I have restructured my report to make it shorter and easier to read and compare – but without losing any of the data points. I have divided it into Quality of Projects, Community Building, and Readership.

NOTE: I have used the Indian way way of denoting large numbers: Crore is equal to 10 million, and Lakh is 100,000.

Community

In the table below are new users who have edited at least 10 times, existing editors with at least 5 edits in that month, and existing editors with more than 100 edits in that month. Once again, it is essential to look at all three numbers in conjunction with each other.

Something that I have been reflecting on is how even in relatively small communities (which is what almost all Indic communities are) there is still a relatively low number of new users coming on board and a very tiny number of editors have edited more than 100 times. The former is self-evident as a problem because it means we need to do so much more to encourage new editors. The latter is worrying because it means we also need to do much more to encourage editor retention as well as editor motivation.

(For context the number of speakers of each language is provided in all the tables.)

Malayalam and Tamil have the healthiest position on this table – across all three parameters and looking at progress month-on-month. This is most probably because of the strong efforts at community building in both communities. It is really important that these communities continue to build on their strong foundations.

I am particularly excited about two languages in this list. Both Marathi and Bengali editor counts have increased across all parameters and that is very encouraging. They are large languages with massive potential. I am also really hopeful that the Marathi media coverage around last month’s WikiConference is going to support the community as they go about encouraging and supporting new and existing editors.

Overall, though, it must be said that the total number of new editors coming to new Indic wikipedias is low. So focus need to be on bringing new editors to wiki and retaining existing users.

Quality of Projects

The following table gives data on the total number of articles, new articles per day, and the number of edits per article on each language wikipedia as of October 31, 2011. The data for September 30, 2011 is also given to provide a comparison point on progress over the past month.

These three numbers should be read in conjunction with each other. Theoretically, the number of edits per article can be taken as a surrogate for the quality of that article (based on the assumption that more edits on an article increases its quality.) To that extent, it would be good to have large numbers in all three – and not only one or two of them. For instance, if there is a large number of articles but a low number of edits, it might point to either poor article quality or high use of bots.

The Tamil and Sanskrit Wikipedias are showing encouraging growth in the number of articles. The Sanskrit Wikipedia’s growth is particularly laudable given the tiny number of speakers and the efforts the community is putting into increasing community strength. Assamese is a relatively tiny Wikipedia, but is growing with increasing edits per article. Malayalam has the highest consistent number of edits per article – which speaks well of the kind of collaborative editing environment that is being fostered by Malayalam community.

Hindi with more than 1 lakh articles continues to be on the top of the article count list. However, article growth is relatively low and number of edits per article is also low. A reason for this is probably the low number of active contributors (see next section). One of the reasons might be (and this is something that I have mentioned in various channels in the past) the relatively higher emphasis on increasing article numbers to reach the 1 lakh article milestone instead of putting greater emphasis on community building. It is also similar to what is happening on Newari Wikipedia which has nearly 70,000 articles but with an average of just 4 edits per article and with no increase in article count.

The Pali, Bishnupirya Manipuri, Newari, Bhojpuri and Sindhi communities have been inactive as far new articles are concerned.

Readership

The following table gives a rough estimate on the number of readers for each language wikipedia.

Given the huge speaker base of Hindi, it is not surprising that the Hindi Wikipedia continues to be on top with close to 87 lakh readers. Marathi also has a huge readership of 59 lakh. News coverage during WikiConference India has helped the Marathi Wikipedia to increase its readership. The near doubling of readership for Malayalam can probably be attributed to a recennt update in Google search (canonical equivalence of atomic chillus and non-atomic chillus).

The above table shows a very interesting trend. The readership on Indic language wikipedias is much higher than most people think – and is growing dramatically! Despite being involved in Indic languages for quite a while now, I was personally amazed to know that there are 4.3 crore readers across all Indic languages in October. Even more amazingly, this number grew by 1.2 crores in October over September!

This data is particularly important because at many times, Indic language Wikipedians feel a sense of dissatisfaction because there is a perception that there aren’t enough readers. By looking at the above statistics itself we know that perception is not true. So we have large number of readers waiting to read what we write. But do we have enough community members to work on different language wikis? The answer is not encouraging. We should be able to convert a small of our readers into editors. For that we all need to work together.

Mail me at shiju@wikimedia.org if you have any queries related to this post or about Indian language wiki projects.

As all of you know recently I joined the India Programs of WMF to support the Indic language wiki projects. In the past I was interacting with various Indic language wikipedians for various community related and technical things (for example, the FAQ booklet translated to various Indic languages, the typing tool integrated to several Indic wikipedias (now rechristened as Narayam extension and now has the official backing of WMF), Wiki India Newsletter, and so on). Now onwards I will be able to spend more time on the Indic language wiki projects.

The data for this report is taken from http://stats.wikimedia.org/. I thank Erik Zachte for providing me the support for the same.

Due to the long processing time, the report at stats.wikimedia.org is getting generated after one month. Hence in this report I have captured the data for 2011 September (also data for 2011 August is given for comparison).

Unlike the previous reports, now onwards I will be analyzing data only for the languages spoken in India. So from this report I have excluded languages of neighboring countries of India like Sinhala, Burmese, and so on (even though personally I am interested to watch the growth of these language wikipedias also since those languages are closely related to one or the other language spoken in India).

Following are the languages of India I have selected for preparing this report. The number of speakers for each language is given against each language.

NOTE: I have used the Indian way way of denoting large numbers, since that make more sense in India. Others please note, Crore is equal to 10 million, and Lakh is 100,000.

Indian languages having wikipedia

In India, Hindi is the language with most number of native language speakers. There are few more languages with huge speaker base. But when it comes to Wikimedia movement of India, speaker base is not making much impact.

The number of speakers for Punjabi (the language spoken in the Punjab state of India) is often misquoted at many places including the WMF stats. Punjabi language has two variants (Eastern Punjabi and Western Punjabi). According to various Indian statistics reports, the Punjbai language (also called Eastern Punjabi according to en Wikipedia) that uses Gurumukhi Script, is spoken by almost 2.9 crore people. The Western Punjabi (a language spoken by close to 6 crore people in Pakistan) has its own wikipedia (http://pnb.wikipedia.org). I assume the issue is similar to that of Hindi and Urdu where languages are closely related but use different scripts due to various reasons. Since my interest is in the Punjabi wikipedia (http://pa.wikipedia.org) that uses Gurumukhi script, I considered the number of speakers for that language.

