transliteration and the kathmandu wiki

while trying to customize my blog today, i found this interesting tool called Google Indic Transliteration. it may not be new to you, but to me, this was a feature i had previously not cared to know about. today i decided to check it out, and i sure am glad i did! although, it says it transliterates to Hindi, it is for any Devnagari script.

here is why it's awesome: you don't have to know the nepali keyboard layout to type in the devnagari script! use the tool to type nepali in roman characters, and it transliterates it to Devnagari. if it transliterates wrong, you get to choose the right word from a list too. it worked pretty well except for words like "sarkari", where it went with "sarakari" instead. try it out for yourself. i was impressed.

also today, i was looking through the wiki of the city i am in, and began wondering, wouldn't it be great to have a wiki for kathmandu! i could look up the most trivial facts on kathmandu, or learn about some obscure street in the capital, or find a hidden gem of a restaurant off the busy streets. it's unfortunate we don't have a wiki for our awesome kathmandu.

but wait, is it right for me to always leave it to someone else to do something? maybe i should make a start and see if people will join in on the effort to create a vast repository of information on kathmandu. so i revived my old website that never really got off its feet, and added a wiki section to it. my website may not have worked, but let's see how the wiki fares. will it grow or wither and die prematurely? time, and the effort i put in will tell.

in any case, i would appreciate thoughts on the wiki and any help. i have barely configured the wiki at this point, but i'm working on it. hopefully it won't be one of those projects that i enthusiastically work on tirelessly at first, and then give up as the novelty wears off. i hope not. this is something i want to see fruition into something big!