DUSHANBE, May 15, 2013, Asia-Plus  -- Wikipedia has reportedly given an official permission to open its version in Shughni language.

Bektour Iskender, the editor of the news online portal, Kloop.kg , wrote on his blog that he had made a request to Wikipedia for permission to open its version in Shughni language.

According to him, an opportunity to revive the writing of an endangered language due to Internet has encouraged him to apply to Wikipedia for permission to open its version in Shughni language.

“Two and half years ago I was in Khorog and I fell in love with the Pamirs.  That time, together with participants of my Khorog training on Internet tools I made a request to Wikipedia for permission to open its version in Shughni language.  Over the next two years, I have repeatedly met with Pamiris living in Bishkek but nobody of them has got down seriously to popularizing Shughni language in Internet,” Iskender writes on his blog.

Shughni is one of the Pamir languages of the Southeastern Iranian language group. Its distribution is in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) in Tajikistan and Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan.

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.  Wikipedia''s 26 million articles in 286 languages, including over 4.2 million in the English Wikipedia, are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.  It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.  Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, which is a portmanteau of wiki (a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclo pedia .  Wikipedia''s departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the presence of a large body of unacademic content have received extensive attention in print media.  In 2006, Time magazine recognized Wikipedia''s participation in the rapid growth of online collaboration and interaction by millions of people around the world, in addition to YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.  Wikipedia has also been praised as a news source due to articles related to breaking news often being rapidly updated.