[Wikimediaindia-l] [Press] : NewsDay: "India: Wikipedia's next frontier"

[CherianTinu Abraham]

*NewsDay : "India: Wikipedia's next frontier"*
http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/india-wikipedia-s-next-frontier-1.3016849

http://jasonoverdorf.blogspot.com/2011/07/india-wikipedias-next-frontier.html


*Wikimedia Foundation taps India for first foray into developing world.*
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*By Jason Overdorf*
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*NEW DELHI, India — With growth slowing in the United States and Europe,
Wikipedia has settled on India for the beachhead of its next round of
expansion — which will see the seemingly ubiquitous online encyclopedia
storm into the developing world for new users, and new contributors, in a
host of languages.*
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*The Wikimedia Foundation — which administers the online encyclopedia — is
set to open its first foreign office in New Delhi in a matter of months.*
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*The nonprofit has already mushroomed here in its typical guerrilla style.
Wikipedia is the fourth most visited website among India's 100 million
internet users.*
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*Contributors and editors to Wikipedia are few in number compared with the
United States and Europe, but the quantity of entries that they produce can
be remarkable. One contributor alone said he had edited more than 14,000
pages and created so many that he's lost count.*
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*That kind of enthusiasm is vital for Wikimedia. By 2015, the foundation
aims to increase the monthly visitors to its sites to a billion people from
around 400 million today, while boosting the number of articles available
online to 50 million from 20 million, according to its latest strategic
plan.*
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*But the number of contributors — "the lifeblood of Wikimedia projects" —
has plateaued around 100,000 active editors.*
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*India's real promise, therefore, lies in its huge, young population and the
rapid growth of internet penetration. Its 100 million internet users will as
much as double by 2015, according to some estimates, as web-ready smart
phones draw more mobile users online.*
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*And due to a dearth of libraries and the infrequent revisions of
government-mandated school textbooks, the demand for Wikipedia promises to
be greater here than virtually anywhere in the world.*
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*"Wikimedia is like an alternative market response to the failures of the
state in India," said Anirudh Singh Bhati, a member of the executive council
for the Wikipedia India chapter. "If a student needs information which is up
to date they use mainly Wikipedia to get it."*
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*To tap that potential, Wikimedia is working to promote 40 individual
encyclopedia sites in Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, as well
as mobilizing volunteers for programs like "Campus Ambassadors," which are
designed to turn users into contributors, said Bishaka Datta, a Mumbai-based
documentary filmmaker who was recently appointed to Wikimedia's board of
directors.*
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*"In India there are thousands of languages, so if you want to reach
somebody who's been to school and studied in Malayam entirely, then that
person has to be reached in Malayalam," Datta said.*
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*That presents its own challenges. Nagging software issues make it difficult
to enter text in Indian languages — none of which use the English alphabet.
Discussions about the accuracy and neutrality of the encyclopedia entries
must often be conducted in multiple languages.*
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*And even though the non-English sites are vital for expansion, the advance
guard of contributors and editors has come mainly from the portion of the
population that speaks English (along with another language), so the number
of entries on the Indian language sites has not grown as rapidly as it might
have.*
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*The Malayalam Wikipedia languished with only around 400 entries for its
first three years, for instance, even though it is spoken by some 36 million
people — most of whom live in Kerala, a state with an unusually high
literacy rate.*
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*India's desperate need for basic research materials, however, has already
begun to act as a stimulus to the growth of the editing community, both in
English and Indian languages. Last month, a Wikimedia team led by Hisham
Mundol — a development sector expert recently hired to drive the expansion
of readership and editor base in India — visited the university hub of Pune,
Maharashtra to roll out the first Campus Ambassadors program outside the
United States.*
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*Academics like Rimi B. Chatterjee, a novelist and historian who teaches at
Kolkata's Jadavpur University, are pioneering ways to leverage students'
reliance (and over-reliance) on Wikipedia to motivate habitual rote learners
to think about their research papers in new ways.*
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*And the government of at least one state, Kerala, has embraced the online
encyclopedia as an educational tool that can save it from using vital
resources from its meager budget essentially to reinvent the wheel — a move
that helped boost the number of entries on the Malayalam Wikipedia from 400
in 2005 to more than 18,000 today.*
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*"I think the potential [for India] is huge," Datta said. "Platforms like
Wikipedia can really equalize access. People in the [developing] countries
of the Global South have always lacked access to knowledge and institutions.
Something like this can really erase that inequality of access."*


Regards
Tinu Cherian
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news#July_2011
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