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A small community of volunteers and free software enthusiasts slowly turned an under-resourced language project into a full fledged Konkani Wikipedia. Over more than a decade, their collaborations with local institutions, students, and fellow Wikimedians built a website and shared public resource for Konkani speakers. Along the way, they navigated questions of scripts, access, and responsibility, revealing what it takes to grow knowledge platforms for smaller Indian languages.
In the mid 2000s, a small group of free software enthusiasts in Goa thought of creating a Wikipedia in their language, Konkani. Konkani is spoken across the western coast of India with a variety of dialects across geographies and communities in Goa, Karnataka, and Kerala. “The efforts for getting a Konkani Wikipedia started somewhere in 2006,” recalls software engineer and volunteer with the Wikipedians of Goa group, Tanmay Pereira Naik.
The group was involved in improving the quality of articles and information on Goa in the English version of Wikipedia. “The Konkani Wikipedia was in incubator stage at the time.” Wikipedia incubators are the online nursery where new language projects are tested before they can become full Wikipedias.
Those early years were slow and almost entirely volunteer-driven. The Wikimedia Foundation approved Konkani as an incubator project sometime between 2009 and 2011, but the language still had to prove that it had enough content, community, and institutional backing to come out of incubation. A key breakthrough came when Goa University agreed to support the project and released its encyclopedia, the 'Konkani Vishwakosh'. “They released it under a Creative Commons license so it could be digitally reproduced anywhere, and now it is on Wikimedia’s WikiSource project as a book.”
University staff and students from the Konkani department took on the slow, unglamorous work of cleaning up and preparing the content for digital use. That combination of institutional support, open licensing, and volunteer labour finally persuaded the Wikimedia Foundation that Konkani Wikipedia was viable. In 2015, the project was promoted from incubator to a full language edition.
The language posed a challenge as it is written in multiple scripts: Devanagari, the Roman script, Kannada script, and also to an extent in Malayalam and Persian-Arabic. Instead of standardising a single script, the community decided to embrace all writing practices. Today, the project supports three scripts side by side. Editors can work in Devanagari, Romi, Kannada, and even Malayalam scripts. Tanmay adds that he has not seen a similar multi-script arrangement for other Indic language Wikipedias, although there are other multi-script editions like Serbian and Kazakh.
Alongside the Goan core of the 'Wikipedians of Goa', contributors from Mangalore and the wider Uttara Kannada became involved, aided by figures such as Harriet Silva Vidyasagar, and organisations like the World Konkani Centre. A separate project called Konkanverter was used to easily transliterate across scripts.
The roots of all this sit squarely in Goa’s free and open source software culture. Before Tanmay joined, local technology activists gathered under the banner of the Indian Linux Users Group, Goa chapter, known as ILUG Goa. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, this group ran Linux install fests where hardware retailers partnered with volunteers to sell computers preloaded with GNU/Linux instead of Windows, saving costs for buyers who might otherwise have found a new machine unaffordable. “You could buy a computer from that retailer and then these volunteers would install Linux on it for free.” At the same time, global conversations around One Laptop Per Child and open hardware were in the air. Linux distributions began shipping with curated sets of offline Wikipedia articles, sometimes five or ten thousand at a time, which made the encyclopedia accessible even without an internet connection.
By 2017, Tanmay was invited by Frederick Noronha, who was running the group, to volunteer, as both a technical helper and an organiser. He was pulled into discussions with CIS‑A2K, an 'Access to Knowledge' program run by the Centre for Internet and Society and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. CIS‑A2K wanted to automate the process of importing entries from the Vishwakosh and Konkani dictionaries into Wikipedia and Wiktionary.
Where he left a clearer mark was at the grassroots level. During the Covid‑19 lockdowns, Tanmay launched 'Wikipedia Weekends', an online series that paired newcomers with more experienced editors over video calls. “That was the program that I started,” he says. “We used to all sit on a video call and take help from each other to edit Wikipedia articles.” He ran sessions on how to edit Wikipedia and how to upload photographs to Wikimedia Commons, and then followed up with more informal calls where participants could share screens and work on articles together.
Tanmay describes disagreements about what kind of content should be allowed, particularly around biographies of living people. “Some volunteers were very enthusiastic, so they put personal information of people there,” he says. That clashed with Wikipedia’s “biography of a living person” policy, which demands extra care and discourages controversial or unverified details. These frictions remind everyone involved that building a language Wikipedia is not only a technical task or a numbers game, it is also an ongoing negotiation around ethics and the responsibilities that come with turning a small language’s scattered print record into a living, editable public resource.
You can visit the Konkani edition of Wikipedia here.
