More Indian languages on Wikipedia

More and more Indians can contribute to the volunteer-edited Wikipedia encyclopedia project, now rated among the top 20 websites globally.

So says Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, founder of the Web-based free content multilingual project.

During a visit to India, Wales noted that volunteer contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia had been growing 22 percent and Bengali 35 percent a month.

"These growth rates are fairly high. Of course, they're growing from a small base. But Kannada already has over 5,000 articles and is still growing. That's really exciting. Bengali too has a growth rate of 35 percent," he said.

"It's not as bad as it was a year ago. We had almost nothing then. Now, languages like Bengali, Kannada, Marathi are in the 3,000-5,000 article range. Hindi, Assamese over 1,000. But Hindi, a very large language, has only 1,500 entries. That's a little surprising," Wales told IANS.

"We still have an enormous amount of work left to do. India has 23 official languages. English has more than 10,000 articles. We aim to have 200,000 articles for every language spoken by a million people," he said.

Currently, Japanese is the only non-European language among the 'big 10' of Wikipedia.

Farsi, Arabic, Korean, Thai, Chinese and Bhasa Indonesia are among those with over 10,000 articles. In the same category are Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.