Indian, Bangladeshi Bengali Wiki community to meet in Kolkata

Kolkata, Jan 8 (IANS) Contributors to the Bengali Wikipedia from India and Bangladesh will gather at a two-day conference here beginning Friday to exchange ideas and celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Bengali Wikimedia community.

The objective of the meet would be to spread the word so that more volunteers can be inducted to take the Bengali domain on a par with the English Wikipedia in terms of popularity and growth.

To that effect, over 200 delegates from the two countries will participate in workshops, discussions, essay writing, photography competitions and photo walks at Jadavpur University here Jan 9 and 10.

It has been organised by the Wikimedia India community and School of Language and Linguistics of the university.

"Though reasonably successful so far in its own right, it is dwarfed in growth and popularity by its English counterpart, mostly because of a lack of awareness about it among the general populace of the two Bengals," a release from the university said.

Highlights on the first day will be workshops for the differently abled and sessions on typing, editing and creating new articles for the Bengali Wikipedia.

Open to all, the event will also be a learning experience on ways to contribute to other projects like Wikisource and Wiktionary in Bengali, the release said.

A large-scale editing marathon - Bengali Wikipedia Ediathon - will give new users a golden opportunity to have their compositions edited and selected.

Wikipedia started 14 years ago and now has over 34 million articles spanning 287 language editions. A quick and handy source of information, its USP lies in the fact that anybody can write for it.

The Bengali domain (bn.wikipedia.org) began January, 2004. Ten volunteers from Bangladesh and West Bengal work as administrators for it.

It presently hosts over 33,000 articles, accessed by about 500 active users every month.

"Our main aim here is to change this situation by improving the quality and reach of its content and spreading the word, so that more and more volunteers come forward to help take this edition of the Wikipedia to a level of popularity comparable to the English Wikipedia," the release said.

At present, 20 editions of the Wikipedia are in Indian languages, while 20 more are awaiting approval.

However, Indians have so far contributed about 1.3 percent of the overall edits of Wikipedia and only four percent of Wikipedia users are from India, the release said.