributeToTamilWikipedia" message along with Welcome template
whenever i know the user is a Tamil. I have also altered my "Friendly"
configuration[2] to have the custom template, so its really easy to welcome
users, just a few clicks. If you feel this is good to do, please create
welcome message to target your language users and let me know. I would add
it to my friendly configuration and can Invite users. Even if I don't know
Bengali, I can invite a Bengali user editing say Siliguri article with a
Bengali Wikipedia welcome message and he would at least visit Bengali
Wikipedia, if not contribute there.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:ContributeToTamilWikipedia
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:ContributeToTamilWikipedia>[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Logicwiki/vector.js

Regards
Srikanth.L
Google Profile <http://j.mp/SrikanthL>
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