Although I am not a programmer, I had worked hard for this phonetic transliteration thing.
I think this problem has been solved (at least partially) by now. I had incorporated this
system even in places like Oriya, Panjabi and Assamese where there are virtually no users.
Except for places where the admins did not want it installed, it is present in all
Indian languages except Urdu, Sindhi and Pastun which are written in Nastaleeq (I dont
know the basics of Nastaleeq and am trying to learn basics).
About "technical" problems, these are faced by almost all non-Latin
wikipedias. Among them, those faced by Brahmic derived are very similar. If people here
are interested, we can form a new group for "Brahmic derived abugida using
wikipedias". That way, we can solve these issues in a broader ground with
help/cooperation from Nepalese, Bangladeshi, Thai, Lao, Burmese, Singhalese, Khmer,
Bhutanese and Tibetan wikipedians as well.
Pradeep Makineni <makineni.pradeep(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One of the big technical barrier is inputting the Indic text, I think many users still
does not know that there are indic input editors which can transliterate english text into
their mother tongue. Even if they knew that, some won't like to copy-paste from these
editors into the browser to edit wiki pages. They have to switch between the editors many
times in-order to edit a single page.
Users of some of the Indian language wikis have over come this issue by incorporating
custom javascripts, which can transliterate english text while typing into their mother
tongue, into the mediawiki namespace and attached that script to the wiki edit box, and
text boxes where ever necessary. It will surely help the editors of indian language
wikipedias if there indic input support for all the indian language wikis.
Padma is one of the open source project which can transliterate many Indian Languages.
Incorporating transliteration into the mediawiki itself would greatly improve the
usability of the indian language wikis.
On Jan 16, 2008 2:35 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
When you say "there are technical barriers", what technical barriers? We have
for instance been working hard on getting a better localisation framework. BetaWiki is
clearly superior. It now shows pointers to what a message is used for. It allows for the
use of "gettext" files. I am really happy to see that for several languages from
the Indian subcontinent this has been taken up. Consequently the use of Commons has been
improved because the user interface of these languages is improving. I have noticed
Bengali, Gujarati among, I have failed to notice Hindi for instance.
What other technical barriers are there that we can help with? I have read in mailing
lists that not enough complaints are received from Asia and consequently developers are
not aware about issues. In one instance there was an issue with performance and once this
was noticed, the performance in Asia is said to have increased substantially as a result.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Jan 16, 2008 7:50 AM, Hari Prasad Nadig <mail(a)hpnadig.net> wrote:
On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 20:28 +0530, Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia
wrote:
It is quite ununderstandable why Wikipedias like
Kannada Language
wikipedia and Gujrathi and Malyalam language wikipedia are so slow
given the fact that literacy levels and IT exposure in respective
states is quite OK and they are immensely contributing to India
centric articles on English wikipedia in big way.
Important regional Languages Assamese ,Oriya , Punjabi wikipedias are
lagging behind like nothing.
Besides we need to look after now sort of extinct but important old
languages wikipedias Sanskrit and Pali
Main chalange is not how to increase their article or edit count but
statisticaly self sustainable website service has to achieve menimum
3000 membership mark from respective languages so website keeps
getting adequate content and how do we do that?
I don't know what to make out of your first statement, really. It would
be stupid to say what you've said.
It might sound rude, but it would be nice if you do some homework before
writing vaguely like this.
None of the wikis you have mentioned are "slow". They have much better
ratio of quality content to stubs which is what the projects need in
order to grow. An infinite array of stubs isn't going to motivate new
visitors to become editors. Instead, it might just do the opposite.
Literacy levels or IT exposure has nothing significant to do with how
respective language Wikipedias are faring.
The challenge of motivating more visitors to become editors has to be
addressed with a much different approach. There are technical barriers.
There are differences in culture that affect the way the projects are
received by the native speakers of each language. But I'd rather not
discuss that in a thread that started with some poorly formed
observation.
- h.p.
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