It is the biggest online collaborative resource in Tamil: with over 55,000 articles contributed and edited by more than 900 contributors, who are diverse in their own ways in an age group ranging from 11 to 77 years.
This Sunday, the Tami Wikipedia community celebrates the completion of 10 years of operations with a day-long conference in Anna University. Though the note is one of celebration, Ravi Shankar from the organising committee says it will also be an opportunity to focus on improvements. “The Tamil Wikipedia has much of its potential untapped,” he told The Hindu .
“Some Wikipedias in languages with fewer speakers than the Tamil population world over have more contributors. Tamil Wikipedia can be as useful as English Wikipedia if at least a few thousand users sign up and contribute regularly.”
The Tamil website that can be accessed on >http://ta.wikipedia.org has impressive web analytics: it gets close to 1.75 lakh page views every day. Its sister project Tamil Wiktionary is the biggest among Indian languages with over 2.83 lakh words and ranks 16 among global Wiktionaries.
To encourage new volunteers for the project, the organisers have announced an essay competition with a cash reward of Rs. 30,000.
One of the regular contributors, who would be seen at the Sunday event, is septuagenarian Sengai Pothuvan. The 77-year-old Chennai resident has an impressive 2,580 newly created articles in Tamil Wikipedia. Add to that his 29,000-plus edits — he is one of the few veterans of the project. “My ambition is to collect all the sources of Tamil literature and catalogue them, every single Tamil book and its author,” he said in a telephonic interview.
The meet will be held at the Tag auditorium, College of Guindy, Anna University from 9 am. For more details, visit >http://ta.wikipedia.org .
