The Hindustan Times : BEHIND THE SCENES AT <a href="http://WIKIPEDIA.IN">WIKIPEDIA.IN</a> ( 13 Feb 2010) <div><br></div><div>( Please note the below article is copyrighted by HT media and sent on this public list for representation purposes only. Request to not download or reproduce the content)</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><b>BEHIND THE SCENES AT <a href="http://WIKIPEDIA.IN">WIKIPEDIA.IN</a> </b></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>MANY AVATARS Across India, hundreds of researchers, students, housewives and professionals are editing Wikipedia articles in 20 Indian languages, setting</div>
<div>up new pages, holding Wiki workshops. It’s a growing community so vibrant that, ahead of its 10th anniversary, Wiki announced its first ever overseas office would be in India.</div><div><br></div><div>■ Sitting in the back of his SUV on his way home from work, Navi Mumbai civil engineer Kundan Amitabh is working on the Angika Wikipedia page, typing</div>
<div>out a doha (couplet) in the ancient Bihari dialect.</div><div><br></div><div>■ In a blue, single-storey government school in Mangudi village, Tamil Nadu, a class of bright-eyed 13-year-olds is huddled around a bulky desktop monitor,</div>
<div>reading about nuclear technology on the Tamil Wikipedia page.</div><div><br></div><div>■ In Bangalore, a group of Wiki editors is conducting a ‘Wikiacademy’ workshop at the office of a local NGO, instructing would-be editors in the technical</div>
<div>aspects of uploading data, and the philosophy and principles of Wikipedia. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Across the country, a 10-yearold online encyclopaedia is changing the way Indians process, access and store</div>
<div>information.And the movement is being led not just by techies and academics but by students, professionals and homemakers</div><div>across the rural-urban divide. Many are not even writing in English — there are now Wikipedia sub-sites</div>
<div>in 20 Indian languages, including Bhojpuri, Sindhi and Pali, the last a language that has no native speakers left,</div><div>but has a rich body of literature. </div><div><br></div><div>Wiki sub-sites in 20 more Indian languages — including Tulu, Kutchi and Bihari dialect Angika — are also in the works.</div>
<div>Combine this vibrant online community of editors with the fact that India is set to become the third largest internet</div><div>user base by 2013 — preceded only by China and the US, in that order — and it’s not hard to see why Wikipedia</div>
<div>celebrated its anniversary in mid-January with the launch of an India chapter of Wikimedia (<a href="http://www.wikimedia.in">www.wikimedia.in</a>), the</div><div>non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia. That’s not all. The San Francisco based Wikipedia is set to open its first</div>
<div>ever overseas office here too. Explaining the move, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told HT over the phone in October: “There is a lot</div><div>of excitement in India about the Internet. With so many languages, India poses a lot of opportunities. We already have</div>
<div>a very successful community in India and we want to strengthen it.”</div><div><br></div><div>In an e-mail response to HT last week, Wales added: “I think the main reason Wikipedia has caught on in India is, of course, </div>
<div>the strong IT sector, but also the fact that there is a very strong tradition of discussion and dialogue.”</div><div>That discussion and dialogue is also helping preserve dying languages and oral literature, and making large swathes</div>
<div>of information from the Web accessible to a range of linguistic groups.</div><div><br></div><div>Take Tamil Wikipedia. Set up in 2003, the site now features more than 25,000 articles on everything from musician AR Rahman to sacked</div>
<div>telecom minister A Raja. The articles have been written or translated by more than 250 people from around the world and the site now gets more</div><div>than 80,000 hits every day. Some of these hits are from local vernacular-medium government schools, where daily ‘Wikipedia classes’ get students</div>
<div>together around a computer so they can read pages on everything from classical music to nuclear technology.Since many of them cannot read English, </div><div>the site has become their only window to the worldwide web.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Then there’s Malayalam Wikipedia. InApril2010,the site released a Wikipedia CD — the term for an official compilation of articles from a Wikipedia </div><div>subsite, sanctioned by Wikipedia. The collection of 500 articles from among the 10,000 on the site was the first Wiki CD to be released in a non-</div>
<div>Latin script. Distributed as part of a government of Kerala initiative, the CDs were then handed out to 60,000 teachers across the state</div><div> as reference material.</div><div><br></div><div>“A number of schools in Kerala have computers but poor internet connections,” says Shiju Alex, 33, </div>
<div>a technical writer and active Malayalam Wikimedian. “This CD gives them access to material that is </div><div>not available to them in their regional language.” This appropriation of the online encyclopaedia </div><div>
is a constantly growing movement in India. Over the past four months, physical communities of</div><div>editors have formed in Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai. These groups meet regularly and train</div><div>
other volunteers. These classes even have their own Wiki tag — they’re called Wikiacademies.</div><div>Here, volunteers and editors conduct workshops on the technical aspects of uploading data and on the philosophy</div><div>
