Main page banner

We are having some discussions about how main page is displayed in different browsers. I've included some screen shots of the main page banner from three different browsers.

Chrome 19.0.1084.46

IE 8.0.6001.18702

Firefox 3.6.28

I don't think I like these differences. :-)

Story so far..

When I was a kid, I could speak only Sinhala.But there was nothing I couldn't do with it. When I moved to Colombo only I found out there is nothing you can do if you don't know English. So I had to learn English because I wanted to survive. Those days I thought one day I would fight back and I did try. But I know today Sinhala is not a practical language. No matter what we argue in the end you have to know English if you want to live. At least in Sri Lanka.

My term as an admin in Sinhala Wikipedia was not planned. When me and Sasakthi started on the project someone had to take up the burden. Those days the interface translation was limited to admins. So I took up the challenge. Later Sas got busy and I also dropped down to just cleaning up vandalization and spam. Time after time one person would pick up an interest in Sinhala Wikipedia and do something. But there never was any real community. When these guys got fed up they simply left the project without even saying good bye.

I remain as a caretaker unchallenged.

When බිඟුවා came in and started work, things were very promising. The article count went really high. The quality improved immensely. New tools came in to be. Lot of positive things started to happen in the project.

*That's a lot of writing for me. I'll write the rest some time later*

Welcome new Admin!

We had a vote once again. This time Singhalawap managed to make it through. He was/is a good contributor and I hope he will be a good sysop too.

As for the statistics:

The article count as of 2011-10-05 is 5593.

සුභ අළුත් අවුරුද්දක් වේවා!

පොඩ්ඩක් පරක්කු වුණත් ඔන්න අමතක කළේ නෑ. සිංහල වීකිපීඩියාව වෙනුවෙන් තමන්ගෙ කාලය ශ්‍රමය වැයකරන හැමෝටම ලැබුවාවූ නව වසර සියලු යහපත් පැතුම් ඉටුවන සුභ නව වසරක් වේවා!

A Meetup!

Yesterday (2011-02-27) we had a sort of a Meet-up. Only myself, Singhalawap and අනංගයා was there. බිඟුවා was also supposed to be there but unfortunately the little bee got sick and the papa bee had to take him to hospital. I was also sick and so couldn't make it to the original venue. Only අනංගයා and Singhalawap managed to go there and they both payed me a visit and we had a nice chat about many topics from "Moon to center of Earth" (OK, You guessed right. I stole that quote ;-))

There were a lot of interesting things on discussion, I even forgot to take a picture also. May be I'll remember that on the next time. I sure hope to see a lot of people then.

This was definitely not an official meetup and was mostly arranged offline. Organizer was Singhalawap. He mailed and called us all and tried his best to get us to meet face-to-face. There were some suggestions from him that sounded pretty good. I hope we can have another meeting of this sort so we can properly discuss these things.



Following my usual tradition I'll end the post with my usual reference to statistics. As of today (2011-02-28), the current article count is: 4339. (It seems to be going down these days!)

The Sinhala Community

The year 2011 is one of the busiest years in my life. A lot of things happen around me and I’m still a way busy with a lot of other work offline. While waiting for my office computer finish a remote job I thought of writing something here.

From what I see in the general behavior of the crowd in the Sinhala Wikipedia, we have some sort of a stable community at the moment. In early days it wasn’t like this. One or two people would start contributing and they can remain really active for about two (2) months and they will say goodbye to the project forever never to be heard again. Then the project will be dormant other than some vandalism and reverting. And so the cycle continued. There weren’t any chance for any real community discussion or such.

But now most of the active users have been there for more than six (6) months. There are also new members who will actively participate in community discussions. This is really a good sign. There have to be discussions for a community to survive. In my opinion even the flame wars count.

We have a lot of battles here and that sure makes ours a COMMUNITY.

As usual I’ll end the note with reference to statistics. On 21st February 21, 2011 the current article count is 4340.

Welcome new Admin!

After a long time we managed to complete an admin vote. බිඟුවා has been an active contributor since a long time and this is his second time running for admin. If you have been following things happening on Sinhala Wikipedia you might have noticed that last time it was a complete disaster. Even though we thought the vote was concluded in favor of බිඟුවා, Stewards didn't think the same. So his request was turned down.

So finally the last vote went well and he won a majority of 9-0. Just nine votes do not count as enough in my opinion. Is that all we got? I hope බිඟුවා will be able to recruit some more contributors.

I wish the new admin best of luck and hope he can make a difference.

---

As for the statistics we have 4405 articles as of 2010-12-29.

සුභ නත්තලක් වේවා!

