About Us
Contents |
Formal launch of this site: late 2013 or early 2014
This is an amateur,hobby archive of clippings from newspapers and magazines.Each clipping waits to be converted into an encyclopaedia article, alone or in combination with other clippings on the same subject.
The formal launch of this site will take place only once we have at least 6,000 articles.
At present we are adding two or three new articles everyday, and adding details to one or two existing articles every week. At this very slow pace the formal launch is unlikely before late 2013 or early 2014.
The contents
Parvez Dewan had, since 1987, been collecting materials for a Britannica-style physical encyclopaedia for India. Every weekday he would add five or six newspaper clippings to already bulging file folders, arranged in the alphabetical order according to the subject; on weekends the number would be five times as many.
By 2006, most of the clippings were electronic files (instead of paper clippings) put into MS Word directories (instead of paper folders.
The collaboration
On the 8th November 2008 Neelotpal Mishra and Parvez met in Beijing on the first evening of their Oxford and Cambridge Society of India trip to China.
By then Wikipedia had totally re-written the rules of how encyclopaedias were compiled, published and read.
Over vegetarian noodles at a nondescript restaurant near the City Wall of Beijing, Neelotpal (Department of Computer Science, Oxford: 2008) very kindly offered to help Parvez out by creating a Wikipedia-style online platform for his archive. Parvez (Wolfson, Cambridge: 1987) was only too glad to accept.
Work on the software officially started on March 8, 2010. The ‘requirements gathering phase’ lasted till April 17, 2010.
The website http://www.indpaedia.com was registered on April 24, 2010.
The software team
Since April 1, 2010 many people tried to get actively involved in the creation of indpaedia.com. However, most had to leave due to a paucity of time.
Ms. Ekta Singh on 12 September 2010 created the installation guidelines for Media Wiki, the frame work that we finally adapted for Indpaedia.
On Nov 21, 2011 Dr. Ravi Prakash helped Neelotpal and Parvez by identifying a group of dedicated students who have since been working very hard to make this bring this project to fruition.
The first basic, functional prototype of this online archive is ready and is in the testing phase. The fully functional website is being developed by the students by taking out time from their busy and demanding academic schedule. (Parvez: ‘Listen, boys, don’t neglect your studies.’)
The students involved in the project under the able guidance of Mr. Vishwa Ranjan are:
| Name | Student ID |
|---|---|
| Saurabh Singh | 091124 |
| Dhiraj Pahilajani | 091299 |
| Vishesh Singh | 091427 |
We would like to express our sincerest gratitude to Prof. Ravi Prakash, Vice Chancellor, Jaypee University of Information Technology for his unstinted support to the project and the continuous motivation to his students to complete such a complex project.
Prof. Prakash’s web page can be viewed at http://www.juit.ac.in/University/vc.php
Our debt to Wikipedia and MediaWiki
Above all, we are grateful to Wikipedia for helping us save forests by creating the paperless model, and to MediaWiki for their open source software package on which indpaedia.com has been built.
