A bunch of ?online volunteers? armed with a ?digital camera and love for Chennai? went around the city last Sunday and clicked photographs of local sights to donate them to Wikipedia and help the online encyclopedia illustrate its articles better.
This ?Internet volunteerism? extends much beyond photography and is now shaping into a sort of community around the biggest online repository of knowledge. Volunteers organise Wikipedia academies across India regularly to reach out to people to encourage and teach them to contribute and edit content. Regular meets are conducted first Wednesday of every month.
Next on cards is an Indian version of Wikimania?annual global conference for the users of Wiki projects operated by Wikipedia Foundation. Enthusiasts are working to set up India chapter of Wikipedia and hope to get approvals in a month.
Clearly, the community-driven initiative that attracts about 75,000 volunteer contributors for the 271 wikipedias worldwide is catching up in India. ?We need a water hole to get all the Indians contributing to Wikipedia at one point,? exclaims Kiruba Sankar, a prominent blogger and one of the leading volunteers of Wikipedia initiatives in India. India ranks among the top five countries using information from Wikipedia but we are pretty much a laggard in contributing to the site, according to him.
Kiruba is not alone. Several Indian volunteers seem to be charged up about making a mark on Wikipedia, which has collected close to 13 million articles in more than 270 languages. Globally, thousands of people contribute voluntarily to put up the content, research, validation and editing too.
While English has blown past three million articles, 11 languages have hit more than 1,00,000 articles. Indian languages are not in that league but are striving to grow fast. Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, put together, have reached about two lakh articles. Malayalam wikipedia has the fourth largest (as of July 2009) page depth following the English, Hebrew and Arabic ones. While Telugu has crossed 43,250 articles, Hindi boasts of over 33,260 articles.
Several ambitious projects are on the cards. Prominent among them is the initiative to upload detailed information about over six lakh villages of India in three years. To begin with, Tamil Nadu government has agreed to provide all the relevant statistics for villages in the state.
As enthusiasts push efforts to contribute to Wikipedia, the confidence seems to stem from the fact that Indian youth has been quick to embrace Wikipedia for information. Google and Wikipedia have overtaken the physical library as the most trusted source of information, according to a survey of about 14,000 kids studying in English-language schools in 12 major cities in India. The study conducted by TCS shows that Wikipedia is the preferred source of knowledge for about a quarter of the youth in metros. Across the country too, one in five students refers to Wikipedia.
Interestingly, Wikipedia is catching up in India at a time when it is facing stagnation in many other parts of the world. Launched in 2001, Wikipedia took five years to reach the one million article milestone. It saw an exponential growth from then and took just 12 months to hit the two million milestone. The next million came last week and took double the time (two years). The average number of users added is almost static and the average number of articles added every day has reduced to 1,800 since July 2007, from an earlier count of 2,200 articles a day.
The net result is that the community-driven social encyclopedia is seen to have become less welcoming to new contributors. A new study conducted at the Palo Alto Research Centre in California suggests that the Wikipedia community is becoming resistant to new content and editors. The study shows that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 55 lakh and 7.5 lakh, respectively.
The new or passive editors who make just a single change per month see around a quarter of their changes erased or modified. The exclusion of several contributions is seen as a shift of the balance of power on Wikipedia and has generated a lot of heat in the online world over the struggle between ?deletionists? and ?inclusionists?. ?Yes, it is a bitter pill to swallow. While ideally there should be no hierarchy but vandalism and promotions need to be weeded out,? reasons Sankar.
The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation responsible for running Wikipedia has launched an internal review to find new ways to manage the ?wisdom of crowds? and if it should consider a print edition or create its own competition. The answers would spell the future of the user-generated content?one of the biggest online trends of the decade.