India's 23rd Regional Wikipedia Launches

The blog post by Ranu P. was published by CCM.net on August 8, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

Tulu, an Indian language that is popular in the southern part of the country has received its own Wikipedia version — for which over 100 editors created 1,100 articles. The announcement was made on Aug. 6 during the Chandigarh-based WikiConference India 2016 by Vishwanatha Badikana and Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, two community organizers who made an 8-year-old dream come true. The greatest hope is that the Tulu wiki will lend support to the struggling language, which is used by just over 2 million native speakers who largely reside in Karnataka. Some research even suggests that it is among the earliest of Dravidian languages, which would make it roughly 2,000 years old.

"After we became [sic] live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump,' set up policies, administration structure, info boxes, and templates," said Dr. UB Panavaja, an engineer and a longtime supporter of regional language computing. In addition to the 23 already-launched Indian Wiki versions, which include Bengali, Manipuri, Hindi, Nepali, Punjabi, and Urdu, there are another 18 Indian languages that are still in the incubator stage awaiting publishing.