Two Wikipedians to attend wikimania meet in Israel

Two Wikipedians to attend wikimania meet in Israel

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Mangalore, August 3, 2011: Two Wikipedians, Gurudath Bantwalkar and Hariprasad Nadig are on their way to Wikimania 2011 in Hafia, Isrel, from August 4to 7. At the annual global meet people will share their experiences with free knowledge initiatives.

Mr. Bantwalkar, Asst. Director, Research Wing, World Konkani Centre, Mangalore and Mr. Nadig a Bangalorean IT Professional are attending the meet to get support from the international community of Wikimania software developers on a Konkani Language transliteration tool they are developing. At present the “extension” or a software add-on enables Konkani speakers to read in their preferred script.

 

Gurudath Bantwalkar and Hariprasad Nadig

 

But they want Konkani writers to contribute to Wikipedia in their scripts, and have readers writing in their preferred script, said Mr. Nadig. The add-on runs on Mediawiki, the software on which Wikipedia is based.

The tool is still theoretical and details have to be worked out, for which they are seeking help from the community of Wikipedians. But they are confident that it can be done successfully. If all works well, it can help other languages with multiple scripts such as Kashmir and Santhali at home, and Serbian and Chinese abroad.

The aim was to create a transliteration tool for Konkani, spoken by people across states and read in several scripts including Roman, Devanagari and Kannada.

The Konkani Wikipedia never got off to a start due to differences in scripts and did not get any contributions. With this tool, many writers from all communities would write for Konkani Wikipedia. “The Idea behind developing the tool is knowledge sharing, to ensure the community does not split because of different scripts,” said Mr. Nadig.

“We have tested the tool on Wikimedia but it is very theoretical. We have to do more research on it. But we intend to gather support for it. It cannot be done by one or two engineers, it requires community participation.” Mr. Bantwalkar said their paper would focus on two issues. One, on the multiple scripts in the Konkani language.

Two, the need for a technological tool to change content from one script into another.

“Though Serbian and Chinese Wikipedians are using similar ideas, we can’t use the same (software tools). But we can tweak it and adapt it for Konkani,” he said.

The software tool needed help from the international community for the details. Wikipedians use their own software (Wikipedia). “We need software development experts from the Wikipedia community to help us” he said.

“It is a political issue. Every community argues for their script. Each community wants to write in the script that it is comfortable in. However, that may not be in the interest of the language, which should have free flow of content that can be read by the people. This tool will benefit writers, readers and publishers of the language,” said Mr. Bantwalkar.

Of 250 to 300 papers submitted, 125 were selected for the meet. Their paper is one of three papers selected in the “multilingual” category. “it is a distinction,” he said.

Courtesy: The Hindu