Nothing exemplifies the power of Wiki – the open and collaborative platforms for content creation – like the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. The site that everybody can freely and collaboratively edit is credited not only with having created a massive repository of knowledge but also democratising the presentation of content on the Web.
Wikipedia, which turns 10 this January, has over 35 lakh articles. In 2010, we saw several Wiki Media Foundation bigwigs visit India, hold public meet-ups with the Wiki community and appoint the first Indian to sit on the board of the Wikipedia Foundation, Bisakha Dutta. Apart from the formal Indian Wikipedia chapter, that has been on the anvil for some time now, Wikipedia Foundation has also chosen India to set up its first offshore office.
Why India?
But why India? The large number of potential Net users here, and the ‘ground support' that exists in the form of a passionate community of Wikipedians, drive these “offshore efforts”. However, they realise, that the ‘Indian Internet' is by no means a homogenous entity. During recent visits to India, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has repeatedly articulated the need to approach Wikipedia growth here from a strictly ‘localised' perspective — by expanding the user base for the local language Wikipedias.
Yes, the Internet, with English as its predominant language, can barely make inroads into vast areas of the country. Indian language content on the Internet is low, and is restricted either to niche blogs or news content. Internet firms are also interested in changing this by enabling web advertisers aim to target larger local audiences.
So, how can Wikis help drive this change? It seems natural that a massive task like this one — that of creating and expanding local language content — is best tackled ‘collaboratively'. And that is just what Wiki communities do best. As of today, there are Wikipedias in over 20 Indian languages. While there are 58,000 articles in the Hindi Wikipedia, Telugu and Marathi too have been growing steadily, clocking 47,000 and 32,000 articles respectively. The Tamil Wiki has around 26,000 articles, Bengali (22,000), Malayalam (16,000) and Kannada (9,900). Together, Wikipedia is arguably the single largest source of Indic content online.
Early challenges
Enthusiastic Wikipedians (Wikipedia editors/contributors) will tell you that this growth has been all but easy. Buggy fonts, lack of platform-independent fonts and the lack of a common standard for keyboard layouts marred early efforts. Data input, though much improved today, is still a challenge for non-technical folks. Most operating systems, particularly proprietary ones, still do not support Kannada fonts ‘out of the box', points out Hari Prasad Nadig, an active Kannada Wikipedia editor.
“Data input was a huge challenge when we started building the Kannada Wikipedia in 2004. Even the Nudi font for Kannada, declared a standard by the Karnataka Government, worked only on machines running on Microsoft Windows. There too, Windows XP, the most popularly OS, still doesn't offer complete support for Unicode Kannada,” he explains. Most Indian languages face similar issues with rendering of Indic fonts.
Wikipedia, which turns 10 this January, has over 35 lakh articles. In 2010, we saw several Wiki Media Foundation bigwigs visit India, hold public meet-ups with the Wiki community and appoint the first Indian to sit on the board of the Wikipedia Foundation, Bisakha Dutta. Apart from the formal Indian Wikipedia chapter, that has been on the anvil for some time now, Wikipedia Foundation has also chosen India to set up its first offshore office.
Why India?
But why India? The large number of potential Net users here, and the ‘ground support' that exists in the form of a passionate community of Wikipedians, drive these “offshore efforts”. However, they realise, that the ‘Indian Internet' is by no means a homogenous entity. During recent visits to India, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has repeatedly articulated the need to approach Wikipedia growth here from a strictly ‘localised' perspective — by expanding the user base for the local language Wikipedias.
Yes, the Internet, with English as its predominant language, can barely make inroads into vast areas of the country. Indian language content on the Internet is low, and is restricted either to niche blogs or news content. Internet firms are also interested in changing this by enabling web advertisers aim to target larger local audiences.
So, how can Wikis help drive this change? It seems natural that a massive task like this one — that of creating and expanding local language content — is best tackled ‘collaboratively'. And that is just what Wiki communities do best. As of today, there are Wikipedias in over 20 Indian languages. While there are 58,000 articles in the Hindi Wikipedia, Telugu and Marathi too have been growing steadily, clocking 47,000 and 32,000 articles respectively. The Tamil Wiki has around 26,000 articles, Bengali (22,000), Malayalam (16,000) and Kannada (9,900). Together, Wikipedia is arguably the single largest source of Indic content online.
Early challenges
Enthusiastic Wikipedians (Wikipedia editors/contributors) will tell you that this growth has been all but easy. Buggy fonts, lack of platform-independent fonts and the lack of a common standard for keyboard layouts marred early efforts. Data input, though much improved today, is still a challenge for non-technical folks. Most operating systems, particularly proprietary ones, still do not support Kannada fonts ‘out of the box', points out Hari Prasad Nadig, an active Kannada Wikipedia editor.
“Data input was a huge challenge when we started building the Kannada Wikipedia in 2004. Even the Nudi font for Kannada, declared a standard by the Karnataka Government, worked only on machines running on Microsoft Windows. There too, Windows XP, the most popularly OS, still doesn't offer complete support for Unicode Kannada,” he explains. Most Indian languages face similar issues with rendering of Indic fonts.
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