I was reading Daily Bhorer Kagoj today, where I read some news about Banglapedia (how it is being pirated). Anyway, a portion of the news was the announcement about the 2nd version of Banglapedia, to be published by 2008. The Asiatic Society gave an estimate of 6 crore taka.
Link to the news item (Requires IE and some non-unicode fonts to view :( )
I'm quite astonished at the huge amount of money being spent in that way. True, a paper encyclopedia needs a lot of expenses. The writers are paid ... the office staff need to be paid and so on.
That's why the power of open source is so great ... in only 3 months, we were able to create 3000 entries in the Bangla Wikipedia, with only 10 people working in our spare time. True, many of these entries aren't complete yet, but I just gave the example to show how the open source collaborative effort can achieve better results than committees and paid writers.
So, in Bangla wikipedia, we can have a target now ... to build a great Bangla encyclopedia, which can definitely rival Banglapedia. Of course, Banglapedia only covers topics related to BD, whereas Bangla wikipedia is going to be a complete encyclopedia, covering all areas of knowledge.
Let's get up to 10,000 articles by next year, as I predicted last may in the BBC interview. And best of all, our knowledge in Bangla wiki is going to be given away free for all the Bengali speaking people of the world!
Banglapedia publishers -- our great intellectuals of the Asiatic Society of BD -- lamented that Banglapedia is being pirated in West Bengal. Well, we don't mind at all if anyone gives away Bangla wikipedia ... after all, "if you give away knowledge, it grows, unlike money". The very essence of Open source is to share ... share our knowledge and contributions with the rest of the world.
Let us make this dream come true.
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2 comments:
ragib bhai...
i think more people should become involved in endeavours such as your regarding bangla wiki.But it is not happening.Just one Ragib hasan (and few others) cannot come up with something bigger.
wht about inspiring more people, with ideas and thoughts like you?
Well, I've been active in generating public awareness about this. My main technique has been to find out people with an active online presence, and encourage them. So far, this approach has netted several excellent contributors.
As you can see, just 10 active editors could create 3000 articles in 3 months. That's more than 33 articles per day! This is, of course, just the start. If 10 people can generate 3k articles, imagine what we could do with 30 - 50 -100 people.
Anyway, the media publicity is now being planned. We have a mailing list called bangla_wiki where we try to organize the effort.
I'm quite hopeful we'll get to our target for the first year : 10,000 articles.
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