WikiConference India 2011/Submissions/Expanding the Bengali Wikipedia

Timestamp
18:18, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
Title of the submission

Expanding the Bengali Wikipedia

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, or presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Sucheta Ghoshal

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

sucheta.ghoshal@gmail.com

State of your origin (Country, if you are not based in India)

Paschim Banga

Abstract (maximum 500 words)

Wikipedia is the place where knowledge meets people and people meet knowledge. Now this process cannot go on without a habit of expanding this book of knowledge to more Indian languages. Though the initiative has already been taken, there is a lack of maintenance. This is a fact that I found while going through the Bengali version of Wikipedia. I was completely taken aback, when I came to know that there are only 195 active users in Bengali Wikipedia! This is quite unacceptable as Bengali language have 230M native speakers.

I did a bit of research on this very fact, and this is what I found out:
Languages Native Speakers in Million Articles Active Users Articles vis-à-vis Native Speakers Active Users vis-à-vis Articles
Standard Chinese 845 370922 5,904 0.0439% 1.592%
English 328 3,716,942 144017 11.3321% 3.875%
German 120 1,276,538 22,951 1.0638% 1.798%
Bengali 230 22,313 195 0.0097% 0.874%


A language which has 230 million native speakers only 0.0097% is the percentage of articles in Wikipedia against the number. This is a miserable figure and needs a lot of things to be done. Honestly what I want to do is to act as a mediator and my modest effort will be to bring Wikipedia into the realm of Bengali intellect. My scheme is to target 2 to 3 individuals who I feel could be ideal contributors – in Bengali - on subjects related to ethno-culture especially Bengali ethos and technology in general. They are professionals and have a repository of knowledge. I would orient them on some basic things like inputting in Unicode and would seriously work with them to contribute on specific subjects.

Track (Community/Knowledge/Outreach/Technology)

Community

Will you attend Wikiconference if your submission is not accepted?
Yes, I will.I want to have a first hand account of the deliberations in the conference.