Wikipedia opens office in New Delhi to encourage participation across India

Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia editable by anyone, is expanding its operations into India with the opening of the Wikimedia Foundation India Initiatives office in New Delhi. Wikipedia’s Hindi section currently sports 100,000 articles, compared to English with 3.7 mn. Wikimedia, the non-profit organisation that manages Wikipedia, has recruited Shiju Alex, a Wikipedia contributor from Karimba, Palakkad, as a consultant for Indian operations. Alex began editing Wikipedia in 2005 and has helped expand the Malayalam wiki from 500 to 20,000 articles. Alex told the Deccan Chronicle:

“I am really happy to be part of Wiki Foundation officially. The most significant project would be Wikipedia’s entry into school curriculum. A project would be developed in association with education departments and students will be asked to create Wikipedia articles as part of the internal tests.”

[caption id=“attachment_122729” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia editable by anyone, is expanding its operations into India with the opening of the Wikimedia Foundation India Initiatives office in New Delhi. Screengrab.”]  [/caption] Wikipedia has a history of working with Indian educational institutions. Earlier this year it collaborated with the College of Engineering, Pune, where students were required to contribute to Wikipedia as part of the B Tech degree course.

Director of CoEP, Anil Sahasrabudhe, said students from seven disciplines — mechanical, electrical, electronics and telecommunication, production, computer, information technology, and mathematics — would undergo the course. “After the students complete the six-month course, they would need to contribute to the website. They would be given internal marks for these assignments,” he said.

Hisham Mundol, the Wikipedia consultant on that project, said at the time:

“Information about India and contribution by people from India are not adequately represented on Wikipedia, and we want to change that.”

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The opening of the New Delhi office should help Wikipedia reach more of India’s online population, and particularly those speaking other local languages. Wikipedia is hoping to improve its presence in languages such as Marathi which has 34,625 articles, Bishnupriya Manipuri (24,764), Gujarati (21,574), Punjabi (3,352), and Kashmiri (414). Said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in an interview:

“Our vision is for people to have an encyclopedia in their own language not their second language.”

Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on the internet, with about 420 mn people visiting the website each month. Research company ComScore places it fifth behind Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo.