Re: purchase www.wikipedia.org.my?

Hi Eric Kow,
Hello all,

On Sun, 2003-12-14 at 00:25, Eric Kow wrote:

> Is there any possibility of (J. Wales?) purchasing a Malaysian domain 
> for Wikipedia?
> 
> Similar to the Belgian site, it would hold a very simple portal to the 
> Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil wikipedias.

I am just getting organised over getting the Tamil wikipedia going
forward in such a way that free information flow and sharing is
maximised in the Tamil domain. As you may already know there is a huge
amount of information online in Tamil (many thanks to few tireless
Malaysian Tamils too).
Careful considerations for the sharing of information will help us
concentrate on important issues that reinventing the wheel.
 
>   I figure that this would 
> be useful for future advertising in Malaysia, one address for the four 
> languages actively used in the country.
> 
> See http://ms.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Portal
> and http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_portals for details.

I would like to point out that the Tamil diaspora is so  widespread
(probably the same with few others too?)  this brings issues that need
to be addressed carefully by keeping close contact, closer to wikimedia
than any other arrangement that might risk adding confusions.

These issues are uniquley further exasperated by legacy fonts and
encoding issues that have in recent times has very negatively affected
the uptake of UTF-8 and even concepts like free information sharing as 
a knock on effect. Bad journalism and ill thought out advertisement are
the culprits at best.

eg: The most successful non standard encoding (among few encodings that
did a good job when they were needed but as things go remain in a
confusing fashion) having been developed outside the Tamil heartland has
given rise to a worrying notion that "'foreigners' in financially better
situations are steering the future of Tamil IT the wrong directions with
fancy technologies".

As we all know Wikipedia is in the correct direction but excercising
greater understanding of the global mosaic of cultures and how easily
the 'masses' that we need to reach out to ultimately can be misled
amidst all the confusing information out there is very important.
Infact most important.
 
I will post few more details that would throw more light on the point I
am making once I complete reading the archives. Will do this as a
priority now.
In the mean time please fire away any questions if you need answers.
( ISO code for Tamil is 'ta')

Best regards,

Ramanan, UK