FAQ booklet/reference

What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written by millions of voluntary contributors from all over  the world. English Wikipedia is the biggest Wikipedia. It has over 34 lakhs articles. Wikipedia projects exists in more than 275 world languages including 20 Indian languages. Every article in a wikipedia is the result of collaborative editing by a large number of volunteers.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create  and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest quality  to every single person on the planet in his or her own language." Wikipedia exists to bring knowledge to everyone who seeks it at no cost to the user.

What is Wiki?
Normally we require technical knowledge and permission of the owner to add content  to most of the web pages. Wiki is a software that frees us from these type of limitations and allows us to freely add, modify, or delete  content without the need of any technical knowledge. Since it is easy to add content using Wiki software, it is a great tool for collaborative  authoring.

Wiki software was developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. He developed the WikiWikiweb software and On March 25, 1995 he hosted it on www.c2.com. He himself suggested the name Wiki for it. He got this name from an employee at the airport terminals at Honolulu island airport who told him about the bus Wikiwiki chance R.T.  52 which runs between the terminus. Wiki means speed in Hawaiian language.

Is Wiki and Wikipedia the same?
Wiki and Wikipedia are not the same. Wiki is not a different name for Wikipedia. Wiki is a software which can be used for collaborative authoring while Wikipedia is a website which uses the Wiki software. In fact, Wikipedia is just one among the numerous websites that use Wiki  software. Wikipedia is the most popular and content rich Wiki website in the internet. It is a popular misconception that Wiki and Wikipedia are the same, which is not true.

History of Wikipedia
The first concept of an encyclopedia which can be edited by all was  Interpedia by Rick Gates. But this did not go beyond the planning phase. Nupedia was another concept which was more specialized in certain areas of the writers expertise. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started it. Since there was more emphasis on the quality of articles, Nupedia grew very slowly. So to accelerate the growth and help Nupedia, Jimmy and Sanger started Wikipedia, an encyclopedia which can be edited by all. Wikipedia soon overtook its parent Nupedia in content and popularity. Today Wikipedia has become a synonym for encylopedia.

Wikipedia is governed by a non-profit organization called Wikimedia foundation (http://wikimediafoundation.com)

Is this initiative recognized by Central or State Governments in India?
Wikipedia is functioning under a non profit organization called Wikipedia  Foundation. The foundation is neither a government organization nor a government funded project. The capital for the functioning of Wikipedia is collected as donation from general public. Since Wikipedia has grown so popular, some government organizations and corporate institutions  have started donating to Wikipedia.

Should I need to have enough knowledge about the topic of the article that I am going to write?
This is a misconception among people and is the major reason why people  hesitate to contribute to Wikipedia. The fact is that you need not be an expert in any field to start writing in Wikipedia. In fact, no Wikipedia article is the result of contributions from a single author. Every article is the result of contributions of authors from various countries and various backgrounds.

Let's take an example. Imagine that a school student from Thiruvananthapuram wants to start and article about Electric bulb. With the limited knowledge that he has, he will write only  a small paragraph about what an electric  bulb is. After a few days, an engineering student from Chennai sees this article and adds more details to it. After a while, an IT professional from US adds a few pictures to this article and adds information on the  working principles and history. So the article slowly grows to become a good article in Wikipedia with the efforts from multiple people. The same process happens behind every article in Wikipedia. You can also be a part of it. There is a lot for you to do in Wikipedia by adding new articles as well as enriching the existing ones.

Is there any guidelines on what to write and what not to write in Wikipedia?
You can write articles about any topic in Wikipedia. But the only condition is that the content of the article should be of encyclopedic in nature. Wikipedia has certain guidelines and polices to make sure that articles created are encyclopedic in nature.

A lot of people edited the article that I created in Wikipedia. Why is that so?
The articles in Wikipedia does not belong to a single person. Its a collaborative effort, and no one can hold the authority of any part or  the article as an entirety. It is subject to revisions, additions and deletions. Wikipedia has its own rules and regulations to control cases where the changes done by its users and not conducive to the proper  functioning of Wikipedia or if they are based on unreliable sources.

Who all contributes to Wikipedia?
Anyone who has an interest to share the knowledge can contribute to Wikipedia,  irrespective of their cultural background, ethnicity, professional or  political backgrounds or interests. This includes school students, ex-military men, farmers, homemakers, software professionals, government  employees or anyone. People from all walks of life with an interest to share knowledge is uniting in Wikipedia and increasing their own  knowledge as well as that of others, thus giving their bit for the  generations to come.

