User talk:Gokulmadhavan

Welcome to Wikipedia![edit]

Dear Gokulmadhavan: Welcome to Wikipedia, a free and open-content encyclopedia. I hope you enjoy contributing. To help get you settled in, I thought you might find the following pages useful:

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Sanskrit verbs[edit]

This page contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.

Namaste! I notice that you are making some expansion on Sanskrit verbs. I was curious about the use of the character ũ, rather than the IAST equivalent. Can you tell me more about your encoding method for the table? It is good to see people who are interested in Sanskrit on Wikipedia, so welcome! Buddhipriya 04:50, 25 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Buddhipriya, I actually know very little about using special characters on Wikipedia. For now, all I'm doing is entering characters straight from OS X's Character Palette into my browser. It's a frustratingly slow and buggy process, but unfortunately I know no other method. I do hope my changes are legible to non-Mac users. I would love to know if there are other, more efficient ways of entering special characters and alternate scripts into Wikipedia. Gokul Madhavan 04:59, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

It is wonderful that you are willing to help with these articles! For your system, your input method for special characters will vary depending on your choice of word processing method if you prepare your texts offline and then cut and paste them into the system. However if you use the "quick pick" Unicode table at the bottom of your Wikipedia editing interface, individual characters can be added that way. I am not sure which method you are using. Either way, for articles using Sanskrit text we generally use the IAST system for romanization because that is the academic standard. In IAST, the long u is transliterated with the following Unicode character on the Wikipedia editing interface: ū

There is also a special template used to render IAST and to identify which of the various romanization methods for IAST is being used. See: Template:IAST

Another issue is that different users may see different characters depending on their own client configurations. To minimize viewing problems, we have a special tag to warn people that Indic text is used on article pages. It includes a link to setup information for all common operating environments.

I would be very happy to work with you on these issues if you wish. For some general information that I have gathered from various threads related to IAST on Wikipedia see: User:Buddhipriya/IASTUsage. That page is not an official policy, guideline, suggestion, etc. It is just the current state of a page I have been using to try to keep track of IAST issues. There are not a lot of editors who work on Sanskrit articles, so we need to stick together. :)

Another approach you could use would be to just enter things using your present method and then ask someone to go over your edits to look for IAST issues. A few joint editing runs like that should identify whatever coding issues are coming up with the Mac character utility. This is not a big deal, so just work as a team and everything will sort out.

As a test of how your system renders Indic text, can you see this text on your display? (Devanagari: ॐ गं गणपतये नमः) (IAST: oṃ gaṃ gaṇapataye namaḥ Buddhipriya 05:23, 25 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

An invitation[edit]

Hello! I thought you may be interested in joining WikiProject Dravidian civilizations. We work on creating, expanding and making general changes to Dravidian related articles. If you would be interested in joining feel free to visit the Participants Page! Thank You.

Wiki Raja 22:40, 26 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Aiṅkurunūṟu[edit]

This is an automated message from CorenSearchBot. I have performed a web search with the contents of Aiṅkurunūṟu, and it appears to be very similar to another wikipedia page: Ainkurunuru. It is possible that you have accidentally duplicated contents, or made an error while creating the page— you might want to look at the pages and see if that is the case.

This message was placed automatically, and it is possible that the bot is confused and found similarity where none actually exists. If that is the case, you can remove the tag from the article and it would be appreciated if you could drop a note on the maintainer's talk page. CorenSearchBot (talk) 19:07, 4 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]