सदस्यः:MikeLynch/Submission

Sanskrit is one of the oldest languages of the world. Scholars call it "the mother of all Indian languages"; indeed, most North Indian languages, and many South Indian languages derive from Sanskrit. But over time, popular usage of Sanskrit has drastically reduced, and the language has lesser than 50,000 native speakers, most of them in India.

Today, for all the greatness of the Sanskrit language, the language is often stereotyped as being meant only for the upper castes of the society, reserved for the "Brahmins", or only the most religiously orthodox people. In a sense, the word "Sanskrit" has become synonymous with Hindu rituals, or sages, or the ancient Vedic period; people rarely associate it with anything "modern". This stereotyping is of course, wrong. Today's world revolves around Science, Technology and Economics, all of which were extensively studied by ancient Sanskrit scholars. The works of the Greeks and Babylonians, which are equally noteworthy, have been publicized quite well, whereas ancient Sanskrit scientific literature has not been publicized so well.

One of the primary reasons for this is the lack of speaker base. This is something that governments and educational departments have to take an initiative on; there is little that the online community can do to increase speaker base directly. Another important reason is the lack of accessibility to material: This is something that the online community can do something about. By creating online information and manuscript repositories like Wikisource, the actual resources can be stored online. The third reason is the lack of speaking skills in Sanskrit; Very often, lack of speaking skills directly translates into incompetence while writing. Wikipedia can create a big change in this situation by providing users easy-to-read material on contemporary topics; students of Sanskrit and other Sanskrit-literate people often seek easy-to-read material to keep themselves in touch with the language. The last major problem that will be discussed in this presentation is the limited knowledge of computers and internet that people literate in Sanskrit usually have; this follows directly from the stereotype that was mentioned before.

Along with discussion of these topics, the presentation will cover the rise of the Sanskrit Wikimedia projects, and will note its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It will note, in detail, the potential that Wikimedia projects have to keep the language alive.