विकिपीडिया:Wikimedia India Newsletter/2011 June

General

The Sanskrit Wikipedia was started on December 21, 2003. However, there was not much progress till 2010, at the end of which there were only 4000 articles. However, this Wiki got a fresh lease of life on February 19, 2011, when the first Sanskrit Wiki workshop was held in Sanskrit Bharati's office at Aksharam, Girinagar, Bangalore. Sanskrit Bharati is already well-known for having made Sanskrit a popular language among the masses. It is hoped that alumni of Sanskrit Bharati, as well as from all the other Sanskrit education centres all over India, will now start contributing to Sanskrit Wiki to make it a vibrant community online and a destination for all seekers of resources related to Sanskrit.

According to Alexa, Sanskrit Wikipedia is the 29th most visited Wikipedia in recent times(with 0.08% of site traffic on Wikipedia), more than any other Indian Wikipedia. Sanskrit Wikisource also is the 21st most visited Wikisource with 0.21% of site traffic of Wikisource. It is also the most visited Indian Wikisource in recent times.

Sanskrit Wikipedia

• After a long hiatus, the first Sanskrit Wiki Workshop was held on February 19, 2011, by Shijualex at Sanskrit Bharati, Bangalore, for an audience of 20 participants. The presentation was intended to give a basic working knowledge of Wikipedia and its interface. More importantly, considerable enthusiasm was generated in the project.
• A second workshop was held at the same location on March 26, 2011. It was taken by Uttara Neurkar for another 15 participants from leading software companies and the Om Shantidham Gurukulam. Again, considerable interest was generated. This time SumanaKoundinya, distributed some units of work to some of the participants with a 'Complete By' Date.
• Since then with the help of some other positive factors, the number of articles has gone up by 750 by. While this is still very far from the desirable rate, it is anticipated that more and more gurukulas and Sanskrit Departments of schools and colleges will be brought into the ambit of this project. Also, the quality of the articles needs to be substantially improved.
• Creation of articles about famous personalities has been initiated in the month of May and about 25 articles have been created newly and many other existing pages were enriched with data.
• The Sanskrit Wiki Embassy has been set up recently. This will allow other users who do not know Sanskrit to get help in their language and would be a central place for resources to help with cross-language issues — site-wide policy and software decisions that affect all of us and interlanguage linking.
• Nepal and Karnataka are chosen as strategic locations and to target one of them, Nepal week was organized.
• A project has been started by Harshavs to crate articles on all the districts of India and it is pretty near to its completion.
• As of May 16, 2011, four Sanskrit Wikipedia Sysops (Yann, Vibhijain, Eukesh and HPN) were placed at 20, 67, 91 and 97 respectively on Top Indic sysops chart.

Sanskrit Wikisource

• This has been a special week as Sanskrit Wikisource had reached 2000 articles after the hard-work of many Wikipedians.
• Improving the wikisource work also has been started with addition of Mahabharatam shlokaH.
• 75 shlokas Bhartruhari Shatakam has been added.

Sanskrit Wikitionary

• Being a silent wiki, some activity has been done in this week which is a very positive sign.

Sanskrit Wikiquote

Requested here.