Introduction (ভূমিকা)
What is Wikipedia (উইকিপিডিয়া কি)
Wikipedia (pronounced /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdi.ə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. The name "Wikipedia" is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism). Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.
The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are the Five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia; however, it is not a formal requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting nearly 78 million visitors monthly as of January 2010. There are more than 91,000 active contributors working on more than 17,000,000 articles in more than 270 languages. As of today, there are 3,496,794 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics.)
People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article prose, references, images and other media here. What is contributed is more important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor. What will remain depends upon whether it fits within Wikipedia's policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source, so excluding editors' opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research, and is free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people. Contributions cannot damage Wikipedia because the software allows easy reversal of mistakes and many experienced editors are watching to help and ensure that edits are cumulative improvements. Begin by simply clicking the edit link at the top of any editable page!
Wikipedia is a live collaboration differing from paper-based reference sources in important ways. Unlike printed encyclopedias, Wikipedia is continually created and updated, with articles on historic events appearing within minutes, rather than months or years. Older articles tend to grow more comprehensive and balanced; newer articles may contain misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Awareness of this aids obtaining valid information and avoiding recently added misinformation (see Researching with Wikipedia).
The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are summarized in the form of five "pillars":
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. It incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory. It is not a dictionary, newspaper, or a collection of source documents; that kind of content should be contributed instead to the Wikimedia sister projects
Wikipedia has a neutral point of view. We strive for articles that advocate no single point of view. Sometimes this requires representing multiple points of view, presenting each point of view accurately and in context, and not presenting any point of view as "the truth" or "the best view". All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy: unreferenced material may be removed, so please provide references. Editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong here. That means citing verifiable, authoritative sources, especially on controversial topics and when the subject is a living person. When conflict arises over neutrality, discuss details on the talk page, and follow dispute resolution.
Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit and distribute. Respect copyright laws, and avoid plagiarizing your sources. Since all your contributions are freely licensed to the public, no editor owns any article; all of your contributions can and will be mercilessly edited and redistributed.
Wikipedians should interact in a respectful and civil manner. Respect and be polite to your fellow Wikipedians, even when you disagree. Apply Wikipedia etiquette, and avoid personal attacks. Find consensus, avoid edit wars, and remember that there are 3,499,115 articles on the English Wikipedia to work on and discuss. Act in good faith, never disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, and assume good faith on the part of others. Be open and welcoming.
Wikipedia does not have firm rules. Rules on Wikipedia are not fixed in stone, and the spirit of the rule trumps the letter of the rule. Be bold in updating articles and do not worry about making mistakes. Your efforts do not need to be perfect; prior versions are saved, so no damage is irreparable.
History of Wikipedia (উইকিপিডিয়ার ইতিহাস)
The concept of gathering all of the world's knowledge in a single place goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon, but the modern concept of a general purpose, widely distributed, printed encyclopedia dates from shortly before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to Paul Otlet's book Traité de documentation (1934; Otlet also founded the Mundaneum institution, 1910), H. G. Wells' book of essays World Brain (1938) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex in As We May Think (1945).[5] Another milestone was Ted Nelson's hypertext design Project Xanadu, begun in 1960.[5]
While previous encyclopedias, notably the Encyclopedia Britannica were book-based, Microsoft's Encarta published in 1993, was available on CD-ROM, and hyperlinked.
With the development of the web, many people attempted to develop Internet encyclopedia projects. An early proposal was Interpedia in 1993 by Rick Gates;[1] but this project died before generating any encyclopedic content. Free software exponent Richard Stallman described the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999.[6] His published document "aims to lay out what the free encyclopedia needs to do, what sort of freedoms it needs to give the public, and how we can get started on developing it." On 17 January 2001, two days after the start of Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation's GNUPedia project went online, competing with Nupedia,[7] but today the FSF encourages people "to visit and contribute to [Wikipedia]".
