[Wikimediaindia-l] [Press] Telegraph : It’s a Wiki Wiki world!

Mon Sep 12 06:48:51 UTC 2011

Thanks for sharing this. Coverage of the article was good.

regards
Arun
.

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 9:54 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
<tinucherian at gmail.com>wrote:

> Thank Srikanth, for sharing this.
>
> The article can be viewed on epaper :
> http://epaper.telegraphindia.com/PUBLICATIONS/TT/TT/2011/09/11/index.shtml
>
> ( Nice to see Vibhi's photo and huge heading "Wiki Warriors:on the main
> page )
> Don't forget to full article on page 13 too.
>
>
> The full text of the article :
>
>  *Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopaedia, has a vibrant
> community of editors and contributors in India. And on its 10th anniversary
> it is looking to enlarge its base in the country, says T.V. Jayan *
> * *
> *Vaibhav Jain, 13, looks like any other child. The Delhi resident is crazy
> about animated characters Pokémon and Shin-chan, and cheers for the Delhi
> Daredevils whenever his home team is playing at the IPL. But looks, as they
> say, can be deceptive. Vaibhav assumes a completely different persona when
> he is on the Web — that of a vigilant cop waging a war against vandalism.
> *
> *Vaibhav is one of the 4,200-odd “rollbackers” of Wikipedia — the world’s
> largest free and open online encyclopaedia. When he is not studying or
> playing, he scours Wikipedia articles for recent editorial changes that are
> suspect and reverts them to the original. Vaibhav, who set up his Wikipedia
> account earlier this year because he “got bored with social networking sites
> and online games”, has a Wiki user page that says it all: “This user reverts
> vandalism faster than Rajinikanth…” *
> * *
> *Seventy-three-year old G. Balachandran from Paravur, Kerala, has a
> different story to tell. Paralysed for nearly two decades, this retired
> junior commissioned officer of the Indian Army got a new lease of life,
> thanks to Wikipedia. When his son presented him with a laptop, Balachandran
> started contributing to Wikipedia in Malayalam. “Wikipedia not only helped
> me rediscover myself, but also gave me the strength to fight my condition,”
> says Balachandran, who has contributed nearly 100 articles to the Malayalam
> Wikipedia since 2008 and has more than 2,000 edits to his credit. *
> *Vaibhav and Balachandran belong to a vibrant global community of
> Wikipedians who contribute to the resource in one way or another. And there
> is a growing number of Indians among them — those who have taken it upon
> themselves to add, edit and improve Wikipedia in their spare time. *
> *
>
> INDIAN MOVERS: (From top) Vaibhav Jain, K. Ravichandar and G. Balachandran
> are part of the global community of Wikipedians *
> *
> From a little known resource on the Web 10 years ago, Wikipedia has grown
> into a mammoth, ever-expanding encyclopaedia with more than 19 million
> articles in 282 languages at last count. The English Wikipedia alone has
> 3.73 million articles, followed by German (1.28 million) and French (1.14
> million). According to Alexa.com, an Internet information company that
> tracks traffic to websites, wikipedia.org ranks fifth in terms of traffic.
> More than 14 per cent of global Internet users visit Wikipedia at least once
> a day. *
>
> *India too has been part of the phenomenon, so much so that Wikimedia
> Foundation, a non-profit body which manages Wikipedia’s affairs, has decided
> to set up its first office outside the US in New Delhi later this year.
> “India is our new focus area,” says Bishakha Datta, one of the global
> trustees of Wikimedia Foundation. “The experience that we gain from India
> will provide us with a blueprint to expand Wiki activities in other
> countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.” *
> *Right now, Wikipedia is available in 20 Indian languages and 20 other
> language versions are under incubation. *
> * *
> *What sets Wikipedia apart from other encyclopaedia, which are written by
> renowned subject experts, is not just that it is free and accessible to
> everyone, but also its dynamic nature. Anybody can contribute a Wikipedia
> article. “You don’t even need to register to be able to edit 99 per cent of
> the pages on Wikipedia,” says Tinu Cherian Abraham, a software engineer
> with a Bangalore-based firm, who has been associated with Wikimedia
> activities since 2006. Abraham has so far contributed more than 2,000 Wiki
> articles and done more than 53,000 edits on the English Wikipedia. *
> * *
> *However, because of its free and open character, Wikipedia is also liable
> to abuse and misinformation being fed into it. And that is where feisty
