THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Malayalam seems to have more lovers in the virtual world. The activities of Malayalam Wikipedia might surpass every literary movement in the state so far. The Malayalam Wikipedia movement had been active with an avalanche of information, especially in the last year. As many as 5,755 new articles were added in 2011, making the total number of articles 21,873. As many as 8,744 new members were added in the last year alone.The popularity of the movement is the effect of concerted effort of the Wikimedians. The community, which joins in the virtual world, has introduced a number of activities such as ‘Wiki Grandhasala’, ‘Wiki Nikhandu’, Mapping, development of one-line information and lot more. A number of workshops was also organised throughout the state, making the movement more popular. The Malayalam Wikipedia has the seventh largest collection of articles, (21,873) in India. Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Bishnupriya Manipuri and Bengali top the list with the highest number of articles. The Wikimedians expect that the articles in Malayalam would reach 25,000 by the middle of this year. An online quiz was one of the programmes conducted to popularise the movement. The programme began in October. As part of the 10th anniversary, a project was mooted to add more information to the one-line information. Around 250 one-line informations were identified and around 80 were developed. Malayalam wiki dictionary now has 71,184 definitions. As many as 10,573 new definitions were added in 2011. Some definitions were made more informative by uploading related photos. Apart from Malayalam and English, the Malayalam wiki dictionary has definitions of words in Tamil, Japanese, Hindi/ Sanskrit, Korean, Arabic/ Urdu, Chinese, French, Persian, Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali and Greek. One of the innovative projects was ‘Malayalam Loves Wikipedia’ movement, where Wikimedians could contribute relevant and copyright-free pictures of individuals, objects, plants etc. As part of this programme as many as 2,158 copyright-free pictures were added to Wikipedia. Ramesh N G, admin of Malayalam Wikipedia, who is an IT engineer based in Bangalore said 2011 was an eventful year for Wikipedia. “Earlier the contributors were mainly IT employees and NRKs. It has changed. Now there are contributors from various fields such as medicine, law, academics etc. This makes information more authentic. School students actively got involved in programmes such as Wiki Grandhasala, which made the movement even more popular among students,” Ramesh added.
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