Also I found that the Bhojpuri wikipedia (http://bh.wikipedia.org/) still uses the wrong language code (bh), the code that represents the Bihari language family. Bihari (ISO-639-1 bh) is a language family and the Bhojpuri language is just one of the languages in this family (Angika, Fiji Hindi and Maithili are few others). Bhojpuri has the language code bho. So we need to do two things in the case of Bhojpuri wikipedia. 1. update the language code to bho, 2. change the language name to Bhojpuri (instead of Bihari) in wikimedia records.

I have included almost all the important parameters (for which there is required and updated data) in this report. From the next report onwards I will be adding few more relevant parameters. The placement of languages in the all the tables of this report is based on the number of speakers.

Article statistics

Hindi with more than 1 lakh (100,000) articles is on the top. Newari wikipedia with 69,826 articles comes second, and Telugu comes third with 48,803.

In the span of 9 months (from 2011 January) Hindi wikipedia has added more than 40,000 articles. But did the community size increased? See the next few parameters for more information.

Odia and Assamese wikipedias made much progress since my last report. Both the article number and community strength are increased for both. The article number in Punjabi wikipedia is going high.

Edits per article

Edits per article shows the number of times a wikipedia article is edited. More edits for an articles means more people contributed to it and neutrality of the article is also high. For active wikipedias it is a rough indicator of quality. Wiki article will have more encyclopedic value when more people see and edit it.

Among active wikipedias Bengali and Malayalam got maximum edits per article. It is expected, since it has a very active community. (To see the community strength refer the next few tables).

For languages like Kashmiri, Pali the edit per article is high because it has very less number of articles and same articles are getting edited (mostly by bots) every time.

Editor and Reader Statistics

Malayalam and Tamil tops the list with almost 85 active editors. But in Malayalam there is a reduction of 14 active editors from the previous month.

As said before, when it comes to Wikimedia movement, the speaker base is not making much impact.

For example, Sanskrit language with just 50,000 speakers is making huge impact in the Wikimedia world. It has 14 active users, a bigger community than many other big Indic languages. I am impressed by the efforts of Sansskrit wiki projects especially with the sister wiki projects (for example wikisource), their way of interacting and implementing the best practices from other Indic language wikipedias, and so on.

In the past few months I have conducted 3 wiki workshops for Sanskrit. I found each time they are maturing with the vision about the future of Sanskrit wiki projects. In the last Sanskrit wiki workshop the main focus was on defining the category tree for Sanskrit wikipedia.

When I published the report last time, Odia and Assamese wikipedias were inactive. Now the situation is changed. Now we have a community to work on it.

The progress made by Odia wiki project (http://or.wikipedia.org/) is note worthy. Kudos to Odia wiki community for all the online and offline initiatives for building the community and to increase the article count. 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 Odia speaker to 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 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 Odia wikipedia logo, FAQ booklet, Translate wiki, and so on. Soon we 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 tyoing solution developed by Junaid 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 we had conducted a wiki workshop 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 project picked up not because Odia has got huge speaker base, high literacy, access to computers or any thing else; it become active only because it has receieved the volunteers who has passion and vision of developing a wikipedia in their mother language. We need similar volunteers for each Indic langauge.

The case is similar for Assamese also. I was trying to get a good volunteer for Assamese wikipedia for the past 3 years. Initially I tried to get the volunteers from Bangalore since Bangalore has good representation of Assamese community and it is easy for me to reach people. But that didn’t worked out. Then I tried for online outreach, initially through emails. Finally I got connected with Parabhakar who is a professor at NIT in Silchar, Assam. Together we try to do online outreach first through a google group (it didn’t worked out), then through facebook. A facebook page is created for Assamese wikipedia projects aimed at bringing together all Assamese people who are in Facebook and who are interested in Assamese wiki projects. It has more than 460 members now. Prabhakar used that group and his personal contacts effectively to build a community for Assamese wikipedia. That worked. Assamese wikipedia started becoming slowly active. Later Prabhakar started another Facebook group dedicated to NIT Silchar for promoting Indic language wikipedias among students (and aluminis) of NIT Silchar. Due to all these in the next few months we are going to see more wiki activity from the Assam state of India and in the Assamese wikipedia. Recently Narayam (the typing solution extension) is integrated to Assamese wikipedia. Thanks to the Assamese wikipedians Chaipu, Prabahakar and other volunteers who actively worked to make it a reality. A major roadblock for bringing Assamese people to Assamese wikipedia is removed now.

Assamese wiki community is currrently concentrated on online outreach, but soon they are planning to start offline outreach activties also.

It is intersting to note that the community size of smaller languages is either equal to or even larger than that of much bigger languages. I don’t fully understand this and like to hear your opinion on this. One hypothesis could be that, larger ratio of people in smaller languages are more passionate about their language and there fore are willing to put additional effort to showcase their mother language. Each Indic language wiki project is waiting for the few users who has vision and passion about the future of the respective wiki project.

The technical issues and the other road blocks for smaller languages are more.

Number of highly active wikipedians (more than 100 edits per month)

Highly active wikipedians are the editors who do at least 100 edits per month. In fact we must say that they are people who are running the respective language wiki.

Here also Malayalam and Tamil tops the list. In fact if we have more high active editors you will be able to see more activities (not just article creation) coming out of that wiki community. Due to this you can see that offline project, photo events, article writing contest, community quiz, collaborating with respective state government, photo contest, wiki workshops, and many other innovative wiki projects are coming out from these two wiki communities. So ideally we should be able to convert more active editors to highly-active editors to make the wiki activism in each language wikipedia more vibrant.

Registered users who edited at least 10 times since they arrived

This parameter shows how many of the registered users did actually turned into actual wiki editors and done at least few edits in wiki.

Even though many big languages has more number of registered users, still Malayalam continues to be on the top. Hindi and Tamil comes second and third. I wish all wiki communities be able to convert more registered users into active wiki editors.

Newly registered users who edited atleast 10 times

This parameter is a subset of the preceding table. It shows how many of the newly registered users turned into wiki editors. Tamil wiki community is leading here. Among smaller communities, Assamese is also doing well (due to the reasons I told else where).

Page Views – Non Mobile (In Lakhs)

This parameter shows how many readers are waiting for us. Are we caring for them? The following table give the data for Non-mobile (mainly PC).
Even though Hindi lags behind in some of the wikipedia editing/editor matrices, the speakers of Hindi are not lagging behind in using Hindi wikipedia. Hindi with 77 lakh page views tops the list. No other Indic langage is near Hindi. And this is expected considering the huge speaker base of Hindi.

