Traffic for the #Odia #Wikipedia

The Odia Wikipedia has less then 1000 articles and it wants to grow everything. Quantity, quality, traffic, editors, localisations there must be something more.

Thankfully, the main page is with its many red links inviting to new editors. However, if I was one of the editors, I would concentrate on feeding the search engines with articles about popular subjects. The Sambad newspaper or any other newspaper brings today's news, they do this day in and day out. The background information to their news items however is what people often have to find elsewhere.

The recent outreach has had a real effect; almost doubling the traffic in a month. My bet is that with the clever selection of new articles it is feasible to continue this explosive traffic growth. There are a few considerations:

• Wikipedia is about encyclopaedic information, not about news
• people like well chosen illustrations
• subjects that will feature on TV will be popular
• Wikipedia provides a web of information
• red links are good but do not have too many
• select the subjects first that will likely be in the news again
• two linked articles are better then one of the same length
• remember, Google is your friend

With a population in Orissa of 27,112,376 people and a literacy of some 73.45% there is a big enough public for spectacular growth of the Odia Wikipedia. Also Odia is widely spoken outside Orissa as well.

There is not much the Wikimedia Foundation can do for you but provide the best possible platform for you to write your Wikipedia on. Advice is freely available, it is for you to make it work.
Thanks,
       GerardM