WikiConference India 2011/Submissions/Growth of Gujarati Wikipedia and possible aspects of dissemination

Growth of Gujarati Wikipedia and possible aspects of dissemination

Talk

Dhaval Vyas

United Kingdom

Abstract(known as Gujarati/s) worldwide and is among the top 50 most spoken languages of the world.

With the growing spread of the internet and information availability on this wide platform,

Gujarati community is increasingly seeking information online. It is still a medium of instruction

in majority of schools and colleges in Gujarat, which puts pressure on the need of various

source of information to be made available in this language. Gujarati language has its own

unique script, which is a form of Devnagari script. Gujarati Wikipedia (gu.wikipedia) was started

in July 2004 and it reached the milestone of 50 articles in March 2005. In the beginning of 2008

it had around 300 articles, and first milestone of 1000 articles was achieved by June in the

same year. Since then, in 3 years, it has 20,000+ articles with minimal stubs and loads of

quality articles. With such a widely spoken language it could even grow faster, which requires

proper dissemination of the information about Wikipedia’s availability in Gujarati. Currently there

are around 20 active users on this steadily growing wiki. This number could easily reach 2000

from this community. Recently we had first ever organized talk with the help of prominent

organization in the field of Gujarati Literature and it got very nice reception. With few such

sessions, regular talks with the same organization as well as other organizations, Gujarati

Wikipedia could be improved and cultivated in nice manner. There is a large Gujarati speaking

community in Mumbai, host of this conference, and the evidence to this is the oldest news

paper of Asia is published in Gujarati and that too from this very city. Dissemination not only is

required within Gujarat, but also in such cities where there is large population of Gujaratis, e.g.

Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, etc in India. Also Gujaratis are settled in great numbers in many

countries of the world, to name a few, UK, USA, Canada, South Africa, Kenya, other African

countries, etc. If liaised with the organizations working in the field of Gujarati language

(education, literature, etc.) there is a huge scope of its dissemination among the wider

population.