2000
In March 2000, the Nupedia project was started. Its intention was to have articles written by experts which would be licensed as free content. Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by Bomis.[47]
2001
In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer review process.[48] The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domain names are registered on 12 January 2001[49] and 13 January 2001,[50] respectively, with wikipedia.org being brought online on the same day;[51] project formally opens 15 Jan ("Wikipedia Day"); the first international Wikipedias are created (March–May: French, German, Catalan, Swedish); "Neutral point of view" (NPOV) policy is formally formulated; first slashdotter wave arrives 26 July. The first media report about Wikipedia appears in August 2001 coincidentally by the newspaper Wales on Sunday.[52] The 11 September 2001 attacks spur the appearance of breaking news stories on the homepage, as well as information boxes linking related articles.[53]
2002
Year 2002 sees: the end of funding from Bomis and the departure of Larry Sanger; the forking of the Spanish Wikipedia to establish the Enciclopedia Libre; and the creation of the first portable Mediawiki software (went live 25 Jan)[dubious – discuss]. Bots are introduced, Jimmy Wales confirms Wikipedia would never run commercial advertising, and the first sister project (Wiktionary) and first formal Manual of Style are launched. A separate board of directors to supervise the project is proposed and initially discussed at Meta-Wikipedia.
2003
Mathematical formulae using TeX are introduced; English Wikipedia passes 100,000 articles (the next largest, German, passes 10,000); the Wikimedia Foundation is established; Wikipedia adopts its jigsaw world logo; and the first Wikipedian social meeting is organized. The basic principles of Wikipedia's Arbitration system and committee (known colloquially as "Arbcom") are developed mostly by Florence Devouard, Fred Bauder and other key early Wikipedians.
2004
The worldwide Wikipedia article pool continues to grow rapidly, doubling in size in 12 months, from under 500,000 articles to over 1 million (English Wikipedia was just less than half of these) in over 100 languages. The server farms are moved from California to Florida; Categories and CSS style configuration sheets are introduced; and the first attempt to block Wikipedia occurs (China, June 2004, duration 2 weeks). Formal election of a board and Arbitration Committee begin – Devouard is the only person elected who was instrumental in the Committee.[citation needed] She and others begin to criticize balance and focus problems and lead efforts to fill in articles in neglected areas. The first formal projects are proposed to deliberately balance content and seek out systemic bias arising from Wikipedia's community structure.
Bourgeois v. Peters,[54] (11th Cir. 2004), a court case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit becomes one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia. It stated: "We also reject the notion that the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level somehow justifies these searches. Although the threat level was "elevated" at the time of the protest, "to date, the threat level has stood at yellow (elevated) for the majority of its time in existence. It has been raised to orange (high) six times."[cite this quote]
2005
Multilingual and subject portals are established; the first quarter's formal fundraiser raises almost US $ 100,000 for system upgrades to handle growing demand; Wikipedia becomes the most popular reference website on the Internet according to Hitwise; China again blocks Wikipedia (October); English Wikipedia passes 750,000 articles. The first Wikipedia scandal occurs, when a well known figure is found to have a vandalized biography which had gone unnoticed for months (the "Seigenthaler incident"). In the wake of this and other concerns,[55] the first policy and system changes specifically designed to counter this form of abuse are established. These include a new Checkuser privilege policy update (checkuser is a Mediawiki tool that assists in sock puppetry investigations), a new feature called semi-protection, a more strict policy on biographies of living people and tagging of such articles for stricter review. A restriction of new article creation to registered users only was put in place in December 2005 following an incident involving former Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler.[56]
2006
English Wikipedia gains its 1½ millionth article; the first approved Wikipedia article selection is made freely available to download; "Wikipedia" becomes registered as a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation; The congressional aides biography scandals come to public attention: multiple incidents in which congressional staffers and a campaign manager are caught trying to covertly alter Wikipedia biographies, the campaign manager resigns.
Jimmy Wales indicates, at Wikimania 2006, that Wikipedia has achieved sufficient volume and calls for an emphasis on quality, perhaps best expressed in the call for 100,000 feature-quality articles; A new privilege "oversight" is created allowing specific versions of archived pages with unacceptable content to be marked as non-viewable; Semi-protection against anonymous vandalism, introduced in 2005, proves more popular than anticipated, with over 1,000 pages semi-protected at any given time.
Wikipedia is rated as one of the top 2006 global brands.[57]
2007
Wikipedia continues to grow, with some 5 million registered editor accounts;[58] the combined Wikipedias in all languages together contain 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages;[59] the English Wikipedia gains a steady 1,700 articles a day,[60] with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked at around the 10th busiest on the Internet (See Wikipedia Statistics); Wikipedia continues to garner visibility in the press and to slowly but steadily gain traction as a tertiary source both in serious legal decision-making and as a source of collated information on current events; the Essjay controversy breaks when a prominent member of Wikipedia is found to have lied about his credentials; Citizendium launches publicly; a trend develops that the encyclopedia addresses people whose notability stems from being a participant in a news story by adding a redirect from their name to the larger story, rather than creation of a distinct biographical article.[61]
2008
Various WikiProjects in many areas continue to expand and refine article contents within their scope. In April, the 10 millionth Wikipedia article was created and several months later the English Wikipedia exceeded 2.5 million articles.