Even for the inactive wikipedias like Sindhi, Kashmiri, Pali, and so on, we have thousands of people accessing it every month. But do we have enough content to offer for these readers? We need to build community for all these languages to serve our readers. In fact we should be converting some these readers into wikipedians of the respective language wikipedias.

Page Views – Mobile

This parameter shows how many are accessing each language wikipedia using mobile. Unlike the non-mobile data, this data is showing an upward trend for all the Indic languages. Eventhough rendering of indic scripts is not good in most of the mobile devices, many users are accessing it. This also shows from where our future readers are going to come.

Here again Hindi comes first. Most of the other Indic languages are increasing its mobile reader base. For some lamguages the growth is more than 100% than the previous month. I assume this is going to increase in future and it is our duty to welcome all these new readers and convert some of them into editors.

Conclusion

In short, in terms of readers most of the Indian languages are doing good. But when it comes to editors that is not the case. One hypothesis could be that we are more knowledge consumers than knowledge creators. Another – and a probably more valid one – is that there are large gaps in basic awareness of the existence of Indic language wikipedias, relatively lower use of Indic language on the Internet, (expected) lack of familiarity with wiki editing, technical issues with regards to Indic languages, tiny community sizes, and many other things.

As wikipedians can we change this scenario?

For wikimedia India we have lot of things to do. In terms of building the community, overcoming the technical challeges, creating awareness about wikipedia (more inportant is creating awareness about Indic language wikipedia), and so on. The challenges are many – but the opportunities are massive. I look forward to working closely with the various language communities on realizing the enormous potential of their respective languages.

Once again, I welcome your views and comments and opinions on the above. Please express your views as comment here. You can also reach me at shiju@wikimedia.org in case you want to send a personal mail. Thanks for reading.

Malayalam Wikisource CD sticker. Image Courtesy: Rajesh Odayanchal

This is by far the biggest digital collection of free books in Malayalam language available on CD for offline use. This is the first time a wikimedia community from India is releasing an offline version of Wikisource. Even though we are not sure, we are told that no other wikimedia community in the world has ever released such an offline version of Wikisource. (But we are not sure about this claim )

Project Idea

The idea of releasing an offline version of Malayalam wikisource was there in our mind for long. But the oppurtinuty didn’t come until we finalized the dates for 4th Malayalam wikimedian’s meetup. There are challenges about the presentation of the Wikisource content.  We know that presenting the content as long wiki pages will fail the Wikisource CD project itself.

Why we chose Wikisource this year?

The reason is simple. Malayalam wikisource is the most active wiki project after Malayalam wikipedia. Also we saw much potential in releasing an offline version of Malayalam wikisource since Malayalam wikisource already has many legendary notable Malayalam books. We want to showcase the Malayalam speaking people the great work done by the Malayalam wikisource community during the past 5 years. Also we know that through this release we will be able to reach more people.

The Wikisource CD project

The project page (വിക്കിഗ്രന്ഥശാല:സിഡി പതിപ്പ് 1.0) to coordinate the wikisource CD project was created on 2011 May 20. The book selection process was started on the same day. Whole wikisource community participated in the selection process. It is decided to include only Malayalam books in this release, since we have few Sanskrit source texts also.

Santhosh thottingal has agreed to take care of the technology part as he had done last year.

Malayalam source texts included in the CD

Following are the books included in this CD:

Selected Poems of

• Kumaranasan
• Cherusseri
• Changampuzha Krishna Pillai
• Kalakkaththu Kunchan Nambiar
• Irayimman Thampi
• Ramapurathu Warrier

Malayalam Grammar

• Kerala Panineeyam by AR Rajaraja Varma

Legends/Folklore

• Aithihyamala

Novels

•   Indulekha

Religious Texts

• Bhagavad Gita
• Adhyatma Ramayanam Kilippaatu
• Harinama Keerthanam
• Geetha Govindam
• Sathyaveda Pusthakam (Malayalam Bible)
• Quran
• Works of Sree Narayana Guru
• Devotional songs

Native Art Form

• Parichamuttukali pattukal

Philosophy (Political)

• Communist Manifesto
• Principles of Communism (Friedrich Engels)

Commons images

Apart from the selected books of Malayalam wikisource we have also included images from Wikimedia Commons (Commons images related to Kerala) also in this CD. The inclusion of Commons image was a test case to see how Commons images can be used for public outreach. The maps of India/Kerala state from the Malayalam wikipedia Map project is also part of this image collection.

Hisham Mundol releasing the Malayalam Wikisource CD by handing over the CD to the youngest Malayalam Wikimedian Sai Shanmugham. Image Courtsey: Fotokannan

Credits

Whole Malayalam wiki community worked behind this. So it is almost impossible to name each one of them. But let me credit some of the major contributors:

• Content creation: Malayalam wikisource community. Over the past 5 years they have digitized and added many important Malayalam source texts to wikisource. Thanks to all the contributors.  I would like to specillay mention two female editors of Malayalam wikisource (User:Atma and User:Su) who made exceptional contributions to this CD collection. Special thanks to users Thachan Makan and Manoj who coordinated many sub projects of this CD release.

• Proof reading: Selection process and proof reading for this CD project had happened at the same time. Apart from the Malayalam wikisource community, Malayalam Buzzers and Malayalam bloggers had also helped us. Special thanks to all of them. In fact we could include Aithihyamala and Indulekha in this CD only because of their wonderful support.

• Technology: Santhosh Thottingal. Apart from taking care of the technology part, he also provided a designed an excellent reading pane that suits to the nature of Wikisource. Also it was his idea to include Kerala related Wikimedia Commons images also in this CD. Read the technolgy ascpects of this project in Santhosh’s blog http://thottingal.in/blog/2011/06/11/malayalam-wikisource-offline-version/.

• WikiMedia Commons Image Gallery: Nishaan, Rajeesh, and Sreejith K

• Art work: Rajesh Odayanchal. He designed the sticker and the cover for the CD. Thanks for all the various wonderful designs that he submitted before we finalized the current designs.

• CD production: Sunil Paravur. Thanks to Sunil Paravur for supporting us to get the CD replicated. For the purpose of the Wikimeetup we have produced 500 CDs.

Unlike the Wikipedia CD that we released last year,we haven’t approached any agency to sponsor this CD. Few Malayalam wikimedians had sponsored the entire production cost. We are charging a nominal amount of Rs 20 to cover the production cost of the CD.

