CIS-A2K/Indic Languages/Meetings/2011 September 30
Appearance
- Place: Aksharam, Samsritha Bharathi, Bangalore
- Date:2011 September 30
- Primary participants: Sanskrit Wikimedians
I was invited by the volunteers of Samskritha Bharathi to conduct a workshop and to give advice regarding various things related to Sanskrit wiki projects.
- Samskritha Bharathi is a volunteer-driven non-profit organization working to bring Samskritam (Sanskrit) back to the mainstream.
- Samskritha Bharathi is involved with Sasnkrit wiki projects at least from 2009. Few Veteran Wikimedians like Arun, Naveen, Sreekanth and others had helped them in various ways to introduce them to Sanskrit wiki projects.
- In the past I had conducted 3 wiki workshop for Samskritha Bharathi volunteers and introduce them the wiki editing and other basic things.
- At Samskritha Bharathi I could see a team of dedicated volunteers (at least 7 members) working towards enriching Sanskrit wiki projects. According to my knowledge nowhere in the world we can see this type of dedication towards a language wiki.
- Their prime focus as of now is Sanskrit Wikipedia and Wikisource. But they have much interest in Wiktionary, Wikiquotes, and Wiki Books also.
- Samskritha Bharathi has produced a wonderful brochure for Sanskrit wiki projects. Don't know whether any other Indic community has done this.
- An advisory committee is formed to advise Samskritha Bharathi on various things related to Wikimedia project. Arun from Wikimedia India Chpater and I are included in that committee.
- As of now most of the contributions in Sanskrit wiki projects is done by Samskritha Bharathi volunteers. I am not sure whether any conflicts arise when community grow and more users outside Samskritha Bharathi join Sanskrt wiki projects. But due to the special nature of Sanskrit language I feel such a situation highly unlikely.
- The volunteers at Samskritha Bharathi are very much interested to study all the advanced type of editing in wiki, including template editing and template creation. I was unable to answer some of their technical queries.
- Samskrtha Bharathi has plans to release some of their major publications in free license. They requested my support regarding this.
- Samskrtha Bharathi sought our help for creating some of the basic templates that is not available in Sanskrit wiki
- Samskrtha Bharathi volunteers enquired about the importance of category and the role of Category Tree. I explained them the importance of defining Category Tree in a wiki and showed them it using en and ml wikis. Now they are planning to prepare a Wiki project for categorizing the existing articles of Sanskrit wikipedia. For new articles, categories will be added as and when it is created