2009
In August 2009, the number of articles in all Wikipedias totalled 14 million.[2] The three millionth article on the English Wikipedia was created on 17 August 2009 at 04:05 UTC.[62]
The Arbitration Committee of the English Wikipedia decided in May 2009 to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists.[63][64][65] A "host of anti-Scientologist editors" were topic-banned as well.[64][65] The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties".[64]
2010
On March 24, the European Wikipedia servers went offline due to an overheating problem. Failover to servers in Florida turned out to be broken, causing DNS resolution for Wikipedia to fail across the world. The problem was resolved quickly, but due to DNS caching effects, some areas were slower to regain access to Wikipedia than others.[66][67]
On May 13, the site released a new interface. New features included an updated logo, new navigation tools, and a link wizard.[68] The classic interface remained available for those who wished to use it.
As of 8 December 2010 there are approximately 3,496,809 articles in the English Wikipedia.
Sister project of wikipedia (উইকিপিডিয়ার অন্যান্য সহযোগী প্রকল্প)
Wiktionary
Wiktionary is a project to create a multilingual free content dictionary in every language. This means each project seeks to use a particular language to define all words in all languages. It actually aims to be much more extensive than a typical dictionary, including thesauri, rhymes, translations, audio pronunciations, etymologies, and quotations. The project started in December 2002, and as of October 2010 is available in over 150 languages with over 3,000,000 entries in all. The largest language edition is English, followed by French, Lithuanian and Chinese. All four of them have more than 300,000 entries each, while 19 languages in total have more than 100,000 entries each. 67 other languages have at least 1,000 entries.
Wikiquote
Wikiquote is a repository of quotations taken from famous people, books, speeches, films or any intellectually interesting materials. Proverbs, mnemonics or slogans are also included in Wikiquote.
The project started in July 2003; As of October 2010, it includes over 113,564 pages in over 75 languages. The largest Wikiquote is in English with over 18,000 pages. Then Polish, Italian, and German, each over 7,500 articles.
Wikisource
Wikisource is a multilingual project, started in November 2003, to archive a collection of free and open content texts. It is not only a superior format for storing classics, laws, and other free works as hypertext, but it also serves as a base for translating these texts. At the beginning, source texts in all languages (except Hebrew) were all on one wiki. However, Wikisource now has several editions in many individual languages.
As of October 2010, Wikisource offers 880,000 source texts in total. The largest is the English Wikisource, with over 150,000 works. Then Russian and Chinese with each containing over 100,000 source texts.
Wikispecies
Wikispecies is an open, wiki-based project to provide a central, more extensive species database for taxonomy. Launched 14 September 2004, Wikispecies is aimed specifically at the needs of scientific users, and as of October 2010, has over 240,000 entries. There are plans to help Wikispecies collaborate with the Encyclopedia of Life project when the latter is more fully underway.
Wikinews
The Wikinews project was launched in December 2004 with the mission to report the news on a wide variety of subjects. As of October 2010, 29 language versions of Wikinews have been launched, producing more than 140,000 news articles in total. (Some Wikinews, including the English one, can be subscribed to through RSS feeds.) Contributors from around the world write news articles collaboratively. Reports range from original reporting and interviews to summaries of news from external sources. All of them are required to be written from a neutral point of view.
Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a project dedicated to learning materials and learning communities, as well as research. It was set up as a Wikimedia project (in "beta" phase) on 15 August 2006 with the English and German Wikiversities, as well as the multilingual coordination hub. Despite what its name may suggest, Wikiversity is not limited to university (or tertiary) level materials, but is open to materials and communities of all learner levels. The way it can facilitate learning activities and communities is still being explored, but is centered around the model of 'learning by doing', or 'experiential learning'.
