CIS-A2K/Indic Languages/Sanskrit/Discussions/2011

This page documents the discussions I have had with few Sanskrit wiki community members. For these discussions, I reached out to everyone I knew and tried to connect with some I didn't through Email-user facility/talk pages. I have created this page based on those interactions. Since then, some community members whom I couldn't contacted earlier have asked to share their views. I request you to share them directly with me personally at shiju@wikimedia.org. I request you NOT to post directly on this page. (In the cases below, I have removed personal details to protect privacy, any personal remarks to try and keep the learning focused and the discussions constructive.) And most important is, all the initial discussions that happened in 2011 were to get the community started sharing the ideas. This will continue in 2012 and in coming years also. Please post your comment/opinion/views regarding the below discussions on the talk page of this page.

2011

Assamese

Bengali

Summary of discussions

Discussions with Sanskrit wiki volunteers from Samskritha Bharathi

Volunteers of Samskritha Bharathi have conducted many wiki workshops to create awareness about sanskrit wiki projects. In the past (while I was in Bangalore) I was involved in some of the initial workshops where I introduced wiki editing and other related stuffs to the Samskritha Bharathi volunteers. Following are some of the points I captured after having discussions and interaction with the sanskrit wiki project volunteers from Samskrita Bharathi.

Samskritha Bharathi is a volunteer-driven non-profit organization working to bring Samskritam (Sanskrit) back to the mainstream.
Samskritha Bharathi is involved with Sanskrit wiki projects at least from 2009. Few Veteran Wikimedians like Arun, Naveen, Sreekanth and others had helped them in various ways to introduce them to Sanskrit wiki projects.
In the past I had conducted at least 3 wiki workshop for Samskritha Bharathi volunteers and introduce them the wiki editing and other basic things.
There are at least 7 members from Samskritha Bharathi working towards enriching Sanskrit wiki projects. According to my knowledge nowhere in the world we can see a similar effort towards a language wiki.
Community's prime focus as of now is Sanskrit Wikipedia and Wikisource. But they also have much interest in Wiktionary, Wikiquotes, and Wiki Books also.
Samskritha Bharathi has produced a wonderful brochure for the Sanskrit wiki projects. I do not know whether any other Indic community had done this.
As of now most of the contributions in Sanskrit wiki projects are done by Samskritha Bharathi volunteers. But due to the special nature of Sanskrit language I feel such a situation highly unlikely.
The volunteers at Samskritha Bharathi are very much interested to study all the advanced type of editing features of wiki, including template editing and template creation. I was unable to answer some of their technical queries. Very rarely we can expect those sorts of questions from any Indic language wikipedians.
Samskrtha Bharathi has plans to release some of their major publications in free license, which might directly help Sanskrit Wiki projects.
Samskrtha Bharathi sought our help for creating some of the basic templates that is currently not available in Sanskrit wiki
Sanskrit volunteers enquired about the importance of category and the role of Category Tree. I explained them the importance of defining Category Tree in a wiki and showed them it using en and ml wikis. Now they are planning to prepare a Wiki project for categorizing the existing articles of Sanskrit wikipedia. For new articles, categories will be added as and when it is created.