A reporter's laptop shows the Wikipedia blacked out opening page in Brussels January 18, 2012. The blackout scheduled for Wednesday to protest against proposed legislation on online piracy has failed to get the support of the biggest Internet players. Despite calls for the participation of sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other big names, the biggest participants are the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the social-news website Reddit. REUTERS/Yves Herman (BELGIUM - Tags: BUSINESS CIVIL UNREST SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY) - GM1E81I19PS01
New Delhi [India], June 6 (ANI): Wikipedia began in the early 2000s in the West intending to ensure that everyone can share in and access free knowledge and information. Now, two decades later it is witnessing a lot of growth in the global south and non-English languages.
Wikipedia has more than 56 million articles across over 300 languages. Roughly 89 per cent of articles on Wikipedia are in languages other than English. Raju Narisetti, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, spoke to ANI digitally about one of the most visited websites in the world and their plan to reach out to the whole planet to provide access to free knowledge and information.
Narisetti, a veteran journalist with a career spanning three decades, said readers in India visit Wikipedia more than 750 million times each month, the fifth-highest number of views from any country. Since its beginning, Narisetti said the label for Wikipedia for a long time has been “free and secular-pedia”. “By definition, it means that we are comprehensive, we are accurate, we are fact-based and we are accessible to everyone. All those principles continue to operate today,” he said.
With almost 300,000 editors at any given time, Narisetti explained how Wikipedia is the largest fact-based editing operation in the world run by volunteer contributors who add, edit, and update articles on-site every month. He continued by saying that the transparency and volunteer nature of the site are among the key factors why people turn to Wikipedia. “I think the transparency, the scale at which it operates, the volunteer nature of it and the fact that original content is not created but it is always on citations have made it the site that people turn to,” he said.
Despite the key role in the dissemination of information, Narisetti admitted that Wikipedia is susceptible to both honest misinformation and sometimes deliberate misinformation. He said most mistakes on Wikipedia are corrected within five minutes, adding that the power comes from the transparency and ability to quickly change it. “This big distinction that you see made on Wikipedia is this separation of opinions from facts. At the end of the day, Wikipedia relies on the ability to point to reliable, fact-based and citable information. And this is what ends up given the higher value,” he added.
“The beauty of Wikipedia is that all these debates are transparent as well. In that sense, separating opinion from facts, discussing it and putting it all out there and anyone can weigh into it. You and I can jump into any conversation on Wikipedia and point to something and say what about this or we can edit something. But it doesn’t mean it will last. If it is based on a citation, it will last,” he added.
Answering a question on the challenges that Wikipedia faces in pursuing its goal of free knowledge and information, Narisetti said unlike other big sites like Facebook and Youtube, Wikipedia is the only platform in the world that currently operates in about 300 languages. “While we began out of the US and West, a lot of growth is coming out from the global south. It’s coming from non-English languages. So we are putting a lot of energy behind it. A lot of people don’t think this, if you are the world’s biggest sites like Facebook, YouTube and Google, they typically operate in about 50-100 languages. Wikipedia is the only platform in the world that currently operates in about 300 languages.”
He said the great effort is being put in place to make sure that the biggest possible goal is that every human being on the planet has access to free knowledge and information. “Will it (the goal) ever be met, honestly we don’t know? It will always be a work in progress. Our planet is going to go to 8 billion soon,” he quipped and added, “that is why we ask people to support us. We are saying that, here is the big goal and if you agree with our goal – I think most people do — what’s there not to agree on free knowledge and information to every person on this planet.” (ANI)
