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Bangla Wiki

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is now the largest encyclopedia in the world. The Bangla version of the wikipedia is evolving slowly since its inception in January 2006. BdOSN take this open content based encyclopedia to build the Bangla Encyclopedia. In Bangladesh, the main thrust sector in Open Content Development has been the development of the Bangla Wikipedia and the thrust was Bangla Wiki. The project aims at developing a free, open access encyclopedia in Bangla language.

The Bangla Wiki project is loosely organized using Internet based mailing lists and informal "Wiki Adda" at BdOSN office. Most of the participants are students in Bangladesh and West Bengal, or expatriates living in North America, Europe, and Japan. We are actively promoting Wikipedia and open content development activities in Bangladesh. Bangla Wiki has conducted several workshops to familiarize the new users with techniques and skills related to the project. To promote public awareness, Bangla Wiki organized rallies during the Bangla New Year, and also observed August 2006 as the "Bangla Wiki Month".

Bangla Wiki will set up an office in conjunction with BDOSN for people with limited Internet connectivity. Also, people from other regions of the country can send articles via postal mail, which is later added to Bangla Wikipedia by Bangla Wiki volunteers.

Besides articles, Bangla Wiki has also focused on creating a free repository of images and other multimedia content. As of October, 2006, more than 400 images on various topics have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons or GNU Free Documentation licenses.

Since its launch in late March, 2006, the Bangla Wiki project has been extremely successful. Although the Bangla Wikipedia was initiated in 2004, it only had 540 articles till March 2006, with very little actual content. Initially, a target of 10,000 articles in one year was set. The project has been able to attract a large number of editors. As of October, 2005, the total registered editor count is 865. The number of articles in the Bangla Wikipedia has grown initially at a rate of 800 articles per month, with occasional burst of activity raising the rate beyond that. As a result of these activities, the Bangla language Wikipedia crossed the 10,000 article mark in September 2006, becoming the 50th Wikipedia, and the 2nd language from South Asia to achieve this.

The project has also gained a lot of media coverage. Bangla language newspapers such as the Daily Prothom-Alo, Ittefaq, and Jai Jai Din have published articles focusing on the Bangla Wikipedia. BBC Bangla World Service broadcasted an interview of one of the organizers of the Bangla Wiki project on May 2. Yahoo! news and many other news organizations covered the 10,000 article milestone of Bangla Wikipedia.

Related Links

• Have a look at Bangla Wikipedia
• Tutorial for editing in Bangla wikipedia
• To join Bangla Wiki Group: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bangla_wiki/

Other Affairs

BdOSN signed MoU with Bangladesh TeleCentre Network

BdOSN and Bangladesh TeleCentre Network (BTN ) will work together to promote open source philosophy in grass root level. The volunteers of BdOSN will provide assistance to the members of BTN who wanted to run their centre with open source software. They will extend their cooperation to the grass root youth for developing skill for open content creation and distribution. BTN, through their network, promote users regarding software piracy and will create awareness among its members so that they can choose between different options of software. In this regard, BdOSN and BTN signed a MoU on 12th July 2008.

Dhaka, July 12, 2008 READMORE

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Anti Tobacco Campaign at BRAC University held

Every year 57,000 Bangladeshi had died and another 3,52,000 had become crippled because of Tobacco. Worldwide tobacco industries targeted the youth for expanding their market. The statistics shows that more of the youth who are habituated with tobacco stick to it than other age groups. So, it is very important to keep the youth free from tobacco. This call once again was uttered in the anti-tobacco campaign organized by BdOSN and BUSEF on 7th July 2008. Dr Zainab Ali, Director, Student Affairs of BRAC univerisity (BRACU) presided over the programme while Professor Jamilur Reza Chowdhury, Vice Chancellor, BRACU and Dr Mostafa Zaman, NPO, NCD, WHO and Mr Munir Hasan of BdOSN attended the meeting as guest of honour.

Dhaka, July 07, 2008 READMORE

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July Issue of Mukto Barta Published

The thitd issue of BdOSN's monthly bulletin just published. Check the publication section of this website.

Dhaka, July 07, 2008

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BdOSN Monthly Talk - Searching life in outer space:The Open approach

The form of life in outer space may be different, they may look like alien, may have a very big head compare to body or may have only head! Who knows? But if they are intelligent enough then they must know how to transmit and receive radio signal. This is the motto of the searching extraterrestrial intelligence in the SETI project. The open model of the SETI@Home project allowed people from different corner of the world to collaborate, to analyze the huge amount of data in a distributed computing environment. All the above were revealed in the monthly talk of BdOSN on 28th, June 2008. The talk was held in FREPD auditorium. Mr Omar Shehab and Ms Sabila Enun, both the core members of BdOSN delivered their talks on the open model of collaboration and computing.

Dhaka, June 28, 2008 READMORE