Telugu Wikipedia was started on December 9th, 2003 by Venna Nagarjuna, renowned for Padma, a system for transforming Indic text between various public and proprietary formats. As of August 2010, the article count stood at 45,273 and is second among the Indian language Wikipedias, next to Hindi Wikipedia

Hindi Wikipedia

Hindi Wikipedia is the Hindi language edition of Wikipedia. It was launched in July 2003. As of September 5, 2011 it had 100,000 articles. In July 2010, Google announced that they had begun working with Hindi Wikipedians to translate English language articles into Hindi and had so far translated...

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Initial growth

In 2005, Telugu Wikipedia received a much needed initial thrust with the joining of pioneer wikipedians like Chava Kiran, Makineni Pradeep, Vyzasatya, Veeven and Chaduvari (who later spearheaded e-Telugu campaign). Vyzasatya planned and executed a project to have stubs for districts, mandals and Telugu movies with the help of a bot. The stubs were expanded into articles with the help of several volunteers from Telugu online/blogging community. Chaduvari translated and drafted many of the initial working policies. Pradeep wrote scripts to automate many of the mundane tasks. The article count became 6000.

Promotion

A symbiotic relationship fostered by the initial Telugu blogger-wikipedian members with the larger Telugu online community proved to be a big boon for Telugu wikipedia’s initial growth. Having gained initial momentum, it was furthered by committed members like Kasubabu, Dr.Rajasekhar, Chandrakantha Rao, Ravichandra, Rahamtulla and Sujatha. Wikipedia was promoted through Book fairs at Hyderabad and Vijayawada with active support from e-Telugu organization and the local language media. This generated lot of interest among the general public

Telugu Wiktionary is another notable project, with major contribution from Ms Sujatha. Brown’s English-Telugu dictionary was incorporated into Telugu Wiktionary in its entirety using a bot script written by another pioneer Telugu wikipedian, Makineni Pradeep.

In 2010, newsletter called Tewiki Vartha was started to share behind scenes stories of Telugu Wiki sites and wiki Editors.

Telugu wiki academies were initiated in 2009 to create more awareness in Engineering and MCA colleges in small towns of Andhra pradesh.

Page views

Page views of Telugu Wikipedia for July 2010 are at 1.8M. This is a growth of over 16% over July 2009. Feb 2010 recorded 4.5M page views, the largest so far, though the statistic was said to be under-reported by 20%-30% due to a server bug.