Distribution of CD

The 500 copies that we produced for the purpose of Wiki meetup is almost over. Malayalam Wikimedians do not have any plans to further replicate this version of the CD. We except people outside wiki community will take care of further distribution. Already Zyxware technologies based in Trivandrum added malayalam wikisource CD in their CD distribution plan. Hope others will also follow soon. Last year IT@school and few other government agencies, and few computer magazines had reused the Malayalam wikipedia CD release. We expect many more social organizations, Government agencies, magazines, and so on will do that this year.

Mathrubhumi News daily (A prominent Malayalam Newspaper) had covered the news about the release of this CD. It is here. A rough translation of this news is provided by Tinu here.

• You can browse the online version of CD here: http://www.mlwiki.in/wikisrccd/
• The ISO image can be downloaded from here: http://www.mlwiki.in/cdimage/mlwikisource.iso
• High quality images of CD sticker and Cover are available at the following location.
  CD sticker
  • http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malayalam-WikiSource-CD-Sticker.png
  • http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malayalam-WikiSource-CD-Sticker.svg

  CD Cover

  • http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malayalam-WikiSource-CD-Cover.png
  • http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malayalam-WikiSource-CD-Cover.svg

Related blogposts:

• http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/06/wikisource-cd-in-malayalam.html
• http://blog.tommorris.org/post/6483928494/malayalam-wikisource-on-cd

From tiny seeds big trees grow

Through this event we are able to contribute close to 2155 copyleft licensed images to wikimedia commons. The images are on diverse topics which added more value to the event.

Malayalam loves wikimedia logo

This is a small report (mainly statistical information) about the photo event. Many users have helped me to prepare this report. To name a few:

• Wikimedia commons user Esby. He has analyzed the category and prepared a report from where we could collect most of the statistical information.
• Malayalam wikimedian Junaid. He has helped to extract the usernames from the photo uploads of flickre bot and some other bots that are used for uploading.
• Malayalam wikimedian Santhosh thottingal. He has helped to calculate the number of uploads on each date

Here is brief summary of the Malayalam Loves Wikimedia event:

• User:Ranjithsiji has uploaded the highest number of free images to commons as part of this event. He has uploaded 246 images.
• User:Sai K Shanmugham is the youngest wikimedian participated in the event. Sai is a 2nd standard student and he has contributed 14 images to wikimedia commons through this event.
• At least 3 women editors (user:Ks.mini , user:Snehae, user:Seenatn) have participated in this event.

• The highest number of uploads was on April 25, the last day of the event. 343 images were uploaded on that day.
• The lowest number of uploads was on April 13. Only 9 images uploaded were uploaded on that day.
• More than 75 people have participated (see the list at the bottom) in this event and many of them were not wikipedians earlier. We understand that many users were waiting for some opportunity like to controbute to wikimedia movement.

I would like to name few Malayalam wikipedians who made some extra efforts (in the background) to make this event a grand sucess.

• User:Praveen P had created the various templates and categories which helped us to coordinate the project in Wikimedia commons.
• User:Sreejith (almost alone) had moved the images uploaded to Malayalam wikipedia (as part of this event) to wikimedia commons
• User:Ajay Kuyiloor had designed the poster for the event
• User:Rajesh Odayanchal had designed the logo for the event.

and many other others. A big thank to all of them on behalf of malayalam wiki communty.

Even though we have repeately announced that the photo event will start only on April 02, few users had started uploading images (as part of the event) as soon as we made the public announcemnt on March 24. Due to this, around 100 images were uploaded as part of this event (between March 24 and April 1) even before the we started the event on April 02.  Here are details:

• 3/24/2011 1
• 3/25/2011 30
• 3/26/2011 33
• 3/27/2011 3
• 3/28/2011 2
• 3/29/2011 2
• 3/30/2011 1
• 3/31/2011 14
• 4/1/2011 15
• 4/2/2011 3
• 4/3/2011 26
• 4/4/2011 64
• 4/5/2011 183
• 4/6/2011 82
• 4/7/2011 52
• 4/8/2011 154
• 4/9/2011 119
• 4/10/2011 196
• 4/11/2011 195
• 4/12/2011 49
• 4/13/2011 9
• 4/14/2011 28
• 4/15/2011 19
• 4/16/2011 29
• 4/17/2011 14
• 4/18/2011 82
• 4/19/2011 126
• 4/20/2011 31
• 4/21/2011 75
• 4/22/2011 30
• 4/23/2011 87
• 4/24/2011 57
• 4/25/2011 343

Here is graphical representation of the above list and this is prepared by User:RameshNG.

Malayalam Loves Wikimedia - Daily upload details - Graphical represnetation

Here are the details of the uploads by each user.

