I am sure a lot of you have heard about the various Wiki projects available on the Web. Wikis are online openly editable databases, some of which have become very large. One of the most famous Wiki sites is http://www.wikipedia.org which hosts an open encyclopedia called Wikipedia in many languages of the world. Wikis are examples of collaborative authoring. Research in collaborative computer-based authoring has been going on for the past 20 years and many software vendors provide such software tools at high costs. The Wiki model provides a free and increasingly popular alternative for collaborative writing. The word wiki is a short form of the Hawaiian phrase wiki wiki which means quick or fast. The first Wiki was installed on the Web by Warn Cunningham in 1995 as a repository for the so-called design patterns used in computer programming. From its humble beginning in 1995, it has become a widespread movement. Wikipedia has encyclopedia type articles in 229 languages as of April 24, 2006. Assamese is one of the languages on the Wikipedia site although there are only 6 articles as of this date. The English version of Wikipedia has more than a million articles contributed by individuals from around the world; its articles have been shown by academic research to be as authoritative as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikis are not only allencompassing encyclopedias, but many are on specific topics. Examples of Wikis on narrowly focused topics are: Fluwiki that is a repository of knowledge about the Flu virus, Wordpress that is a repository of knowledge for Wordpress authors, a Wiki for teaching freshmen English in college, and an Wiki for users of the Emacs editor. So, the Wiki model has found widespread usage in diverse domains.
The Wikiassam project was started by Saurav Pathak and Jugal Kalita in the summer of 2004. It was first hosted at a Website at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The site was moved to http://www.wikiassam.org in 2005. Wikiassam is also called Raizkoox which means a substantial repository of knowledge, to be created about Assam in a collaborative manner by authors from around the world. We invite would-be contributors to become members of the Web site; once one becomes a member, one can write on any topic of interest and edit any article that is there at this time. One can write a sentence about a topic or a whole essay. One can start writing on a topic and can come back the next week or the next month or the next year and edit it. One can edit articles written by others at will. We request that whatever you write be factual and unbiased. Guidelines for writing are posted on the site. We have a few hundred articles as of now, and we would like the repository to grow substantially. We consider it a long-term project and hope that in the next 5 or 10 years, this will be a very large repository of knowledge about all aspects of Assam. If you would like to write about any topic related to Assam, you should open an account on the site and start writing. Example topics: the schools or colleges you went to; the place you grew up in whether it is a town or a village or a city; a person of renown you know or knew or adore from the past or the present; flora and fauna of Assam; rivers, lakes, hills and mountains in Assam, etc. There is no end of topics you can write on.
Recently, Saurav Pathak has started a project that hopes to build a substantial online dictionary of Assamese. The project is hosted at http://www.wikiassam.org/ dict. The goal is to build a dictionary of Assamese in a collaborative fashion. Assamese characters can be entered in Unicode using a simple clickable table. You may have to download a Unicode Assamese font to be able to read and write properly. Once again, anyone interested in creating a substantial Assamese online dictionary is invited to create an account and start entering information. Also, anyone who wants help design and write the code to build a scalable dictionary is invited to contact Saurav Pathak (sauravpathak@yahoo.com) or Jugal Kalita (jugalkalita@yahoo.com). This can easily be someone’s Masters or Ph.D. thesis topic as well.
By Jugal Kalita, Colorado Springs,
Colorado
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