Wikipedia enhances its Bong connection

Kolkata, Dec 16: World's largest encyclopaedia, Wikipedia mounted to enhance its popularity and impact upon the Bengali Wikipedians by conducting first meet up by the members of

in Kolkata on Dec 11.

With an introduction to Wikipedia and Indic language Wikipedias by Tinu Cherian and Shiju Alex, the Bengali Wikipedia admin, Jayantha Nath began the meet up.

During the meeting, the members of the team shared facts and problems that they face on Bengali Wikipedia. As per the current report, only 150 among the 15,000 registered Bengali Wikipedians are active.

One of the organiser of the meeting Indranil Das Gupta stated, "The existing Bengali articles are not software translated, but are manually done by the contributors."

"But of the 21,000 articles, about 90 percent are either stubs, or erroneous, or, not written from a neutral perspective," he added.

Indranil also informed, "Unlike in Kerala, here we do not have any governmental initiative on pushing computer education in Bengali."

During the meet up, Bengali Wikipedians also introduced some techniques which will empower Wikipedia in Bengali.

The new endeavours by the Bengali Wikipedians is - three in-built Bengali Keyboards for Bengali typing and that key board allows users to type in Bengali without the installation of any software.

The technology, which has been introduced in Bengali recently, has been initiated in Malayalam Wikipedia and Tamil Wikipedia a long time back.

A new Wikimedia mailing list also has been introduced to collaborate on Wikimedia activities in Kolkata and West Bengal.

OneIndia News