Optional: write a lede — not necessarily a WP:LEAD. Interesting > encyclopedic.

When many senior academics in India dismissed Wikipedia from a distance, Prof. Madhav Gadgil chose a different path: he logged in, showed up, and promoted it with great conviction. A pioneering ecologist, public intellectual, and chair of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, Gadgil believed that knowledge about local resources including biodiversity, rivers, forests, should be collated and used by local communities and not sit behind distant institutional walls. Instead, he saw Wikimedia projects as living platforms for citizen science — places where local communities could document their environments, hold authorities accountable, and democratise ecological knowledge. Until his passing in January 2026 at the age of 83, he remained a rare figure of his stature who actively bridged professional science, grassroots activism and the open knowledge movement.

Prof. Madhav Gadgil passed away in January 2026 at the age of 83. A pioneering ecologist, he established ecology as an academic research area at the Indian Institute of Science where he founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences. He headed the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel which he handled through public consultations and conversations across the region. He received a Padma Shri in 1981, the Padma Bhushan (2006), and was awarded the United Nations Champions of the Earth (2024). He was co-recipient of the 2015 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

He engaged and corresponded with several Wikipedians and was particularly interested in efforts to improve ecological and scientific content in Indian languages. He participated in outreach workshops in several states including Maharashtra and Kerala. He advocated the re-licensing of scientific and environmental literature under free licences, released several of his own books under CC BY-SA for digitizing them on Wikisource, and supported digitisation initiatives that enriched Marathi Wikisource. A significant portion of his father's library (Dhananjay_Ramchandra_Gadgil) had been digitized and made available through the digital library of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. He also encouraged the use of public datasets, including census data, to improve village-related content on Indic-language Wikimedia projects which resulted improvement of 25,000 village articles on Telugu Wikipedia.

Subodh Kulkarni, his close associate in the environmental movement and later an active Marathi Wikimedian, has noted Gadgil’s sustained encouragement of and support for the Wikimedia movement in India.

"Madhav Gadgil was a pioneering advocate for knowledge democratization, championing the role of grassroots communities in open platforms like Wikimedia. He envisioned these projects as vital "Citizen Science" tools for documenting local environmental data, biodiversity, and traditional wisdom, such as folksongs and folktales. By recording observations on issues like illegal mining and river health, Gadgil believed local communities could provide critical insights that formal science often overlooked. He envisaged these digital repositories to serve as a medium for social audits, holding authorities accountable through transparent, community-led data.
To support this vision, Gadgil collaborated extensively with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and various civil society organizations to scale awareness. He spearheaded thematic content generation & digitization drives and led by example by donating his own published works to Wikimedia Commons under open licenses. His influence successfully persuaded numerous authors and institutions to embrace the relicensing process, significantly expanding the Indian public domain. Furthermore, Gadgil served as a hands-on resource person for Wikimedia workshops across Maharashtra, Goa, Telangana, Karnataka, and Kerala. His sustained engagement effectively bridged the gap between professional scientific expertise and grassroots documentation, leaving a lasting legacy in the open knowledge movement."

Another user, Shyamal, grew up in the same campus neighbourhood where Gadgil worked and was influenced into contributing to the English Wikipedia after attending a workshop on biodiversity databases in 2005. Gadgil had then given a talk to the attendees, noting how Wikipedia had become particularly valuable within the community of mathematicians (this was based on what he had heard from his son who is now a professor of mathematics) and that other science communities would do well to emulate.