I would also like to ask Shiju if Wikipedia community has the right to
adopt the say its own numeral standard without considering the fact that
whole world does not use it.
This is my personal opinion as an Indic language wikimedian. According to
me, Wikimedia community should be following what the speakers of that
language use. We cannot force numerals/script through wikimedia projects on
the speakers of a language if the speakers of that languages are not even
aware about it. That is the reason why few Indic language like Tamil,
Malayalam and so on completely moved to Arabic numerals since the
respective language speakers do not know the language numerals. But take
the case of Kannada. The Kannada speakers are aware about kannada numerals
and they use both numeral system in their daily life. So it was easy for
Kannada community to stick to Kannada numerals. This will not be possible
in Malayalam or Tamil since majority of the speakers of the respective
language do not know the respective numerals. So in short Wiki community
cannot forcefully adopt a numeral system with out considering the speakers
of the language. That is why it was so easy for Assamese and Bangla to
adopt the respective numeral.
Can Wikipedia be used as medium to introduce language changes or should the
task be just documenting things?
If we think from English or European language wikipedias the answer might
be No. Here I am answering from the perspective indic language wikipedias.
So the answer (according to me) to this question is, *to some extent* Yes.
Remember for most Indic languages, Wikipedia is the first unicode website
in that respective language. Even though the primary mission of wikimedia
is to document things through various projects, for Indic languages
knowingly or unknowingly we are brining many revolutionary things for that
language in the cyber world. So for Indic language, Wikimedia projects are
not just another website in that language. Which means there is some sort
of language intervention is happening through the work done by Indic
Wikimedians.
Over the past 6 years I have seen many of us asking (only we Indians will
ask like that) about the relevance of Indic Wikipedias when English
Wikipedia is available. I personally met and heard wikipedians itself
speaking against it and lobbying for it. But now a days I am able to note
that these same people who had criticized the existence of Indic wikipedias
now started speaking for it and even slowly started editing on it :) I have
seen users who never used an Indic language for their studies earlier, now
started studying their mother language just to contribute to the wiki
project in their mother language. This trend is going to continue and
increase now and we will see more speakers of a language speak and work for
their language wiki projects. That is why I told Indic language wiki
projects are doing more than just documenting the things.
May I also please ask you to add a Copyright notice on blog(similar to
copied text/images wmf blog) since the same is pasted from meta.
I have asked the chapter blog administrators to add copyright notice at the
footer of the blog. I do not have access to that.
Shiju
On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik@gmail.comwrote:
On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Noopur Raval nra...@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey folks,
Shiju has published an interesting post on numerals in an Indic context.
It's a really fascinating overview - including how numerals are depicted
across Indic languages, their use across languages, the policies adopted by
the various Indic communities, the need for some community decisions to
take things forward, a bit of Shiju's personal grumble on the fact that
Hindi film posters are no longer in Hindi :-) and a picture of a Northern
Railways bed sheet!
Intrigued? Read more on either on
metahttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Numerals_in_Indic_Languages__Indic_language_Wikipedias
and
or the Chapter
bloghttp://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/06/01/numerals-in-indic-languages-indic-wikipedias-2/
.
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Numerals_in_Indic_Languages_%26_Indic_language_Wikipedias
[2]
http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/06/01/numerals-in-indic-languages-indic-wikipedias-2/
Good read. Thanks for the post Shiju.
Coincidentally I came across Kaplan's blog[1] about digits and numbers
just yesterday. It was a good read, also throws in implementation
(technical + usage) related issues. I would also like to ask Shiju if
Wikipedia community has the right to adopt the say its own numeral standard
without considering the fact that whole world does not use it. Can
Wikipedia be used as medium to introduce language changes or should the
task be just documenting things?
I ask this because we are also having similar debates about language
style[2] (not to be confused with grantha, which is planned to be discussed