1. user:Ranjithsiji : 246
2. user:Tinucherian : 197
3. user:Raghith : 166
4. user:Sreejithk2000 : 147 + 14 (flicker bot) = 161
5. user:Ajaykuyiloor : 134
6. user:Rameshng : 2 + 127 = 129
7. user:നിരക്ഷരൻ : 103 + 2 (Magnus Manske)+ 21 (Upload to ml wiki) = 127
8. user:Praveenp : 90
9. user:Rajeshodayanchal : 78 + 1 (Magnus Manske) + 8 (Upload to ml wiki) = 87
10. user:Manojk : 71
11. user:Prasanths : 71
12. user:Vaikoovery : 61
13. user:Ashlyak : 58
14. user:Vijayakumarblathur : 48
15. user:Anoopan : 27 + 7 (flicker bot) = 34
16. user:Fotokannan : 31
17. user:Jithindop : 28
18. user:Akhilsunnithan : 23 + 1 (Magnus Manske) = 24
19. user:Edukeralam : 20
20. http://www.flickr.com/people/47608778@N05 ViBGYOR Film Collective – 19
21. user:Vinayaraj : 18
22. user:Pradeep717 : 18
23. user:Rojypala : 18
24. user:Ks.mini : 16
25. user:Anilankv : 16
26. user:Arayilpdas : 16
27. user:Sadik Khalid : 15
28. user:Johnchacks : 15
29. user:Reji Jacob : 15
30. user:Sai K shanmugam : 11 + 1 ((Magnus Manske)) + 2 (Upload to ml wiki) = 14
31. user:Jacob.jose : 14
32. http://www.flickr.com/people/26323088@N00 Rakesh S – 14
33. user:Naveenpf : 13
34. user:Jyothis : 11
35. user:ShajiA : 11
36. user:Irvin calicut : 10
37. user:Manjithkaini : 6 + 4 (flicker bot) = 10
38. user:Shijualex : 8
39. user:Ezhuttukari : 8
40. user:Snehae : 7
41. http://www.flickr.com/people/51668926@N00 Ryan – 7
42. user:Manucherian : 6
43. user:Santhoshj : 6
44. user:Hrishikesh.kb : 6
45. user:Mrriyad : 5
46. user:Sivahari : 5
47. user:Bluemangoa2z : 5
48. user:Seenatn : 4
49. user:Kiran Gopi : 4
50. user:Jayeshj : 4
51. user:Vm devadas : 3
52. [[user:]] : 2
53. user:Joshypj : 2
54. user:Sreelalpp : 2
55. user:Prasanth Iranikulam : 2
56. http://www.flickr.com/people/91314344@N00 Dinesh Valke – 2
57. user:Sudheeshud : 1
58. user:Sameerct : 1
59. user:Srijithpv : 1
60. user:Jairodz : 1
61. user:Pranchiyettan : 1
62. user:Satheesan.vn : 1
63. user:Kevinsooryan : 1
64. user:Dpkpm007 : 1
65. user:AniVar : 1
66. user:Shehnad : 1
67. user:വെള്ളെഴുത്ത് : 1
68. user:Sugeesh : 1
69. user:Anoop puthu : 1
70. user:Aneeshnl : 1
71. user:Suraj : 1
72. http://www.flickr.com/people/61799827@N06 vagheseej – 1
73. http://www.flickr.com/people/29695407@N00 Easa Shamih – 1
74. http://www.flickr.com/people/9598429@N06 yeokhirnhup – 1
75. http://www.flickr.com/people/55925503@N02 Hari Krishnan – 1

This is not the first time Malayalam wikimedians are contributing to the wikimedia commons. During the last few years we have contributed more to 6000 free-licensed images to wikimedia commons. Through this event we have added another 2000. We are planning for more topic based events in the near future.

Malayalam wiki community thank everyone who supported us during this event.

Malayalam loves wikimedia logo

As mentioned in my previous blog post, Malayalam wikimedians were able to convince a major political party of Kerala (LDF) to join the wikimedia movement by changing the license of their website to a free license. That helped us to get many free images for wikimedia.

This week we have launched the Malayalam Loves wikimedia (മലയാളികൾ വിക്കിമീഡിയയെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു) program to attract more Malayalees to wikimedia. We named it this way with a purpose.

We know about the xyz city Loves wikipedia (for example, London Loves wikipedia, Bangalore Loves Wikipedia) type of programs that were conducted in the past across various parts of the world. In most cases, these type programs were associated with a city. On some chosen dates wikipedians from that city go around the city to capture different images of the city and upload it to a location (commons, ficker, and so on) in some free license.

But Malayalam community is not yet big enough (even though it is one of the biggest language wiki community from India) to conduct such a program in a particular city. The reason for that is the fact that the concentration of Malayalam wikipedians in a selected place is very less. So we dropped the idea of xyz…city Loves wikipedia program and launched a different program which is very similar to that.

To include all the interested Malayalees in this program we named the program as Malayalam Loves Wikimedia. The duration of this program is 2 weeks 2011 April 2 – April 17.

The major reason for conducting this program now is because of the Assembly election in Kerala. Kerala is going to polling booth on April 13 to elect its new government. We know that this is the perfect time to capture the images of the notable politicians and important personalities of Kerala. The duration is kept as 2 weeks so that we can cover some major events and more people will be able to contribute to it.

When we started this program we thought that we will be able to donate around 500 free images to wikimedia commons through this program. But the program already surpassed our expectation! Within 4days itself we have already donated more than 400 free images to commons. All the images uploaded through this program are available here.

We are happy to inform that many non-wikimedians are also coming forward to donate images to wikimedia. They were all waiting for some oppurtunity like this to contribute to wikimedia. When they got it they are utilizing it. Some of them started uploading images as soon as we announced the program, that is, even before April 2

We hope other Indian language wiki communities will be able to launch similar programs in the near future.

Malayalam wiki community is fortunate to receive the support (at least from 2008 onwards) from Kerala State Government or various other organizations which allowed us to execute various projects (wiki meetups, wiki workshops, wikipedia CD project, wiki FAQ book, and so on).

Map of Kerala - Districtwise division. Prepared by Malayalam wikipedian Rajesh Odayanchal and released under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

But I would like to specially mention the various indirect support that we received from State Government.

• Way back in 2008, Kerala Government had officially announced that it is changing the license of Govt. sponsored print encyclopedia project (expert-written-encyclopedia) of Malayalam (sarvavijanakosam) to GFDL. This was done in 2008 December while Jimmy and Sue were in Thiruvananthapuram to attend the free software conference. Now since the license of that encyclopaedia is compatible with the license of Wikipedia, Malayalam community is able to reuse its content to develop many Malayalam wikipedia articles. We are still in the process of slowly migrating the content from this expert-written-encyclopedia to enhance many existing stub articles of Malayalam wikipedia. (But we are not blindly copy pasting content since the language style and the usage of words of this encyclopedia is bit different from the style of Malayalam wikipedia)
• Setting up of school wiki (wikipedia article) and there by teaching children about wiki culture and wiki editing in schools itself. Remember they are the future torch bearers of Malayalam wiki projects.
• Teaching of Malayalam Inscript typing in schools. Due to this, a major road block to contribute to Malayalam wiki proejcts is removed for future Malayalam wikiepdians.
• Introducing a lesson about Malayalam Wikipedia and its sister projects in school syllabus.
• …. and many others

All the points that I mentioned above have indirectly helped us (Malayalam wiki community) to spread our wings. The good thing is, all the above things are done by Government with out our intervention or lobbying. But later we assisted government officials with few of the above things.

We know that in western countries various Government and NGO organizations support wikimedia movement indirectly like this. For example, in the past many such organizations made the license of their website into some free license (that is compatible with the licensing policy of wikimedia projects), so that the wiki projects were able to reuse the content and images.

Now I am happy to make announcement regarding a similar indirect support that we received from a political party (actually a coalition of political parties) of Kerala. Left Democratic Front (LDF) is the current ruling coalition of Kerala. Now it is election time in Kerala and LDF has setup a website as part of their election campaign. It is available here: http://ldfkeralam.org There are few things that is unique about this website.