and principles of Wikipedia. Over the past year, ‘Wikiexperts’, in association with the state education</div><div>department, have held workshops across eight districts in Kerala; there are similar workshops in Tamil Nadu too.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Back in Navi Mumbai, Kundan Amitabh, 43, is using the page he set up six months ago to preserve the rich oral</div><div>history of the Angika dialect. For about two hours every day, he transcribes poetry and folk tales from this </div>
<div>Bihari dialect in Devnagari script, to be saved on en. <a href="http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Angika_literature">wikipedia.org/wiki/Angika_literature</a>.</div><div>“We live in a digital generation. Stories passed through the oral tradition will soon become obsolete,” says</div>
<div>Amitabh. “If Angika is to survive, it must have a Web presence. And what better place to start than on Wikipedia?”</div><div>Amitabh’s project now has three other active editors — a student from Delhi, an Indian-origin businessman</div>
<div>from Australia and another from Nepal. </div><div><br></div><div>“Our page has brought Angika speakers from around the world together on one platform,” he says.</div><div>His next step: A tour of schools in Jharkhand where students still study in Angika. He plans to teach the youngsters</div>
<div>to access the information he has uploaded, thus helping them take their first baby steps onto the information</div><div>superhighway.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><b>I N T E R V I E W</b></div>
<div><b>JIMMY WALES,CO-FOUNDER, WIKIPEDIA</b></div><div><br></div><div>Why do you think the Wikipedia has caught on in India? One reason is that the IT sector in India is very strong, but</div><div>I also think there is a verystrong tradition in India of discussion and dialogue, deep in the roots of Indian democracy.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>What has the response been like at the Wiki meets you attended in India? What were the common problems people raised?</div><div>The main response is an excitement about the future. The main problems have to do with keyboard entry — many</div>
<div>people have learned to type only in English and don’t know how to type in their own language.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>How does it help users to have a Wikipedia in their regional language?</div><div>Statistics show that only 5% to 10% of India’s literate are able to use English effectively.</div>
<div>So there is a huge body of people for whom their mother tongue is the only way for them to learn and expand</div><div>their horizons. The same thing is happening all around the world. In the UK, Welsh is endangered because everyone there</div>
<div>speaks English. So the Welsh Wikipedia is a place where people write joyfully in their mother tongue. I think this is wonderful.</div><div><br></div><div><b>KOLKATA</b></div><div>■ A Wikipedia birthday cake at one of the many celebrations held in West Bengal; 97 ‘parties’</div>
<div>were organised in India to mark the occasion, more than in any other country in the world. </div><div><br></div><div>In the state-run Jadavpur University in Kolkata, post-graduate English literature students are now made to write</div>
<div>an article for Wikipedia as a part of the curriculum.The articles are graded on editorial content,</div><div>research and material. “Too many students base their papers on information available on Wikipedia. Now, they can no longer do</div>
<div>this,” says professor Abhijit Gupta, smiling. </div><div><br></div><div><b>KERALA </b></div><div>■ Would-be Wikipedia editors attend a Wikiacademy training session in Palakkad, Kerala.</div><div><br></div><div>Editors of Malayalam Wikipedia are documenting the unique games endemic to various villages across the state. While one volunteer</div>
<div>writes down the rules, another travels to the respective village for pictures. Fifty games have been documented on the site so</div><div>far. “Some of these games are already dying, replaced by the national craze for cricket and football,” says Malayalam Wikipedia editor</div>
<div>and technical writer Shiju Alex, 33. “We have to depend on oral descriptions from village seniors in these cases.” </div><div><br></div><div><b>PUNE</b></div><div><br></div><div>■ At a civic school with no internet access, students use a Wikipedia CD to browse through articles.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Pune Wikimedians are compiling CDs of select English Wikipedia articles for free distribution to schools across the state that</div><div>have no internet access. Last month, an early copy of the CD was handed over to a municipal school in Pune as an experiment.</div>
<div>“The students had never seen an encyclopedia before,” says electrical engineer Nikhil Sheth, 25, the man behind the project.</div><div>“Some logged on to read about the history of the Taj Mahal, others started exploring pages related to animals.” </div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><b>TAMIL NADU</b></div><div>■ Last June, the Tamil Nadu government organised an essay-writing contest where college students were asked to write articles</div><div>for the Tamil Wikipedia sub-site. More than 2,000 students participated and 1,200 entries are currently being uploaded. At</div>
<div>the same conference, the government donated a CD its own online glossary of 1.5 lakh Tamil words to</div><div>the Tamil Wikimedians. The Tamil Wiktionary is now among the world’s top ten, in terms of number of words. </div>
</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Regards</div><div>Tinu Cherian </div>