Fortunately, there are many young Indian Wikipedians who have shown they have what it takes. Srikant Ramakrishnan, a 19-year-old computer science student in Coimbatore, began editing on Wikipedia when he was 13. He now had 10,000 edits on English Wikipedia. “The students have treated it like a common assignment for which they are getting university credits. Getting an incentive for this isn't the right way to get things done here,” said Ramakrishnan, who has not been very active on Wikipedia ever since he began living in a hostel. However, he says he goes on an editing spree whenever he visits home.

With endless access to knowledge that is constantly evolving and the thrill of contributing to something that will be of use to others, these bright youngsters have discovered that Wikipedia can be just as addictive as Facebook. For example, 18-year-old Surya Prakash, the youngest administrator on Tamil Wikipedia, admits to spending most of his holidays and free time at his campus browsing centre. Instead of status updates, he borrows his friends’ laptops to make an urgent edit or update pages. And in Kozhikode, Kerala, Netha Hussain, a 20-year-old medical student, likes chatting with her friends as they make improvements on the same Wikipedia article and compare notes.

But what would drive a young person to contribute to something that is essentially anonymous in nature and with no monetary gain? “Wikipedia has helped me understand concepts in medicine. Whenever I notice an insufficiency in a medicine-related article, I look up authentic websites/books and edit that article. So I’m learning while editing,” said Hussain.

In the pic: Netha Hussain is a 20-year-old medical student from Kozhikode, Kerala. Her first contribution to Wikipedia was in creating content for the Wikipedia page