Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Few hours of stay, longer period of inspiration

[archived]

Title ideas

• Few hours of stay, longer period of inspiration

Summary

A brief, one-paragraph summary of the post's content, about 20-80 words. On the blog, this will be shown in the chronological list of posts or in the featured post carousel on top, next to a "Read more" link.

• For over a decade, we the Bangladeshi wikipedians have been helping the expansion of Bangla Wikipedia with the entry of information about any topic. Besides, we are working on the Bangladesh related article in English wikipedia too. One of our dreams was to have the founder of this vast medium of knowledge, Jimmy Wales among us. The dream came true, when Jimmy joined the gala event jointly organized by Wikimedia Bangladesh and Grameen phone on 26th February, 2015. The occasion was to celebrate the decade of Bengali Wikipedia.

Body

For over a decade, we the Bangladeshi wikipedians have been helping the expansion of Bangla Wikipedia with the entry of information about any topic. Besides, we are working on the Bangladesh related article in English wikipedia too. One of our dreams was to have the founder of this vast medium of knowledge, Jimmy Wales among us. The dream came true, when Jimmy joined the gala event jointly organized by Wikimedia Bangladesh and Grameen phone on 26th February, 2015. The occasion was to celebrate the decade of Bengali Wikipedia.

Jimmy joined us in the midst of his very tight schedule and join us after 12 hours of long journey. On that morning while going to the hotel from the airport, I asked him what is one of his biggest challenges he is facing nowadays? Guess, what his answer?

- JetLag!

The idea of an encyclopedia isn't new to us. The first ever Bangla encyclopedia was written more than hundreds years. Even today, we have had the national flag carrier encyclopedia, the Banglapedia [1]. However, the idea of this collaborative platform where everyone can contribute to knowledge that is freely available to everyone is really new to us, Not only for us, it is new for the humanity too. As a nation we experienced the power of unity in 1952 and in 1971 when our forefathers fought for our language and the for our independence respectively. So, when we had learn the mission of wikipedia which is to create wikipedia so that every single person on the planet can have free access to the sum of all human knowledge, we jumped into the movement.

I reminisce about the year 2004, a young from Bangladesh named Hemayet started the Bangla Wikipedia by writing the first article named "বাংলাদেশ". Since then, the Bangla speaking community of the world is being building the largest internet based Bangla knowledge base for the humankind. However. in the early days, we don't have the Wikimedia Bangladesh. But, we didn't wait too. We are thankful to Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN) [2] to help wikipedians from March 2006 when we have only 550+ articles. The mobilization, awareness and capacity building by the Bangla wikipedians were greatly supported by BdOSN. In 2011, the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia Bangladesh has got approval from the foundation and took over the responsibility of the local enrichment and outreach programme in the country. Wikimedia Bangladesh is organizing seminar, workshop, meet-up, edit-a-thon etc on regular basis. With the immense and constant efforts from 77 thousand registered editor guided by 14 admin, Bangla wikipedia now have about 35 thousand articles. Our goal with Bangla wikipedia is not about the quantity but rather quality. Therefore a large quantity of our 35000 articles are actually very well written and curetted. However we still have a long journey ahead.

Last year we have gathered to plan our decade celebration. We have had planned several outreach programme, photo walk, edit-a-thon as well as workshops for new editor. The leading telecom operator, Grameen Phone, joined this endeavour and together we planned for contributor meet up and a content creation competition among the contributors. The gala event is organised for marking the finale of this contributors meet. As part of this initiative, representatives from Grameenphone and Wikimedia Bangladesh visited seven regions and ran sessions for students, providing practical guidance on how to edit Wikipedia and inspiring them to edit Wikipedia. Along with these there were sessions where Wikipedians informs the students about the Wikipedia show them how to use it and how it could be helpful for their studies. In all, 400 students participated in the competition, of which 21 from seven regions were recognized at the gala event. 10 of them were awarded certificates and top three were awarded with gifts for their contribution to enrich Bengali Wikipedia. At the very beginning we planned to arrange a two day long conference to celebrate the 10 year of Bengali Wikipedia. We invited the Wikipedians from home and abroad. We prepared a list of Wikipedians who will receive scholarship to attend the event. But due to the current political situation we had to modify our plan and pushed the conference date one month. The event date was announced and scheduled earlier with the guests, so we restructured the whole event.

The gala event started at 1pm with full house of audience. Mr Munir Hasan, president of Wikimedia Bangladesh delivered the speech and gave an overview of the journey of Bengali Wikipedia. There were ups and downs and the strategies to took earlier to enright the Wikipedia. Like at the very beginning we thought the total number of articles should be increased and act that way. After reaching a certain a certain number we thought that we should focus on the quality. And that is what we are doing still now.

In his speech Grameenphone CMO Allan Bonke told, “To create more Internet users we need to not only work on the development of relevant content, but learn to provide this content in the language that makes sense to the majority of the people in the country,” .

After that, Jimmy wales gave a key-note address titled "Access to Knowledge: The Wikipedia approach". Jimmy shared the mission, vision and experience of wikipedia in last 14 years. Wikipedia Founder said, “Wikipedia was created so that every single person on the planet can have free access to the sum of all human knowledge. We must grab every opportunity to take down any barriers to accessing knowledge, whatever that might be such as affordability, language or creating content that people need. It gives me huge pleasure to be part of the 10 year celebrations of Bengali Wikipedia, and to celebrate the amazing efforts of so many people - Wikipedians, Grameenphone and Wikimedia Bangladesh - to increase access to knowledge for everybody. He also mentioned that based on the article depth hierarchy Bengali Wikipedia in on number three just after the English and Macedonian Wikimedia.

After his speech, momentos were handed over to him and the top three contributors of the nation wide contributors meets were awarded with gift. The gala session ended with a photo session.

Later in the afternoon, Jimmy participated a panel discussion where the topic was ‘Internet for all = Access to knowledge for all’. Jimmy along with the other panelist discuss the barrier of the access to knowledge in a country like Bangladesh.

In the evening, before his departure, Jimmy set with the Bengali wikipedians and discussed various issues.

Jimmy concluded his speech by quoting a famous poet of Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth.

We are very happy and hope the inspiration he gave us, will drive us to accomplish our goal in coming days. We will continue our struggle to make the knowledge free for all

...

• Munir Hasan, President, Wikimedia Bangladesh
• Nasir Khan Saikat, Executive Member, Wikimedia Bangladesh

Notes

Ideas for social media messages promoting the published post:

Twitter (@wikimedia/@wikipedia):

(Tweet text goes here - max 117 characters)
---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|------/

Facebook/Google+

• ...

-->