Urdu Wikipedia
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Urdu Wikipedia (Urdu: اردو وکیپیڈیا or اردو ویکیپیڈیا), started in January 2004, is the Urdu language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. As of February 2007, it had about 4,501 articles.
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[edit] History
Wikipedia started being multilingual in May 2001. According to the announcement, about 12 non-English editions had been created, including a Japanese one.[1] The original site address was http://ur.wikipedia.com and all pages were written in the Latin alphabet, as the software did not work with Urdu characters.
[edit] Urdunization
At first, Urdu Wikipedia faced technical problems with the Urdu script font, but now this matter is mostly settled; some unsolved areas remain. Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic script, a right-to-left writing system. As a result, clients must configure their operating systems and web browsers accordingly.
Currently Urdu Wikipedia uses a font called "Urdu Naskh Asiatype" which was introduced and is freely distributed by BBC at BBC Urdu Service website. This font is primarily used for article bodies and headings. Urdu variation of Times New Roman is used for navigation links. Both of these fonts are variations of Naskh style.
Some Pakistani variations of complex Nasta'liq script are also supported only as a secondary choice in class definitions of CSS, i.e. if default font is not found on client system but Nasta'liq is then later will be used.
The translation of the Wikipedia interface and project information pages into Urdu is still in progress. Some pages about how to edit have been translated.
