Dear Friends,
The year 2020 is full of woes and wonders. Just before the ending of 2020, Bengali Wikipedia[1][2] has passed a significant milestone of passing 100K articles.
Bengali, an Indo-Aryan language and lingua-franca of the Bengal region of South Asia, is the fifth most-spoken native language and the seventh most-spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world.[3] The Bengali Wikipedia Project launched on 27 January 2004 with very few editors. On 25 December 2020, after 16 years of the initial launch, it now has passed the milestone of 100k+ articles.[4]
As most of the contributors of Bengali Wikipedia are young and this year's long lockdowns and campus shutdowns of educational institutes, Wikipedians had managed to utilized their extra free times by contributing to the Bengali Wikipedia and it has enjoyed growth at an almost double rate than the previous year with an organized approach of topic-based consecutive edit-a-thons.
Here is a quick overview of the milestones achieved -
27 January 2004: Launch of Bengali Wikipedia
September 2006: 10K articles
28 June 2009: 20K articles
13 May 2014: 30K articles
04 January 2016: 40K articles
30 April 2017: 50K articles
08 August 2018: 60K articles
16 July 2019: 70K articles
23 January 2020: 80K articles
22 June 2020: 90K articles
25 December 2020: 100K articles
I welcome you to congratulate the Bengali Wikipedia community for their achievement and wishing them all the best for future progress and prosperity.
Regards,