Thursday, February 18, 2010

Urdu #wikipedia gives priority to mobile

The Urdu Wikipedia is one of the smaller projects all be it with a big potential; more then 60 million people speak the language. At translatewiki.net there is a lot of activity for this language.

What I find really interesting is that they have given priority to the mobile interface over the most used messages. What this may mean is that for Urdu Wikipedia access is best achieved using mobile telephony.

The yearly growth of traffic is 65% and they currently have some 13K articles. I understand that the Urdu Wikipedia is now available for mobiles. I do wonder how we will learn if this indeed makes a lot of difference for the popularity of Wikipedia in Pakistan.
Thanks,
     GerardM

3 comments:

Unknown said...

the main problem with urdu wikipedia is the lesser number of contributors.. only a few contributors are actively working there & therefore a little bit of attention is given to the localization of media wiki in urdu.. a lot work has to be done on localization & currently i am the only person who is doing this job.. mobile interface has a few messages that had to be translated i.e. 25... & yes indeed a lot of users access urdu wiki through mobile interface so i thought i have to translate that interface first so i did...

GerardM said...

As I think this is a brilliant idea, I have informed two mailing lists about localising the mobile software early ..
Thanks,
GerardM

Andrew Gray said...

Do we have stats for visitor access broken down by conventional versus mobile sites? It'd be interesting to see which other languages have this sort of differential.