This is the first time a political party of Kerala is presenting the website in Malayalam!

I know that this is surprising for most of the people from West. But this is a fact. Leave apart the parties from different States of India. Look at the website of 2 major political parties of India; Indian National Congress (INC – Wikipedia article) and Bharathiya Janatha party (BJP – Wikipedia article). At the time of writing this article, the content of both the website is available only in English. Even the other official language of Central Govt of India (Hindi) is no where in picture. So there is no need to think about providing the content in the other 2o official languages of India. I assume the case might be similar across all Indian political parties and states. IT wing of most of the Indian states still didn’t understood the importance of having websites in regional languages. And the worst part is, some of them (which have websites in regional language) are still in the ASCII era.

Another unique thing about http://ldfkeralam.org website is that the site is released under CC-BY-SA 2.5 IN license. This is the first time such a thing is happening in Kerala from the part of a political party. I do not know about the political parties in other Indian states. But at least in Kerala this is the first time such a thing is happening.

As a consequence of this, wiki community could use photos (and the content also) of some of the notable LDF candidates. Also since the content and images are free, citizens could freely use it across web for their blog, buzz, and so on.

We were able to use the photographs (and content) of some 25 left front notable politicians in Malayalam wikipedia. Many of these images are useful in English wikipedia also.

MA Baby - Current Education Minister of Kerala. Image Couutsey - LDF Keralam website - Content and images of website are licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5 IN

Later when other district committees of LDF (and LDF candidates) started their own website they also followed it since the mother site is using a free license. There were cases of some district committees using NC/ND license. But they corrected it as soon as Malayalam wikipedians pointed the issue of using non-free licenses. Now there are many LDF sites using the free license.

I foresee that this policy change by LDF will have huge impact on the free software culture of Kerala. Of course Wiki projects will benefit much from this policy change. As mentioned by a notable Malayalam wikipedian, this will even force other political parties to think about changing the license of their website to something similar.

I congratulate the LDF team for doing a great job in this regard. Already the adoption of free license is helping LDF in various ways. I hope when next government is formed (during 2011 May) in Kerala, lot of things will happen in favor of free software movement. Malayalam wikimedians are ready to provide any support to make those things happen.

Some wikimedians know the importance of wikisource project. Which ever wiki community understood the importance of wiki source is giving proper care to it. From Indic Wikis, I can show the example of Bengali wiki source. According to me, both the wikitionary and wikisource projects are the backbone of every language.

For a language like Sanskrit (which is a classical language) both wiktionary and wikisource projects are very important projects. For the past 3 years when I interacted with Indic language wikimedians,  many Sanskrit lovers among them asked me why wikisource is not yet available for Sanskrit since it has huge collection of source text. Why no one cared to create a Sasnskrit wiki source? Since I am not a Sanskrit speaker and my interest with Sanskrit is same as for the other Indic languages, I always thought some Sanskrit wiki lover will take initiative to start it. I was waiting all these years to see Sanskrit wikisource.

Finally I decided to move forward and take initiative to place a request for Sanskrit wiki source.  I have logged a request to create the Sanskrit wikisource on 2010 October o4. The request is approved by the language committee on 2010 November 04, and finally the wiki is created on 2011 March 18.

The main page of Sanskrit wiki source when it was created is shown below.

Sanskrit wikisource- Current Main page

The major tasks of creating a good main page and importing more than 1500 source pages available in old wiki source are pending. I am planning to import pages from old wiki source with the help fo some senior meta wikimedians. Hope all Sanskrit lovers join this wiki and make it a big success.

I was waiting for the past 2 months to publish this report. Since this report is based on statistical information published at http://stats.wikimedia.org, I was waiting to get that site updated. But due to various technical issues (my assumption), the stats.wikimedia team is not yet able to generate data for some important parameters. So I have decided to move forward with the available data.

Disclaimer

In this blog post I am not going to select the best Indic language wikipedia after comparing different parameters.  My intention is to compare different quality and quantity parameters and present the current status of various Indic language Wikipedias.

Parameters selected

I have included almost all important parameters (for which there is required and updated data) for this report. But there are few parameters like articles with size > 0.5 kb, articles with size > 2 kb, bytes per article, and so on that I want to include in this report. But the data for those parameters is not yet ready. So I am using only those parameters for which the complete information is available.

Wikipedias Selected

For the analysis, I have selected the wikipedias of all the languages spoken in Indian subcontinent, or more precisely, the languages of India and its neighboring countries.

In the report, the language wikipedias are divided into 3 groups based on the number of articles (The number of articles that respective language wikipedia had on 2010 December 31). This division is done purely for comparing apples with apples . There is no meaning in comparing a Wikipedia having more than 50,000 articles (for example, Hindi Wikipedia) with another wikipedia having less than 1000 articles (for example, Assamese Wikipedia). Following are the groups and the languages that fall under each group.

Group 1 (More than 10,000 articles)

• Nepal Bhasha/Newari
• Hindi
• Telugu
• Marathi
• Bishnupriya Manipuri
• Tamil
• Bengali
• Gujarati
• Urdu
• Malayalam
• Nepali

Group 2 (More than 1,000 articles)

• Kannada
• Burmese
• Sinhala
• Sanskrit
• Pali
• Bhojpuri
• Punjabi

Group 3 (Less than 1,000 articles)

• Odia (Oriya)
• Kashmiri
• Sindhi
• Assamese

Report

This analysis is divided into 2 sections. 1. Article statistics and 2. editor statistics. I have labeled the first 3 positions of each group using A, B, and C.

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NOTE:

I am forced to place tables as images in this blogpost, since I found it very difficult to handle these many tables in good format in wordpress blog. If any one require PDF or ODT format of the below tables please contact me at shijualexonline@gmail.com

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Section I: Article statistics

Parameter 1 – Number of Articles

Number of articles in a wiki is always a popular parameter (and fancy parameter ) that everyone likes. Most of the time it is shown as an indicator of a successful wikipedia. But many communities are misusing it by concentrating only on increasing the article count using bots (and most of those articles are one-liners or copy paste from English wikipedia) and not on building the community.

Number of Articles

Like last year, Nepal Bhasha/Newari wikipedia continues to be on the top with 69,557 articles. Hindi, the biggest language of India, comes in the second place with 58,055 articles. Nepali wikipedia has grown from 3,079 articles to more than 10,000 articles.

