The Telugu Wikipedia was begun on 10 December 2003 by Venna Nagarjuna, who is known for Padma. On 28 August 2016, its article count was 65,048—fifth among the Indian-language Wikipedias, after Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Newar.
Background
In 2005, the Hindi Wikipedia received a boost when Chava Kiran, Akkineni Pradeep, Vyzas Satya, Veeven and Charivari joined; Charivari later spearheaded the Telugu campaign. Satya planned and executed a project to add stubs for districts, mandals and Telugu films with the aid of a bot. The stubs were expanded into articles with the help of volunteers from the Telugu online and blogging communities. Charivari translated and drafted many of the initial policies, Pradeep wrote scripts automating mundane tasks and the article count increased to 6,000.
History
A symbiotic relationship between the early Telugu blogger-Wikipedians with the larger Telugu online community was a big boon for the Telugu Wikipedia. Its initial momentum was furthered by committed members such as Kasubabu, Dr Rajasekhar, Chandrakantha Rao, Ravichandra, Veeven, Kasyap, Rahamtulla and Sujatha. Wikipedia was promoted at book fairs in Hyderabad and Vijayawada and supported by the e-Telugu organization and the local-language media, sparking interest from the general public. Telugu Wiktionary has had a major contribution from Sujatha. Charles Phillip Brown's English-Telugu dictionary was added to the Telugu Wiktionary in its entirety with a bot script written by Telugu Wikipedian Makineni Pradeep. Telugu wiki-academies were established in 2009 to heighten awareness at engineering and MCA colleges in small towns in Andhra Pradesh. :te:తెవికీ వార్త|Tewiki Vartha, an e-zine, was created in 2010 to share behind-the-scenes stories of Telugu Wikipedia pages and editors. In 2012, another effort was made to revitalize the Telugu Wikipedia. The community organized a two-day celebration in Hyderabad on 10–11 April 2013, coinciding with the Telugu New Year. The Telugu Wikipedia is now available offline in Kiwix. HMTV broadcast a documentary about Wikipedia celebrations, and Rajasekhar, Rahimanuddin, Malladi and Vishnuvardhan participated in a phone-in program about the encyclopedia. In October 2013, the Telugu Wikipedia had 2.1 million page views. The greatest number of page views was 4.5 million, recorded in February 2010.
Any Unicode Telugu font input system may be used for the Telugu Wikipedia. Although some editors use the InScript keyboard, many use Google phonetic transliteration or the Telugu Wikipedia's :MW:Universal Language Selector|Universal Language Selector. The latter offers phonetic and InScript keyboards.
