Wikipedia in India: We need more contributors in Hindi, says Jimmy Wales

Mumbai: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he saw tremendous potential for the growth of Indian regional language articles on Wikipedia and said he hoped to see an increase in the number of active contributors and editors from India. Wales was in Mumbai on Friday to deliver the keynote address at India’s first ever Wiki Conference, and said that at present there were only a little over 50 active contributors to Wikipedia in Hindi which was a pity. He further added that given the fact that Wikipedia editing in regional languages was still at a fledgling state, it was a very exciting time to recruit new contributors.

“The problem for a newcomer to the English pages on Wikipedia is that often the articles are already exhaustively researched and there is very little room for new contributions. But at the regional language level when everything is still new there is so much room for people to contribute. Every little bit helps”, said Wales.

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[caption id=“attachment_134562” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Wales said Wikipedia was too full of procedures and rules which made it intimidating for newcomers to get involved in editing.Getty Images”]  [/caption]

Wales acknowledged that there were obstacles to the growth of regional language pages, including the fact that keyboard entry was a challenge. He said that the Wikimedia foundation was willing to actively support efforts to circumvent these blocks. Apart from this, he said he was hoping to introduce an award called, “The global Wikipedian of the year” which would seek to incentivise existing Wikipedians to work towards growing the number of regional language contributors on the site.“Knowledge is the path to peace, which is why it is so important everyone contributes”, he said.

Wales also said that Wikipedia as a whole was also too full of procedures and rules which made it intimidating and difficult for newcomers to get involved in editing .“Large communities (Like the English language Wikipedia) need a lot of rules. These should not be translated ad hoc and applied to smaller groups”, he said, adding that what the site needed was an entirely new user friendly interface which was similar in design to the ‘wall’ in Facebook. However it is likely that any changes in this regard will have to be approved by the Wikimedia community.

Wales also stressed on the importance of getting people to translate pages from one language to another, saying that machine translations tended to miss cultural nuances and often lost the meaning implied in the original language. “The smaller the language, the worse the machine translation”, he said.

The Wiki Conference which is to be held over three days, focuses on developing regional language contributions, and also looks at gender issues in terms of editing Wikipedia, as well what role the encyclopaedia can play in various sectors of society.