Aapka Apna Wikipedia

Sundar is part of a posse of similarly inspired Wikimedians who are slowly but steadily adding to the corpus of information,in the language they think and dream in,rewriting,word by word,edit by edit,the way India learns. In a country of scores of native tongues and thousands of dialects,where English-speakers still live in urban ivory towers,they are producing a new,purposeful literature intelligible and available to the common man. Without having to buy a book,a Keralite can now read about anu samyojanam (nuclear fusion) in his language,a Tamil can appreciate the finer points of Batesian mimicry,and a Bangla-speaker can find on the Web the bhakti verses of Ramprasad Sen in the language they were originally written in. And if the 20 other Indian-language encyclopaedias in incubation elicit a hearty response from the respective communities,you could soon search Wikipedia in Awadhi,Bodo,Dogri,Mizo and Rajasthani,among others.

Although the first Indian-language Wikipedias (Oriya,Punjabi,Assamese and Malayalam) date back to 2002,the Wikimedia India chapter was officially set up only this June to promote projects in the country. The last few months have seen a flurry of offline activity in the Wikipedia community: regular meet-ups in Bangalore,Mumbai and Delhi,Wiki academies conducted in small towns to initiate new volunteers,and most recently,Wikimedia Foundation’s chief global development officer Barry Newstead’s visit to India last month,when he announced the plan to set up the Foundation’s India office.

Shiju Alex,one of Malayalam Wikipedia’s major contributors with over 18,000 edits,says multilingualism,fast vanishing from the stomping grounds of the English language,can be revived with the aid of Indian-language Wikipedias. “Now online doesn’t mean only English. Wikipedia is helping revive many languages and scripts. For several languages,including some from India,Wikipedia is the first website,” he says.

Anirudh Singh Bhati,an English and Hindi Wikipedia administrator and law school graduate in Ahmedabad,edits while having lunch,reading a research paper,watching television or hanging out in a café (and goes by the name Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington,or Nearly Headless Nick,an apparition that haunts Hogwarts Castle). He concurs with Alex on the transformative potential of Wikipedia. “We have 81 million internet users in this country. As India leaps into the knowledge age,it is more and more likely that people who do not speak,read or write English will have access to technology and will want to access content. Many of the

Indic-language Wikipedias are already the largest resources on the internet in local Indian languages,” he says.

While over 90 per cent of Indian Wikipedia users still prefer to access the English version,edits to English Wikipedia by Indians have been dropping steadily — by almost 10 per cent in the last year — perhaps indicating a saturation of sorts. Mahitgar,a contributor to Marathi Wikipedia from Pune,who works on linguistic and grammatical aspects of the Marathi language,seconds that. “English Wikipedia is already overcrowded and offers less flexibility to work. Working on local language Wikipedia benefits one’s own community more directly and is much more rewarding,” he says.

In the faceless world of Wiki where there is no ownership of articles — they are all subject to change by anyone who knows and cares enough to edit — being a big frog in a small puddle is often a reward unto itself. Srinivas Gunta,who wears several hats as an English and Telugu Wikimedian,Wikimedia chapter functionary and an assistant professor of strategic management at the Indian Institute of Management,Indore,explains how it is easier to get recognition working for smaller Wiki projects: “English Wikipedia is the largest with three million-plus articles. I have close to 12,000 edits and I barely make it to the list of top 4,000 contributors to English Wikipedia worldwide. Telugu Wikipedia has less than 50,000 articles and I hardly have 350 edits but I would comfortably be among the top 100 contributors and can easily make it to the top 50. So,what these statistics should tell you is that hardly 20 to 30 Wikimedians do the bulk of the work on most Indian-language Wikipedias,” he says.

Alex,however,is quick to point out that Wikipedia is anything but a one-man job. Some of the best articles are a study in the spirit of collaboration. For example,when a Malayalam contributor started an article about savei kali,a game played in the villages of Kerala,another went to his village and took a photograph of people playing the game,and a third Wikimedian wrote a definition of it. Eventually,other contributors added details about the rules of the game,illustrations and so on. “This is how a Wikipedia article is developed,” Alex says. It is this ability to collaborate that drew C.R. Selvakumar,a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo,Canada,to Tamil Wikipedia. “The Tamil Wikipedia with 25,000 articles written with about one crore words is one of the most extensively and most collaboratively written works in the language. The manner of interacting,all in good Tamil,was a unique experience for me — functional,constructive and

really useful,” he says.

If Indian-language Wikipedias are windows to a multicultural world,their contributors are the hinges that prop them open. Some are driven by a sense of duty towards their native language and for others,it is the sheer joy of jogging their mind for words,or the challenge of inventing a modern lexicon. A lot of Indian-language Wikipedia content is translated from the English under the Commons licence,but what do you do about technical words with no equivalent in your language? You can transliterate them,but Sundar has a better idea. He puts out word requests in the article’s talk page,where experts often help him coin terms. “Over time I learnt the trick: split tech terms to their Greek or Latin roots,translate the roots to basic Tamil words,and combine them. It’s a very rewarding experience,” says Sundar,who grew up in Cholavandar,a village near Madurai,and came to Bangalore in 2002 for his master’s at the Indian Institute of Information Technology,after which he continued to live and work here.

Research on the demographics of contributors to Tamil Wikipedia reveals a marked presence of highly educated Tamil speakers from humble and often rural backgrounds,and Tamil people who emigrated to Canada and Australia from India and Sri Lanka. Mayooranathan Ratnavelupillai,a Tamil from Sri Lanka who lives in the United Arab Emirates,was among the first to kickstart Tamil Wikipedia in 2003 by translating the interface page,and has since initiated over 3,000 articles.

Srinivas Gunta says the stage is set for local language information. “With local language interfaces in the mobile phone market overtaking the English-language interface recently and with the imminent onset of 3G,I expect a huge demand for websites in local languages,” he says.

There are technical challenges,though. Several Indian-language Wikimedians have found automatic translations to be inaccurate and have taken a stand against them,translating content manually instead. Then there are issues with scripts. Hari Prasad Nadig,a software developer who contributes to the Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedias,points out,for instance,the case of Konkani Wikipedia,where more than one script has to be enabled. “This is because Konkani is written using Kannada script in Karnataka,using Devanagari in Maharashtra and using Roman in Goa,” he says.

As for the effort that goes into all this,Wikimedians say it’s entirely worth it. Belayet Hossain,who works for a non-profit organisation in Dhaka that advocates computing in Bangla,spends 20-25 hours a week improving Bangla Wikipedia,and says the satisfaction is unmatched; Selvakumar says Wiki takes up 40-50 per cent of his “mind space” outside his professional commitments. “I feel it is far more useful than spending time on Facebook,for example,” he adds,“It is the power and clarity of learning in one’s language.”