One of the major policies of Wikipedia is the idea that content should cite reliable sources. With libraries having good content in short supply in the country it is not surprising that many editors cite blogs, non specialist websites or stray news reports and these are often reverted, particularly on the English Wikipedia.
A suggestion that we need to complement such systems as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RX (which is doing a great job as far as scholarly journals in English go) has gathered some interest from both the A2K project and the India Chapter. Perhaps either of these bodies could apply for the needed funds and appoint specific individual editors who would have members to the specific libraries and act as clearing agents - gathering requests from bonafide editors, obtaining digital versions of the sources needed and providing them in a time bound way. This post is just to open out this suggestion for discussion. Suggestions on quality libraries, research services, costs and ways in which this ought to operate are welcome.
A model to examine is the German https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Literaturstipendium (use Google translate to get some sense of what it is)
A few libraries that might be worth examining for India specific content http://www.hathitrust.org/ http://www.goethals.in/ http://www.delnet.nic.in/
Non-copyrighted content that is obtained could be contributed to the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org while the rest could be privately archived for the sake of keeping record. Of course all this would require that checks to see if content is already available on free and open-access digital libraries, dspace repositories and so on. In addition editors seeking research material may need to demonstrate some interest in improving specific Wikipedia articles that they indicate.
In addition, perhaps there should be an effort to work with librarians themselves to see if the can consider pro bono support for Wikipedia researchers esp. working with Indian language content. Let us not forget the L and the A in GLAM.
best wishes Shyamal
en:User:Shyamal