> rollbackers like Vaibhav come into play. Recently, a Wiki article on Team
> Anna member Arvind Kejriwal was ambushed by a miscreant and his name was
> changed to Neelabh Kaushik. However, the watchful Vaibhav caught the fraud
> in no time and rolled it back. *
> * *
> *Developing events find their way to Wikipedia almost instantaneously,
> thanks to more than 1,40,000 registered editors around the world who
> contribute and edit Wiki articles free of charge. “Everyone can be an editor
> on Wikipedia,” quips Hisham Mundol, a consultant with Wikimedia
> Foundation, who is slated to head its India operations. “We genuinely feel
> that with inputs from various quarters, Wiki articles can be more rounded,”
> adds Datta. *
> * *
> *The policy has paid off, with a growing number of online editors and
> contributors adding their bit to the burgeoning resource. Take K.
> Ravichandar, who is an employee of Karnataka Bank in Bangalore. He wrote
> about Melattur, a tiny town in Tamil Nadu that is famous for a unique form
> of dance drama called Bhagavatha Mela. “Very little was known about this
> dance form till my article in Wikipedia,” says Ravichandar, who has made
> more than 35,000 contributions to the resource by way of articles and edits.
> *
> * *
> *It’s the energy and enthusiasm of people like Ravichandar, Vaibhav and
> others that’s spurring the Wikimedia Foundation to woo India in a big way.
> Apart from setting up an office in Delhi, the foundation is also organising
> its first ever WikiConference in India in November this year. The
> conference, to be held in Mumbai, is expected to become an annual feature
> and will draw up a road map to develop Wikipedias in “Indic” languages, says
> Pranav Curumsey, one of the Wikimedians behind the meet. The conference
> will also discuss how to make Wikipedia available offline to schools in
> rural India, which do not have Internet access, reveals Curumsey. More than
> 400 Wikimedians from India are expected to participate in the conference.
> *
> * *
> *“The Wikimedia movement is strong and vibrant in India. But we need more
> people to join us,” says Abraham. “People from India can make an important
> contribution to global knowledge, and we want both Indians and the broader
> world to benefit from that.” *
> *Indian Wikimedians say they face some challenges in achieving these
> objectives. First, the general public is mostly unaware of the fact that it
> can actually edit Wikipedia articles. Second, most people do not know that
> Wikipedia is available in many of the Indian languages. *
> *But some point out that Indian language Wikipedia often fall short in
> terms of quality and quantity. Among the Indian languages, Hindi has the
> largest number of articles — 99,815. This is followed by Telugu (48,000),
> Tamil (35,700) and Marathi (34,400). Malayalam and Bengali are two other
> Indian languages that have been witnessing some active contributions in
> recent times. *
> * *
> *“It’s not just the number of articles; the depth of the content is also
> important. For instance, though Malayalam Wikipedia has only 19,000
> articles, I would say that they are of far better quality than those in the
> other Indian languages,” says Bala Jeyaraman, a Coimbatore-based
> Wikimedian who played a significant role in expanding the Tamil version. *
> * *
> *Shiju Alex, a Bangalore-based technical writer, who has played a pivotal
> role in the Malayalam Wikipedia movement, says there is a need to take the
> movement beyond Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is just one of the many products from
> the Wikimedia community. There are sister products like Wikisource, which
> involves digitalisation of old books, Wikictionary which deals with
> dictionary development in a particular language, and so on,” says Alex. *
> *Mundol, reveals that in an effort to expand Wikimedia’s reach in India,
> the foundation has plans to work with Indian college students. As part of a
> pilot project, students from two colleges in Pune have been roped in to
> create content in academic subjects. “The programme, taken up with the
> consent and involvement of the college administration, will also be used for
> the internal assessment of volunteering students,” says Mundol. *
> * *
> *Clearly, in its 10th year, Wikipedia is all set to go from strength to
> strength in India.
>  *
> **
>
> Regards
> Tinu Cherian
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 1:06 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110911/jsp/7days/story_14492284.jsp
>>
>> --
>> Regards
>> Srikanth.L
>> http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news#Sep_2011
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