විකිපීඩියා සාකච්ඡාව:කෝපි කඩේ

as i have explained to lee Yesterday we have created another account to proceed our work and there is no war we have started.

we use the user name felidae because we are responsible for the articles we have uploaded. then you can identify the articles we have uploaded and give us your feedback if any, as you are doing now. and most of the time its not once who is doing the translation uploads the article.

so if Lee still thinks that we should not use our company name will change it. But remember we are not trying to get any commercial mileage by doing that.

and the Tag line. we understand your concerns - will take action on that.

Pls don't delete the articles. but you can put that tag, so we can send them back to the original translator and get them corrected.

pleas use "~ ~ ~ ~" without spaces, that will create your username/time. then, it is easy to reply to you. බිඟුවා 03:34, 7 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Need to Archive

I think it is time to archive page. Too large. බිඟුවා 03:40, 7 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Felidae's Involvement in Sinhala Wikipedia

Hi All,

I am Kanishka and I am from Felidae. Because there is some misunderstanding and debate about Felidae’s involvement in Sinhala wikipedia, we thought it is important to clarify what we are doing.

I understand that Hasitha from Felidae has contacted many of you in this regard and is hoping to have a meeting with all of you. Without waiting for this meeting , I thought it is best to discuss a bit about this project with you.

Introduction to the Project

The Sinhala Wikipedia development project is a project initiated by the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) in partnership with Practical Action and Felidae. As you all know there is plenty of content regarding any subject in the English language on the internet, but there is very limited content available in Sinhala. For our people to use ICT effectively, specially people who are not comfortable with English such as people in rural disadvantaged communities, there needs to be sufficient content in Sinhala on the internet.

The ultimate content/knowledge destination on the web is the Wikipedia. Although people in urban areas will be able to benefit from the English Wikipedia with more than 2.5 million articles, people in rural communities find it difficult to benefit from this. Therefore, the ICT Agency has taken the initiative to develop the Sinhala Wikipedia and promote its use among communities.

When the project started, the Sinhala Wikipedia consisted of less than 300 articles. This was not enough for it to be a general resource for all purposes and for it to become popular among the larger community. The Wikipedia will grow into a useful and multi faceted resource only when there is a sufficiently large number of users who can contribute their wealth of knowledge to the Wikipedia.

Thus, to attract a larger community to the Wikipedia, it is necessary to increase the number of articles in it. It was therefore decided to translate 5,000 articles from the English Wikipedia to Sinhala. This was to be the “seeder” content which will attract more users to use the Sinhala Wikipedia regularly and make it grow in size and quality.

Since the target beneficiaries of the project are rural disadvantaged communities, we did a lot of research earlier on in this project to understand which areas of the vast knowledge available in the English Wikipedia will be useful to them. Focus group discussions were organized with representative sets of rural community members and we discussed which areas they have difficulty obtaining information for out of the areas of knowledge available in the English Wikipedia. This exercise was facilitated by Practical Action South Asia, an organization which is doing a lot of useful development work with rural communities.

In order to get the opinion of the general public in this regard, we also conducted an online survey publicized through e-mailers. Many interested users participated in this survey, and we used the survey feedback to aid our selection of articles as well.

Choice of articles and article length

We collected a lot of useful information from the exercises above, from which we compiled the set of articles to be translated from English to Sinhala. The set of articles chosen covers every area requested by rural community members and the general Sinhala online community.

Due to timeline and other limitations, we were at a dilemma to decide whether to develop a smaller number of full-length articles or a larger number of smaller articles covering more areas. Since the goal of the project is to increase the popularity and usefulness of the Sinhala Wikipedia it is important to have more articles across a diverse set of topics. Only then will the Wikipedia appeal to a larger community of users.

Therefore it was decided to go with a larger number of articles covering a diverse and useful set of topics. The number was set to 5000 articles. The expectation is for this seeder content to be useful to a larger community of users, and for that larger community to develop these 5000 article into the future 10,000 or 100,000 articles of the Sinhala Wikipedia. Only then will the Sinhala Wikipedia become the useful resource people use every day.

So in Wikipedia terminology, you may consider some of these 5000 articles to be Wikipedia stubs.

Brief Introduction to Felidae

Felidae is a company started by 3 undergraduates from the University of Moratuwa in 2005. We do work in several areas with respect to development, specially e-learning and software solutions.

We are a company working genuinely towards the development of our country. We take pride in working with leading institutions in the country as well as the larger community, giving meaning to our slogan “Together we can”. It is therefore our pleasure to be part of this Sinhala Wikipedia development project.

