Saturday, October 01, 2011

Official languages of #India; we support you

#Wikipedia supports over 270 languages from all over the world. This is much less than the 452 languages listed for India.

India is strategic for the Wikimedia Foundation and consequently its localisation team has been tasked to provide the necessary language support. To make it manageable, we will be concentrating our effort on the official languages of India.

This will be challenging; we want to make sure that everybody can actually enter the characters for the scripts involved and see the results. Some languages are written in multiple scripts, will it be possible to see these results in these scripts?

For all these challenges, the team will do the heavy lifting and create enabling functionality. It will be really hard to find the input methods, the fonts, the conversion tools for each language as well. For this reason we need people to join us in our language support teams. We need people who know if zero is a plural or a singular in their language, we need people who can find us the appropriate and freely licensed fonts, we need people who can help us test our software for their language.

We need you.

By the way, if your language is not one of the official languages of India, the heavy lifting for India does provide you with the tools to do the same things for your language. Helping you to help yourself is something that will always be important to us.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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