Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-05-03/In the news

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The deadline for article submission in Tamil Wikipedia Contest has been extended to May 15. And there has been only 2000 submissions so far.--Sodabottle (talk) 15:38, 4 May 2010 (UTC)Reply

Are the articles not actually uploaded to the Wiki until the end? YellowMonkey (vote in the Southern Stars and White Ferns supermodel photo poll) 01:58, 5 May 2010 (UTC)Reply
Yes, they will be added only after the contest ends and wikipedians scrutinize the entries. The number of submissions can be found from the unique IDs of entries in the submission page. They use a incremental system starting from ***6000 . At present the last article submitted has ***8129 as ID. --Sodabottle (talk) 04:05, 5 May 2010 (UTC)Reply

Hmm.. Based on what I can gather from Google translate, the Italian article says nothing about the Catholic Church sex scandal. Samuell Lift me up or put me down 20:46, 4 May 2010 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for pointing that out. My Italian is rusty. Ottre 21:43, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Ganesh, I find the news report on Tamil Wiki contest highly biased, having incorrect information and unnecessarily negative in tone. It would have been nice if the SignPost reporters had contacted any of the Tamil Wikipedia contributors for fact checking before publishing this. It will be good to allow us to improve the news report now. Below is a better and updated version of the article:

The Government of Tamil Nadu, an urbanised state in southern India, is running a contest until May 15th for college students and the general public to expand the Tamil Wikipedia. Currently, The Tamil Wikipedia has 22,000+ articles. Along with a graphic design contest for high school students, it aimed to introduce young people to modern Indic computing ahead of the Tamil Internet Conference, to be held in June.

Orientation programs were run at Loyola College in Chennai to teach participants how to write standard Wiki articles. The best entries, selected by an international jury of academicians and professionals, will receive prizes and certificates from the government.

This is the first time a state government has promoted local content in Wikipedia.

Thanks--Ravishankar (talk) 03:11, 6 May 2010 (UTC)Reply

I believe that there was no bias in the editors who wrote this and I'm sure Ravi would agree on that. They went by the news items and the inaccuracies and the tone have reflected here. Let me fix the factual issues first and leave it to the original reporters to fix the rest taking the above submission by Ravi. -- Sundar \talk \contribs 05:45, 6 May 2010 (UTC)Reply
I appreciate the feedback Ravishankar, but please bear in mind that I don't speak the language and had to go by the reports in The Hindu, which skipped over a lot of detail. It took me over an hour to research the main points of the article and to make sure there was a clear connection to the Tamil Internet Conference per this press release. The article may simplify things because I could not find anyone to translate the Tamil news reports for me, but the tone is neutral. The only oversight is neglecting to mention who will be coordinating the contest -- I didn't think our readers would really be interested. Ottre 14:25, 8 May 2010 (UTC)Reply