Wikipedia’s cultural mission in India

After moving to big cities, some preserve their culture through Wikipedia entries written in regional languages.

• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
When Subhashish Panigrahi moved to Bangalore, far from his hometown in Odisha in eastern India, it was Wikipedia that helped him keep in touch with his roots. He started writing articles on the arts, literature, food, and even tourist attractions in his home region on Odia Wikipedia, “odia” being the local language. Ditto for Bala Sundara Raman, from a southern Indian town, and his contribution to Tamil Wikipedia.

Mr. Panigrahi and Mr. Raman are a small part of a community of Indian “Wikipedians” who are using the website to document their culture. As they live in cities and work at jobs that require them to speak English, Wikipedia keeps them connected to their first language.

Wikipedians, all volunteers, also work to spread technical and scientific knowledge beyond the English-savvy minority of Internet users in India. Panigrahi recently joined the Wikimedia Foundation in New Delhi, the first Wikipedia office outside the United States, set up with the aim of increasing the quality and quantity of regional language content.

“This is much better than blogging,” says Panigrahi. “Everything is teamwork, and I have been able to encourage other young Odias to pitch in with their efforts.”

Get daily or weekly updates from CSMonitor.com delivered to your inbox. Sign up today.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Wikipedia’s cultural mission in India
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2012/0202/Wikipedia-s-cultural-mission-in-India
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe