Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-05-08/Special report
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The clouds had set in, the cold breeze also joined and then came the pleasantful showers. Hyderabad is located on a very hot and dry Deccan plateau, April is a summer time but all of nature just joined to make the 3rd edition of Wiki Conference India in Hyderabad this April, an exciting, enriching and an enhancing experience. For the languages and communities in India and its subcontinent, the 7 years wait to host another national conference, the challenge of Covid pandemic, all stood low, somewhere paused and then stopped against the drama of dedication, determination and deliverance by the communities.
If technologies are solving every problem, learn about the Kashmiri Wikipedia. Keyboards don’t support all characters, machine translation still not effectively good, less digital content over the internet. That’s not all, the scenic beautiful high altitude mountain state of Kashmir where the language is native, has internet shutdowns. Yet, Kashmiri Wikipedia never fails to disappoint. The content is increasing so is the readership and editor base. Amir E.Aharoni and the larger language community also helped to get the Universal Keyboard extension working. Let there be problems, the Kashmiri community will always find solutions and make a bigger history someday. The Set In Stone Challenge which will be undone and so mark the space.
Listen to some more ! Angika is a language spoken in Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and parts of Nepal. If India falls under Global South, these regions are further south amongst the Global South. The language was in incubation for nearly 12 years and only went live on 22nd March, 2023. Can 12 years of wait be imagined? That’s the art of resilenece, which is almost a curiosity for today's generation of volunteers. As more and more of machine learning, automation and faster technological solutions began to sink in the movement, the word ‘resilience’ began to disappear. User Angpradesh and the larger Angika community have shown the willingness and commitment to do the odds and succeed. Meanwhile, Gondi,Kolami and many other languages are also writing their history and very soon expect them to succeed.
While Angika work stretched until and before the 1st Wikiconference in 2011, learn about the User:Bharathesha Alasandemajalu and User:Vishwanatha Badikana who made Tulu Wikipedia active at around the time for Wiki Conference India 2016 in Chandigarh and this time they came with even more exciting developments. Heard of Arebhashe ? A dialect of Kannada having a history of more than 500 years. On Invitation from Karnataka State Arebhashe Samskrithi Mattu Sahitya Academy, they have set up a 950-page dictionary and a 450-page encyclopaedia for the underrepresented language and still counting.
There are more stories to hear, there are more stories to appreciate. Doteli is one, Santali is another. Wikisource in India has its own fairytale from stories on digitization to audio books to new technologies. The writing space will fall short, the time space will be limited but the stories will not finish. These are communities from India and its subcontinent.
It is the same community who suffered worse of Covid pandemic and asked for vaccination, protection kits and expert counselling. The very same community which repeatedly has hardware and bandwidth challenges. What did some of these and others stories show at Wiki Conference India 2023 ? The challenge may be any, hard or soft, it is the communities who always make the difference. There are no two contesting contentions, communities in the Indian subcontinent will continue to rise.
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