The Bengali Wikipedia or Bangla Wikipedia is the Bengali language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Launched on January 27, 2004, it surpassed 10,000 articles in October 2006, becoming the second South-Asian language to do so. In, total article crossed articles with active editors per month, and ranks among Wikipedias. In 2018, Bengali Wikipedia was viewed about 190 million times from all over the world. On an average, the site was viewed over 500 thousand times a day. As of June 2020, Bengali Wikipedia is the only online free encyclopedia written in Bengali language. It is also one of the largest Bengali content related sites on the internet. The mobile version of Bengali Wikipedia was launched in 2010. It also has a phonetic Latin alphabet to Bengali script tool so Latin alphabet keyboards can be used to type Bengali without downloading any software. Community-produced news publications include WikiBarta.
Early history
In February 2002, the developers started creating language-code based sub-domains for different language Wikipedias. Along with other Wikipedia sub-domains, Bengali language sub-domain was created at that time. A placeholder page was created automatically in that sub-domain on June 1, 2002. On December 9, 2003, A Bangladeshi Ph.D. student of Canada's McGill University named Shah Asaduzzaman emailed Wikipedia FounderJimmy Wales with a request to create Bengali Wikipedia. As a result, the developers created a test page on the Wikipedia named "Home Page" on December 26 of the same year. The Main Page of Bengali Wikipedia was created on January 27, 2004 from an IP address which marks the official beginning of Bengali Wikipedia. ':bn:বাংলা ভাষা|বাংলা ভাষা' is the first article of Bengali Wikipedia which was created on May 24, 2004.
History
Bengali Wikipedia started its journey on January 27, 2004. Back then, the Bengali-speaking population had a little interest in Wikipedia. A few students and scholars used the English Wikipedia, but it was not accountable. Besides that, there were various difficulties contributing in Bengali. The whole scenario has been changed in 2006. During that time, the Bengali blogging world was growing slowly, and many people became accustomed to Bengali computing where a free and open-source Bengali typing tool, Avro Keyboard played a key role. On March 25, 2006, a Wiki team was created by the ‘Bangladesh Open Source Network’ to popularize Wikipedia throughout the country. The aim was to represent Bengalis to the world through Wikipedia and build a complete encyclopedia in Bengali. At that time, Bengali Wikipedia had only 500 articles. ‘BdOSN wiki team’ managed to spread the word through some newspapers and start a Bengali Wiki mailing list. Soon, many Bengali-speaking people from Bangladesh, India and abroad joined them in this dynamic project. As a result, by the end of the October, Bengali Wikipedia got to 10,000 articles. Among the SouthAsian language Wikipedias, Bengali Wikipedia reached that milestone first, and many of these articles were illustrated with photos from the demonstrator of Bengali Language Movement Dr. Rafiqul Islam, who donated all his historical photographs taken during the language movement to Wikimedia Commons. One of the pioneer of the Bengali Wikipedia, Dr. Ragib Hasan said that Between 2009 and 2010, Bengali speakers from West Bengal, India also started to contribute to Bengali Wikipedia. In the meantime, the Wikimedia Foundation started their operations and on October 3, 2011 a local chapter named Wikimedia Bangladesh was approved in Bangladesh by the Foundation to promote educational content in Bengali. On February 26, 2015, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia—visited Bangladesh for a celebration program that was organized by Wikimedia Bangladesh to mark the tenth year of Bengali Wikipedia. In his keynote, Jimmy said that according to the article depth, Bengali Wikipedia is rated quite well. Bengali Wikipedia now has articles on various topics with active editors per month. As of January 2019, Bengali Wikipedia is the only online free encyclopedia written in Bengali language. It is also one of the largest Bengali content related sites on the internet.
Over the years, there have been confusion in Bangladeshi media regarding some information of Bengali Wikipedia. In April 2018, Bangladeshi print and electronic media reported that Wikipedia named Runa Laila, a renowned singer from Bangladesh, among its Top 30 Bengali people of all time. This confusion arises due to the use of a collage image in the Bengalis article's infobox at Bengali and English version of Wikipedia. In August of the same year, an unregistered user added fake date of death in Muhammed Zafar Iqbal's article, which also attracted media attention.
