CHENNAI: The State government has decided to conduct a contest for college students to increase the Tamil content in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia.
The contest will be held as a prelude to the Tamil Internet Conference, which will be held concurrently along with the World Classical Tamil Conference at Coimbatore in June.
M. Anandakrishnan, chairman of the organising committee for the Internet Conference, said the competition was also to encourage the youth for trying and identifying online Tamil resources in their fields of specialisation and areas of interest. Explaining the rationale behind the contest, Professor Anandakrishnan said there were
about 22,000 Tamil entries in Wikipedia, following Hindi (68,000 entries) and Telugu (47,000 entries). By deciding to hold the contest, the Tamil Nadu government was the first government to take the initiative of promoting the presence of resources in a language.
Those willing to participate in the contest should register themselves online (http:/tamilint2010.tn.gov.in) by April 30. The word length of each entry to the contest should vary from 250 words to 500 words. The entry should conform to Unicode. Selected entries would be hosted on the Tamil Wikipedia. More information could be had from the website http://ta.wikipedia.org. Earlier, he presided over a meeting of the committee. Kanimozhi, Member of Parliament; Poongothai Aladi Aruna, Information Technology Minister; P.W. C. Davidar, IT Secretary; and Anto Peter of the Tamil Computing Sangam were among those who attended the meeting.
