Indic Writing Systems Campaign 2025 Report

The Indic Writing Systems Campaign 2025 was a collaborative initiative aimed at preserving and documenting South Asian writing systems, many of which are underrepresented or endangered. Running from January 23 to February 21, 2025, the campaign was organized under WikiProject Writing Systems with support from the Endangered Alphabets, Cambridge University, and Script Encoding Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. It focused on two key activities:

1. Wikidata Datathon and Labelathon, where new items around writing systems from South Asia were created and participants enriched labels, descriptions, and properties for script-related items, and
2. Wikipedia Translatathon, which encouraged the creation and expansion of articles on South Asian scripts across multiple languages.

The campaign sought to enhance Wikimedia’s coverage of these scripts, raise awareness about their cultural significance, and foster collaboration among Wikimedians, linguists, and language enthusiasts. This report highlights the campaign’s participation, key achievements, challenges, and future directions.

Some communities and contributions:

Wikipedia Language	Total Edits	Top Editors	Pages Created
Assamese (as)	322	Naruna Baruah (163), JyotiPN (61), দিব্য দত্ত (41)	20
Punjabi (pa)	272	Stalinjeet Brar (255), Sonia Atwal (6), Satdeep Gill (6)	17
Kannada (kn)	48	~aanzx (37), ChiK (10)	5
Angika (anp)	12	Amrit Sufi (12)	2
Doteli (dty)	1	Janak Bhatta (1)	1
Bengali (bn)	4	ShakilBoT (1), FaysaLBinDaruL (1), CharlesWain (1), Suadur Rahman (1)	0
Wikidata	1302	~aanzx (669), Kuldeepburjbhalaike (306), ᱥᱟᱹᱜᱩᱱ ᱗ (105)	76

*Note: The data above is sourced from the Indic Writing Systems Campaign 2025 Statistics

Highlights:

• Assamese Wikipedia: Under the direction of JyotiPN and Naruna Baruah, the community generated 20 new pages and 322 modifications, including articles on scripts like Tamil, Kadamba, and Pallava.
• Punjabi Wikipedia: The community added 17 new articles covering scripts including Kamarupi, Coorgi-Cox, and Gaudi, while Stalinjeet Brar made the majority of the 272 updates.
• Kannada Wikipedia: 48 modifications by contributors like ~aanzx and ChiK created 5 new pages, including articles about Pallava and Nāgarī scripts.
• Amrit Sufi made two new entries on the Balbodh and Ahom scripts and twelve updates to the Angika Wikipedia by himself.

Challenges and Learnings:

1. Lack of Tools to Identify Missing Articles: One of the key challenges was the absence of existing tools to efficiently identify articles that were missing across South Asian language Wikipedias. Since no automated solution was available, we had to manually develop scripts to extract and compile lists of missing articles, which was time-consuming and required additional effort.
2. Difficulty in Tracking Participant Contributions: Monitoring participant contributions was another major challenge, as edits were made across Wikidata and multiple language Wikipedias without a centralized tracking system. Since no existing tool could provide real-time progress updates across different platforms, we had to create custom scripts to track and compile participation data. This highlighted the need for better tracking mechanisms for future multilingual Wikimedia campaigns.

Gratitude and Next steps:

The success of the campaign demonstrates how committed different language communities are to conserving and recording South Asian writing systems. The content on underrepresented scripts has been greatly enhanced by these cooperative efforts, guaranteeing their survival for upcoming generations.

We sincerely thank each and every participant for their priceless efforts, and we eagerly anticipate working together on such projects in the future.