Ravishankar, Programme Director, Wikipedia India, says that people, who are not online, don't know about Wikipedia (a majority in Tamil-speaking population) and those who are, are not aware of Tamil Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is on a drive in Tamil Nadu to build Tamil content for its site. Currently, receiving around 900 articles a month from users, Tamil Wikipedia is striving to increase the scope and number of articles it receives. A Ravishankar, Programme Director, Wikipedia India, talks to dna exclusively about local language content for Wikipedia, the new Tamil projects and the challenges.
Areas where Tamil content is needed
“We welcome articles on all areas based on contributors' interest. However, we encourage them to work on list of topics that have been identified as most important for any encyclopaedia. There is a consistent demand for Tamil society related topics and current affairs. For example, check this list of most important 10,000 topics.https://ta.wikipedia.org/s/8jr,” explains Ravishankar.
Tamil Wikipedia has 5 sister projects
Tamil Wiktionary - Has Tamil meanings for 3,13,000+ words. Ranks first among Indian language Wiktionaries and Top 20 among global wiktionaries. https://ta.wiktionary.org
Tamil WikiSource - Collection of classics and references works. Acts like a Wiki Library - https://ta.wikisource.org/
Tamil WikiNews ( https://ta.wikinews.org/)
Tamil WikiQuote ( https://ta.wikiquote.org )
Tamil WikiBooks ( https://ta.wikibooks.org )
Challenges to getting local language content for Wikipedia
Ravishankar says that people, who are not online, don't know about Wikipedia (a majority in Tamil-speaking population) and those who are, are not aware of Tamil Wikipedia.
He adds that users are not aware that Wikipedia exists in local languages including Hindi and Tamil. A major change is possible here when Google voice search is enabled for Tamil like in Hindi.
“Among those who know it exists in Tamil, they do not know they can edit Wikipedia. Among those who know they can edit, very few know to type Tamil (or type fast enough. This is equivalent to digital illiteracy!) in computer,” says Ravishankar.
Other challenges they face is the quality of writing - writing for an encyclopaedia-format is also different from writing blogs and Facebook posts that most are comfortable with. “New generation of users access Internet through mobile from which it is not so easy to add lengthy content. If one crosses all these hurdles, one is not able to write about all topics because most of our higher education is in English. One needs to coin many new words for modern topics. So, the challenges we face are very systematic,” he says.
Drive to increase awareness of local language Wikipedia
“We are promoting awareness through social media, conducting contests and institutional tie-ups like the one with Tamil Virtual Academy (a government organization). But, our single biggest promoter is our content itself. The more content we have, we get more people to use us when they search the web and land in our website. So, the core focus had always been in building more quality content across all topics,” says Ravishankar.
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