Tamil Wikipedia


The Tamil Wikipedia is the Tamil language edition of Wikipedia, run by the Wikimedia Foundation. It was established in September 2003 and crossed 91,000 articles in March 2017. As of 1 July 2020, the Tamil Wikipedia is the 61st largest Wikipedia and the second largest Wikipedia among Indian languages by article count. It is also the first Wikipedia of Dravidian origin to possess more than 10,000 articles. The project is one of the leading Wikipedia among other South Asian language Wikipedia's in various quality matrices. It has more than 91,610 articles and 109,691 registered users. It crossed 100,000 articles in May 2017.

Cultural Significance

Contrary to common academic criticism of Wikipedia in the Western countries, the Tamil Wikipedia is widely regarded as an important source of information in the Tamil language on the Internet. The encyclopedia undergoes far less vandalism compared to larger Wikipedia projects, largely because the project has slower growth, mainly due to the lack of computers or Internet service in rural areas of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Most of the project's development comes from the overseas Tamil diaspora.
In April 2010, the Tamil Internet Conference held a contest for college students across the state of Tamil Nadu, India for increasing content on the Tamil Wikipedia. The contest was made with regards to the World Classical Tamil Conference 2010, a meeting of Tamil scholars across the world who discuss modern development of the language. With over 2000 contestants enrolled, the contest concluded with the creation of 1,200 new academically reviewed articles on the Tamil Wikipedia in various subjects.
In September 2013, The Tamil Wikipedia celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Users and editors


Number of user accountsNumber of articlesNumber of filesNumber of administrators

Verifiability

In March 2020 the Tamil Wikipedia contained 490.6 thousand references, wherein 4.01% of them had the DOI identifier and 5.8% of references contained the ISBN number. Total share of articles on the Tamil Wikipedia with at least one reference was 68.74%. At the time it had 6.78% and 0.21% of articles with at least 10 and 100 references respectively.