The article creation in Bishnupriya Manipuri is almost stopped now. Now there is no community  to work on it. According to me, this will be the case with all wikipedias that are not trying to build a community. For the wikipedias that has good community the article creation and the activity in Wiki are almost stable.

The focus of Bengali wiki community is completely shifted from article creation to increasing the quality of the existing articles. I found that more language wiki communities have started focusing on the quality than on the quality.

Pali, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, and all the wikipedias in Group 3 are inactive. There needs to be some program to revive the respective community by reaching out to the speakers/interested users of the respective language.

Parameter 2 – Number of Edits

The number of edits shows the overall activism in wiki.

Total number of edits

Malayalam tops the list and Bengali comes second. Malayalam recently crossed the 10 lakh edit mile stone, the first Indian language wikipedia to cross that milestone.

Parameter 3 – Breakup of Edits

This parameter shows the percentage of manual edits and bot edits.

Manual vs edits Bot edits

Few experienced Wikipedians use bots to automate many tasks that are repetitive (for example, adding inter wiki links, fixing double redirects, and so on). In general it is a good idea to automate the tasks that are repetitive. But when we even create articles using bots (just for the sake of increasing the article count), then we are misusing a good tool that is given for our assistance.

By comparing the above parameters with the other parameters listed on this blogpost, we can find that most of the articles in Nepal Bhasha/Newari wikipedia are bot created. The percentage of bot edits in that wiki is more than 90 % which is not good to sustain an active community. Same is the case with Bishnupriya Manipuri with almost 97% bot edits.If we continue to create bot articles like this then community won’t grow. And wiki may eventually become inactive especially if the number of speakers of that language wiki is less. You can already see the sign of low activity in Bishnupriya Manipuri wikipedia. Only 10 articles are created in that wiki in 2010 even though it has more than 24,700 articles when we started 2010. Also bpy wiki has no active editors now. So this is an alarm sign for all wiki communities.

Blocking of bot edits in a wiki is also not a good idea. We do not want active editors go after fixing double redirects, insert inter wiki links, and so on which can easily be done using a bot. In the case of Sinhala wikipedia most of its articles doesn’t have inter wiki links. That is one of the main reason for its low bot edit percentage. This is also not good for a wikipedia.

So a balance is required for using the bots for wiki editing. My suggestion is, use bots only for the most required and sufficient tasks. Do not use bot to block the tasks that a new user would like to do (a new user always like to start wiki editing by creating new articles). As per my understanding, 40-50% of bot edit is normal in Indic wikis due to various type of fixes required. But if it goes beyond 50 or 60 percent that means active editors are moving away from wiki, which is not good for a wikipedia.

Remember Wikipedia is an encyclopedia in making. We do not want to complete this task today.

The world will not end tomorrow. If it does, we don’t need Wikipedia. If it doesn’t, and if Wikipedia is to be a long-term, respected and reliably informative entity – perhaps even “The Encyclopedia of the Future” – then we can afford to take our time when deciding on what is allowed in, and when we open the door.

Parameter 4 – Edits per article

Edits per article shows the number of times a wikipedia article is edited. For active wikipedias it is a rough indicator of quality. Wiki article will have more encyclopedic value when more people see and edit it. When more people edit an article the neutrality and the quality of article will increase. So it is an indicator of quality.

Edits per article

Malayalam tops the list with almost 30 revisions per article. Bengali and Tamil come in the second and third positions. As you know all these wiki communities are very active. If you have large number of active users the quality of wiki article will go up. The higher number of edits per article for some of the languages (for example, Pali and Bhojpuri) in Group 2 and all the languages in Group 3 is due to the low article count in that wikis. So same articles are getting edited all the time.

Section II: Editor statistics

Parameter 5 – Number of active wikipedians (atleast 5 edits per month)

The number of active editors are editors who do atleast 5 edits in one month.

Atleast 5 edits per month

Malayalam tops the list with 90 active editors. Tamil and Hindi comes in second and third positions with 70 and 46 active editors respectively. From this parameter we can understand that even though most big Indian wikis has more than 20,000 registered users, not even 100 of them are active.

The worst affected wikis are Bishnupriya Manipuri and Nepal Bhasha wikis. It doesn’t have even a single active user. This is the one of the after effect of creation of articles using bots. By doing so we actually blocked many potential users from becoming wiki editors. We need to find some plan to convert a good percentage of newly registered users to active editors.

The alarming part is, for some wikis with huge article count the active user base is very low. Those communities should think about some plans to build the community.

Parameter 6 – Number of highly active wikipedians (atleast 100 edits per month)

Highly active wikipedians are the editors who do at least 100 edits per month. They are the backbone of a wikipedia. Infact we must say that they are people who is running the respective wiki.

More than 100 edits per month

Tamil tops the list with 18 highly active users. Malayalam comes second with 16 and hindi comes thrid with 6 highly active users. From the chart you can see that for most of the Indian wikipedias not even 5 editors are highly active. As mentioned before, the worst affected Wikipedias are Nepal Bhasha and Bishnupriya manipuri. The interested users need to come back and build the community to save the project.

This parameter will define the future of wikipedia in the respective language. So it the duty of current highly active users to convert many of the active users to highly active users.

Parameter 7 – Wikipedias who edited atleast 10 times since they arrived

This parameter shows how many of the registered users did actually turned into actual wiki editors and done at least few edits in wiki.

Editors who edited atleast 10 times sinc ethey arrive

Malayalam tops the list with 564 wikipedians, which means that out of more than 20,000 registered users in Malayalam wikipedia, Malayalam community was able to convert only 564 users into actual wikipedians. Hindi with almost 40,000 registered users got only 559 of them as wiki editors. Tamil comes third.

This parameter can be used for the strategic plans of WMF. We should be able to convert at least one third of registered users to wiki editors.

This parameter shows we need to have some good program to convert many registered users to actual wikipedians. There lies the future of wiki proejct in the respective language. The importance of advocacy programs like Wiki workshops, seminars, exhibitions, wikipedia CD, wiki meetups, participating in various programs, and so on can help to popularize wikipedia among the speakers of the respective language. Some language communities are already doing it. But we need to replicate that success story across various Indic languages.

Conclusion

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, my intention is not compare different parameters and find the best Indic language wikipedia. Each language wikipedia is good when we take one or the other parameter. But by comparing different wikipedias you can make your own conclusions.