Is Wikipedia available in languages other than English? Is there a Wikipedia in Malayalam and other Indian languages?
Wikipedia exists in more than 270 world languages. There is a Wikipedia for Malayalam language as well. The first Wikipedia was English Wikipedia, which was started on 2001 January 15th. After 2 months in 2001 March, Wikipedia started functioning in German language. In the following months, Wikipedia started in French, Chinese, Dutch, Hebrew, Italian,  Russian etc.

In the first one year, no Indian language had its own Wikipedia. In June 2002, Punjabi, Assamese, and Oriya Wikipedias came into existence. Malayalam Wikipedia started on 2002 December 21. Year 2003 saw the starting of a lot of Indian language Wikipedias. Bhojpuri started in February, Marathi in May, Kannada in June, Hindu in July, Tamil in September, Telugu and Gujarati in December  and Bengali in the January the next year. Wikipedia now exists even in languages like Sanskrit, Pali, and so on.

English Wikipedia is the biggest of the wikipedias with more than 33 lakh  articles as of 2010 April. Malayalam Wikipedia has over 15,000 articles as of 2010 November.

I am fluent in English. Why should I contribute to Malayalam Wikipedia?
You may know English very well, but that is not a reason to abandon your  mother tongue. You can use your skill in English to gather information and republish them in your mother tongue. That will be very helpful to the people who doesn't know English or the people who would like to read  articles in their mother tongue.

Many local sources of information are still unrevealed or poorly presented in English  wikipedia because of cultural and linguistic limitations. It is much easier to share those information in a local language than translating  it to English. Readers are also required to re-translate them back to their native language for correct understanding if it is in English. In some cases, the translation to english is very hard and many things gets  lost in translation.

Many Indians are not fluent in English, but people are well  versed in their mother tongue. There is no reason for stopping people from gathering knowledge just because they don't know English.

I want to contribute to Malayalam Wikipedia. But I don't know how to type Malayalam. What should I do?
There are many ways to type Malayalam in Malayalam Wikipedia. Malayalam Wikipedia includes an inbuilt tool to type Malayalam in Malayalam  Wikipedia without the support of any external tools. It supports the Transliteration and the Inscript style typing of Malayalam. Also you can use third-party softwares available in the internet to satisfy the same needs. See the last section of this book or the Help:Typing page in Malayalam Wikipedia for more information

Why should I write article in Wikipedia? What benefit will I get?
We acquired the knowledge that we have now from various sources at various  times. We have the social responsibility to store and share this knowledge to others. There is a lot of information that has been irrecoverably lost because nobody cared to store it. By sharing our knowledge through Wikipedia, we are doing a service for the generations  to come.

The satisfaction of sharing knowledge is the reward each Wikipedia contributor gets. Knowledge always grows when shared. The knowledge we have today is the result of other people sharing like this in the past.

Wikipedia editors keep the knowledge in Wikipedia more up to date and complete about our  favorite subjects than on any other place on the internet. Wikipedia writers always comment that to write articles they study about it first  and that helps to increase their knowledge as well. The corrections other knowledgeable persons make on your article helps you to understand  the topic better. Also, by the conversations with other Wikipedia writers who contribute on your topic of interest, your knowledge  increases again. So by contributing to articles, your knowledge also increases in multiple ways.

Will I get any monetary benefits if I write in Wikipedia?
You will not be get any monetary benefit by contributing to Wikipedia. You are practicing an old phrase that says: "Rolling Stone gathers no moss",  by sharing your knowledge. It is always a good practice to brush up your knowledge that might otherwise be forgotten.

Can you give me a brief history of Malayalam Wikipedia?
An easy way for typing and reading Malayalam on computer was not available  even in the first couple of years of this century. So if somebody want to read a Malayalam article written by someone else, then the reader was  required to have the same type of computer and font as that of the  writer. After the project to 'assign code points for all language's characters' named 'Unicode' gained popularity, computer became more  flexible to Malayalam. Malayalam Wikipedia became active only after Unicode-Malayalam started getting it's share and after the errors in  Malayalam font rendering in browsers were reasonably fixed.

Malayalam Wikipedia (http://ml.wikipedia.org/) was started by Vinod Menon M.P.,  on 2002 December 21. For the first two years, he (almost alone) worked hard to keep Malayalam Wikipedia alive. On early days, there were very few users, and most them were NRI Malayalees. Driving such a vast project by two or three people was not an easy task. At that time growth of Malayalam Wikipedia was very slow. Malayalam Wikipedia had to wait until December 2004 for its 100th article.

From mid-2004, typing tools for Malayalam slowly gained in popularity. As a result, Wikipedia got more active users in 2005. Serious organizing of main page and process of categorization was started on that year. It's heavy dependency on meta-wiki minimized in 2005 September when its first  sysop took charge.

