Our Mission
Our vision is to make Urdu one of the more popular languages on the internet from its quite obscure position nowadays. A major effort is required for this purpose in multiple directions. UrduWeb was established with these goals in mind.
- To establish a community of Urdu-lovers.
- To create (and digitize) Urdu content.
- To develop open-source Urdu software tools.
- To localize web (and personal computing) applications for Urdu.
- To create a collection of tutorials and articles on these topics.
We established a distributed community of Urdu bloggers by aggregating their writings on Urdu Planet. Since March 2005 when it was started with a few Urdu blogs, it has really grown.
Our Urdu forum is a first step towards an online Urdu community. It was the first forum in Urdu text when it was started in June 2005. In less than a year, its membership has swelled to more than 500 and it has attracted a large body of Urdu lovers who have not only been helpful to us in our projects but have also suggested new projects.
One of the projects that arose out of these ideas is an online Urdu Library, a Project Gutenberg for Urdu so to speak. The purpose of this library is to digitize classical Urdu works that are free of copyright restrictions and make them available completely free. Work on digitizing has been going on for a few months now and we are ready to present a number of books to the world.
While modern operating systems have Urdu support, a lot of computer users in India and Pakistan are still using Windows 98 which does not have any such support. We do not want to leave these people behind, so our software development team developed a Javascript program (Urdu Webpad) which can be integrated with websites to map English keyboards to Urdu characters. This makes it easy for users who do not have Urdu support installed on their computers to contribute to Urdu websites.
Another important task is to translate open-source software to Urdu so that users see a completely Urdu interface. Our localization team started this effort by localizing our forum software, phpBB. Now we have made our contribution public so that other Urdu forums can be setup across cyberspace. Ongoing localization projects include the blogging software WordPress and the content management system Joomla.
In addition to the library, two projects which we hope to unveil in the near future include an online Urdu-English dictionary and an online Urdu magazine focusing on science, technology and computing.
As we have worked to create these offerings, we have learned a great deal about computing and web technologies: Unicode, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python, Javascript, and various software. From time to time, we try to document our learning experience by writing articles on these topics on our blog, on Mehfil or on the wiki.
Our philosophy is that open-source software presents the best chance to spread the fruits of our labor. Hence we distribute all our software using the GNU GPL.
How You can Help
As a volunteer community, we are always in need of more volunteers since we can think up new ideas so much faster than we can find the manpower to do them. There are many, many ways you can contribute to promoting Urdu on the Internet. Here is a partial list of what you can do:
- Become a part of the community, contribute by your presence.
- Let us know of any issues and problems you encounter with UrduWeb or with the use of Urdu in personal computing and the Internet.
- Share with us any ideas or suggestions consistent with our mission.
- Tell your family, friends and acquaintances about UrduWeb.
- Become a part of the library team by typing a part of a book, scanning it or proofreading already digitized materials.
- Contribute your experiences with Urdu computing by writing tutorials and articles on the wiki or blog.
- Write about developments in science, technology or computing in our magazine.
- Contribute to our localization efforts by helping with the translation of different terms into Urdu.
- If you are comfortable with website or graphics design, you can help us out in making our site look better.
- If you know programming, we might have a software project for you.
These are just a few ways you can help. We are sure you can think of others. Any help you provide us will be greatly appreciated.
History
In 2004, there were very few Urdu websites. A number of sites used images for their Urdu content and others wrote Roman Urdu. Similarly, there were a few blogs. The founders of UrduWeb came to know each other through their Urdu blogging. One day in January 2005 while looking at his site visitor statistics, Zack Ajmal realized that even though he didn't blog much in Urdu, his couple of posts about blogging in Urdu were among the most popular on his weblog. He contacted Asif Iqbal, a polyglot blogger to setup some tutorials and resources for blogging in Urdu. Danial Ahmad suggested setting up a group blog and Nabeel Naqvi suggested a wiki. Both were setup on Zack's and Asif's domains. A webring for Urdu bloggers was setup and Urdu Planet aggregating the recent posts from Urdu blogs followed in March 2005.
We were also thinking of translating some discussion board software into Urdu to create a community forum. Along came Qadeer Rana who had done some translation work on phpBB.
Nabeel started our software projects by coding up UrduEditor, Urdu Webpad and UrduEditor Lite to write Urdu text files (in UTF-8 encoding) on your computer as well as on the web. Asif packaged some Urdu fonts together in a Microsoft Windows installer file to make it easy for users to read Urdu text.
In April, we looked ready for a take-off. So we decided to get a domain and collect all our work together under one site. We set up a poll among the plausible domain names. UrduWeb.org won that contest and we got the website started on June 24, 2005.
On June 30, 2005, we installed the localized version of phpBB and Urdu Mehfil made its debut.
Since that time, UrduWeb has expanded a lot as you can see from the links on this page to our different activities.