As a New Year resolution, I have started working on Wikipedia in my mother tongue, Wikipedia Marathi. I had been on it at least for the last three and a half years,[1] but was so disappointed with its quality and so fascinated with that of English Wikipedia, that I had hardly troubled myself to even check what was going on there. I spend almost a year and a half on English version at first doing small edits and then making some encyclopedia-worthy articles and working on DYKs. [2] As I was editing, I had been learning the style of editing and other technical issues on Wikipedia.
Suddenly came a thought to my mind, when I was working on the article about David Diop for ghalibana, that I must write this article for Wikipedia and I created it in both English and then in Marathi version of wiki. Going through this process, once again I felt very pathetic about the quality of most of the articles on Marathi Wikipedia, and I felt I have no right to think like this unless I do not put my full efforts to make it worthy to the position where it should be. And I resolved to devote my maximum efforts to Marathi wiki and started once again working on it.
Marathi version of Wikipedia in not a tiny one in comparison with the scores of others. It is at the 58th position in the list having about 30,000[3] articles (this count is nowhere as compared with the English version, but it still is a significant number). It has a large number of registered users, but the fact is only a few, not more than 20 or 30, are able to contribute on a regular basis and to involve in the management process, which severely hampers its quality.
Now we have started a project there to create at least 2500 wiki-worthy articles in 2010. Starting only with three members, we hope we can find a few more who think in the same way as we do and who can find some time to build a great reference source in our beloved mother tongue. Let us hope the best.
Footnotes:
1. I joined Marathi Wikipedia on February 01, 2006.
2. I had created five 'Did You Know?' articles last year.
3. It has 26,133 articles currently (January 09, 2010).
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Thank you very much for your sincere interest in Ghalibana. Your feedbacks and comments are important. You can tweet me @ganeshdhamodkar for quick reply.