Wikipedia boom in Marathi, Malayalam and other desi languages

Wiki, the world’s largest online encyclopaedia where anyone can write and edit articles, didn’t have much content in vernacular till a few years ago.

The article by Sandhya Soman was published in the Times of India on August 1, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

Wiki, the world’s largest online encyclopaedia where anyone can write and edit articles, didn’t have much content in vernacular till a few years ago. According to the study, Wikis in Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi have added thousands of new articles on various subjects from September 2012 to April 2013. A few of these pages were viewed more during this period. Marathi, which had 30 lakh page views per month previously, had another 10 lakh visitors, while Bengali Wikipedia had 14 lakh page views.

While Malayalam Wiki took the top position with an enviable team of 100 plus editors, the number Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit editors came down. “Marathi has 40,000 articles. But most editors in Mumbai prefer to work on English. Pune has more Marathi editors,’ says T Vishnu Vardhan, programme director, Access to Knowledge project at CIS.

“In the last two years, the demand for knowledge in Indian languages has grown as we have moved to the motto of ‘roti, kapda and internet’,” says Vardhan.

One of the reasons for growth is that many browsers now support Indian language scripts. But this was not the case in early 2000. Though many wanted to read and type in their own language, there was no browser support, says Shiju Alex, blogger and Malayalam Wiki editor. Moreover, many didn’t know how to type in their mother tongues.But once Indian languages were encoded in Unicode, the fonts became accessible. “There was no need to write Malayalam in English and people started blogging in their mother tongues,” says Alex. According to Vardhan, communities with better literacy rates seem to have taken the lead online.

“Telugu Wiki is stronger as internet penetration in Andhra Pradesh is higher than in places where Bhojpuri or Assamese is spoken.”

As with most online language initiatives, the Wiki movement was also fuelled by the diaspora. Tinu Cherian Abraham, a former board member of the Wikimedia India chapter, talks about how an NRI’s love for Malayalam kick-started the project.

But now there are many Wiki foot soldiers in India, including a blind editor of Hindi Wikipedia and an elderly contributor from Kerala whose passion for free knowledge has helped him forget his ailments.