Will young India take to editing Wikipedia?

At the age of 10, Srikant Kedia began inserting his name into Wikipedia articles as a prank, leading to several of his accounts being blocked. However, a year ago, Kedia turned into a serious Wikipedian after finding that he could make contributions to Wikipedia in Oriya — his first language. “Now, I am part of the sum of all human knowledge,” gushed the 18-year-old college student from Cuttack.

At the upcoming WikiConference in Mumbai, Wikipedians from across the country will come together to chart out an action plan for the future of the user-generated online encyclopaedia in India. And they hope that the youth will play a major role.

Computer savvy, with plenty of time on their hands and a direct involvement in the sphere of knowledge and education, students are ideal candidates for a project like Wikipedia, which is completely volunteer-driven.

Srikant Ramakrishnan, a 19-year-old computer science student in Coimbatore, began editing on Wikipedia when he was 13. He now has 10,000 edits on English Wikipedia.

With endless access to knowledge that is constantly evolving and the thrill of contributing to something that will be of use to others, these bright youngsters have discovered that Wikipedia can be just as addictive as Facebook. Take the case of Surya Prakash, 18, the youngest administrator on Tamil Wikipedia. He admits to spending most of his holidays and free time at his campus browsing centre. Instead of status updates, he borrows his friends’ laptops to make an urgent edit or to update pages. And in Kozhikode, Kerala, Netha Hussain, a 20-year-old medical student, likes chatting with her friends as they make improvements on the same Wikipedia article and compare notes.

But what would drive a young person to contribute to something that is anonymous in nature and with no monetary gain? “Wikipedia has helped me understand concepts in medicine. Whenever I notice an insufficiency in a medicine-related article, I look up authentic websites/books and edit that article. So I’m learning while editing,” said Hussain.

Prakash, who did his schooling in Tamil, said, “Having conversations with foreigners has helped me develop my English. I’ve learned how to write professionally. I have also picked up skills on how to convince and bargain with people,” he said, referring to the extensive dialogue that goes on in the back-end of every Wikipedia page whenever an addition or edit is brought to question.