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Report of Konkani Wikipedia's progress (July-December 2015)

Posted by Rahmanuddin Shaikh at Jan 01, 2016 09:00 PM |
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Konkani language is one of the 22 languages recognized by Indian union in 8th schedule. As per the 2007 census there are about 7.4 million Konkani speakers.[1] Konkani language has its own Wikipedia created on 15th June 2015. This blog post will try to put out Konkani Wikipedia's growth from a perspective based on Wikimedia stats.

Konkani language has varied scripts used by its speakers. There are more than six different scripts in which Konkani people seem to be writing, of these, Devanagari (same as Hindi, Marathi), Romi (Roman or Latin script) and Kannada script are more popular. The project went out of incubation and became a live Wikipedia project as Goan Konkani Wikipedia (language code gom and is available at gom.wikipedia.org).The Konkani community that contributes on Wikipedia is mostly present in Goa with a few contributors living elsewhere.

Below is the last 6 months' statistics of Goan Konkani Wikipedia:


 Total Editors New editors Active editors Very active editors Article count New article created per month
July 2015 124 8 4 2100 8
August 2015 125 1 6 3 2300 6
September 2015 125 5 4 2400 1
October 2015 125 5 3 2400 1
November 2015 125 2 2400

Observations:

  • As we see the total number editors is at a good state as compared to other language Wikipedia projects that have gone live recently. Also the article count seem to be significant.
  • But the growth in total number of editors is not that encouraging and needs to be worked upon. This might be probably because of unawareness of Konkani Wikipedia among the native language speakers.
  • The active editor count has been declining over the 6 months. For the month of December, there has been no activity from the active community on Konkani Wikipedia.
  • Number of the most active Wikipedians will grow once we proactively engage with the existing community in organising outreach to bring new editors.
  • There has been no new article created on Konkani Wikipedia in November and December at all. This is an alarming issue.
  • This is slightly disturbing as we can see from stats tables.
  • Of the 40 or so active Konkani Wikipedians, only 2 of them have done some small activity on Konkani Wikipedia, whereas the rest have not visited the site for almost 3 months.
  • The community needs to be engaged with more and there is a need for bringing leadership. May be Konkani language encyclopedia Konkani Vishwakosh that was relicensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license by the Goa University will be a useful resource to enhance the Goan Konkani Wikipedia.

Note:
1. Mikael Parkvall, "Världens 100 största språk 2007" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin