At the very beginning of the year, editors on Bangla Wikipedia were found busy editing science-related articles. From 30 December 2024 to 5 January 2025, the Jagadish Chandra Bose Science Editathon 2024 was held on Bangla Wikipedia, organised by Anandomoy Biggan Jogot (ABJ in short), a non-Wikimedia Science Club based in Munshiganj, Bangladesh.
The club’s aim to expand science-related content in the Bangla language on the internet to facilitate science students aligned well with the goal of Bangla Wikipedia to enrich its size on science-related content. The editathon was a tribute to Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, a prominent Bengali scientist of the 20th century from Munshiganj.
During the editathon, 60 articles were submitted by 30 participants within a span of a week. The main attraction of the editathon was that it engaged quite a large number of new users. Some of them joined Wikipedia within the week to participate in the contest. A whopping 40% of the users had on-wiki experience for less than a year; one-fourth of the accounts were less than 5 months old. Furthermore, a user from ABJ coordinated the editathon on-wiki with an experience of less than a week.
More than 71 thousand words were added to Bangla Wikipedia within a week during the contest, with an average of 1586 words added per article. Of the total words, more than 40% were added by users with less than a year of on-wiki experience. Only two female users participated in the contest; both of them had less than a year of experience. One of the female participants joined Bangla Wikipedia during the contest and solely worked to translate an editathon article.
With amazing passion shown from the Bangla Wikipedia community, especially from the newcomers, the organisers are looking forward to organising the second season of the editathon and are determined to make an impact on Wikipedia beyond the scopes of general editathons organised before.
What do you think about the initiative? Was the editathon really a success? Are you aware of any other science-themed editathons on different Wikipedias? Please drop the link to the landing pages of them below and mention the organizers if possible. We would love to connect and learn from them.
Can you help us translate this article?
In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?
Start translation