Wikipedia talk:Meetup/Kolkata/Kolkata5

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Wikipedia meet up Kolkata 5 - A report
11 June, 2011. Kolkata.

A Wikipedia meet-up was held on June 11 at 77, Satish Mukherjee Road, Kolkata. The meeting was to acknowledge common people about Bengali Wikipedia. It was not a highly organized meeting and everyone could share their views and thoughts. It was a meeting of almost two hours duration. The Wikipedia meet-up was organized by mainly three persons: Jayanta Nath, Sujay Chatterjee and Kalyan Sarkar. Nath was the administrator and he explained various things to all the people present there. There ware almost eleven persons who attended the session including Nath. First of all, all the eleven persons introduced themselves, which was the introducing session. The next session was the explanation session and as Nath was the administrator, he only explained few things. First of all the point that was explained was ‘What is Wikipedia’. It is a site runs by Mediawiki software which people can share their views or write anything which is relevant. Wikipedia runs in 275 languages of the world and 20 languages in India. Wikipedia even launching another interesting language ‘Angika’. This is a language made by the mixture of Bhojpuri and Bhagalpuri. It has grown up near Bhagalpur, Bihar. Now, another topic has been discussed was ‘What is wiki?’ it was told by Nath that there is a big misconception among people between ‘Wikipedia’ and ‘wiki’. Both are different things. Wikipedia is a site runs by Mediawiki software where common people can share their views with relevant references but ‘wiki’ means ‘quick’, it is software which is used by all the other websites. Next comes the Wikimedia Foundation. It was introduced in the year 2003 at California. This is a non-profitable organization so that any common man can approach. Wikipedia is running from the year 2001. It has already been told that Wikipedia runs in 275 world languages but the most used language is English. Discussing the next topic was the Indian Wikipedia which was first launched in Punjabi language in the year 2002. The demand of Bengali Wikipedia is mainly in Bangladesh. It stands sixth among the Indian languages. The present condition of Bengali Wikipedia is not up to the mark. Only Bengalis can help to upgrade the Bengali Wikipedia. It is not possible for a Punjabi person to learn and gain knowledge about Bengali language and to write about it but a Bengali can do so. It was requested to the Bengalis to write something or at least edit anything which they think is incorrect. The first Indian Wikipedia meet-up was held in 2007 in Bangladesh and it was discussed that all the Bengalis should do something constructive to upgrade the Bengali Wikipedia. It has been estimated that within India and Bangladesh there are 350 million Bengalis and if every one can do a little work then a huge amount of work would be done on Bengali Wikipedia. The work of launching an online Bengali dictionary is at progress to enable all to know their respective languages in more detail. It was also discussed that a website bn.wikibooks.org is a website where anyone can write books and submit them, but writing anything irrelevant would not be accepted. The article as a whole may be deleted if a large group of people feels the same. The last topic discussed was the position of different languages that is used in Wikipedia. By this survey is was found at languages like Bhojpuri, Assamese, Bishnupriya and Pali is not in use and Wikipedia would soon to stop running on these particular languages. The last session of the meeting was the questioning session. If any one present there would leave any queries then they could ask each other or discuss among themselves. Discussing and questioning continued till 6.00 IST after that a group photograph had been taken by the Wikimedia commons photographer.

- Medha Ganguly (talk) 14:59, 18 June 2011 (UTC)