10th Anniversary of Wikipedia, Mumbai

To commemorate ten years of trying to build a repository of all knowledge possessed by netizens, 40-odd users and contributors of Wikipedia in Mumbai met on January 15, the day known to Wiki users are Wikipedia Day. The event was organised as a part of the public functions held worldwide to mark Wikipedia's tenth anniversary.

The meet-up started in the most delicious possible way.

Gooey, chocolate cake in the shape of the 10th anniversary logo of Wikipedia

In keeping with the mood of cheer at the event, the cake was cut to the singing of the happy birthday song. A video message about the anniversary from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia followed. He urged everyone to contribute to Wikipedia. (View the video.)


 

Newstead talking about the article on India

Barry Newstead, the Chief Global Development Officer at Wikimedia Foundation was the first speaker. In a brief introduction, Newstead said the Wikimedia Foundation with 60 employees and 450 servers, has undertaken numerous projects apart from Wikipedia like Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikimedia commons and Meta wiki. He spoke about building the future of Wikipedia in India; Wikipedia is set to open its first base outside of the United States in the country. He said India is the fastest growing region in terms of Wikipedia readership. There was a discussion about the Wikipedia article on India. The attendees could see the first version of India article made way back in 2001 by an Indian. It had undergone 17,835 edits from 5,442 editors since. Newstead demonstrated how an act of 'Wiki vandalism' on the page on Mumbai was discovered and removed immediately by a bot. He added that Wikipedia plans to make editing easier in this decade as well as introduce more APIs. Next was a heart-warming video featuring monologues from users worldwide, who believed contributing to Wikipedia was not their cup of tea but  later found using it and editing it incredibly simple and fun. 

A short but lively question-answer session followed:

Question-answer session with Barry Newstead

On being asked what Wikipedia does if wrong or controversial content is posted and how Wikipedia deals with it legally, Newstead replied that factually incorrect, unverifiable and slanderous content is either set right or removed. Controversial content stays. He said, in such cases the discussion page attached to the article gives us as deep an understanding of the topic as the article itself, if not more. As for the legal aspect, Wikipedia follows US laws because its servers are located in the US. It does not display content tailor-made to suit each country's laws on libel, censorship etcetera. In reply to another question he said that Wikipedia was considering incorporating social media tools. To a question about introducing a business plugin for Wikipedia, he replied that Wikipedia is free to use for commercial purposes and non-commercial ones and an attribution to the source was necessary. He added at the for commercial use, the contents of Wikipedia, the logo etcetera cannot be used in a way that suggests Wikipedia endorses or supports the business.

The session veered towards the use of Wikipedia for educational purposes. An offline version of Wikipedia for schools is available for download at the site as well as on Kiwix, along with a full version. The website Metastudio which is built on free MediaWiki software, views education as a continuous process in our everyday lives. A faculty Nagarjuna G. suggested a new grading system in which teachers grade students' contributions to Wikipedia instead of exams. He spoke about his course on 'History of Science', the objective of which is to collectively write a book based on the lectures, classroom discussions and the readings done by the students and faculty.

Post tea break the number of attendees has dwindled to almost half. Kundan Amitabh, a Wikipedia administrator spoke about the use of Indic languages and scripts in Wikipedia.

(View the presentation.)

Kundan Amitabh speaking about the use of Indic scripts

He said that content exists in 20 Indian languages on Wikipedia and other projects. Twenty more are in the offing, being developed in the Wikimedia Indic Languages Incubator. The Hindi language Wikipedia with 65,000 articles is the largest wiki in an Indian language. The rest have far fewer articles. The Wikipedia in Bishnupriya Manipuri is very active despite the number of native speakers being comparatively small. He added that we need more counterparts of the English language pages on the Indian-language Wikis.

Amitabh discussed the use of the Inscript (Indian Script) keyboard, a layout for typing in numerous Indian scripts using a QWERTY keyboard. This layout features the vowels on the left hand side and the consonants on the right. He and Utkarsh conducted a tutorial on using, editing and contributing to Wikipedia. The  flow of the session was however overtaken was attendees who had very fundamental queries on editing it and found the mark-up text intimidating and those who discussing the relative merits and demerits of the Inscript keyboard, Google translate, Google Transliterate and Google IME over each other. One of the attendees narrated an experience in which he had discovered the hard way that self-promotion is not accepted on Wikipedia. Utkarsh introduced the attendees to the different kind of pages, permissions and features that exist on Wikipedia and also to Wikipedia India noticeboard, Wikipedia sandbox, Be bold page, and Wikipedia Tutorial. The attendees particularly liked the Time Capsule, a page on which users are invited to share their thoughts, ideas and wishes for the 25th anniversary of Wikipedia.

In the ten years of piecing together every bit of information known to Internet users, Wikipedia has revolutionized the way we document, chronicle, gather and share information online. Its unparalleled SEO and penetration ensure that if there is a page on Wikipedia for a search-string, it will mostly turn up in the top results on a search engine. With over 13 million registered users, operational in over a hundred languages, with 257 active editions, 23 million pages covering every topic known to humankind,  it is sum-total of our collective and common knowledge. Here's wishing the jig-saw puzzle ball many more years of flying high in cyberspace.

The Wikipedians

Links:
Wikipedia page for 10th anniversary at Mumbai.
Wikipedia mailing list for Mumbai.
Wikipedia for schools, Offline version.
Video: 'The State of Wikipedia' narrated by Jimmy Wales.
More photos of the meet-up by Nikhil Sheth.

Venue: Veermata Jijabai Institute of Technology, Matunga, Mumbai.

Muchos thank-yous:
To Vipul Patil, Ankit Daftery and Moksh Juneja for the photos,
To Kundan Amitabh  for the link to the presentation.
To Gauri Gharpure and Subir Dey for their help and inputs.
To Nikhil Sheth for the Wikipedia for schools, offline version. (He is trying to share the file using Opera Unite, Torrent and 4shared. If you want to help, please drop him a line. Wikipedia for Schools project.)
To Simon Owens for the link to the video 'The State of Wikipedia'.