Five Kashmiri youth are making a huge effort to create Wikipedia in the Kashmiri language so that vast literature in the Kashmiri Language could be brought to the digital format.
Kashmiri language Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia project written and maintained by the Kashmiri youth – Iflaq, Iman Qazi, Tajamul, Risha Bhat.
The project led by Syed iflaq, a radiology student from Srinagar is open-source on the web in collaboration with the Wiki-based editing system.
Iflaq said that most of the volunteers working for the project of Kashmiri Wikipedia are not language experts but their love for their mother tongue is driving them to take up this work.
Since 2021, these volunteers have been creating new pages and checking the dictionaries for spellings so that the pages remain error-free.
Tajamul another Wikipedia contributor says that the aim of the project is to “keep our mother tongue alive in the digital world.”
He also said that Kashmiri language organizations in Jammu Kashmir did not provide them any help. “In fact, when we approached them for help, they discouraged us, perhaps because we did not come from within them,” he told Muslim Mirror.
They appealed to Kashmiri language lovers from all over the world to come forward and voluntarily contribute to this project.
The project can be accessed at https://ks.wikipedia.org