Say Ahmedabad-based Wikipedia contributors who met at the
CEPT to discuss future plans about the portal’s Gujarati project.
For the first time, Ahmedabad-based Wikimedians (or Wikipedians) - as people writing for the online Wikipedia are called - gathered on Sunday for an informal meeting at the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT).
The meeting, which was organised by Wikimedia, India chapter (WIC), registered in Bangalore, was attended by a total of 26 people.
Anirudh Bhati, a member of the WIC executive council, chaired the meeting at CEPT, Ahmedabad. "For me, writing for the Wikipedia is a passion," he said. "It helps me expand the horizons of my knowledge."
He said that as technology had penetrated into rural areas faster than the English Language, a growing number of people in the villages were using smart-phones to access information in Indian languages.
"Some Indian-language Wikipedias are already the largest online repositories of information in their respective languages," Bhati said. "Regular community meetings such as the one we had today in Ahmedabad can help spread the word about our mission."
He further said that such meetings would also encourage online participation of people in Gujarat from different backgrounds, on Wikimedia projects.
"More content for the English and Gujarati Wikipedia projects will help us achieve our goal of free knowledge easily accessible to the people of this country," Bhati said. "We will be looking for support from the state government to speed up the development of Gujarati Wikipedia."
Bhati, who graduated as a lawyer, decided to hold this meeting so that contributors from Gujarat could be told how to write for the Wikipedia and what the dos and don'ts are for the same.
"For Ahmedabad, we can start with articles on different areas and streets of the city and also upload pictures to the Wikipedia to give a first-hand feel of the city," he said.
This will help academics and researchers working on Gujarat and Ahmedabad, and anyone interested in the city, know more about it and the state, he said. "In a way it will also help build a community of Wikimedians in Ahmedabad and in Gujarat," he added.
"A large number of articles are uploaded to most Wikimedia projects but only the English Wikipedia has 3,091 featured articles," Bhati said.
"There is no formal target for achieving a fixed number of featured articles on non-English Wikipedias, but we definitely expect the number to more than double in the next five years," he said.
Kartik Mistry, former project manager of the online dictionary, GujaratiLexicon, was also present at the meeting. Mistry said GujaratiLexicon was a huge language resource as it was a Gujarati-Gujarati, Gujarati-English and English-Gujarati dictionary combined into one.
"The company [GujaratiLexicon] wanted to enter the Wikipedia project list and, for that, I had written an article for Wikipedia. Discussions with the WIC are still going on for the company to enter the Gujarati Wiktionary project which currently has very limited data," Mistry said.
It was decided by the Wikimedians at the CEPT meeting that a monthly meeting would be held, depending on how many volunteers could find the time to attend the get-together.
Wikipedia is considered a secondary source of information but its contents carry reference links, so that facts and figures mentioned in its articles can be cross-checked. It is a website accessed by students and professionals alike, for various purposes.
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