Friday, May 05, 2006

My BBC Interview

I recently have started promoting the Bangla wikipedia. Unlike the English one, there are still too few articles in bn-wiki. However, with some very energetic people in BD joining the effort, I believe we'd be able to achieve a great, balanced encyclopedia pretty soon.

What I like about wikipedia is its ability to combine the little bits of information into a vast continuum of knowledge. It reminds me of the saying, "if you spend money, it's gone. But if you donate knowledge, it grows".

Anyway, recently, The Daily Prothom Alo did an article on Wikipedia. The article, which can be found here, was by Munir Hasan, and it helped launch interest in bn-wiki ... to a great extent.

Somehow, BBC Bengali learnt about the movement, and became interested. So, this week, on May 1, they called me and took a 10 minute interview on what Wikipedia is, and how
the Bangla wiki is being developed. I spoke about the progress, and how we can advance the bits and pieces of information into a large repository of knowledge.

The interview was broadcast worldwide on May 2 evening. I felt so great!! After all, I grew up listening to BBC every evening in our old radio set. It is great to be myself a part of that. Luma was so happy!! And so were my parents and Luma's parents!

I hope we'd at least get up to 8,000 articles and at least 2000 good articles in bn-wiki by the end of the year.

2 comments:

; said...

heh heh... c'grats rana bhai...lots of c'grats. You should've posted an audio link to the interview in your blog. I don't usually listen to radio, but wouldn't have missed it if you were in their hotseat.... I've signed up for a wikipedia account too.. after the term final, there's gonna be a lot of editing if I'm up for it.

ps: Why have you made the commenting system only permeable to blogger users?? CAPTCHA can hold back non-blogger spammers, can't they?

; said...

ok...It was fun (the interview that is) :) Especially the part when you modestly said that most net users in BD doesn't know/are not inclined to take advantage of the services provided on the web...

But times are changing...although the day when everyone understands the grotesque nature of UNICODE or UTF-8 are wayyyyyyyyy...in the future.