My thirteenth column in “Vijaya Next” (Kannada) was about writing in Kannada Wikipedia. Main points were,
- Brief introduction to Wikipedia
- Wikipedia was formally launched on Jan 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger (he quit in 2002). Jimmy Wales has actively promoted Wikipedia over the years.
- A mere 60 employees are employed by Wikipedia
- The site runs only on donations, no ads allowed
- Wrote about my visit to my first Bangalore Wikipedia meet (there are some interesting points in my post)
- English is the most popular language on Wikipedia (over 3.5 million articles)
- Hindi, Telugu, Tamil are having reasonable amount of content. Kannada has just 10,000 articles because the number of volunteers are very few.
- If we want to see the quantity & quality of Indian language content increasing on Wikipedia then we have to participate in this awesome project.
- Aren’t there enough Kannidigas who can contribute one article a week to strengthen namma Wikipedia?
- For a change let us stop complaining and start being part of the solution. Please contact me if you are interested in contributing to the growth of ‘namma Kannada’ on Wikipedia.
No offense. Will this make a difference.? I have always felt, language has to be used only for ease of communication not other way round. I have never been able to understand why do few make it such an issue on such things. [ no offense to ne1]
Dear Editor,
I just wanted to pass along a graphic that my team and I created about the growing use
of Wikipedia and how it’s redefining the way we research:
http://open-site.org/wikipedia/
Feel free to share it, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it as well!
Thanks,
Jen