MANY AVATARS : Across India, hundreds of researchers, students, housewives and professionals are editing Wikipedia articles in 20 Indian languages, settingup new pages, holding Wiki workshops. It’s a growing community so vibrant that, ahead of its 10th anniversary, Wiki announced its first ever overseas office would be in India.

■ Sitting in the back of his SUV on his way home from work, Navi Mumbai civil engineer Kundan Amitabh is working on the Angika Wikipedia page, typingout a doha (couplet) in the ancient Bihari dialect.
■ In a blue, single-storey government school in Mangudi village, Tamil Nadu, a class of bright-eyed 13-year-olds is huddled around a bulky desktop monitor,reading about nuclear technology on the Tamil Wikipedia page.
■ In Bangalore, a group of Wiki editors is conducting a ‘Wikiacademy’ workshop at the office of a local NGO, instructing would-be editors in the technicalaspects of uploading data, and the philosophy and principles of Wikipedia.

Across the country, a 10-yearold online encyclopaedia is changing the way Indians process, access and storeinformation.And the movement is being led not just by techies and academics but by students, professionals and homemakersacross the rural-urban divide. Many are not even writing in English — there are now Wikipedia sub-sitesin 20 Indian languages, including Bhojpuri, Sindhi and Pali, the last a language that has no native speakers left,but has a rich body of literature.

Wiki sub-sites in 20 more Indian languages — including Tulu, Kutchi and Bihari dialect Angika — are also in the works.Combine this vibrant online community of editors with the fact that India is set to become the third largest internetuser base by 2013 — preceded only by China and the US, in that order — and it’s not hard to see why Wikipediacelebrated its anniversary in mid-January with the launch of an India chapter of Wikimedia (www.wikimedia.in), thenon-profit organisation behind Wikipedia. That’s not all. The San Francisco based Wikipedia is set to open its firstever overseas office here too. Explaining the move, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told HT over the phone in October: “There is a lotof excitement in India about the Internet. With so many languages, India poses a lot of opportunities. We already havea very successful community in India and we want to strengthen it.”

In an e-mail response to HT last week, Wales added: “I think the main reason Wikipedia has caught on in India is, of course, the strong IT sector, but also the fact that there is a very strong tradition of discussion and dialogue.”That discussion and dialogue is also helping preserve dying languages and oral literature, and making large swathesof information from the Web accessible to a range of linguistic groups.

Take Tamil Wikipedia. Set up in 2003, the site now features more than 25,000 articles on everything from musician AR Rahman to sackedtelecom minister A Raja. The articles have been written or translated by more than 250 people from around the world and the site now gets morethan 80,000 hits every day. Some of these hits are from local vernacular-medium government schools, where daily ‘Wikipedia classes’ get studentstogether around a computer so they can read pages on everything from classical music to nuclear technology.Since many of them cannot read English, the site has become their only window to the worldwide web.

Then there’s Malayalam Wikipedia. InApril2010,the site released a Wikipedia CD — the term for an official compilation of articles from a Wikipedia subsite, sanctioned by Wikipedia. The collection of 500 articles from among the 10,000 on the site was the first Wiki CD to be released in a non-Latin script. Distributed as part of a government of Kerala initiative, the CDs were then handed out to 60,000 teachers across the state as reference material. “A number of schools in Kerala have computers but poor internet connections,” says Shiju Alex, 33, a technical writer and active Malayalam Wikimedian. “This CD gives them access to material that is not available to them in their regional language.” This appropriation of the online encyclopaedia is a constantly growing movement in India. Over the past four months, physical communities of editors have formed in Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai. These groups meet regularly and trainother volunteers. These classes even have their own Wiki tag — they’re called Wikiacademies. Here, volunteers and editors conduct workshops on the technical aspects of uploading data and on the philosophyand principles of Wikipedia. Over the past year, ‘Wikiexperts’, in association with the state educationdepartment, have held workshops across eight districts in Kerala; there are similar workshops in Tamil Nadu too.