Even in those times, growth was slow due to people's lack of knowledge on Malayalam typing. In 2006, many malaylees residing abroad, mainly from USA and Gulf countries,  started Malayalam blogging and many of them became well versed in  Malayalam typing. Popularity of blogs played a key role in popularizing Malayalam typing. Eventually many of these bloggers redirected their attention to Malayalam Wikipedia and the community started growing.

After getting some active users, diversity and count of articles increased. On 2006 April 10, Malayalam Wikipedia crossed the 500 article milestone. On same year September the article count reached 1,000. On 2007 December 12  count increased to 5,000 and  10,000 article milestone was  crossed on 2009 June 01. As of now (2010 November) Malayalam Wikipedia has more than 15,000 articles.

What are the Wiki projects outside Wikipedia?
After the grand success of the free online encyclopedia wikipedia, wikimedia  foundation slowly started focussing on other knowledge bases. A multi lingual free dictionary - "Wiktionary", a place to store public domain  or with free licensed books - "Wikisource", a wiki for free content  textbooks and annotated texts - "Wikibooks", A free content news souce  which works by collabarative journalism and citizen journalism -  "Wikinews", a project to produce collaboratively a vast reference of  quotations - "Wikiquote", an online multimedia file repository -  "Commons", are some of them.

Among these four projects are available in Malayalam. They are Wikigranthashala (Wikisource), Wikinighantu (Wiktionary), Wikipatashala (Wikibooks), and Wikichollukal  (wikiquote). Now all these projects are in their childhood stage, but all projects are important to Malayalam language.

What is the significance of Malayalam Wiki projects when we have English Wikiprojects?
While the objective of wikimedia foundation, which includes wikipedia, is to  free up knowledge and spread knowledge with everyone, malayalam wiki  initiatives have an added aim to keep our ailing language alive, and to  provide a healthy presence of malayalam in the cyber space.

In this age where school education is becoming more student-centric,  knowledge gathering and assimilation outside text books is critical. As the reach of internet increases in schools and homes, children have an  opportunity to utilize various wiki-initiatives including malayalam  wikipedia. Malayalam wikipedia provides a wealth of knowledge in different areas including history, geography, astronomy etc. A lot of  copy-right free books are available in malayalam wiki source. Wiki Pathasala provides an opportunity to write wiki books in any knowledge  area. Wiki Nikhantu (wiki dictionary) helps you know the malayalam meaning of words in different languages. Through these malayalam wiki initiatives, you have an opportunity to gather knowledge as well as to  share knowledge with others. Along with that, you are contributing to the sustenance and growth of our language.

I am planning to write an article about the factual errors of Wikipedia articles. What do the Wikipedia editors have to say about that?
This confusion probably arises by equating wikipedia with traditional  knowledge sources. In traditional knowledge sources (including news papers, books, blogs, television, etc) you don't have an opportunity to  correct factual errors, or even to point them out to the right  listeners. The difference is that wikipedia is free and editable by anyone. Wikipedia gives you the power and the right to correct any factual error as you see it. I believe that it is the responsibility of every user (or reader) to participate actively, and correct any factual  errors that you encounter them.

It might be much easier to fact-check an article and make it error free, than writing an  article on the factual errors of wikipedia. The nature of wikipedia is such that no article is born as a complete perfect article. It goes through multiple eyes, through multiple revisions, and gets distilled  with each revision. So our humble opinion is that you should participate in wikipedia, and correct the factual errors that you encounter, rather  than writing an article on factual errors and publishing it somewhere  else. You have the power to do it. Anyway your article will be out of date as soon as those errors you have spotted are corrected - about 5  minutes after the Wikipedians get to read the article.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Wikipedia?
Articles in wikipedia are written by a large group of volunteers. Of these, some may have a lot of knowledge to part with, some may have a good grasp of  language, some may be better in proof reading articles, some may be  domain experts, in particular areas. When all these people combine and work continuously, good articles get born.

Most of wikipedia contributors are working with the intent of helping others by  providing knowledge. There may be few with malicious intent, but in a community where most are sincerely working towards a common goal, it is  easy to identify any malicious intent. Wikipedia has a policy that knowledge should be shared with verifiable references. This ensures the authenticity of articles. We admit that a user with malicious intent, or someone with experimental motives could dilute the quality of an  article, by abusing the freedom given by wikipedia for anyone to edit. But these destructive changes do not last long, as vigilant users watch for changes in articles, and correct any incorrect or malicious  information at the first sight.

Which all Wiki projects are currently active in Malayalam ?

