Patrice Riemens on Fri, 2 Jun 2017 17:21:13 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Subhashish Panigrahi: Indian language Odia Wikipedia turning 15 this |
Bwo Frederick Noronha/Bytes for All readers (Odia is an Indi-Aryan Indian language, mostly spoken in Odisha -formerly Orissa- in Eastern India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odia_language) There exist 23 Indian-language Wikipedias, and the oldest one is turning 15 Born in 2002, the Odia-language Wikipedia is celebrating its 15th birthday on June 3. By Subhashish Panigrahi The Odia-language Wikipedia is celebrating its 15th birthday on June 3. Born in 2002, just a year after the English Wikipedia, the first ever Wikipedia went live. Odia might not be there in the Google Translate, but as one of the three oldest languages of the Indian subcontinent it also has the oldest Indian-language Wikipedia. June 3 marks first ever edit in Odia-language by an anonymous editor. Along with Odia, Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedia were also born in the same year. Today, there exist 23 Wikipedias, the latest entrant to the family being Tulu, in 23 different Indian languages. Odia Wikipedia is a compendium of 12,619 encyclopedic articles written by only a handful volunteer editors, also known as Uikialis (Odia for Wikipedian or Wikipedia editor). Though the project is 15 years old, it was dormant for about nine years until a couple of editors started actively contributing and building a community around it in 2011. Slowly these editors spread out, reached out to more people, and the content sprawled to more subject areas when subject experts started contributing related to their domain expertise. Just like any other Wikipedia, Odia Wikipedia is never going to be complete, but will continue to mature. When there are over 350 articles related to Medicine, there are only two articles related to feminism. The reason behind that is simple. A Wikipedian would often contribute to either a subject area that they are interested in, or an expert in. For instance, when a veteran doctor and assistant professor of a medical school translated hundreds of medicine-related articles, there were not many editors to do the same for the articles about feminism. Not all the editors are subject experts themselves, many Wikipedians--like Pritiranjan Tripathy who has contributed the largest number of biographical articles, and Sangram Kesari Senapati who has written several articles on Indian movies and actors--actually contribute for articles that they are personally interested in. The contributor community of these Wikipedians have also worked in bringing two other Wikimedia projects--Odia Wikisource, an online library of freely-licensed books, and Odia Wiktionary, a dictionary with the meanings of native words that are equivalent of foreign language vocabulary. Though the community is small, there is a wide mixture of people of all professions, most importantly open source software developers. This has helped the community build many tools that they themselves and the larger society is using. One of them is a converter that helps anyone convert text typed in legacy encoding systems into Unicode, a universal and contemporary alphabet encoding standard. There are hundreds and thousands of text in multiple non-standard legacy encodings that has been typed in the recent past, and are being typed currently by writers, publications, journalists and media houses. Because of the use of such diverse encoding systems, the content is never searchable on the Internet nor reproducible. This converter has transformed the state of the language on the web. This and many other software that have been developed by the community have been released under open licenses along with the source code. Many of the software are also built in collaboration with the global and other Indian-language open source contributors. Globally, there are 285 active Wikipedias in diverse world languages and each of these Wikipedias is looked up by millions of viewers every single moment. In India, Wikimedia India chapter, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) at the Centre for Internet and Society, Punjabi Wikimedians, West Bengal Wikimedians User Group, and Karavali Wikimedians are designated as movement affiliates that operate with some institutional framework managed by either/both volunteers and paid professionals. But outside these collectives, there exist a few thousand volunteers that have been constantly driving the open movement in their native languages. Author bio: Subhashish Panigrahi is a Bangalore-based educator, communications, partnership and community strategist, and a long time Free/Libre and Open Source advocate and contributor. He has worked over six years in global nonprofits like Mozilla, the Centre for Internet and Society Contact: +91 8050515339, psubhashish@gmail.com -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: