|
There is a lot of talk about languages on Wikipedia, but English remains too predominant. What needs to be done to encourage other languages? A bit on Indian languages?
In India, some of the languages are doing better then the others. Kannada for example, is growing 20-30 per cent a month. It is attracting a lot of people. What we find in small languages is that once we can get 20-30 people contributing it becomes more fun. Within three-five years, Kannada will be a large project. Other languages like Hindi, Bengali and Tamil are also growing. Very few people in India do languages. This is because of a lack of awareness. Many don’t know about the existence of these language projects. People here are enthusiastic about having more Internet content and activity in Indian languages.
Globally, we have over 200 language projects. But we count languages as being active when we have thousand plus articles. That way, we count 107 languages.
What are your comments on attempts to gag Wikipedia in China? Has Wikipedia faced these kind of issues elsewhere? Even Indian authorities had tried to gag blogs here. Your views?
Wikipedia is blocked in China. We don’t know what they took offense to. We really don’t intend to compromise the way Google did. We also feel that the block is an error. I am trying to set up high-level meetings in China to state our case and explain why we should be unblocked. We have no idea what the result of that would be. But we are somewhat hopeful. Wikipedia is not a haven for dissidents but an encyclopedia. About 99.9 per cent of Wikipedia has topics that are not of interest to the Chinese Government. There is no political component. We are hopeful that they can see the point.
Censorship is unfortunate. It does not achieve much any good especially on the Internet. Even in China, many people know how to get around the firewall. When people are censoring, they are not just preventing outside information from coming into the country, but also preventing local people from having a voice in the world. So the Chinese people would like to contribute to Wikipedia to give the Chinese point of view for the entire world to see. And China needs to be better understood by the rest of the world.
Don’t you think the academic and specialist orientation is missing with Wikipedia vis-à-vis the Encyclopedia Britannica?
We have a lot of experts in many fields contributing. People drawn into the project are those who know a lot about a subject and by having an open editing process, we allow other people like those who are more interested in copy-editing, style and grammar. Everyone can help. Sometimes, an engineering professor may not be the best person to present advanced concepts to the general public because he may be very technical. So someone who is a good science writer can help in presenting these things in a clear way to the public. The community that is enforced to keep things organized on track writes a lot of policies.
There are 3000 active members in the community and this is an arbitrary list.
How do you make sure the data that is presented on the site is authentic? How do you cope with vandalism of articles?
The core community is passionate about quality and they review all the copies as they come in. Of course, mistakes are made, but accuracy tends to be high. One of the things we do is that we keep every single version of every article. If someone comes and puts up something ridiculous, anyone can very quickly go back to the previous version. In terms of editorial standards we are traditional and old-fashioned. If something seems controversial, we insist that the contributor provide the exact source for it and we also evaluate the quality of sources in a traditional way. It is all about humans making editorial judgments.
Every article has a discussion page where people respond to an error. If you post a note calling attention to some mistake, the community will swarm in and clean up the article. If someone sees something ridiculous in Wikipedia, they can remove it and say please don’t put it back unless you have a source. This usually works well.
(Image courtesy: Wikipedia)
|
