I beg IAMAI to discredit the crawler they used to calculate the number they’ve reported. Is this FUD at it’s worst? The web crawler they’re using obviously did not start with Google.com. A simple search for the keyword हिन्दी returns well over 37,400,000!

> Better text editors which have both
> transliteration (English phonetic keyboard)
> and Inscript (common keyboard layout for all > languages)

We are working on a third alternative that is easy to pick up and use called Lipikaar.

- Santosh

Second, as you noted local languages are not in a competition. They can all improve.

Governments are missing a huge opportunity. Web technologies can make the government more transparent, efficient, and accountable. Not just for filling out the forms, static information but for budget planning and policy development. For instance what if the expense accounts of all the mps are online. What if all the government programs and their cost, benefits, reach, and timeline are online. This is huge, and officially they have to be in local languages. But they are clueless about how to create large data base driven web sites in local languages. It can been done (http://www.tamilmanam.net/). The knowledge base is there. They have to use it.

For all their talk about Tamil, TamilNadu government must be shamed about the state Tamil in their hundreds of websites. 90% are in English. Most db based sites are almost completely in English. Do they not care, or are they ignorant.

Teaching local language typing is the basis for local language computing. Google has provided a Hindi automatic translation engine. It is theoretically possible to have similar engines for other languages. Even if Google does not do it, is not upto the governments to working on such projects.

Ignorance is not excuse, they should ramp up their efforts.

For Tamil informational web sites listings see:
http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Tamil_Websites

In addition there are ezines, and news sites.

There is a sizable blogging community. 2500 seems to be a fair number.

Malayalam wiki is probably number one in terms of quality. Number of articles along is not a good indication. The depth must also be accounted for. A simple technique is to click Random Article for a give number of time and see how many are not place holder or single sentence articles.

Good article. Very interested about Indian languages computing.

Here’s the link: http://www.andhrajyothy.com/sunday/sundayshow.asp?qry=2009/18-1/coverstory

To paraphrase the last paragraph in the article:

With 41,806 articles, 81,607 pages, and 7,906 users, Telugu Wiki is in the number one position among all Indian languages.The national language Hindi has 24,265 articles though it has 9,449 users.Tamil is in the 6th place(?) with 16,380 pages and 5,993 users.

My point: Wiki is a good example of UGC. Can we assume that atleast 75% of Wiki contributors will have their own blogs (all of them may not be updated frequently)? Personally, I belong to TeluguBlog google group, but I blog in English

But in Wiki, Telugu Wikipedia has more articles (42,039) than Hindi (24,500) and Tamil (16,657).

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Complete_list_of_language_Wikipedias_available

The number of articles show that even though no. of Telugu bloggers is less, they are far more active than the average blogger.And if we look at the Telugu film sites, the monetization factor is quite obvious.