Punjabi Wiki Loves Journey
Three Punjabi Wikipedians, Charan Gill, Parveer Grewal and I started on a journey to Ludhiana city on 28 May 2015. We were invited to give a Presentation on Punjabi Wikipedia in 3rd All India Conference for Linguists, Language and Folklore held on 28-29 May 2015 at Punjabi Agricultural University, Ludhiana. We attended the introductory session of the Conference and then left the University premises with Jay Pee (User:Journojp), an editor based in Ludhiana.
With Jay Pee we went to Swarnjit Savi’s workplace named ArtCave. We told him about the Wikipedia project and helped him in creating his account and make some initial edits as well. He has a lot of photographs of Punjabi people and agreed upon uploading them to Commons. He uploaded an image of en:Amrita Chaudhry and then added it to the article about her in English Wikipedia.
Then, the four of us went to Punjabi poet Jaswant Zafar’s place. We discussed our project with him and helped him in creating his account (User:Jaswant Zafar). We taught him basic editing and creating new articles. He created his first article about his maternal village, Sanghe Khalsa, on Punjabi Wikipedia. Thereafter he improved some other village articles as well. He also promised to motivate more and more people to edit Wikipedia.
Zafar joined four of us and we went back to Savi’s workplace. Amarjit Grewal joined us there as well. There we had a group discussion about Wikipedia. Questions like why working on Punjabi Wikipedia is important were raised. Amarjit Grewal answered this question by raising another question whether Knowledge is Universal or Contextual? I told them about the vastness of Wikipedia and how English Wikipedia is 100 times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica. Amarjit Grewal, who is a director of a group of colleges, showed his interest in organizing workshops at his colleges. We discussed other Wikimedia projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource as well. That ended the Discussion about Wiki for the day.
The next day began with creating an account of Parvez Singh, who is the son of a friend of Charan Gill’s. Parvez was taught to create a new article. He started the article about Culture of Mexico, which became the 17,000th article on Punjabi Wikipedia.
The 3 of us, who started the journey from Patiala, then went to eminent Punjabi poet Surjit Patar’s residence. We talked about many projects such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikisource. We helped him in creating his account and showed him a few pages on Wikipedia and sister projects. He realized the important of Wikidata as well. We discussed the immense of possibility of the Wiki Movement and he agreed to help us in any way possible.
After this the three of us went to the conference, where Jay Pee was also present. Charan Gill gave his lecture about Wikipedia Movement and Punjabi Wikipedia with the help of a Powerpoint Presentation, which was attended by about a 100 people.
Then three of us started our journey back while Jay Pee joined us well. Things like creation of a User group of Wikimedians based in Punjab and organizing a WikiConference were discussed. In all it was a fruitful journey and we hope that Ludhiana community will grow at a faster pace now.