As of October 2010 there are over 30,000 learning resource entries across 12 languages. The English version contains over 13,000 and both French and German have over 2,000 entries.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons was launched in September 2004 to provide a central repository for free photographs, diagrams, maps, videos, animations, music, sounds, spoken texts, and other free media. It is a multilingual project with contributors speaking dozens of languages, that serves as a central repository for all Wikimedia projects.
Interview of some prominent people on Why we need Wikipedia in Bangladesh (বাংলাদেশ উইকিপিডিয়ার প্রয়োজনীয়তা)
Wikimedia Projects in Bangla (বাংলায় উইকিমিডিয়া প্রজেক্টসমূহ)
Following Wikimedia Projects are available in Bengali:
Prject | Native Name | URL |
Wikipedia | বাংলা উইকিপিডিয়া (Bengali Wikipedia) | |
Wikisource | উইকিসংকলন (Wikisangkalan) | |
Wikibooks | উইকিবই (Wikiboi) | |
Wiktionary | উইকিঅভিধান (Wikiavidhan) |
Bengali Wikipedia
Bengali Wikipedia is the biggest wiki in Bengali Language and the most active wiki among all the Wikimedia Projects in Bengali. As of July 2010 Bengali Wikipedia has over 21,500 article. In Bengali Wikipedia the number total pages is over 106,000 with over 14,600 site registered user as of July 2010. There are only 3 active administrator and 1 bureaucrat at Bengali Wikipedia where the total number administrator is 8. Among 8 administrator 2 of them are Indian and rest of them are Bangladeshi by origin. According to List_of_Wikipedias Bengali Wikipedia has the depth 102, which is the second among all the Indian language's Wikipedia after Malayalam. Fully localized mobile interface (bn.m.wikipedia.org) is available for Bengali Wikipedia with a nice homepage portal. On June 30, 2010 the Usability Initiative deployment has been done at Bengali Wikipedia and switch to "Vector" from "Monobook" as default interface.
Bengali Wikisource
Bengali Wikisource is the youngest Wikimedia project in Bengali language. Bengali Wikisource start it's journey on September 2007 right after Wikimania 2007. But this wiki is the second most active after Bengali Wikipedia. Very recently Bengali Wikisource has been crossed the 5,000 pages milestone. Bengali Wikisource has the literary works of many prominent writer in Bengali language including Rabindranath Tagore. According to List of Wikisource page, Bengali Wikiosurce is now at rank 21 among 56 Wikisource based on number of content pages.
Other Projects in Bangla
Other than Wikipedia and Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikibooks projects are available in Bengali language. But they are least active projects in Bengali. Recently there is some initiative from the community to increase the contributor at the project. The community is so active in collection and upload free licensed regional photos at Wikimedia Commons site. Also community localized 100% of most often used messages and 85% of MediaWiki messages at translatewiki.net. Also community is active in translation of site notice messages at Meta site.
Wikipedia community (উইকিপিডিয়া কমিউনিটি)
The members of Bengali Wikimedia Community are mainly from Bangladesh and West Bengal but some of them are living in other part of the world as well. To spread the words of Wikipedia to all over the country, the community members from Bangladesh are working actively from the end of 2005. From the beginning, to promote Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, the community members from Bangladesh have focused on Bengali blog sites and have written numerous blogs related to projects and activities in different popular Bengali language blog sites. Since the internet penetration rate is very low in this part of the world, Bangladeshi Wikimedia community identifies that Bengali blog sites are the place where Bengali Wikimedia projects can get a good number of contributors who can type Bengali in Unicode at their PC. In different occasions, Bangladeshi members of the community also published news items in the national newspapers regarding the projects and the activities to spread the words of Wikipedia to the mass people all over the country. They regularly arrange physical or online meetups in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and in regional towns. They already conducted some workshops on Wikipedia in different universities with help of local Open Source communities. To collect free licensed photos related to Bangladesh for Wikimedia projects, the Bangladeshi Wikimedia community has campaigned several times and collected and uploaded thousands of photos in Wikimedia Commons for use in Wikipedia and other projects. Also, they are working with local individuals and organizations to collect photos and references about Bangladesh.
Bangladeshi Wikimedia community now feel that they need to be more organized to do better for Wikimedia Projects. They are planning to be organized as a Wikimedia Chapter called "Wikimedia Bangladesh". The chapter formation process is now under discussion. Wikimedia Bangladesh now has a meta page, a mailing list, Facebook page and twitter account to contact with them. The URLs are,
Conclusion (উপসংহার)