Urdu Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Urdu Wikipedia |
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| URL | http://ur.wikipedia.org/ |
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | Urdu |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
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 2008, it had more than 6,871 articles.[1]
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[edit] History
Wikipedia started being multilingual in May 2001. As of December 2007, Wikipedia had approximately 9.25 million articles in 253 languages. The original site address for Urdu Wikipedia was http://ur.wikipedia.com and all pages were written in the Latin alphabet, as the software did not work with Urdu characters.
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, users sometimes need to configure their operating systems and web browsers accordingly.
Currently Urdu Wikipedia uses "Urdu Naskh Asiatype" font, which was introduced and is freely distributed by BBC at BBC Urdu Service website. The 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, then Nasta'liq script is 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.
[edit] Science articles
Scientific material in the Urdu language is in need of improvement. A number of reasons can be attributed to this shortfall: The Urdu wikipedia is seeking to provide the articles on science in Urdu language; there are many articles on the various fields of science and technology as well as on mathematics that cannot be found anywhere in Urdu language, such as articles on genetics, oncology, tumor suppressor genes. As the terminology for the science is defficient in Urdu, the English language terms for every scientific word is given with the Urdu alternate, as can be seen in the articles of robot and cancer. Because this is the first time with Urdu language that the articles on such advanced areas of science are written in the language, there is a kind of strangeness due to the Arabic language terms for science as many people do not know the words and terms in Urdu were always from Arabic and Persian and only the grammar is from Hindi. Although the technology and modren science is insufficient in Urdu but the literature for Medicine (specially Unani medicine) is very rich, and the fact that the terminology for literature and Unani is from Arabic can be found in any of the Unani medicine book written by the experts in this field, so called Hakeem (plural: Hukma) in India and Pakistan.
[edit] References
- ^ Urdu Wikipedia, Retrieved on February 12, 2008
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
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