The Bengali Wikipedia, a web-based free-content multilingual encyclopaedia project, has crossed the landmark of 10,000 articles. It became the 50th language to do so and only the second from South Asia.

Telugu wikipedia is on the top spot with over 15,000 articles.

"Bengali is spoken by almost 220-250 million people, making it the seventh largest language in terms of total speakers," said Ragib Hasan, a student at the department of computer science in the University of Illinois.

"Bengali Wikipedia - http://bn.wikipedia.org - has seen a growth from 500 articles in March 2006 to 10,000 as of now," he said.

Ragib said there were now 20-25 active voluntary editors who edit Bengali Wikipedia on a regular basis.

"These editors are mainly from Bangladesh and from West Bengal (India). The Bangladesh Open Source Network (BDOsn) and the Bangla Wiki are mainly behind the project," he said.

"Both BDOsn and Bangla Wiki raised awareness, involved the media and recruited more editors to work on Bengali Wikipedia," he added.

Ragib said Bengali Wikipedia also plans an article improvement project, aiming at having at least 1,000 or more good articles (similar to English wikipedia) by May 2007.

In August, Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales said during an Indian tour that some Indian languages like Kannada and Bengali were seeing "fairly high" growth rates, over a small base.

Wikipedia - now among the top 20 most-visited sites worldwide - is an unusual venture that harnesses the work of worldwide volunteers to build a sharable and copyright-unencumbered field of knowledge. It tries to do so in diverse languages.

Wikipedia exists as a 'wiki' - a website that allows any visitor to freely edit its content, which can be accessed via wikipedia.org cyberhome.

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