Wikipedia soon in Indian languages

The Wikimedia Foundation has started working closely in India to encourage Wikipedias in 25 major Indian languages

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Delhi | February 29, 2012

As part of its strategic plan to encourage readers and contributors in developing countries showing positive user trends, the Wikimedia Foundation has started working closely in India to encourage regional language Wikipedias in 25 major Indian languages.

The free web encyclopaedia is the world's fifth most popular website and the only one of this magnitude to be run by a not-for-profit organization. It works in collaboration with contributors worldwide to update and maintain valuable content on its websites.

The Wikipedia conference in Mumbai held in November last year, followed by a technology "Hackathon" that spread over three days, kick-started the Indian language revolution. A similar "Hackathon" was conducted in Pune over the last weekend with huge participation from the IT fraternity -- individual volunteers belonging to different fields, students, professionals, etc., who converged to give their contribution to resurrect Indian languages and put them on the digital map.

While a minuscule amount of content is already available on Wikipedia in popular Indian languages, the number is less than a drop in the ocean of knowledge, culture and history that is locked away in these languages. Through these "Hackathons" and regular conferences and workshops lined up in various Indian metros over the coming months, Wikimedia Foundation, based out of San Francisco, USA, will be working closely with Indian volunteers to make the technology user friendly and make the Indian language fonts and scripts available on Wikipedia.

Speaking at the occasion, Alolita Sharma, Director of Features Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation, said, "Our goal is to increase the reach of Wikipedia and to make it user friendly and accessible for the growing Internet savvy Indian population while mobilising a technology platform to enable easy Indian language fonts. The majority of the Indian population speak and write in their own mother tongue and many now have access to the Internet, thanks to the mobile telecommunications revolution. We aim at involving and encouraging sharing of content and knowledge for and by this large Indic language population by building open source tools and technologies to make it easier for reading and editing articles on Wikipedia in Indic languages. We are also working on providing the offline version of language wikis that can be downloaded, scanned or even printed on paper so as to reach to those who do not have internet access 24x7.”

She added, “We just completed and released the offline version of Marathi Wikipedia about a week ago and it has been a great achievement. With the enthusiasm and support of the Indian community, we hope to do this for all the 25 major Indian languages very soon."

Apart from making the language versions available offline, the engineering and software development team of Wikipedia, along with Indian volunteers, is also developing Android and mobile apps for enabling India language access on mobile phones.

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