wikipedia in nepali
Recently, I have been reading a lot of articles at Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and I found today that volunteers have been working on a Nepali version. Currently, there exists only a main page, and half of it is in Sanskrit, but with enough people interested, it can grow pretty quickly. So if you are a Nepali and are interested in porting this wonderful open source free encyclopedia into your own language, go to http://ne.wikipedia.org and start creating pages. A good way to start is to take existing pages in other languages (such as English, or Hindi, written in the same script) and translate them. If you cannot see Unicode Nepali characters (and other Indic scripts), such as the following letters: नेपाली, follow the instructions here. To type in Unicode Nepali, you will need a Nepali keyboard layout, which you can download from the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya site (follow online directions, I currently have Windows XP Home and I use their Nepali Unicode Traditional tool). The wikipedia main page also contains a bunch of links to different tools.
The Wikipedia in Nepali also gave me the idea of starting a Wikipedia in Nepal Bhasa, which is my mother tongue. But doing so in any of its own scripts (such as the Ranjana) would be very hard, considering none of them are supported by Unicode yet. Still, I might start a few pages in Devanagari this summer if I have time.
June 23rd, 2005 at 10:34 am
You should. I would offer to help, but… Maybe I will learn some Nepali. Still working on Japanese, and I should be working on Hungarian. Down the road, I still have to take one more Spanish course…*grumble.* But languages are cool. Cho kokoi.