Wikipedia is arguably the world’s largest, and most complete encyclopedia, all the more impressive as its fully crowd-sourced by volunteers with a passion to detail the world’s knowledge. However, Wikipedia has a serious flaw. Because it is crowd-sourced, its really only complete where there is a crowd interested in adding information.
Let’s look at the number of articles per language, juxtaposed against the world’s population that speaks that language:
| Language | Articles | Population |
| English | 4,413,036 | 365 million |
| Dutch | 1,715,221 | 22 million |
| German | 1,669,864 | 92 million |
| Chinese | 742,005 | 935 million |
| Hindi | 109,404 | 295 million |
| Telugu | 54,490 | 74 million |
| Marathi | 39,722 | 73 million |
| Assamese | 2,663 | 17 million |
Do you notice anything amiss? Like how few articles are in languages other than English, regardless of population? Or how amazingly few are in four languages of India? That latter point has inspired the government of India to ask the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing to build Vikaspedia, a knowledge portal to reach the ‘un-reached’ communities of India, especially the poor, to make a difference in their social development.
Vikaspedia is starting in five local languages – Hindi, Assamese, Marathi, Telugu and English – and it will will eventually expand to 22 Indian languages. Though unlike the actual Wikipedia, it only has information on health, agriculture, education, social welfare, energy and e-governance, and curiously, isn’t running on actual wiki software, but on Plone, though you can register to contribute.
