The Hindi Wikipedia ( , ) is the Modern Standard Hindi edition of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

. It was launched in July 2003. As of , it has articles, and ranks 10th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. In October 2021, there were 72 million page views. It is the first Wikipedia to be written in a variety of Hindustani, followed by the

Urdu Wikipedia Urdu Wikipedia ( ur, ), started in January 2004, is the Urdu language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. As of , it has articles, registered users and files, and it is the largest edition of Wikipedia by article co ...

, launched in January 2004. On 30 August 2011, the Hindi Wikipedia became the first South Asian-language Wikipedia to surpass 100,000 articles. Hindi, using the

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

script, requires complex transliteration aids to be typed on devices. Thus, a Phonetic Roman Alphabet converter is also available on the Hindi Wikipedia, so the Roman keyboard can be used to contribute in Hindi, without having to use any special Hindi-typing software. Hindi Wikipedia is the second most popular Wikipedia in India after the

English version English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

. However, more than 85% of Wikipedia pageviews from India are to the English Wikipedia. Between January 2016 and January 2021 the share of Hindi Wikipedia increased from 2% to 8%. On average, the Hindi Wikipedia receives 50 to 70 million monthly pageviews as of December 2022, mostly from India. Hindi fell from 15.2 thousand active users in 2020 to 12.2 thousand in 2021. In 2022 the decrease in the number of users with at least one edit in this year continued, although the pace of the decrease was much lower. In the last four months of 2022 the number of active users in Hindi began to grow again and in 2023 the number of active users began to record noticeable growth, nearing the 2020 levels.

Features

Despite the fact that Hindi has 440 to 620 million speakers, based on the

2011 Census of India The 2011 Census of India or the 15th Indian Census was conducted in two phases, house listing and population enumeration. The House listing phase began on 1 April 2010 and involved the collection of information about all buildings. Information ...

(the number depends on which definition we take), Hindi Wikipedia has a very low ratio of articles to its number of speakers. Poverty, lack of awareness and lack of internet access are among the reasons for this. Based on research published by the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

in 2018, only 32% of internet users in

Madhya Pradesh Madhya Pradesh (, ; meaning 'central province') is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal, and the largest city is Indore, with Jabalpur, Ujjain, Gwalior, Sagar, and Rewa being the other major cities. Madhya Pradesh is the seco ...

have heard of Wikipedia. Many Hindi speakers with

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

use

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is, along with the Simple English Wikipedia, one of two English-language editions of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was founded on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition, and, as of , has the most arti ...

instead. Given the great geographic spread of the Hindi language, the contributors to the Hindi project live in various areas around the country. There are also prolific users whose native language is not Hindi, as Hindi is a government language in India alongside English. A distinct trend that is observed in Hindi is that for many years, apart from a few dedicated contributors, the composition of the editors in Hindi Wikipedia changes often. Despite this, Hindi has more active users than any other Indic language. Hindi Wikipedians have organised the WikiSammelan conference, with assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to bring the Hindi Wikipedians together. According to a 2017 research, the readers of Hindi Wikipedia are motivated to read Hindi-language content more as a part of intrinsic learning, similarly to

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

Attempted state support

In September 2019, the Ministry of Science and Technology of India announced a plan to translate articles about science from English to Hindi and other Indian languages. However, the plan was not proceeded with.

Google Translator Toolkit usage

The Hindi Wikipedia was launched on 11 July 2003. In July 2008,

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announced that they had been working with Hindi Wikipedians to translate English language articles into Hindi and had since 2008 translated 600,000 words in Hindi using a combination of

Google Translate Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an API ...

and manual checking. This coordinated translation contributed to growth for the site.Wikipedia statistics
Retrieved on 29 October 2013.

Users and editors

Differences from the Urdu Wikipedia

Hindi and

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' standardized registers of the

Hindustani language Hindustani (; Devanagari: , * * * * ; Perso-Arabic: , , ) is the '' lingua franca'' of Northern and Central India and Pakistan. Hindustani is a pluricentric language with two standard registers, known as Hindi and Urdu. Thus, the lang ...

. The differences between Hindi and

in-terms of the content's language is majorly in their

writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable fo ...

s and the

literary language A literary language is the form (register) of a language used in written literature, which can be either a nonstandard dialect or a standardized variety of the language. Literary language sometimes is noticeably different from the spoken langua ...

from which each of the

variety Variety may refer to: Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats * Variety (radio) * Variety show, in theater and television Films * ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont * ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...

derive their non-colloquial vocabulary from. Hindi is written in the standardized-

Devanagari alphabet Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...

of the

Nagari script Nagari may refer to: Writing systems * Nāgarī script, a script used in India during the first millennium * Devanagari, a script used since the late first millennium and currently in widespread use for the languages of northern India * Nandinag ...

and derives significant amount of formal vocabulary from

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

majorly in

tatsama Tatsama ( sa, तत्सम , lit. 'same as that') are Sanskrit loanwords in modern Indo-Aryan languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Hindi, Gujarati, and Sinhala and in Dravidian languages like Malayalam and Telugu. They ...

form. Urdu is written in Nastaliq-style of the

Perso-Arabic alphabet The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran (Western Persian) and Afghanistan ( Dari Persian) since the 7th cent ...

and derives significant amount of formal vocabulary from

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

and to a lesser extent from Turkish.

References

External links

Website of Hindi WikipediaWebsite of Wikipedia
{{Wikipedias

Internet properties established in 2003 Languages on Wikipedia Wikipedias by language Wikipedia in India