In India, few language wiki communities already tried this (or trying) and found that this is a wonderful way to reach out to people. For example, Malayalam wikipedians had released an offline version of selected Malayalam wikipedia articles on 2010 April 17.  The whole process that went behind the creation of Malayalam wikipedia CD is documented here.

Tamil wikipedians are also planning to release a Wikipedia CD of selected articles soon. Currently Tamil wiki community is under the process of the selection of the articles and the peer review of the selected articles.

Releasing the Wikipedia CD to school children is a fantastic idea as long as  it is done with proper care.  We done it and it was a huge success. So we are happy to see the success story replicated in other Indic language wikipedias and in other Indian states.

But recently there is trend among few people to take the dump of whole wikipedia, convert it into ZIM format, and distribute it among the school children in the form of wikipedia CD. As far as I understand (from the various mails that I received from the Wikimedia India list), this is already happened for Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati wikipedias.  While viewing from outside, this exercise might feel like a great initiative. But there are many far reaching consequences that may take the whole wiki community for a ride.

I am wondering whether the volunteers behind this effort thought about the issues that respective communities are going to face by giving the whole language wiki dump to school children. In the case of languages mentioned above, the respective language community is not at all aware about this effort. But when questions about the CD content arise every one, (including the volunteers who distributed the CD), will point their fingers to the respective language community.

Some of the issues that I see in giving the whole wiki content are:

• Who had checked the validity of the content provided in the CD? Once the CD is created, the content is frozen for ever. We never know in what ways the content in CD is going to get duplicated.
• How we are going to handle the copyright violation of text and images included in the CD? Can we always point our fingers to WMF?
• Who will answer the queries related to the  explicit images contained in many articles. The inclusion of explicit images, controversial articles, and factual errors in the CD supplied to the school children are not small issues.
• …… and so on

From outside, releasing a wikipedia CD will look like a fancy thing. But at the end of day it may damage the image of the respective wiki community if it is not handled properly. And it may even affect the future of wiki projects in the respective language.

Just think why English wikipedians from west are not giving whole dump of wikipedia to school children. The whole idea of Wikipedia CD for schools project is to overcome many of the drawbacks that I mentioned above. A quote from that project.

The articles were manually selected from the English Wikipedia by volunteers working for SOS Children, checked for suitability for children and cleaned by hand and script. This additional step helps overcome what are perceived by educators as the problems with Wikipedia.

For the English wikipedia official release selection and proof reading are happening. The process adopted by Martin Walker and team is very stringent. A big team is working out to bring out the official CD version of English wikipedia articles.

So when we see the working examples and the best practices from other wiki communities it is our duty to adopt some of them and find out our own process for this effort.  Even though the methodology adopt by each community may differ, it is better if some general guidelines are followed by all who are part of this effort.

My suggestion to the people who are behind this exercise is, always consult the respective wiki community and work closely with them to release the wikipedia CD to school children. It will benefit all of us in various ways.

Narayam, a new Mediawiki extension is developed for inputting text in the various text fields of a Mediawiki installation. This extension is more relevant and useful to the users of the wikis that use non-latin scripts. The extension is developed by Junaid P.V.

Image of Narayam - Image courtesy - Sadhik Khalid

Why the typing solutions need to be integrated to wikis?

Active Indian Language wikimedians (or all wikimedians who use non-latin scripts to input text) know that  inputting non-latin text to wikipedias is a major challenge.  Most of the active wikipedians are depending on various third party tools to overcome this challenge. Over time active wikimedians will get accustomed with these third party tools and continue to contribute to wiki with the same.

But for the new users (and for the users who try to contribute to wiki from different conditions), inputting text to a language wiki (especially for the wikis that use non-latin scripts) is a major challenge. Malayalam wikimedians had spotted this issue long back in 2007 and we found that this is the major road block for community development in Malayalam wiki projects. So with the help of few Malayalam wikimedians, who are developers, we developed a Malayalam typing solution for wiki and integrated it to Malayalam wikipedia in early 2007. Read more about this story in my previous blog post.

Later in 2010, Junaid has developed a new tool to overcome issues in the old tool and to include various features. Another Malayalam wikipedian Sadhik Khalid also contributed to the integration of the tool to Malayalam Wikipedia. Initially the tool was only able to handle one typing scheme at a time, later it was enhanced to handle more than one typing scheme. Apart from the Transliteration scheme, the InScript scheme is also implemented in Malayalam wikipedia using the tool.

Features of the tool

• The tool is language and keyboard independent.
• It works by utilizing rules in certain format, so by creating rules table, the tool can be used for implementation of any transliteration and keyboard simulation.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, later this tool is extended to implement transliteration and other keyboard layouts for various Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Sanskrit, and so on. Out of these, Bengali Wiki use three input methods to meet requirements of people spanned across two countries (India and Bangladesh).

Developing a Mediawiki extension

Even though the tool integrated to some language wikis mentioned above (and the tool is working fine), we felt that it will be more good if the solution is developed as a Mediawiki extension. Some of the advantages of making a Mediawiki extension solution are:

• Avoid manual loading of the tool as it will be loaded along with other scripts in Mediawiki.
• Any Mediawiki installation (not only WMF wikis) can utilize the extension to enable input methods on them.
• Implementing input scheme for multiple scripts will become more easy.

Keeping these points in mind, Junaid had developed a Mediawiki Extension for the typing solution. The extension is available at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Narayam

The extension contains two components, tool and typing schemes.

The tool is general for all the schemes. But the typing schemes need to be developed for each script and can be integrated to the extension. Currently the typing schemes are developed and integrated only for few Indic Scripts like Malayalam, Tamil, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bhojpuri, and Bengali. To find widespread usage of the extension more schemes have to be developed for variouse languages. For that the support from respective language community is required. If typing scheme need to be developed for your language please contact me at shijualexonline@gmail.com

Narayam in action

For time being the extension is installed in Junaid’s test wiki. It is available here: http://testwiki.junaidpv.in/wiki/Main_Page

Please see the various typing schemes in action in Junaid’s wiki. In normal case, in language wikis only those schemes related to the script used in the wiki will be enabled. In the test wiki various schemes for Tamil, Malayalam, Sanskrit, and Benagli are enabled just for demonstration purpose.

Also the Extension is now part of translate wiki. It is available here: Please localize it to your language.

Trivia

Many wikipedians might be wondering why this extension is named as Narayam. The reason is simple. Narayam is the name of a writing instrument used in ancient South India. Since this tool is also developed for writing or inputting text, Junaid named it as Narayam. Read more about Narayam here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narayam