The Hindi Wikipedia () is

Modern Standard Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of the Government of India, alongside English, and is the ' ...

edition of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

. It was launched in July 2003. As of , it has articles, and ranks 10th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. In December 2023, there were 91 million page views. It is the first Wikipedia to be written in a variety of

Hindustani Hindustani may refer to: * something of, from, or related to Hindustan (another name of India) * Hindustani language, an Indo-Aryan language, with Hindi and Urdu being its two standard registers * Hindustani Muslims are the Urdu-speaking, Hindust ...

, followed by the

Urdu Wikipedia The Urdu Wikipedia (), started in January 2004, is the Standard 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 ar ...

, 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 ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

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. 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 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. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...

in 2018, only 32% of internet users in

Madhya Pradesh Madhya Pradesh (; ; ) is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal and the largest city is Indore, Indore. Other major cities includes Gwalior, Jabalpur, and Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, Sagar. Madhya Pradesh is the List of states and union te ...

have heard of Wikipedia. Many Hindi speakers with

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

use

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition. English Wikipedia is hosted alongside o ...

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 multilingualism, multilingual neural machine translation, neural machine translation service developed by Google to translation, translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a web applic ...

and manual checking. This coordinated translation contributed to growth for the site.

Users and editors

Differences from the Urdu Wikipedia

Hindi and

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

are considered to be standardized registers of the

Hindustani language Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in North India and Pakistan as the lingua franca of the region. It is also spoken by the Deccani people, Deccani-speaking community in the Deccan plateau. Hindustani is a pluricentric language w ...

. The differences between the Hindi and

in terms of the content language is mostly in their

writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

s and the

literary language Literary language is the Register (sociolinguistics), register of a language used when writing in a formal, academic writing, academic, or particularly polite tone; when speaking or writing in such a tone, it can also be known as formal language. ...

from which each

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), ...

derives its non-colloquial vocabulary. Hindi is written in the standardized

Devanagari alphabet Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ancient '' Brāhmī'' script. It is one of the official scripts of India and ...

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 * Nandina ...

and derives a significant amount of formal vocabulary from

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

, primarily in

tatsama Tatsama ( , 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 Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. They generally ...

form. Urdu is written in the

Nastaliq ''Nastaliq'' (; ; ), also Romanization of Persian, romanized as ''Nastaʿlīq'' or ''Nastaleeq'' (), is one of the main book hand, calligraphic hands used to write Arabic script and is used for some Indo-Iranian languages, predominantly Persi ...

-style of the and derives a significant amount of formal vocabulary from

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, and to a lesser extent from

Turkish Turkish may refer to: * Something related to Turkey ** Turkish language *** Turkish alphabet ** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation *** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey *** Turkish communities in the former Ottoman Empire * The w ...

References

External links

Website of Hindi WikipediaWebsite of Wikipedia
{{Wikipedias

Internet properties established in 2003 Wikipedias in Indo-Aryan languages Wikipedia in India