Posting this from a mail thread that I came across. This came as a plea to mainly the hindi speaking audience, but this holds true for all Indian languages. Using myself as an example, I may be safe to stereotype similar folks as those who were given a good English education, and exposure to Indian languages, though mainly spoken. I learnt Hindi for several years in school, but never got to use it in real life, and hence have lost all fluency in writing/reading Hindi.

Of late, due to my efforts at teaching the kids to learn to read/write Tamil, I have beginner's level fluency at reading/writing Tamil.

 

If you are literate and fluent in any Indian language (or any another language for that matter), please do your best to contribute to that language in Wikipedia. I think this is a great effort to help in sustaining languages using the web as a powerful communication tool.

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As I’m sure many of you know, Hindi is one of the most spoken languages in the world, with 400 million native speakers (more than English!) and 650 million fluent speakers in all. I was recently disappointed to discover that, despite the wide attention Wikipedia has received in the English-speaking world and the unprecedented growth of the English-language Wikipedia to over 1.6 million articles, the Hindi-language Wikipedia is still extremely tiny. It has only 7,000 articles, 1,000 registered users, and lacks coverage even in essential high-level topics. The lack of knowledge available to Indians on the Internet today in their own language may be one factor contributing to the ongoing economic rift between India and English-speaking countries. I invite knowledgeable and tech-savvy people like yourselves to help mitigate this imbalance by contributing to this effort and by spreading the word to friends and family as well.

 

Main page: http://hi.wikipedia.org

Sign up page: http://hi.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B6%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B7:Userlogin&type=signup

 

If you speak another Indian language, you’ll find many other Indian-language Wikipedias are experiencing similar issues, such as:

 

Bengali: http://bn.wikipedia.org  (15,188 articles)

Telugu: http://te.wikipedia.org (26,503 articles)

Marathi: http://mr.wikipedia.org (7,792 articles)

Tamil: http://ta.wikipedia.org (7,049 articles)

Urdu: http://ur.wikipedia.org (4,702 articles)

Gujarati: http://gu.wikipedia.org (284 articles)

Kannada: http://kn.wikipedia.org (4,405 articles)

Malayalam: http://ml.wikipedia.org (2,089 articles)

Oriya: http://or.wikipedia.org (10 articles)

Punjabi: http://pa.wikipedia.org (64 articles)

Assamese: http://as.wikipedia.org (34 articles)

Kashmiri: http://ks.wikipedia.org (351 articles)

Sindhi: http://sd.wikipedia.org (141 articles)

Nepali: http://ne.wikipedia.org (445 articles)

I was showing the following tools on the web to a colleague. I use them to help teach my kids tamil: both reading and writing

 

One is a simple editor from Murasu systems: http://www.murasu.org . The cool thing about this tool is that you can type almost phonetically in English and it will translate text into tamil for you. There is no need to remember a map of which keys are which letters. It takes very little to get used to it. Also you can save it as RTF so you can do cool formatting in word, create fun ppt presentations etc.

 

My recent find (thanks to Mastaan/Anusha for pointing it out) is: http://www.tamilvu.org. Check out their primer studies at: http://www.tamilvu.org/courses/primer/bp000001.htm. With kids being so adept and hooked on to computers, this is a fantastic resource for them to play and learn tamil. One caveat on this though: All the text and words are in "sen-tamizh". My 5 year old was playing with it one morning and asked me why they couldn't say it in simple spoken Tamil :-)

 

Happened to introduce the balvikas kids to Adi Sankara last week. Based on the initial introduction to Adi Sankara, I went to wikipedia to check out info on Adi Sankara. As always was amazed by the rich inter-referenced material in there. check this link out for more info if interested:

 

The essence of advaita is brought out in this simple story in Sankara's life.

During his long stay at Kasi, one morning Sankara was returning with his disciples from the temple of Visvesvara. An outcaste (Chandala), leading four dogs, stood on the way. Sankara asked him to clear away from the path. But the outcaste did not move and asked Sankara, instead: Which do you want me to move? The soul or the body? The soul is eternal, unborn and immutable. You, I and every other being in this universe is a manifestation of Brahman. Hence you cannot ask me to move my soul, because it is the same as you. Now do you want me to move my body? Without the soul, the body is powerless, inert and irrelevant. How can I move just the body?

"What do you say, Oh! Learned Brahmin? Which do you want to differentiate; this body of matter or the living Chaitanya?"

Sankara was struck dumb at this, as the very purpose of all his teachings, that the Self alone is the sole Reality, had been summarised by the Chandala in a single verse. Sankara immediately understood the Vedantic purport of the Chandala's question and also conjectured that the Lord Himself had come in the form of a Chandala to test if Sankara had realised the truth that he had been teaching. He then uttered in reply, those immortal slokas which go by the name of "Manishapanchaka". These represent the high watermark of Sankara's teaching, where the consistency of a remorseless dialectician, Sankara declares, that he, who has realised the oneness of the Brahman, and he who has intuited the Truth of this doctrine, is fit to be even Sankara's master, even though he, be a Chandala or a high caste Brahmin by birth. Even as he was about to conclude the small poem, the outcaste and his dogs disappeared and Lord Visvanatha was seen above the place, blessing the Acharya.