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Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, the founder of the impressive Web-based free-content multilingual encyclopedia Wikipedia project sees a growing role for Asian initiatives on this volunteer-edited product, that is now rated among the top 20 websites globally. Currently, Japanese is the only non-European language among the ‘big ten’ of the Wikipedia. But Farsi, Arabic, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, are among those with 10,000+ articles. In the 1000+ articles category are Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu among others.
Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, the founder of the impressive Web-based free-content multilingual encyclopedia Wikipedia project sees a growing role for Asian initiatives on this volunteer-edited product, that is now rated among the top 20 websites globally.
Currently, Japanese is the only non-European language among the ‘big ten’ of the Wikipedia. But Farsi, Arabic, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, are among those with 10,000+ articles. In the 1000+ articles category are Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu among others.
During his visit to India in late August, Wales noted that volunteer-contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia had been growing 22% and Bengali 35% per month. The relevance of this becomes clear from the fact that the larger Asian languages tend to have many million speakers, even though there is little sign of them in an English-dominated cyberspace.
"These growth rates are fairly high. Of course, they’re growing from a small base. But Kannada already has over 5000 articles and still growing at this rate. That’s really exciting. If that growth rate exists is going to to grow big really soon. Bengali too has a growth rate of 35%," he said.
"It’s not as bad as it was a year ago. Gee we have almost nothing, then. Now, languages like Bengali, Kannada, Marathi are in the three-to-five thousand article range. Hindi, Assamese over 1000. But Hindi, which is a very large language (in terms of numbers of speakers) has only 1500 entries. That’s a little surprising," he said.
Wales (40) told APC that he was satisfied with the manner in which conflict-mechanism was worked out by the online encyclopedia.
"We still have an enormous amount of work left to do. India has 23 official languages. English (is the only language used in India with) more than 10,000 articles. We aim to have 200,000 articles for every language spoken by a million people. That covers 94% of the people on the planet," he said.
Wales, who took part in a conference on open content in India, said he had just started a new project called the Wikiversity. "We want to provide a free encyclopedia to every single person in the planet. We also want to provide all the tools to become literate," he said.
"The Wikipedia project is inherently global. Our mission reaches far beyond the internet. Even people who don’t have access to electricity. There are over 1 million articles in English. And English is less than one-third of the total work of Wikipedia. Ten other languages of 100,000. German 500,000. Japanese, French, Polish 250,000. But most of the larger projects are of European languages," he said.
"Unless you have a thousand articles, I don’t count it as a fully active community," he told audiences in India, urging them to do more in this regard.
With just four full-time employees, this volunteer-driven project had become the 17th most visited website in the world, and currently had some 200 servers across the globe.
Wales said the Wikipedia was drawing more hits than the "BBC and the CNN combined". He cited tests that show that the Wikipedia had only four mistakes per article as against the Britannica’s three.
"People should have this idea that Wikipedia is pretty good and that its getting better all the time. I think what was surprising for most people was not that Wikipedia had four errors per article, but that Britannica had three (per article)!," he added.
He argued that once enough people built momentum to volunteer, each project got going on their own. "The focus of my effort is to see how to get the initial communities going," he said, explaining that he planned to test-hire his fifth employee in India to encourage content to be built up.
"Yeah, maybe we’re a bunch of crazy lunatics. But we’re pretty smart, and we care a lot about quality," he said, adding that perhaps there were about a thousand volunteers who were key in putting together the bulk of the Wikipedia content.
Wales referred to the Wikipedia on a CD, or on mobile phones. Webaroo.com, a project founded by IITian Rakesh Mathur that offers software for users to download highly-compressed search-allowing web content onto their computing devices, has also offered portions of the Wikipedia through this format.
In keeping with its free nature, anyone could copy the Wikipedia content, print it and even sell it, Wales said.
Indian techies who interacted with him suggested the time was "right" for Indian language content creation, since the tools for doing this had been created, including by projects such as IndLinux.
"When I was here in India last year, some Wikipedians here in Delhi, said we have English keyboards said it was really a pain in the neck to type Hindi. That’s an issue," he noted. But others pointed out even the Remington typewriter keyboard had now been mimicked for seniors wanting to use computers.
Wikipedia is run on a website that allows any visitor to edit its content. It is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website. Wikipedia’s main servers are in Tampa, Florida, the United States, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.
Wikipedia started as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia.
Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."
As of August 2006, Wikipedia has more than 5 million articles in many languages, including more than 1,300,000 in the English-language version. There are 229 language editions of Wikipedia, sixteen of which have more than 50,000 articles each.
There has been controversy over Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials.
Currently, in terms of languages, Spanish has about 147,000+ articles in its "la enciclopedia libre", as compared to English’s 1.35 million entries. Japanese, ranked fifth worldwide, is the first Asian language in the list, followed by Chinese (12th), Indonesian (25th), Turkish (26th), Korean (30th), Arabic (35th), Malay (36th), Thai (38th), Vietnamese (48th), Bengali (53rd), Telugu (58th), Uzbek (60th), Kurdish (61st), Marathi (62), among others.
