Madurai  :

In its bid to promote Tamil languages on the internet, the state government is taking up steps under the initiative, ‘Kani Tamil Peravai’. One of the initiatives includes working with Wikipedia, the free-content internet encyclopedia, to develop Tamil content writings.

Director of Tamil Virtual Academy T Udhayachandran said they have set a target of publishing one lakh articles written in Tamil in Wikipedia in a year. “It will help people to have easy access over the articles written in their mother Tongue,” he said.

Wikipedia officials say around 45 lakh articles in English language are contributed from across the world. Among Indian languages, Hindi language has the largest number of articles published in Wikipedia and Bengali articles stand on the third position. Meanwhile, a non-profit organization, Wikimedia Foundation, publishes around 68,000 articles in Tamil languages on their web portal.

Wikipedia India program director A Ravishankar said Tamil people should contribute more articles to the website. “Many people are still not aware of the availability of Wikipedia in Tamil. Most of articles are about language, writers and other prominent persons. But, Tamil articles on specialized subjects like science are still scarce,” he said.

The number of articles available in Wikipedia is an indicator of how developed the language is on the internet, Ravishankar said. Experts should come forward to help increase Tamil contents in specialized subjects, he added.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Madurai / by Devanathan Veerappan, TNN / September 06th, 2015