Stress on posting articles on Kannada Wikipedia

This article by R Krishna Kumar was published in the Hindu on August 2, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja is quoted.

For those with knowledge of Kannada and basic computer skills, here is an opportunity for posting articles in Kannada on the collaborative and free Wikipedia and facilitate the growth of Kannada online.

To help interested people learn the process of posting their articles on Wikipedia, the Centre for Proficiency Development Placement Service (CPDPS) of the University of Mysore will conduct a one-day workshop on August 6 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The workshop will be conducted on the CPDPS premises, Manasagangotri, and is being conducted by U.B. Pavanaja of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

Niranjana Vanalli, Director, CPDPS, told The Hindu that though Kannada has got the classical language tag and several Kannada writers have got the Jnanpith, Kannada is among the least represented language on Wikipedia in terms of articles in Indian languages, and this workshop is a small step towards correcting these lacunae.

According to Mr. Pavanaja of CIS, Bangalore, though Kannada Wikipedia was launched in June 2003 and this year marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of the website, there are only 14,500 articles in Kannada.

This is in contrast to nearly 1,00,000 Hindi articles, 52,000 Telugu articles about 52,000 articles in Tamil, 25,000 in Bengali and 30,000 articles in Malayalam in the Wikipedia. There are over 4.6 million articles in English. German and French are close to English and so it is not merely Kannada but all Indian languages that are lagging behind, said Mr. Pavanaja.

However, there is scope for improvement as 13 lakh people visit the Kannada Wikipedia website every month. It definitely means that many people are interested in reading articles in Kannada online, so there is scope for posting more articles for their benefit.

Interestingly Wikipedia, which was launched in January 2001, has articles in 22 Indian languages and 256 languages around the world. There are over 3 crore articles and the number is growing by the day.

There are other significant aspects to the contribution of Indians to the development of Wikipedia. While Kannadigas have taken to the enrichment of Wikipedia in English their contribution to the enrichment of the Kannada section has been abysmal. Incidentally, there are nearly 16 lakh editors of Wikipedia all over the world of which about 5,500 are Indians and of them 3,300 edit and contribute regularly in English. The remaining 2,200 contribute in Indian languages.

According to Mr. Pavanaja, roughly 2 crore Indians regularly visit the Wikipedia site but very few are either contributing or editing.

“Indians were definitely taking advantage of Wikipedia as it gets more than 2 crore hits every year. But the number of Indians contributing to enrich the content is less, more so for Kannada”, he added. Mr. Vanalli, who is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Mysore, pointed out that it was ironical that the Kannada was the only Indian language to have an encyclopaedia of its own – Kannada Vishwakosha – published by the University of Mysore. But when it comes to the online collaborative project of Wikipedia, Kannada is lagging behind and this should be reversed.

The workshop will introduce to the participants the features of Wikipedia, and give hands-on demonstration on how to edit and contribute articles. Participants can bring articles of their choice for editing and posting on Wikipedia. For details, contact Director of CPDPS on 0821-2419337/405 or email [email protected] for registration.

The workshop will introduce participants to features of Wikipedia, and give demonstration on how to edit and contribute articles