For the #Odia #Wikipedia, editor retention is a luxury problem

When a Wikipedia has 700+ articles, when the most often used messages are not localised, the first order of business is to get more editors. Editor retention has a face; it is could be ଜଗଦୀଶ ଉତ୍ତରକବାଟ retention. Every loss is felt and every Odiya editing newbie is celebrated.

As more people speak Odia than Dutch, it is quite astonishing that a language can be languishing like this. Lately there have been people taking an interest, the percentage of localisation for the "most used messages" has gone up, seminars have been given, input methods are included in Narayam and web fonts in WebFonts.When you add all this up, Odia is a little behind where most new Wikipedias start. With all this in place, Odia is on a level playing field.

The WebFonts extension has not yet been reviewed, it runs in a test environment at translatewiki.net. The Narayam extension runs in production for the Malayalam projects; a requirement has been expressed to prettify the user interface. There are instructions, hopeless for a person who is not confident with computers, on how to install fonts and input methods.

So here is a challenge; as the or.wikipedia is barely alive and as its community trusts the Indian developers who wrote these two extensions, we could install them just on this Wiki. It will accelerate the development and it will invigorate the Odia Wikipedia.

An experiment like this is likely to get us attention in the newspapers that serve a population of some 45 million people. This will get us people who will start off with being curious but who can help this project over the 1000 articles mark.
Thanks,
      GerardM