Draft Recommendation #2: Wikipedia Academies across the country

No. School Wiki is not started as a competitor to Malayalam Wikipedia,

School Wiki is started to develop the culture of collaborative learning among school childeren of Kerala state. It is launched under the aegis of IT@School project of Kerala Goverenment.

It is not a competitor to Malayalam Wikipedia. In fact, some Malayalam Wikipedians (including me) have assisted the government officials to setup the wiki and I am a Sysop in schoolwiki. Still School Wiki officials are taking advice from us to enhance the school wiki experience.

Basically, school wiki is a database of schools in Kerala.

The school student of each school in Kerala are editing the school wiki to enter information about the school, statistics, alumini association, teachers, images, and so on. It also has some projects associated with each school page. Some of the projetcs are School newsletter (പ്രാദെശിക പത്രം), Local encyclopedia (നാടോടി വിജ്ഞാനകൊശം), My Village page (എന്റെ ഗ്രാമം), under the guidance of teachers. These project pages are created as sub page for each school. So the content as a whole is not useful for Wikipedia. But the information from the project pages associated with each school will be useful to Malayalam wikipedia in future.

I have some other related information to share with you.

  • In 2008 December (One year back), Kerala Government has donated the entire content of its prestigious encyclopedic project (Sarvavijnjanakosam - http://www.sarvavijnanakosam.gov.in/about-us.htm) to Malayalam Wiki community (link). They have released the content of Sarvavijnjanakosam in GFDL license. Kerala government is even helping us by digitizing the content. We are exploring different ways to use that content effectively in Malayalam Wikipedia and Malayalam Wikisource. When the content from sarvavijnjankosam is used wisely the quality of our wikis will go up. We will do it soon.
  • In 2008 June/July Kerala government has decided to move to Unicode. It has started using Unicode Malayalam in all the Kerala Government websites. I do not know whether any other Indian state did that.

As I already said, school wiki is not a competitor of Malayalam Wikipedia. In fact Kerala Government is indirectly creating future wikians for Malayalam Wiki projects.

Shijualex16:46, 7 February 2010