The weekend is approaching and that could mean a slight surge of activities in UrduWiki. I have been thinking about the further strategy of improving and promoting UrduWiki. I strongly feel that people with development and programming skills should also join their efforts together for creating better tool support for creating Urdu content. At the moment I have little or no knowledge of php. That means I will have to spend some time chewing at php’s syntax. Following are my ideas and suggestions.
Wikilog or Wiki Weblog
Has anybody heard of the term Wikilog? This is supposed to be a hybrid of a bog and a wiki. Some say it is a synergy. There is even a MovableType add-in for creating and managing a wikilog. To be honest I did not fully grasp the idea behind it but I would my fellows to have a look at it. It might have a potential improving the collaborative work
A Consistent Navigation System
For the time being, Asif is shouldering complete responsibility of maintaining UrduWiki. My idea is to help him by providing ideas on improving the layout of the wiki. We will soon need a better navigation system inside UrduWiki. The website of WikkaWiki points to some nice custom layouts. I would request bloggers with experience of website design to help improve the look and feel of UrduWiki. The amount of Urdu content is relatively small right now, but this can change pretty soon. A good layout and a consistent navigation system are essential for effectively finding information from large content.
WYSIWIG Wiki
Although UrduWiki is a wonderful platform for creating and gathering Urdu content, I think typing Urdu inside wiki’s editor is rather cumbersome. Mixing English words inside Urdu sentences looks ugly because it reverses the order of text in the paragraph. This always causes confusion. I have been looking for ways to improve editing inside the wiki. I did a google search on WYSIWYG Wiki and I founds links to many wiki editors with lots of features and funny names (e.g. WysiwygWikkiTikkiTavi). One such wiki editor is SPAW. It would be nice if better wiki editors are integrated into UrduWiki.
Spreading the word
I checked today the CRULP’s website. The people at CRULP develop the Nafees family of fonts. The download page for Nastaleeq Nafees font shows a counter of nearly 10,000 visits. Considering the OpenType Nastaleeq font to be a historic development, this counter is disappointingly small. What is the reason. People are not taking interest or they do not know about it. I always thought that people were enthusiastic about using Urdu on their PCs. I still remember immensely talented young lads who developed their own Urdu editors with bitmap fonts. The software exhibition Softech at FAST Lahore was always full of young programmers eagerly showing off their Urdu based tools. It has been a while now that Windows XP, which supports unicode Urdu, is mainstream. Technologies like OpenType Urdu fonts and unicode compatible editors are also in place. I find it rather surprising that there is such still a small number of urdu websites, many of which still use graphic Urdu. The revolution in online Urdu content that I hoping for was not to be.
It looks like the computer science students and the developer community have not really caught up with the developments on the Unicode Urdu front. I might be wrong but one reason could be the lack of information and communication. A fellow blogger Ejaz Asi (عاصی؟) once posted a comment on my blog suggesting that we should voluntarily promote Urdu fonts and well known Urdu sites such as BBC’s Urdu web site and Jang’s web site using the Nafees Web Naskh font by adding links to these in our blogs and websites. That might help standardize the use of Urdu fonts which would also mean easier work on part of the Urdu web-content producers. I have a similar suggestions to all fellow bloggers. You could do us a favour by adding a link to this blog and the link to UrduWiki in your blogs. We need more involvement of people for creating quality content.
Have a nice weekend.
Nabeel