It was milestone in the history of literary Konkani when the Konkani Wikipedia came into existence in June 2015; when the efforts of volunteers spread over nearly a decade bore fruit and thus, today there is a functional wikipedia with articles on a wide variety of topics, written from the point of view of Konkani people.
In March 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs all the Wikipedia sites, approved the Konkani Wikipedia, and the process of creation of the new wikipedia was completed in the end of June 2015. The Konkani Wikipedia project had been started in the 'Incubator', the place where the foundation starts new projects, in 2006. However, initially, there was little progress, and the pace of development only picked up in September 2013 with support from organisations like India Access to Knowledge, Goa University, Nirmala Institute of Education and Dalgado Konknni Akademi.
The Konkani Wikipedia has been assigned the URL:
Here 'gom' is the ISO code for the language that is called Goan Konkani in order to differentiate it from the group of dialects spoken in Maharashtra. This group of dialects have features in common with both the Marathi and Konkani languages, and have been assigned the ISO code knn, and is called as Maharashtrian Konkani.
The new Konkani Wikipedia is a tri-script Wikipedia, with articles in the Devanagari, Latin (Romi) and Kannada scripts. There are around 1000 pages in the Devanagari script, 700 in the Roman script, and 100 in the Kannada script.
Not only the content, but even the interface and menus are available in both the Devanagari and Latin scripts. Although the default script of the Wikipedia interface is Devanagari, users can easily change it to Latin using a language selector feature.
There is also a proposal to develop a script converter, so that articles written in any script can be read in any other, but this is likely to take considerable time. For now, it is time to savour what is probably the moment when Konkani truly enters the online world.
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