Bhubaneswar, June 8: A group of young professionals, who are taking Odia language to the world, have charted plans to promote the use of Unicode fonts and share valuable content online through language tools.

The group of 30 youths, who are active contributors to Odia Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia in Odia, met during a two-day conclave held in the city last week on the completion of 14 years of the project.

During the event, the contributors, both students and professionals who come from across Odisha and outside, focused on intensive capacity building activities as a community. Odia Wikipedia has more than 10,600 articles at present.

"Everything uploaded on the website are in the universal, web-compatible Unicode font for Odia language to make it be searchable, shareable and reusable on the Internet. This is how we can expand the reach of our native language," said Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the administrators of the project.

The group has also launched several campaigns online to promote the use of Unicode. "We are promoting use of converters to convert existing text and helping users of outdated and non-standard encoding systems to use Unicode. Before the onset of these converters, a vast majority of those working in the press and media were stuck with outdated encoding systems such as Shreelipi and Akruti," said Bangalore-based Subhashish Panigrahi, who is an active contributor to the project.

The group is also organising workshops to encourage youngsters to contribute articles in Odia.

Aliva Sahu, one of the active editors, said: "Being a student of Odia language, I was seeking information on musical instruments and could not find much. So, I began contributing articles on the topic."

The group is now working on enhancing the quality of the existing articles by adding more images, references from external sources and expanding small articles by adding more information.

Apart from this, the group is also working on two other projects - Odia Wikisource, an online library that already has over 300 volumes of text in Odia - and Odia Wiktionary, an online dictionary that has over one lakh entries in Odia.

Shitikantha Dash, a long time contributor, said they were working towards attracting more people to add to Wikisource and Odia Wiktionary.

"It is important that more people contribute to the project so that words of all times and all genres, especially the technical and loan words, make their way into this free multilingual dictionary. A 10-day campaign is going to be held to celebrate the 11th anniversary of Odia Wiktionary and create awareness about its usefulness," he said.