Wikipedia to set up an office in India within 6 months, says Founder Jimmy Wales in Mumbai
Monday November 01, 2010 , 3 min Read
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, was in India last evening, to share Wikipedia`s expansion plan in India. This was Jimmy’s third visit to Mumbai. He spoke to a large audience at Sophia College last evening and shared his India visions. Arun Ramrathnam, President Wikipedia India Chapter, who is based out of Bangalore, was also present on the occasion.
Excerpts of the talk by Jimmy Wales -
Why India?
India is one of the few countries with Wikipedia usage less than 15%. There are millions of people online in India but English is not their primary language. There is going to be several hundreds of people in 10 years from now who cannot read or write English but if we start contributing to the content today on local languages, we are looking at a very large audience in 5 years from now.
Where are we today in India?
Some of the interesting number which will give you an overview of where we are today in India -
Number of Internet Users 81M
Share of Global Internet Users 4.7%
Page views per month 191M
Share of Global Page Views 1.5%
Page edits per month 90K
Share of page edits 1.3%
(as on July 2010)
What is you dream for Wikipedia?
The Dream of Free Knowledge for All. Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum total of all human knowledge – that’s what we are doing.
Define the users by numbers?
402, 000, 000 people read Wikipedia every month and there are 250 different language versions of Wikipedia. Surprisingly, 87% of the Wikipedia users worldwide are male and that’s what we want to change and the average age of the users is 26 which is fairly a young crowd.
What are some of the project for Wikipedia?
We are looking at setting up University Clubs; regular meet ups, press conferences, organizing writing contests etc to name a few to encourage the Wikipedia projects in India.
Wikipedia`s 2015 Goals for India?
Wikipedia aims to build a strong and healthy India readership and India based projects with some of these milestones :
- Top 10 Indian languages have mature Wikipedia( more than 100K substantial articles) and Wiktionary available enabling potential reach to 80% of Indian population
- 100M unique visitors every month to Wikipedia Projects
- More than 75% of schools in India have access to Wikipedia and Wiktionary both online and offline
- Top 10 projects maintain/sustain positive monthly growth
Views from the sidelines by Samridhi Sharma, Mumbai
