Together with the global communities, Wikimedia Bangladesh also organized a series of programs to mark Wikipeda's 15th anniversary. As part of the anniversary celebration, couple of events were organized that were hugely successful and appreciated by the local community. Good article contest, Good article edit-a-thon day and Wikipedia workshops for University students were notables events among them. Finally, a gala event was held on 15th January 2016 at Bishwo Shahitto Kendro in Dhaka to celebrate the special day.

On January 15th, 2016, Free encyclopedia — Wikipedia — completed its 15 years journey. To celebrate this special day, a good article writing competition was organized in Bangla Wikipedia by Wikimedia Bangladesh. Bangla Wikipedia has a total article count of 42,000+. Among these, only a handful of articles have been reviewed as good articles. In an attempt to enhance the content quality in the Bangla Wikipedia, the competition was organized which aimed at increasing the number of good articles. The competition continued from 1st of November 2015 to 10th of January 2016. The events received press coverage from around the country, including newspapers like Prothom Alo and The Daily Star.

In this contest, Bangla Wikipedians have fully translated about 600 good articles from English Wikipedia. A total of 550 Bengali speaking registered users from Bangladesh, India, Italy and South Korea participated in this two months long competition and 130 of them were awarded Wikipedia Badge, wristband, USB flash drive and T-shirts by Wikimedia Bangladesh. A reviewer panel comprising 35 experienced and regular users evaluated the translated articles. Among all the participants of the competition, 86% were new in Wikipedia and contributed for the first time, 14% were frequent editors and 12% were female editors. This contest has increased the number of good quality articles in Bangla Wikipedia and, at the same time, engaged a huge number of new users in Wikipedia through this contest. S.M. Monir created the highest number of articles and was awarded the first prize, a bicycle, and a certificate in the 15th year celebration program.

Good article edit-a-thon day was another event of this series of programs. Five edit-a-thons were organized in three different cities, which are - Dhaka, Sylhet and Chittagong division. The aim of the edita-thons was to increase the number of good articles in Bangla Wikipedia. As a result of these edita-thons, the number of good articles are increased from 14 to 60. Besides those events, Wikipedia Workshop were held in three different Universities of Bangladesh. On an average, about 50 students attended in each workshop. The main goal of the workshops was to create awareness about Wikimedia projects. Another goal was to introduce Wikipedia (especially Bangla Wikipedia) to the audience and show the attendees how to edit the articles and contribute photographs to Wikimedia Commons.
The series programs ended on 15th January 2016 at Bishwo Shahitto Kendro in Dhaka through the celebration of Wikipedia's birthday. Noted filmmaker Mostofa Sarwar Farooki was present at the program as a special guest.

* Event details in Bangla Wikipedia

* See Photos on Wikimedia Commons

Nahid Sultan, Secretary,
Wikimedia Bangladesh

Greetings! With about 250 million native and about 300 million total speakers worldwide, Bangla is the seventh most spoken language in the world by total number of native speakers and the eleventh most spoken language by total number of speakers. It is the only language in the world which is achieved by a language movement; people sacrificed their lives for the right to read, write, and speak the language Bangla. Building an encyclopedia in this language was unavoidable.

Bangla Wikipedia started its journey in January 2004. Back then, the people of Bangladesh had a little interest in Wikipedia. A few students and scholars used the English Wikipedia, but it was not accountable. Besides that, there were various difficulties contributing in Bangla. One of the pioneer of the Bangla Wikipedia, Dr. Ragib Hasan, said that “the biggest challenge was writing something on internet in Bangla. The Bangla Unicode was not supported on most operating systems, only few websites on the internet supported Bangla Unicode, and users had difficulties configuring it. Moreover, the idea of writing something with Bangla Unicode was new. … in the beginning, the idea of a Wikipedia in Bangla was not actually workable.”

The whole scenario has been changed in 2006. During that time, the Bangla blogging world was growing slowly, and many people became accustomed to Bangla computing—thanks in part to a free and open-source Bangla typing tool, Avro. On March 25, 2006, a Wiki team was created by the Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN) to popularize Wikipedia through out the country. The aim was to represent the country to the world through Wikipedia and build a complete encyclopedia in Bangla. At that time, Bangla Wikipedia had only 500 articles. But the ‘BdOSN wiki team’ was not alone. They managed to spread the word through some newspapers and start a Bangla Wiki mailing list. Soon, many Bangla-peaking people from home and abroad joined them in this dynamic project. As a result, by theend of the October, Bangla Wikipedia got to 10,000 articles. Among the South Asian language Wikipedias, Bangla Wikipedia reached that milestone first, and many of these articles were illustrated with photos from the demonstrator of Bengali Language Movement Dr. Rafiqul Islam, who donated all his historical photographs taken during the language movement to Wikimedia Commons.

The community now began increasing the quality of their articles. Between 2009 and 2010, Bangla speakers from West Bengal, India also started to contribute to Bangla Wikipedia. In the meantime, the Wikimedia Foundation started their operations and in October 2011 a ‘local chapter was approved in Bangladesh by the Foundation to promote educational content in Bangla.

Now, Bangla Wikipedia has more than 38,000 articles on various topics with over 500 active editors per month. People from around the country now regularly arrange workshops and meet-up with active Wikipedians.

On February 26, 2015, Jimmy Wales—the founder of Wikipedia—visited Bangladesh for a celebration programme that was organized to mark the tenth year of Bangla Wikipedia, a great motivation for Bangla Wikipedia community. In his keynote, Jimmy said that according to the article depth, Bangla Wikipedia is rated quite well. It may also be noted that Bangla Wikipedians from Kolkata, India arranged a similar event, and both of the events were attended by Wikipedians from both sides.

Written by,

Nahid Sultan and Nurunnaby Chowdhury (Hasive)

Administrators, Bengali Wikipedia

* Originally published on Wikimedia Blog on November 10, 2015.