Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/ I am deeply interested in enriching Sindhi Wikipedia: Mehtab Ahmed

Title ideas

• I am deeply interested in enriching Sindhi Wikipedia: Mehtab Ahmed
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Summary

• Profile of a leading Sindhi Wikipedian
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Mehtab Ahmed is pursuing Bachelor of Education and believes in using Wikipedia to educate masses in their native language. Photo by Mehtab Ahmed, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

“ Today's world believes in the survival of the fittest and we can see around us that only those who are working hard are given high value and position. Similarly, if we want our languages to stay up to date and full of resources, we have to work very hard and consistently. Therefore, I will suggest my Pakistani Wikimedians to come forward and bring new ideas so that we can have an atmosphere full of knowledge and a stronger community platform. ”

Sindhi Wikipedia started in 2004. Till October 2014, it witnessed slow growth. This is when a few enthusiasts such as Asad Jogi, Mohammad Mujeeb and Mehtab Ahmed started contributing and thereby decided to rejuvenate and infuse a fresh lease of life in the project. Among the three, Mehtab started contributing as recently as August 2015, and yet he has contributed close to 9000 edits with more than 2600 articles to his credit. As this young contributor works in an overzealous manner to enrich the knowledge on Sindhi Wikipedia every day, we decided to interview him and gain insight from his editor experience.

Mehtab Ahmed is pursuing Bachelor of Education. He belongs to an educated middle class family from Sindh, Pakistan. His father is a retired bank officer and mother a teacher. Being a native Sindhi, Mehtab is conscious about his language. He has contributed to Google Translate in Sindhi besides many other online Sindhi platforms. With this background, when he started contributing to Sindhi Wikipedia, he got permission from Encyclopedia Sindhiana and other resources to use their works on Sindhi Wikipedia, which resulted in him achieving the distinction of holding one of the highest number of edits on Sindhi Wikipedia.

As a pragmatist, Mehtab cited the example of how the addition of Sindhi language on Google Translate ensured hundreds people of coming forward to contribute. This event has given him a hope that Sindhi language is going to make a significant place in today's modern world. More recent examples in this area are the number of Apps, websites and blogs in Sindhi that are being created with each passing day. Mehtab prioritizes one of his future tasks to tell Sindhi people the good things about Wikimedia projects and then convince them to become volunteers. He is trying via Facebook to convince volunteers to edit for Sindhi projects. He is hopeful of building a strong community in near future. In order to enlist more users, Mehtab answers and guides volunteers on Sindhi Wikipedia Facebook group on a number of matters.

Speaking on the the efforts aimed at Perso-Arabic collaboration with common goals for expanding Urdu, Western Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Baluchi Wikipedia, Mehtab specifically appreciated the efforts of Urdu Wikipedians in this direction.

Mehtab listed his future Wiki goals - addition of high quality information on Sindhi projects, increasing the number of volunteers and representation of Sindhi language on every wiki project. He believes that there is great potential in Pakistan but it needs to be refined and properly guided. And this, he hopes, will definitely result in the growth and expansion of Sindhi Wikipedia on par with many other language Wikipedias.

Syed Muzammiluddin
Wikimedia community volunteer