A milestone for Malayalam Wiki

[jestin]

Source : THE HINDU

It is sometime since Malayalam has carved a niche for itself in
cyberspace with Keralites, especially those in exile, resorting to
Internet browsing in Malayalam. Concurrently, blogs and websites in
Malayalam stole the show.

Now, signalling the popularity of its use as a digital repository of
information, Malayalam Wikipedia (http://ml.wikipedia.org/), the free
online encyclopaedia, crossed the 10,000-article milestone on June 1.

As on Sunday, it had 10,093 articles, most of them pertaining to
geography. With this, it has become the seventh Indian language Wiki,
after Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Bishnupriya Manipuri and Tamil
to have 10,000-plus articles. “However, with regard to quality and
depth of articles, it ranks third, after English and Hebrew, among 229
different language Wikipedias stacked away in the cyber world,” says
Shiju Alex, an active Malayalam Wiki user.

From its modest beginning on June 15, 2001, the free-for-all cyber
encyclopaedia at the moment has 10,574 registered users, 13
administrators and three bureaucrats.

Created by United States-based M.P. Vinod Menon, the initial record of
Malayalam Wiki as a storehouse of information was somewhat dismal.

The advent of Malayalam Unicode, however, turned the tables in its
favour as it started gaining in popularity. Besides geography-related
articles, the Malayalam Wikipedia has a rich history section as well.

The flipside is, there is virtually nothing on physical science and
earth sciences. Psychology and archaeology, too, have not found any
contributors.

The stupendous growth of Malayalam Wikipedia prompted the State
Institute of Encyclopaedic Publications to authorise it, a few months
ago, to release online its ‘Sarvavijnanakosham’ series under GNU Free
Documentation Licence 1.2 besides utilising the corpus of knowledge to
pad up the articles in Malayalam Wiki.