For 22-year-old Raju
Jangid, his mother tongue Hindi is the biggest passion, so much so he chose to give up his profession as
a carpenter and instead turn into a Wikipedia editor.
According to reports, Jangid has edited 57,000 pages on Wikipedia using his humble old mobile’s keypad and has written 1,800 articles.
YesPunjab/Twitter
Wikipedia in 2016 gifted him a laptop and a free internet
connection. Since then, there has been no looking back, and he has been
curating cyber content of high quality and attending many cyber conferences as
a Wikipedia editor.
Carpenter-turned Wikipedia editor is Raju Jangid (22), hails from a small Jodhpur village, Thadiya and comes from a Suthar
background with his family engaged in the carpentry profession.
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“The only reason I typed these articles on Wikipedia
was that I could not find anything informative about my village in Hindi on its
website,” Jangid told IANS.
“The purpose of contributing on Hindi Wikipedia was to
help those people who were searching for something of their use in the Hindi
language. There are many pages on Wikipedia in other languages, however, not
many articles are available on Hindi Wikipedia as it should have been.”
“Hence, besides working as a carpenter for 10-12 hours,
I started writing and editing the Wikipedia pages as and when I got spare time
using my mobile. I wondered that at a time when Hindi is the most spoken
language in India, there should have been more information on Wikipedia in this
language too,” he said.
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Jangid says, “With my basic phone model, Samsung s5610,
it was difficult to type, but I wanted the information on my village to be
shared with people. Hence I collected information on my tehsil when I was in
Class 8 and that was the starting point,” he said.
Jangid was a school dropout who left education after
passing Class 10. In 2015, he started writing for Wikipedia and simultaneously
appeared for private exams of Class 12 and then for his BA exam too.
Unsplash
Now 22, he has so far edited more than 57,000 edits and
created more than 1,800 articles on Wikipedia to become an experienced cyber
editor in the present date.
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Raju presently is working for Wiki Swastha, a special
project of Wikipedia where he is putting in information on health-related
articles. Also, he has participated in many conventions of Wikipedia in India.
Reuters
He is now busy
updating information on cricket as this is his favourite game. “I have
launched the WikiCricket Project in Hindi and have written over 700 articles on
the same. There are very few articles in Hindi on cricket and, hence this
project is quite important too,” he added.
There are a total of 341 million Hindi-speaking people,
however, around 1.4 lakh pages are available in Hindi on Wikipedia with limited
active writers which count to around 1,100. “Hence, I think we need to
work more strongly in this domain,” he averred.
Wikipedia is a volunteer-crafted encyclopedia, and editors
who take up the task themselves play a crucial role in keeping this product
running. Wikipedia, mainly due to its English and other better-established
language versions, is the sixth most visited site in the world.
All Inputs IANS