Government promotes Tamil Wikipedia, and more

Tamil Nadu government's contest to promote content in the Tamil Wikipedia

Last month the government of Tamil Nadu, an urbanised state in southern India, held a contest for college students to expand the Tamil Wikipedia. Along with a graphic design contest for high school students, it aimed to introduce young people to modern Indic computing ahead of the World Classical Tamil Conference organised by the Tamil Nadu government, and the co-located annual IT expo, the Tamil Internet Conference, to be held in June. The Tamil Wikipedia has 22,000 articles and some extremely committed editors, but its existence is not well-publicised in the Tamil community. The current annual growth of just 3,000 articles a year shows the significant opportunities for expanding the rates of participation (see Signpost coverage). The Telugu Wikipedia has twice as many articles, despite roughly the same number of native speakers of both languages. The Tamil Nadu government is hoping for 30,000 to 40,000 new articles to be uploaded when the contest closes on 30 April.

Update: the closing date has been extended two weeks.

Orientation programs were run at Loyola College in Chennai to teach participants how to write standard wiki articles. The best entries, selected by a jury of Wikipedia editors, will receive prizes and certificates from the government.

The contest went unnoticed on the main Wikipedia forums. An announcement was made on the Wikimedia India mailing list and a blog was used to post media coverage, but no updates were posted on the Foundation mailing list. Within India it received attention due to the involvement of Kanimozhi in this year's Tamil Internet Conference. M. K. Kanimozhi MP – a former journalist who has championed Tamil literature since entering politics – joined P. A. Aruna, the state IT Minister, on the organising committee. One Indic computing expert said the Tamil Wikipedia is "gaining good traction and patronage".[1] The Hindu reported this is the first time a state government has promoted local content in Wikipedia.

References

Briefly

The international press has been taking a lot of interest in Wikipedia editors lately. User:Brucevdk was quoted extensively in the Ontario newspaper The Sault Star (circulation: 25,000) on research he has done for the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike article.[2] This follows a full-page interview with User:Heitor C. Jorge in the Brazilian Estadão newspaper (circulation: 220,000) in which he discussed his efforts to bring the São Paulo article up to featured article standard.[3] There have also been interviews in the Italian newspapers with a disgruntled former administrator and a priest who uses the site.[4][5]

A short comedy video on atom.com poked fun at COI editing, sockpuppeting ("You used my Wikipedia account to change your page? Yes, of course I used your account. I can't use my own, people will think I am a phony!") and BLP issues.

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3 May 2010 (all comments)

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The deadline for article submission in Tamil Wikipedia Contest has been extended to May 15. And there has been only 2000 submissions so far.--Sodabottle (talk) 15:38, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Are the articles not actually uploaded to the Wiki until the end? YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 01:58, 5 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, they will be added only after the contest ends and wikipedians scrutinize the entries. The number of submissions can be found from the unique IDs of entries in the submission page. They use a incremental system starting from ***6000 . At present the last article submitted has ***8129 as ID. --Sodabottle (talk) 04:05, 5 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm.. Based on what I can gather from Google translate, the Italian article says nothing about the Catholic Church sex scandal. Samuell Lift me up or put me down 20:46, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for pointing that out. My Italian is rusty. Ottre 21:43, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Ganesh, I find the news report on Tamil Wiki contest highly biased, having incorrect information and unnecessarily negative in tone. It would have been nice if the SignPost reporters had contacted any of the Tamil Wikipedia contributors for fact checking before publishing this. It will be good to allow us to improve the news report now. Below is a better and updated version of the article:

The Government of Tamil Nadu, an urbanised state in southern India, is running a contest until May 15th for college students and the general public to expand the Tamil Wikipedia. Currently, The Tamil Wikipedia has 22,000+ articles. Along with a graphic design contest for high school students, it aimed to introduce young people to modern Indic computing ahead of the Tamil Internet Conference, to be held in June.

Orientation programs were run at Loyola College in Chennai to teach participants how to write standard Wiki articles. The best entries, selected by an international jury of academicians and professionals, will receive prizes and certificates from the government.

This is the first time a state government has promoted local content in Wikipedia.

Thanks--Ravishankar (talk) 03:11, 6 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that there was no bias in the editors who wrote this and I'm sure Ravi would agree on that. They went by the news items and the inaccuracies and the tone have reflected here. Let me fix the factual issues first and leave it to the original reporters to fix the rest taking the above submission by Ravi. -- Sundar ^{\talk \contribs} 05:45, 6 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate the feedback Ravishankar, but please bear in mind that I don't speak the language and had to go by the reports in The Hindu, which skipped over a lot of detail. It took me over an hour to research the main points of the article and to make sure there was a clear connection to the Tamil Internet Conference per this press release. The article may simplify things because I could not find anyone to translate the Tamil news reports for me, but the tone is neutral. The only oversight is neglecting to mention who will be coordinating the contest -- I didn't think our readers would really be interested. Ottre 14:25, 8 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]