ඔබ සැමට සාමය සතුට පිරි ශ්‍රී සුභ නත්තලක් වේවා!

It's really HOT!

Now in Sinhala Wikipedia the activity level is at a all time high (at least that's how I feel it). There are a few casual contributors but we have a few exceptionally active users now.

I guess it's about time we form that reviewer panel there. I prefer if Sinhala Community learn to use admins rather than giving them personalities. I started a discussion regarding this in කෝපි කඩේ but there was not much of a response on that.

I of cause didn't go for a full scale reviewer panel to start with. My first concern was on deleting articles. We are having some doubts about deleting most of the articles. Today's mechanism of deleting things is one person tags an article to be deleted and an admin go through the article and check whether it should be deleted or not. If the admin feels it should be deleted then the article is deleted. This is very inefficient since we only have two admins in our wiki now. Besides I'm not a big fan of giving decision making power to admins. I prefer if we can keep admins as tools not as personalities.

Well, anyway it's up to the community to decide on that. We will have a real thing soon ;-)

As for the statistics, the article count on 2010 August 27 is 3,846.

Trolls

For some reason there is an increase in the activity level in Sinhala Wikipedia these days. You would say it's good. But I have mixed feelings about it. Let's see what they are.

First of all on the good side now we are having some kind of a community there. People ask questions, others answer them and there are a lot of community activities going on. Since creation of the Sinhala Wikipedia, now only we are seeing the "කෝපි කඩේ" being utilized to the limits.

However on the bad side, most of these new ones seem to be "Trolls". How are we to deal with this situation?

In my opinion we are fighting a war against extinction, defending a already (half) dead language. How successful we will be in the fight against the minority of people who speak and understand the same language we are trying to defend?

I just hope people who do the hard work in our Wiki will have strength to ignore these trolls to continue their work.

Wish us luck!

:-)

Administrator

Last month, බිඟුවා requested sysop rights on our Wikipedia project. Here is the link if you like to see the discussion.

I couldn’t believe the number of users voted this time. You may remember how little people participated in the vote for Kylu. This time there was a load of voters in the discussion.

Usually I would have thought it is still too early for him to ask for admin, but after seeing the way he work I also casted my vote for him. By the way I hope you didn’t get the feeling that all the votes were for him. There were a lot of votes against him. So in the end when the vote is posted to META, they did not believe he has support from majority and the request was turned down.

However all was not bad from the Sinhala Wikipedia side. This was the biggest discussion ever on Sinhala Wikipedia as far as I can remember. That means we have a community. And the most important is බිඟුවා still is working with us.

Unfortunately most of the people came to vote here were just there to oppose him. After the vote is over I’m yet to see a single edit from some of them. I hope they’ll someday use the force they unleash on බිඟුවා to help our wiki grow.

Main Page - Part II

It's good to see that now we have a kind of a decent main page. However there are a few issue brought up.

It is brought to my notice that we need to have a "Get Sinhala" link in the main page. The main point raised here is that most of the users out there using XP and by default that operating system does not support Sinhala Unicode.

Sounds true to me...

But the previous link really does not look nice (in my opinion). [හරියට නිකං සීනි බෝල කඩේක බෝඩ් එකක් වාගෙ.]

I believe our main page should be either in the standards of the the English main page or ours should be better. If we can't do better we can at least stay at the standards of the English wiki.

We already have a text link in small text on each and every page including the main page that says read this if you can't read the text in the page. I didn't check the content on that page in many years though... :-)

Started a thread on කෝපි කඩේ also. Let's see what people have to suggest on this.

Statistic Update: Number of articles 3,773 (2010-06-02)

Main Page

Now we have a decent number of contributors and articles it's time to think about the real look and feel of the wiki :-)

Notice the smile at the end of previous sentence.

I think the current main page of the Sinhala Wikipedia is not something we can call exactly a perfect one. I feel it's not balanced properly.

(Just like the web pages I used to make when I was learning HTML)
Shhhhhhh... I didn't say the previous sentence ;-)

So all the interface gurus out there, how about helping us in cleaning things up?

A few things I'd like to see in our main page.

• A simple page.
• It should load fast.
  
• It should be FULL
  

A simple page.

It's an intro page. It's nice if the page is simple rather than having a page choked with information.

It should load fast

Today I find it slow on my home connection. When it is slow I feel like not going there. That limits the time I stay with the wiki.... and That's bad :-)

It should be FULL

Today there are a lot of blank spaces in the main page (as I see it). I'm sure we can improve those.

Let's hope my dream will come true in near future ;-)

Statistic Update:
The current article count as on 25th May, 2010 is 3323.