Back in Navi Mumbai, Kundan Amitabh, 43, is using the page he set up six months ago to preserve the rich oralhistory of the Angika dialect. For about two hours every day, he transcribes poetry and folk tales from this Bihari dialect in Devnagari script, to be saved on en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Angika_literature.“We live in a digital generation. Stories passed through the oral tradition will soon become obsolete,” saysAmitabh. “If Angika is to survive, it must have a Web presence. And what better place to start than on Wikipedia?”Amitabh’s project now has three other active editors — a student from Delhi, an Indian-origin businessmanfrom Australia and another from Nepal.
“Our page has brought Angika speakers from around the world together on one platform,” he says. His next step: A tour of schools in Jharkhand where students still study in Angika. He plans to teach the youngstersto access the information he has uploaded, thus helping them take their first baby steps onto the information superhighway.

I N T E R V I E WJIMMY WALES,CO-FOUNDER, WIKIPEDIA

Why do you think the Wikipedia has caught on in India?

One reason is that the IT sector in India is very strong, butI also think there is a verystrong tradition in India of discussion and dialogue, deep in the roots of Indian democracy.

What has the response been like at the Wiki meets you attended in India? What were the common problems people raised?

The main response is an excitement about the future. The main problems have to do with keyboard entry — manypeople have learned to type only in English and don’t know how to type in their own language.

How does it help users to have a Wikipedia in their regional language?

Statistics show that only 5% to 10% of India’s literate are able to use English effectively.So there is a huge body of people for whom their mother tongue is the only way for them to learn and expandtheir horizons. The same thing is happening all around the world. In the UK, Welsh is endangered because everyone therespeaks English. So the Welsh Wikipedia is a place where people write joyfully in their mother tongue. I think this is wonderful.

KOLKATA■ A Wikipedia birthday cake at one of the many celebrations held in West Bengal; 97 ‘parties’were organised in India to mark the occasion, more than in any other country in the world.
In the state-run Jadavpur University in Kolkata, post-graduate English literature students are now made to writean article for Wikipedia as a part of the curriculum.The articles are graded on editorial content,research and material. “Too many students base their papers on information available on Wikipedia. Now, they can no longer dothis,” says professor Abhijit Gupta, smiling.

KERALA ■ Would-be Wikipedia editors attend a Wikiacademy training session in Palakkad, Kerala.
Editors of Malayalam Wikipedia are documenting the unique games endemic to various villages across the state. While one volunteerwrites down the rules, another travels to the respective village for pictures. Fifty games have been documented on the site sofar. “Some of these games are already dying, replaced by the national craze for cricket and football,” says Malayalam Wikipedia editorand technical writer Shiju Alex, 33. “We have to depend on oral descriptions from village seniors in these cases.”

PUNE
■ At a civic school with no internet access, students use a Wikipedia CD to browse through articles.
Pune Wikimedians are compiling CDs of select English Wikipedia articles for free distribution to schools across the state thathave no internet access. Last month, an early copy of the CD was handed over to a municipal school in Pune as an experiment.“The students had never seen an encyclopedia before,” says electrical engineer Nikhil Sheth, 25, the man behind the project.“Some logged on to read about the history of the Taj Mahal, others started exploring pages related to animals.”

TAMIL NADU■ Last June, the Tamil Nadu government organised an essay-writing contest where college students were asked to write articlesfor the Tamil Wikipedia sub-site. More than 2,000 students participated and 1,200 entries are currently being uploaded. Atthe same conference, the government donated a CD its own online glossary of 1.5 lakh Tamil words tothe Tamil Wikimedians. The Tamil Wiktionary is now among the world’s top ten, in terms of number of words.

Copyrights: The Hindustan Times : “BEHIND THE SCENES AT WIKIPEDIA.IN ” by Radhika Raj, appeared in” The Hindustan Times ” newspaper on 13 Feb 2011

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