Karavali Wikimedians to supply content offline to Tulu students in village schools

At present, Tulu Wikipedia has 1,034 articles

March 18, 2017 12:33 am | Updated 12:33 am IST - MANGALURU

Wikipedia writers here launched Karavali Wikimedians, affiliated to the Wikipedia Foundation in the United States, and put forward a project of providing Tulu content offline for students studying it as a third language, especially in village schools.

Speaking after the launch of Karavali Wikimedians, a registered body of writers for Tulu, Kannada and Konkani Wikipedia, U.B. Pavanaja, secretary, said, “Tulu Wikipedia writers have created content relating to the Tulu syllabi of Classes VI to X. Students learning Tulu in schools that lacked internet connections in rural areas should not be deprived of the content on Tulu Wikipedia that went live last August. Karavali Wikimedians plans to supply this content offline by copying the same to DVDs, CDs or pen drives. With this, students will just need a computer to access the material.”

Vishwanatha Badikana, president, Karavali Wikimedians, said that content relating to science and other general subjects taught in schools were ready in Tulu.

Mr. Pavanaja, also editor, Vishva Kannada, and formerly a programme officer (Indian languages) at the Centre for Internet Society, Bengaluru, said, “A language could survive only if content or information relating to daily life and transactions were available in the respective language. This applied to Tulu and Kannada as well. A language could grow only if it used daily also through modern IT tools.”

He added that now, Tulu Wikipedia had 1,034 articles, Kannada Wikipedia had 21,751 articles and English Wikipedia had about 50 lakh articles. Wikipedia projects were available in 294 languages across the world.

B.A. Vivek Rai, former vice-chancellor of Kannada University, Hampi and Karnataka State Open University, Mysuru who inaugurated a two-day workshop on writing for Kannada and Tulu Wikipedia on the occasion asked writers to create profiles of villages and towns in the coastal belt.

Stating that writing in Tulu was a challenging task, Mr. Rai asked the youth to spend time creating content on Wikipedia that would remain forever thus helping future generations.

The Karvali Wikipedians organised the workshop at Ramakrishna Pre-University College.

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