Kannada has many miles to go on Wikipedia: Expert

He was speaking at the 10th anniversary celebrations of Wikipedia organised at Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering (SJCE), here on Sunday.

While Kannada has only 10,000 articles on Wikipedia, other Indian languages such as Tamil, Malayalam and Bengali have taken the lead in promoting content in regional languages on the Internet.

He urged scientists, litterateurs, artists to take active part in uploading Kannada content on the website. Uploading content is free on the website and if they are mistakes, then there will be others who will be correcting it on a regular basis. He said that Internet has reached the villages and it is necessary to provide information on agriculture for them.

Wikipedia Administrator Hariprasad Nadig said that the Wikimedia Foundation operates 10 free knowledge projects, which have been built by over 130,000 volunteers.

He observed that on a monthly average, about 10.2 million users visit the site. Nadig bemoaned that while 9.9 million use the English version of Wikipedia, only about 3.2 lakh people visit the regional languages version.

Another project that was discussed at the celebrations was Wiktionary, which has about 80,000 Kannada words for which the meanings have been uploaded on the internet.

Speaking about Wiktionary, Wiki enthusiast Kiran said that six months ago only 250 words were available on the website. But now after a small group of people have taken interest in the project, it has grown to 80,000 words.