[Foundation-l] Edits by project and country of origin

[Anthere]

Ragib Hasan wrote:
> On Tue Sep 5 20:13:59 UTC 2006 David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> 
>>>Some will be improved with good promotion, others will need efforts
>>>extended from our virtualworld community. And it would be a possible
>>>task and challange for the Foundation, but for that, a careful and
>>>thoughtful approach, collaboration of other organizations both local
>>>and global etc will be expected.
> 
> 
>>Has anyone asked Free Software Foundation India if they're interested
>>in this? It's not absolutely part of their primary mission, but open
>>content is quite related to open software, and it's under the GFDL,
>>which is an FSF licence; and pride in local content can be developed
>>into pride in local software (under a free licence), not least in
>>helping Mediawiki localisation.
> 
> 
> 
> I'm just joining the thread, but I can answer your question to some extent.
> 
> I am a bureaucrat of the Bengali Wikipedia (bn), which has increased
> in size from 500 articles in March 2006, to 8970 articles as of now.
> This phenomenal growth has been achieved via a full scale media
> campaign in Bangladesh, which has 75-80% (150 million) of all Bengali
> language speakers. Bangladehs Open Source Network, a proponent of
> Bangla localization and other open source technology, has promoted
> this a lot.
> 
> We have regular updates in the local (Bangladeshi) news media, and a
> BBC Bengali World service programme (radio) covered the movement in
> this May. Actually, we had set a target of 10,000 total articles and
> 1000 total good quality ones by May 2007, but with a lot of efforts,
> and somewhat semi-automated imports, the 10k article will probably be
> reached within 15 days from now.
> 
> Access to the Internet is a privilege in Bangladesh ... until a few
> months ago, the country only had satellite linkage (V-SATs) to the
> Internet, only got submarine cable connection 2 months ago. So,
> Bangladesh Open Source Network has taken up an office, and arranged so
> that interested writers can send content via postal mail, which can be
> entered into bn-wiki by people who have Internet. I myself have
> received articles via email (from people with offline Internet
> access), and added them.
> 
> So, we have a huge number of interested people in Bangladesh, and the
> Bengali Wikipedia development is gaining a lot of media coverage
> there. This shows up in the statistics from Kelly Martin, where,
> Bangladeshi editors have added up to 60% of total edits. Around 25%
> came from the US, but that's most likely the few (2 or 3) Bangladeshi
> and West Bengali expatriates here (including me), who are very active.
> 
> Definitely, we are planning to open a Wikimedia chapter in Bangladesh
> soon. A limited edition of Bengali wikipedia on CD is also planned for
> the Language Movement commemorative Book Fair in February 2007.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Ragib
> 
> (en:Ragib , bn:Ragib )

I am glad to read that :-)

ant