Odia Wikipedia Touches Record Heights; How It Helped People During COVID-19

Wikipedia is one of the top websites globally in terms of visitor numbers. The online encyclopedia, written and maintained by a community of volunteers, has become popular due to the availability of well-sourced and reliable information in over 300 languages, the largest pool of linguistic content offered by any online content platform. Within India, there are about 20 Wikipedia language editions, where the Indian diaspora of volunteer editors contribute knowledge in their local languages.

Celebrating its 21st anniversary this year, Odia Wikipedia is one of the largest Indian-language Wikipedias. Volunteers provide detailed, accurate, and locally relevant information in their native language, especially during critical times and major events, such as the COVID-19 crisis, and the 2023 FIH Men’s Hockey World Championships in Bhubaneswar.

Odia Wikipedia’s readership has grown to a staggering 34 million views since its creation in 2002. A sharp spike in average monthly readership to two million unique views has catapulted Odia Wikipedia to new heights, and it is now helping to fill in language-based knowledge gaps on the internet. Praveen Das, Lead Partnerships Manager, South Asia at the Wikimedia Foundation, spoke with Chinamayee Mishra, and Sangram Keshari Senapati, two stellar volunteers within the Wikimedia Odia community to learn more about the growth of the site over the last few years.

Q: Can you shed some light on the rise of Odia Wikipedia’s readership and how the website became increasingly popular in Odisha since the pandemic?

Chinamayee: Wikipedia has been a key source of COVID-19 information for millions of people globally since the pandemic. Readers in Odisha often referred to Odia Wikipedia articles to update themselves on COVID-19-related symptoms, prevention, and treatment. Odia Wikipedia’s extensive coverage of COVID-19 and other topics led to an increased readership of about two million page views per month.

In other areas of information too, the platform has become a major source of credible information ranging from general knowledge to specific areas of interest. For example, we saw a lot of activity on the sports pages, especially hockey, where page views on international and domestic hockey players went as high as 50,000 during the 2023 Men’s FIH Hockey World Cup that took place in Bhubaneswar.

Sangram: The average monthly views on Odia Wikipedia before 2021 were about 800,000, but it rose to two million during the pandemic. This rise in the average monthly readership is a testimony to the site’s role in providing trustworthy information, especially during key current events.

Odia Wikipedia also provides a key opportunity for Odia-speaking people to build and share free and open knowledge and help record the culture, history, and relevant local information of their region on a global platform. Today, there are over 1,900 medical articles in Odia Wikipedia, making it the most comprehensive source of medical content in Odia on the internet. Some other topics which are widely covered on Odia Wikipedia include politics, literature, and cinema. There are more than 1,500 articles on politicians from Odisha and over 1,400 articles on Odia literature. Interestingly, Odia Wikipedia is the only online platform in Odia containing details of all released Odia language movies.

Q: How do you collaborate with other language communities?

Sangram: The Odia Wikipedia community often collaborates with other South Asian language Wikipedia communities as there are many pan-South Asian or pan-Indian events and contests throughout the year. We recently met members from more than 15 local language communities during Wikiconference India 2023, in Hyderabad – a volunteer conference that took place to promote collaboration and learnings among South Asian community members.

Odia Wikipedia also shares a close relationship with the Santali Wikipedia community members since 2014-2015, when they required technical assistance to release the Santali language edition of Wikipedia from its incubator phase. The collaboration grew over time after Santali Wikipedia went live in 2017. Moreover, many Santali Wikipedians have enriched content about Santal people and tribal culture on Odia Wikipedia, due to their fluency in Odia. They have even translated articles on other topics from Odia to Santali.

Q: What are some of the unique initiatives taken by the Odia Wikipedia community in recent times?

Sangram: There are many initiatives taken by individuals as well as by the community as a whole but let me share some key initiatives that come to my mind.

The Odia Wikimedia community has been instrumental in advocating for and helping the Government of Odisha to convert the license of a lot of their information into public and open licenses, helping Wikimedia contributors to use the content in their articles without any copyright issues. Odisha Government has also taken similar steps for some of their Twitter handles, allowing the Wikimedia community to use images uploaded on those handles to be re-used freely on Wikimedia projects. One Odia Wikimedian, Jnanaranjan Sahu has created a tool called ‘Twitter To Commons’ to help upload these images to Wikimedia Commons – a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos, and other media, in a time-efficient manner. Over 1,000 images have already been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons from these social media handles, and most are being used for Wikipedia articles. There have been ongoing and periodic releases of 17 websites, nearly two dozen dictionaries, and several social media handles which now publish content compatible with Wikimedia projects. The latest addition was the Chief Minister’s Dashboard, an aggregator of many dashboards of government initiatives providing live data on the implementation of beneficial plans for the public.

Chinamayee: In terms of events, the Odia Wikimedians User Group organised an in-person event parallel to Wikimedia’s global community conference, Wikimania in April this year. While many on-wiki campaigns, ‘Edit-a-thons’, and other events are helpful for growing content, in-person events have been helpful to brainstorm together as a community and to boost the morale of the volunteers.

I am also grateful for the experience of working with a diverse group of Wikimedia volunteers from other communities to organise Wikimedia conferences and events in India. We recently concluded Wiki Conference India 2023 (which was the first in-person Wikiconference in India since 2016), and I am now working with the global organising team for an upcoming international event, WikiWomen to be held in Delhi later this year.