Process

Translating 5,000 articles across different areas in a world leading encyclopedia is no easy task! To meet this challenge we decided to follow the process below.

1) Undergraduates studying in different universities will be used to translate the articles. This ensures that people who know the respective subject areas will be doing the translations

2) The articles will then be typesetted by professional typesetters

3) The typesetted articles are then uploaded to the Sinhala Wikipedia, after which they are reviewed by experts in the respective fields (usually degree holders in the respective areas)

Problems Identified and Possible Solutions

We faced several problems when putting this novel process into action. Some of these problems have been raised by Sinhala Wikipedia community members as well.

The following are the problems that have been noticed.

1) Getting quality work out of some of the translators (mostly undergraduates) is difficult. Therefore some articles that have been submitted are very poor translations, and in the worst cases, word-to-word translations from English.

It must be noted that while some articles have these translation issues, most articles are very well done and are up to the expected level.

2) Some reviewers are slow to deliver reviews due to their busy schedule. This has resulted in us having to limit the amount of expert reviews, meaning that we will not be able to do a expert review of all articles. But we will be doing a layman review of all articles to minimize spelling and other basic mistakes as far as possible.

3) Due to some articles being a sub section of the English article, the title of some articles does not give a clear idea of what the article is about. We are currently working on providing meaningful titles to these articles.

Wikipedia community members have raised most of these concerns and have given us some very valuable feedback. We are currently considering how we can implement the feedback received from the community.

Notice at the bottom of articles

We have put in a notice under each article we have submitted to the Sinhala Wikipedia to say that the article was translated from the English Wikipedia under this project. Although some users have commented on this notice text, it is very important to keep it in so that we can identify which articles we have submitted and for future reference. Although this notice is not published with any commercial intention in mind, we do understand the concerns raised by some Wikipedia users regarding this. We will be discussing with other project partners as to what can be done in this regard.

The Way Forward

The noble wikipedia concept is made possible by great volunteers like you all. We all owe a lot to you for your commitment in developing and moderating the Sinhala Wikipedia and bringing it to the level it is today. We should have gotten in contact with you much earlier on in the project, but it was not clear how to make contact with you. However, I’m very glad that we have finally managed to get in touch and hear each others’ ideas and concerns.

So let’s work together,

Make Sinhala Wikipedia grow to 5000 useful articles,

Get more and more users to see the benefit of Sinhala Wikipedia,

And make Sinhala Wikipedia develop our wonderful motherland.

--Kanishkas 19:25, 7 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

දිග කථාවක්! මේ ලිපියට තරම් මහන්සි උනානම් අනික් ඒවටත් No problem.

OK I'm (+). Hope other genuine wikipedians are the same. (they will respond to you later I guess)

Hope this is not some thing like කථාව දෝලාවෙං - ගමන පයිං

Wish you all the best !! Singhalawap 19:35, 7 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

OK. Still I'm live in wiki. බිඟුවා 01:54, 8 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Improving articles done by ෆෙලිඩේ in the past

I have done some improvements for past ෆෙලිඩේ wiki articles last night. My main intention was to realize the amount of work to be done & set some examples. It was nice as some new wikipedians joined in last night & they are people working for wikipedia. They were involved in miner editing. I could show I of them that there are many major thing to do before correcting miner errors. I was so happy that he accepted that he did not realized that & he thanked me twice. I'm really + about it. Hope all existing wikipedians & users to be joing from Felide company could work together so we could drive sinhala wikipedia on correct track.

Singhalawap 02:24, 8 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

The Tag - It's Gone!

Dear All,

It is my pleasure to inform you that we had a discussion with all project partners involved in this project and it was decided not to use the tag under articles in the future.

This is a great victory for the wikipedia community. All the concerns and ideas you have raised did not go to waste, and we are glad we could convince all project partners regarding this.

We thank the wikipedia community for pointing out the inappropriateness of this tag in the wikipedia context. All future articles uploaded by us will not have this tag.

Regards, --Kanishkas 11:37, 13 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

That is Good. --බිඟුවා 11:52, 13 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

• Great! I appreciate your decision. :-) --සමීර ශාකුන්තල | Sameera Shaakunthala 12:44, 13 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Need to Archive

I think it is time to archive කෝපි කඩේ pages. Those are Too large. (yeah, I copied this from what බිඟුවා has said above)--Randeer (talk) 16:00, 24 ඔක්තෝබර් 2015 (යූටීසී)