End of a War!

The year 2010 is mostly a war at Sinhala Wikipedia. A company has started putting article to the wiki (Paid Editing). It wasn't bad until they started showing disrespect towards the community.

Personally I'm not against anyone getting paid to improve the starving Sinhala wiki. As you all know we have a very few contributors at the moment. But I don't think I like it when they want to own the wiki articles and play funny games with Wikipedia policies.

However it is good that the company finally agreed to strongest of the demands by the community.

Few things I would like to note here.

• First is, if you are interested in doing something good, you have to learn the basics about it.
• If you are getting paid to do something and there are people who do the same thing for free, they deserve some respect.
• When you are involved in a community driven work, try to be part of the community rather than fight against it.

There are a lot of request for me to protect articles just to make sure that non-logged in users won't destroy the article. I'm not 100% sure whether that's a good move. I know most of the people involved in the previous battle did their *bad* work without logging in. :-)

Let's see how things will turn out.

As on 2010-May-22, the current article count is 3309. That's not a bad value compared to what we used to have.

Hi 2009!

It’s been a very long time since I updated this blog. So I thought I should be posting some update here.

The current article count as at 2009-07-31 is 1858. That’s really impressive compared to old days where we were trying to get the thing started. However it’s still too slow in growing. But we can live with that. Now we are not advertising a blank site so there should be new contributors coming in soon enough.

As for the main page I don’t think I like how it looks right now. Anyway I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who thinks that way. But it’s a bit annoying to see that nobody is brave enough to make those corrections. If nobody’s going to make nice changes to main page, I’m planning taking the layout back to look and feel of the English wikipedia.

Well, that’s all I have for now. I’ll try write more often than this!

:-)

Opps! It’s happening again!

Today we got a new post in one of our talk pages.

[
I am sorry, this translation from English wiki Current Events is killing me..I can not do it alone
]

How do you feel about it?

I know, I’ve felt the same way when I started on the project. You started working and you are working everyday hoping that some one will join you and someone will use your work. But hey; nobody even care.

Now before you start on blaming every politician, you’ve to listen to this.

First let me ask you few question.

1. Who uses Sinhala wikipedia?
2. Do we really need an encyclopedia in Sinhala?
3. Do we have something that can be called a Sinhala community?
4. Do people like to work in Sinhala?

I guess that’s enough for one round. Try to answer them and I’ll get back to you with more info on this.

Thanks UoC!

Well... Yes I know. It's really a long time since my last post in this blog. But you know half the reason. As I expected, time blew that storm away and now we are back again in calm waters.

However I have many things to report now. One great thing is University of Colombo is doing a great job by helping in. You won’t believe the article count as of 2008-08-14 goes up to 795. Most of this goes to University of Colombo.

I know Dr. Ruwan has been behind this but that’s all I know about that side. I wish I knew the rest of the people who were there so that I can personally thank them.

Even though I do not know you all personally, thank you all for the great work!

Stay tuned if you want to know more.

I'm still alive!!!

ok, now there is something happening. :-)

It's really nice to see people adding articles to the Sinhala wiki after a long time. 327 articles (as per the count on 19-Nov-2007); mmm... not bad at all. There is a chance for us to make it to the 500 article target I set for 2007 ;-)

Well, any way now there are enough user and admins at Sinhala wiki. So I'm planning to leave the project so that old man in me won't bother the new guys in there way to the new era. :-)

I'll still be around for some time before saying goodbye for ever.

We have a new Main Page!

After a long time we changed the main page contents. It is nothing much but at least it’s not just a plain page with lot of links (which are also not working). Basically it is the skeleton from the English WP. (OK, OK some times it does not hurt to steal ;-))

Hmmm… lot of content to be filled up!

We don’t still have a page that we can call complete. Therefore we’ve used the one that is closest.

BTW something embarrassing also happened there. Kylu asked for sysop. Can you guess how many votes were there? Can’t guess ah? OK, then I’ll help you. There were no votes against her. That is ok, because we owe her a lot. But for her there were only 4 votes. That is the count of active users in Sinhala Wikipedia today. :-)

So talking about statistics, we have 198 articles (16th August 2007).

I'm back again

Ok, it’s a long time since I did something at the wikipedia. There were some tips from user Thogo about handling spambots. Implemented it! Let’s see if we are going to be free from them.

Most of the previously active users seem to be away from the Sinhala wiki now. :-( Too bad, we were staring to do something there. But let’s see if we can get some brave new souls to fill the void left by those heroes. :-)

Article count is 173 (as on 2007-04-22).