CIOL:Wikipedia to uphold freedom on the net

Idhries Ahmad

BANGALORE: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has laid to rest speculations emanating from various quarters that the online encyclopedia has clamped down on its "anyone can edit policy”.

Speaking to a packed audience here at Infovison 2006, Information and Knowledge Summit hosted by Confederation of Indian Industries, Wales said that Wikipedia continues to be as democratic as it was before and the people are free to edit and submit their content as long as it is factually correct and doesn’t hurt the sentiments of people.

"What we have said is that Wikipedia will let the content go live only after it has been viewed by a core group of editors from Wikipedia. This is only to keep a check on contributors who are posting factually incorrect content or content that may hurt the sentiments of the readers,” commented Wales.

Wales said it was only because of its “anyone can edit policy” that Wikipedia has become hugely popular site among people who considered it an authentic source of information. “People have faith in the content that is there on our website and it is but natural that we also have a responsibility that the content available on the site is as correct as possible.”

Wales said that Wikipedia has tried to improve upon quality to manage the content and live up to the faith that readers have in it as an online encyclopedia.

“Wikipedia has witnessed three major eras. The first one was the era of protection - when people could post and edit content without logging and it would go live at the same time. The second was the semi- protection era when contributors had to first log in and the content was live after four days. The third was ‘the era of flagging’ where the content goes live only after it has gone through the eyes of the core group of editors who look at the authentication of facts," Wales said.

Referring to Indian context, Wales lamented the fact that the content available in Indian languages on Wikipedia was very minimal as compared to other languages, “Only 1000 articles are available in Hindi language on Wikipedia, which is far cry from 30, 000 articles that are available in Arabic language only”, said Wales

Wills also added that most of the content in Hindi on Wikipedia was uploaded not by resident Indians but by people living abroad.

"Just a look at the IP addresses makes it clear that people living in countries other than India are uploading content in Hindi, " Wales said urging the participants to actively contribute Hindi content.

Apart from Hindi, Wales said that Malayalam, Bengali, Telghu, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada fared better with article count ranging from 3000-10000.

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