 * Wikipedia (http://ml.wikipedia.org)

Most active and important wikimedia wiki project is Malayalam Wikipedia. We have discussed a lot about wikipedia.


 * Wikigranthashala (http://ml.wikisource.org)- Malayalam wiki source

Wikigranthashala is an online library of textual contents, which are available in  'public domain or in free licence'. Mainly three types of books are available in wikisource. First, text from ancient source which are outside coupyright range, second is text with expired copyright status  and third is text with copyright status but copyright holder released it  to public domain. Anybody can add Malayalam texts to wikigranthashala, which passed any of the above constraint.

Wikigranthashala started on 2006 march 29. Njanappaana writen by Poonthanam was the first work added to wikigranthashala. Adhyathmaramayanam Kilippattu also started to add later that year. In 2008-2009, Bible, Khuran, Keralapaanineeyam, Indulekha, Krishnagadha are  some works completely included in Wikigranthashala at that time. Later Sree Narayana Guru's Complete books are also included there. Muhyudeen mala writen by Khasi Muhamed, which is considered as a first Arabic-Malayalam verses and Christian praise verses from K.V.  Simon, P.M. Kochukaru, P.V. Thommi, Mosavalsalam, V. Nagal and Kochu  Kunju Upadeshi are some unique works available in Wikigranthashala.

Wikisource editors are now collecting works by famous writers. Kunchan Nambyar, Kumranashan, Changampuzha, Poonthanam, Ezhuthachan, Melppathoor are some  writers in focus. Bhagavatham Kilippattu, Narayaneeyam, Geethagovindam, Rigvedam are some works now partially included. There is also a strong effort to include Thyagaraja Kritis, Swathi Thirunal Kritis and Ulloor Kritis.

Before print era, many noble books were limited to a small group of people. Printing was a revolution, favour to the majority. But now increased number of printed books and profit oriented publishing methodology ended in  catastrophe, which drag people away from many valued books. Ofcourse there is republishing of old books happens, but it is impossible to  reprint all books from past. Increased number of paper use also causing environmental loss. This situation gives a special importance to wikisource (Wikigranthashala). Wikigranthashala aims to share all works, covering all topics - including religion, science, literature etc - to  Malaylees. It will be all pleasure to Malayalees when they get Ramacharitham writen by Cheeramakavi or Keralasahithya  charithram written by Ulloor in a single click. Wikigranthashala is a podium to this dream. If everybody contribute any help whatever possible by them, this pleasure is not far.


 * Wikinighandu (http://ml.wiktionary.org) Malayalam wiktionary

Wikinighandu is a wikimedia project in Malayalam to create a knowledge base which  include definitions of words, synonyms, antonyms, etymology etc. Definitions of words includes meaning in Malayalam as well as other languages. Now around 60,000 words are included in Wikinighandu. Lion's share of words are from Malayalam language, but definitions of the words  from languages like English, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Tamil, Chinese  are also available.
 * Wikipadasala (http://ml.wikibooks.org)Malayalam wiki books

Provide a brief introduction to Malayalam wiki books and its current status


 * Wiki chollukal (http://ml.wikiquote.org)Malayalam wiki chollukal.

Provide a brief introduction to Malayalam quote and its current status.

Whom should I contact if I have doubts about writing or editing in Wikipedia?
Most of your queries are answered in the help pages of Malayalam wikipedia. You can also ask for help to any active Malayalam Wikipedian. If you are not satisfied, please send an email to help@mlwiki.in for help. We will answer your queries.

I have created a login in English Wikipedia. Can I use the same login id for Malayalam Wikipedia as well?
Yes. For that, you have to unify your account for all wikimedia projects. For more information, please see the help page on metawiki. You can also contact help@mlwiki.in for help.

Is there is a distribution list like google or yahoo groups to discuss about Malayalam Wiki projects? Can I chat with Malayalam Wikipedians?
Yes. Malayalam wikimedia community has its own mailing list. You can communicate with active users of Malayalam wikimedia community by  subscribing to this mailing list. Please visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiml-l to subscribe the  mailing list.

A freenode Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel is available for Malayalam wiki community in which you can can  engage in real-time discussions with active Malayalam wikimedians.
 * Server: irc.freenode.net
 * Channel: #wikipedia-ml

Please see  [http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B8%E0%B4%B9%E0%B4%BE%E0%B4%AF%E0%B4%82:%E0%B4%90.%E0%B4%86%E0%B5%BC.%E0%B4%B8%E0%B4%BF. help page in Malayalam wikipedia] for more details.

For your any other queries regarding malayalam wikimedia projects, please send an email to help@mlwiki.in