London, Nov 20 (ANI): Wikipedia, the world's leading online encyclopedia, is hosting its first conference in India, which has been attended by over 700 'Wikimedians' on the first day of the event organized in Mumbai.
The three-day event is part of the website's plans to expand in the sub-continent.
Wikipedia wants to tap into India's growing Internet population, by creating more pages in local languages, such as Hindi, Marathi and Gujrati, the BBC reports.
The website has said that the conference is the one of the largest gatherings it has ever held.
Meanwhile, outside the campus of Mumbai University, where the conference is being held, a small group of protesters demonstrated against the depiction of the map of India on Wikipedia, saying it is an inaccurate and illegal representation of the country's borders.
The site's founder, Jimmy Wales, however, seemed unconcerned by the protests.
"I want Wikipedia to be neutral on such topics. It's not up to us to decide what's the correct map of India, but it is up to us to explain to people that there is this controversy," Wales said.
According to the report, Wikipedia, which started out a decade ago, is targeting India to take advantage of the country's growing number of internet users, currently around 100 million.
"It's an extremely important place for Wikipedia," said says Hisham Mundol from the Wikimedia Foundation.
"For starters there are a billion people out here and hundreds of millions of users are more comfortable thinking, dreaming, talking and counting in their mother tongues, so we need to really build the Indic language Wikipedia projects," Mundol added. (ANI)
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