India remains as the Number one among the Wikipedia’s Priorities

After 2010, now in 2016 India is expected to remain the “number one most strategic region” in the global plans of the Wikipedia, the free Internet encyclopedia that allows its users to edit most of its content.

India – Wikipedia:-

India became the largest, most popular general reference work on the Internet, and among the top 10 most-visited sites in the world.

• This was coping with India’s “huge size and diversity”. “Hindi Wikipedians as a community have such a hard time meeting up across different states and even countries”.
• The WikiConference India 2016 ended in the twin towns of Chandigarh-Mohali in August.
• Instead of taking an approach of seeing themselves as “guardians” of culture, museums working with Wikipedia could also fulfil their mission of reaching out to communities citing the example of the British Museum, and other such institutions.
• Figures emerging at the Wiki Conference, meanwhile, suggest that compared to the English Wikipedia’s total strength of five million articles, Hindi had 106,000 and Urdu had 105,000 articles. Tamil had a little over 88,000, and Telugu, almost 64,000.
• The Wikipedia is the seventh most visited site in India, and by some estimates, the sixth-most popular in the world. Some 1.8 million sites link to the Wikipedia, according to alexa.com, that provides commercial web traffic data and analytics, giving a hint of its clout in cyberspace.
• It is noted that the Partnerships with museums and universities — who are natural allies for a project like the Wikipedia could be a bit of a challenge.

‘Linguistic Versatility:-

The Punjabi Wikipedia had revitalized itself over the last two years with a “young and energetic” group, in an “amazing” way. They managed to grow as a team, and attain 30 per cent growth in content too, he said.

• Also, with Malayalam, there was a lot of “self-organizing, mutual help and specializing”. Their wiki samamga mahotsav meetings were a useful outreach to elementary schools.
• They had even raised funds to buy a computer for a team-member who simply could not afford it, and the State government Tamil Virtual Academy (tamilvu.org) had made much progress in digitizing Tamil literature “en masse”.
• The “subjective” challenges included arguments among those volunteering on this giant global project, the emphasis on status and authority, especially given that the project is sometimes seen as self-governing or leaderless. Moreover, he suggested, peer collaboration might be a less acceptable trend in India.