Wikipedia Office - Efforts to locate at Chennai
N. Ganesan
Wikimedia to open office in India in six months
The company will build a small local team for the office, which will
help build content in regional languages
Surabhi Agarwal, surabh...@livemint.com
Wikimedia Foundation Inc., which runs Wikipedia and some other free
content websites, will open an office in India in about six months—its
only presence outside the US, chief global development officer Barry
Newstead said in an email interview.
Wikimedia will build a small local team for the office, which will
serve as a centre for the organisation’s growth plan for the “global
south”.
“We selected India as a priority for a number of reasons, including
the large number of Internet users coming online every day, the fact
that Wikipedia is already used actively, and the local community of
active volunteers is growing (here),” he said.
“We also see opportunities to develop global capabilities around
mobile and offline products, since India is at the forefront of
innovations in these areas,” he added.
India has about 80 million Internet users and this number is expected
to rise to 215 million by 2015, according to the department of
telecommunications (DoT).
Wikimedia’s decision to have an office in India came after a recent
open “planning process” with its community of volunteers, which
provided a five-year roadmap.
One of its top priorities is to grow readers and contributors in
India.
Newstead said the not-for-profit organisation wants to use India to
build small language projects.
Wikimedia is in the final stages of launching a Wikimedia India
chapter, which was approved in June. It will be the foundation’s 29th
chapter and will aim to co-ordinate various Indian language Wikipedias
and other Wikimedia project users living in or connected to the
country.
“This will be an aligned but independent organisation based in
Bangalore,” said Newstead, talking about the India chapter.
Journalist and film-maker Bishakha Datta, whom Wikimedia recently
named to its board of trustees, said there already are more than 20
Wikipedias in different Indian languages, though none has crossed
100,000 articles.
“The India office will support the India chapter, which will help
build content in regional languages so that Wikipedia can become the
first point of reference online for people who read, write and speak
in different Indian languages,” she said.
According to several estimates, only about 10% of India’s 1.1 billion
population knows English.
Newstead said of the more than 16 million articles in Wikipedia, 3
million are in English.
Though Hindi is spoken by 550 million people, there are only 59,000
articles in the language, he added.
“It is important to highlight the work required on local languages...
We hope to encourage Indians to join the Wikimedia movement, and focus
on creating knowledge resources that are truly a product of the local
language and culture,” Newstead said. “Ultimately, we imagine a world
with both amazing Indian content in English and amazing encyclopaedias
and other resources in languages that most Indians can read and
benefit from.”
Newstead plans to visit India this month to work on the modalities of
the India office and meet Wikimedia volunteers in the country.
Wikimedia Foundation is scouting for a national programme director for
its India office, likely to be located in Mumbai, Bangalore or Pune.
The India office, Newstead said, will be an important pilot for the
Wikimedia Foundation and help it determine its path for other global
work.
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Wikipedia aims to interact in top 10 Indian languages
Barry Newstead, who joined the executive management team of Wikimedia as chief global development officer in June 2010, will help to execute the strategic plan by increasing editor contributors and readership, especially from what it calls the Global South — countries in Asia (excluding Japan), Central and South America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia.
“The strategic plan has three goals: to strengthen the infrastructure by setting up a new data centre in the US and caching centres around the world, and simplifying the software for editors (volunteers who contribute content), strengthening the health of the community, and expanding the reach of Wikipedia,” said Mr Newstead, who is here to hunt for a national programme director for India.
Currently, Wikimedia has more readers and contributors in the Global North — US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Its editing community has also flattened out at about 96,000 active and 12,000 very active editors. “India is important to us because it is the fourth-largest country in terms of internet users. It has about 80 million internet users today and is among the fastest growing. In the next five years, it will be 150 million internet users,” said Mr Newstead, one of the 55 employees of Wikimedia.
Mr Newstead quit the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked for five years, to join The Bridgespan Group, a non-profit organisation, which was one of the two consultants Wikimedia hired to formulate its strategic plan that was largely a volunteer effort. Mr Newstead had the choice to stay in a corporate career and make a lot money, but he felt there were other measures of accomplishment and satisfaction. At The Bridgespan Group, he got so deeply involved in the strategic plan that he eventually moved on to Wikimedia to execute the plan and take full ownership of it.
“I’ve always had a passion for education and knowledge. I enjoyed the training I got in consulting, but it was a personal decision to spend my career working on important social issues,” he said. Mr Newstead’s position of chief global development as well as another position of chief community officer are both new and have been created for the strategy that will run through October 2015. For the first time, Wikimedia also recently hired a chief talent officer to oversee the human resources function.
Mr Newstead doesn’t view the hiring of staff or the strategic plan as being different from what Wikimedia has done in the past. “It is a continuation of the same philosophy of the movement and the spirit with which it was started,” he said. “We all have a similar vision. The backgrounds are different, but it is a common core.” The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to have a world in which every single human being can freely share the sum of all knowledge. In a sense, it embodies the original ideals of the internet — freedom and sharing of information.
“Our goal will be to have Wikipedia available in top 10 languages in India. For this, we have to overcome obstacles such as keyboards that are primarily available in English,” Mr Newstead said. About 1% of Wikipedia’s edits are from Indians. Making Wikipedia available on handsets, allowing photographs to be uploaded from handsets and even enabling edits on handsets is the next frontier for this mammoth effort sustained for almost a decade.
