SASEP/Background of SASEP

Background: South Asian Scripts (Devnagari, Bengali, Telegu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujrati, Gurmukhi etc) or Indic scripts are used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. There are 19 wikipediae which use these scripts. However, due to the lack of proper input devices (keyboards), these wikipediae have very limited number of articles which are poorly written. However, this disability can be overcome with an effective software. Most of the wikipediae suggest for set up of Indic scripts which includes running the setup and then learning the Indic input system. Users from public places like colleges, libraries, cyber cafes etc do not have the admin. facilities to run setup. Besides, learning of Indic script takes some time which further slices down the enthusiasts. Hence, low number of edits and low quality articles are observed.
 * Problem:
 * Regarding Editing:

As the "search" box is enabled in Latin alphabets, the search rarely results in aritlces being shown and are useless at times.
 * Regarding Searching and surfing:

Shortcomings:
 * Pseudo-Solution:
 * For those who are using Devnagari, a Latin to Devnagari translator is present here. This is the simplest translator as whenever a person types say "ka" in typing box, the result "क" is displated in the resulting box. The resulting text can then be copied in the pages of wikipedia.
 * People do not get the instructions to go to the transliteration page.
 * Most of the people still think that they need to learn all the complex input codings to translate there.
 * For a newcomer, clicking in a link which opens a page (that takes time to load) where you type something which can be copied and then returning to the page and then pressing the edit button and then pasting the converted text with a fear in the mind that the whole world will be reading it, is not a very pleasant experinece.


 * My suggested solution:
 * Enabling of the program mentioned above in the respective wikipedia so that whenever someone types "ka" in a wikipedia enabled in Devnagari, the text dispalyed is "क". This should be accompanied with the creation of a "Latin" button in the Editing bar (the one with Bold, Italic and all those buttons) which when pressed, gets switched on so that the text then displayed is Latin. This button is important for insertion of commands as well as phrases and words in Latin scripted languages.
 * For the languages with use of more than one fonts, two search boxes, one in Indic script and the other in Latin or respective script can be put up.


 * Things that need to be done:
 * Development a program like the one mentioned above for all Indic scripts with input method similar to the above.
 * Enabling of the developed software in the respective wikipediae.
 * Running of a test version in Incubator before full scale implementaion


 * The type of people needed for project
 * Programmers
 * Developers
 * People using Indic scripts
 * People with knowledge of Unicode
 * Interested Volunteers


 * Relates to: Telegu, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Malayalam, Nepal Bhasa, Sanskrit, Kashmiri, Nepali, Gujrati, Romani, Panjabi, Pali, Assamese, Bhojpuri, Oriya Wikipedia and other related projects.


 * Test page:In Incubator


 * Proposed by: Eukesh 17:01, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

People interested in joining:

 * Desiphral 20:22, 11 November 2006 (UTC)