KOLKATA: More than 250 Wikipedia contributors from India and Bangladesh are expected to meet at an international conference ‘Bengali Wikipedia 10th Anniversary Celebration’ in Kolkata to share ideas about the projects run by Wikimedia.
Scheduled to be held on 9 and 10 January, 2015 at the Jadavpur University campus, the two-day conference would mark the 10th anniversary of the Bengali Wikimedia community, said Wikimedia India chapter secretary Jayanta Nath.
The conference is planned to increase content in languages such as Bengali, the official said.
With a mission to bring free educational content at everyone’s fingertips, Wikimedia Foundation runs projects like Wikipedia, an open-source encyclopedia where anyone can contribute, edit and review an article.
The conference is a get together of Indian Wikimedians, students, research scholars, faculty members and all individual experts.
The conference will give the Wiki users, Wiki editors and developers of Wikimedia projects an opportunity to meet with each other, exchange ideas, report on researches and projects and collaborate for the future projects and ideas.
The conference is open to the public and widens the chance for the educators, researchers, programmers and cultural activists who are interested in the Wikimedia projects to meet the Wikimedians.
Available at www.bn.wikipedia.org, the Bengali edition of Wikipedia has more than 35,000 articles in the regional language. But out of its 450 active contributors, a dismal number of only five are from India, he added, sounding a note of caution that how regional languages are losing their popularity when it comes to reading habits.
“The majority are from Bangladesh. We are trying to increase our community from West Bengal,” Nath said.
Around 17 Wikipedia contributors are coming from Bangladesh while another 22 delegates would be from India, it is further learnt.
They will be conducting workshops and lectures for students on how to type, edit in Bengali, upload image in commons, contribute to Bengali Wiktionary, etc.
Contributors from Indian languages like Telugu, Assamese, Hindi, Kannada, Odiya, Punjabi, Tamil, etc would be deliberating upon new ideas in the conference.
A unique feature would be mass editing where a large group will work on articles related to West Bengal together.
“This would encourage people who are new to Wikipedia as contributors. They would write new articles, edit existing ones or upload media files on Wikimedia Commons, etc. We are expecting around 200-250 participants in this Wiki Marathon,” Nath concluded.
