Goa University Partners CIS India To Build Konkani Wikipedia
http://www.medianama.com/2013/09/223-goa-university-partners-cis-india-to-build-konkani-wikipedia/
The Goa university has entered into a three year memorandum of understanding
(MoU) with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) for building the Konkani
Wikipedia, reports navhindtimes.
As part of this partnership, Goa University will be uploading the four volumes
of Konkani encyclopedia and the Konkani wikipedia is expected to be available
in six months. It appears that the partnership with CIS India includes
processes such as scanning, digitization, and creating articles as per
requirement of Wikipedia. CIS India has also called out for volunteers for a
period of three months to help them digitizing the Konkani encyclopedia.
This is quite notable since most of the development in digitizing documents in
Indian language did not include Konkani language, which is spoken in western
coast of India. Besides, since the university will upload the Konkani
encyclopedia on Wikipedia, it will allow users to search through texts. Most of
the digitization projects just scan the books and upload the pages in image
format, which makes it difficult to search or perform any kind of data related
query.
Last year in May, Wikipedians were digitizing Indian language, out-of-copyright
texts online, trying to address the comparative paucity of Indic language texts
online. Wikisource is a repository of documents and archived material that
serves as a reference source for Wikipedia, and a means of improving access to
information sources. Of the 64 languages Wikisource is available in, 8 are
Indian: Tamil (stats), Malayalam (stats),Telugu (stats), Kannada (stats),
Sanskrit (stats), Marathi (stats), Bengali (stats) and Gujarati (stats). Note
that most of these Indian language Wikipedia’s receive active contribution from
CIS India under its CIS-A2K program.
Wikipedia had recorded 43.5 million pageviews in Indian language wikis, as of
October 2011. In June 2013, the Hindi language Wikipedia had received monthly
pageviews of 7.8 million, Tamil language Wikipedia had received 5.2 million
pageviews, among others. So there’s clearly a demand to access information in
local languages.
That said, while more languages are being added to the list, it should be seen
that the articles in these languages do not contain just one or two sentences.
According to an analysis by Shijualex.in, many articles posted under Indian
language Wikipedia were under 2kb, indicating that it contained only couple of
sentences.
Thanks
Nitika
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