More Indian languages on Wikipedia

More and more Indians can contribute to the volunteer-edited Wikipedia encyclopedia project, now rated among the top 20 websites globally.

So says Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, founder of the Web-based free content multilingual project.

During a visit to India, Wales noted that volunteer contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia had been growing 22 percent and Bengali 35 percent a month.

"These growth rates are fairly high. Of course, they're growing from a small base. But Kannada already has over 5,000 articles and is still growing. That's really exciting. Bengali too has a growth rate of 35 percent," he said.

"It's not as bad as it was a year ago. We had almost nothing then. Now, languages like Bengali, Kannada, Marathi are in the 3,000-5,000 article range. Hindi, Assamese over 1,000. But Hindi, a very large language, has only 1,500 entries. That's a little surprising," Wales told IANS.

"We still have an enormous amount of work left to do. India has 23 official languages. English has more than 10,000 articles. We aim to have 200,000 articles for every language spoken by a million people," he said.

Currently, Japanese is the only non-European language among the 'big 10' of Wikipedia.

Farsi, Arabic, Korean, Thai, Chinese and Bhasa Indonesia are among those with over 10,000 articles. In the same category are Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

Microsoft out with Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2

Microsoft's Windows Media Player hasn't been around as long as Apple's QuickTime, but the Redmond company has been working furiously to make it the biggest, baddest, and above all most dominant media player on the block. Version 7, released in 2000, was the first "bells and whistles" version that offered all sorts of extra goodies such as CD ripping and visualizations. Version 8 arrived with the release of Windows XP a year later, 9 arrived in 2003, and version 10 came along with XP SP1.

Now, Microsoft has released Beta 2 of WMP 11 and is anxious to spread the word as quickly as possible. The new version is available for US customers (international versions will arrive later) and requires Windows XP (Home, Pro, Tablet, or Media Center Edition) and Service Pack 2 (Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005). The download is not available for users running the beta or Release Candidate of Windows Vista, but that is not surprising: Vista comes with WMP 11 already by default.

The new player was designed with user feedback from previous versions in mind. Gone are many of the extraneous curvy user interface elements, in favor of a sleeker design. As in previous versions, various tools are arranged into tabbed sections at the top of the window, such as Now Playing, Library, Rip, Burn, Sync, and making its debut in the default configuration, the online music store URGE.

Microsoft is clearly, one might even say URGEntly, pushing this new download service as a rival to Apple's iTunes Music Store. However, the store, developed in partnership with MTV, lacks the polish of its rival.

Mozilla updates Firefox 2.0 beta

Mozilla has released a new test version of Firefox 2.0, which will be the next major version of its popular open-source browser.

Firefox 2.0 Beta 2, released Thursday at about 3 p.m. Pacific time, features an improved user interface and a limited version of the phishing protection feature that Mozilla is developing for the browser. More information on the Beta 2 release can be found here.

Beta 2 also comes with improved search capabilities, a spellchecker for Web forms, and jazzed-up tabbed browsing capabilities.

This second beta release will probably be the last beta version of Firefox 2.0. Developers are now planning to ship a nearly final "release candidate" edition of the browser on Sept. 19, with the finished product going out the door by the end of October.

Mozilla had been hoping to have Firefox 2.0 finished by September, but that date was pushed back recently to give developers more time to squash the growing list of bugs in the beta code.

Both Mozilla and Microsoft are rushing to finish major updates to their browser software. Late last week Microsoft posted the first release-candidate version of Internet Explorer 7, and it is expecting to ship the final version of the next-generation browser by year's end. The release candidate can be found here.

Research company OneStat.com estimates that about 13 percent of Web surfers now use Firefox. The Netherlands-based company pegs IE users at 83 percent.