India, a key growth area for Wikipedia, is gearing up for a national
conference "for Wikimedians in India to meet and share their views,
discuss challenges and exchange useful tips, best practices and other
information".
While the conference is open to "Wikipedians" from
across the globe, organisers announced here that it would have a "very
distinct Indian flavour and will deal primarily with issues relating to
India on Wikipedia and its sister projects".
Wikipedia, founded in
2001, is the world's sixth-most popular website in terms of overall
visitor traffic. Its worldwide monthly readership totals almost 500
million.
Since 2011, the Wikipedia has been working to expand its
growth in India, and it held its first Indian conference in Mumbai in
November that year, which was attended by 700 persons and addressed by
website founder Jimmy Wales.
This year, the meet takes place from
August 5-8 in Chandigarh, the city and a Union territory of a million
population that serves as the capital of the states of Punjab and
Haryana.
"The main objective is to reduce the gap between
different communities and get help from other community members on
technical issues and other things like best practices in decision making
and how we resolve the disputes in the community," the organisers said.
Those
attending including Wikimedia Foundation executive director Katherine
Maher, board member Nataliia Tymkiv, senior programme officer for
emerging Wikimedia communities Asaf Bartov, language engineering team
international manager Runa Bhattacharjee, Punjabi poet Dr Surjit Patar,
and Wikipedia education programme senior manager Tighe Flanagan.
From
India, participants will include The Centre for Internet and Society
executive director Sunil Abraham, and Wikimedia India president Yohann
Varun Thomas.
This event includes "hackathons" and "edit-a-thons" - collective workings towards improving the content available online.
It will also see sessions on the Wikimedia movement in India, examples
of its use in education, innovative tech solutions from India, content
translation, a "gentle introduction" to Wikidata, gender gaps, and case
studies from various Indian languages.
Participants are coming
from the Wikipedias in languages including Punjabi, Kannada, Odia,
Tamil, English, Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Sindhi, Hindi and
Chinese.
Because of its widespread popularity - and contrary to
fears that a website "anyone" can edit will not have quality - the
Wikipedia notches often among the highest results when information is
searched for on the world wide web.
It is a project supported by
the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of "openly editable
content". As the site explains: "The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of
the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from
the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning quick) and encyclopedia."
Google Rolling Out New Features Across Its Platforms to Help Users Plan Vacations28 March 2025
Search
![[Sponsored] 10 Reasons to Buy Samsung Galaxy Book5 Series Laptops](https://c.ndtvimg.com/2025-03/6gg1i738_samsung-laptops_160x120_28_March_25.jpg?downsize=180:*)
![Gadgets 360 With Technical Guruji: Ask TG [ March 22, 2025]](https://c.ndtvimg.com/2024-12/5s52e4k_-ask-tg_640x480_14_December_24.jpg?downsize=180:*)
