The Near Future of Free Knowledge in India: Interview With Jimmy Wales

This weekend was a goldmine for soft-tech events. We had TEDx Gateway on Saturday followed by a session with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia on Sunday evening. Wikipedia is setting up shop in India (in addition to the Wikipedia Foundation that already exists here) and Wales talked about his hopes for Wikipedia especially on the number of articles in Indian languages.

This was the third Wikipedia meet held in Mumbai and was aimed primarily at Wikipedia editors who work with articles in English. Wales started out by showing some trends on Wikipedia usage and editing. He said that 87% of Wikipedia editors are male. This could be for a variety of complicated cultural reaons but also a technical reason. Editing a Wikipedia page is way harder than it should be and it's mostly computer science geeks, aka, males, who can figure it out. The average age of the Wikipedia editor is 26. 402 million people read wikipedia every month and there are 250  different language versions. Wikipedia has come a long way since it's started. It's reputation of being a credible source of information has been getting better and college professors no longer shun their students for sourcing Wikipedia. This is mostly because the folk over at Wikipedia are their own worst critics and always use words like 'citation needed' and 'references need checking' on their articles.

402 million unique visitors read Wikipedia every month globally

Wikipedia pages exist in 270 different languages around the world

He then went into statistics for Wikipedia usage in India. Less than 15% of internet users in India read Wikipedia every month which is much lower compared to other parts of the world. The number of internet users in India is 81 Million, which is 4.7% of global internet users. The number of Wikipedia page views per month is 191 million which is 1.5% of global Wikipedia page views. The average number of edits per month is 90 thousand which is 1.3% of global page edits. Clearly the trend here is significantly more views than edits. Hindi, having the largest number of speakers (in terms of Indian languages) also has the highest number of pages in an Indian language (57,823 of them). Telugu (45,963 pages) and Marathi (31,499 pages) are second and third in position. There is one sign of local languages catching up though. The percentage of edits in English in India are dropping and the percentage of edits in local languages is increasing. The two might be causally related.

Wikipedia's looking at India in the future

The big reason that Wikipedia is opening here is that the country is at a level of 'middle enthusiasm'. What this means is the number of Wikipedia pages in Indian languages isn't very high but isn't so low that hope is barely floating. Basically, Indian Wikipedia pages have a lot of potential to grow but need help to capitalize on that potential. This is different for say, a country like Sweden, where they have an ample number of local pages and don't need more help than their local Wikimedia Foundation. This is also different for countries in Africa like Ghana and Somalia where the internet enthusiasm is still very low. Tapping those markets would be a Wikipedia project in about five or more years.

Wikipedia's goals for India till 2015 include:

• Top 10 Indian languages have mature wikipedia pages (which means having more than 100 thousand substantial pages) and Wiktionary available enabling potential reach to 80% of the Indian population
• 100 million unique visitors monthly to Wikimedia projects
• More than 75% of schools in India have access to Wikipedia and Wiktionary either via the internet or offline (via CD-ROM etc)

Wales made two more points to note. He sees tablets (with Android) as the way to the future and Wikipedia on the mobile is a big deal for him, more so for reading than editing (now, wouldn't editing a Wikipedia page on the mobile phone be super easy?). He also said writing in local languages now has more readers than it did five years ago, therefore editors who contribute in local languages should not worry about readership.