[Wikipedia-l] Indian languages and grants (was Re: Combined effort)

[Tim Starling]

David Gerard wrote:
> All major languages of India?!
> 
> That's  ... amazing. (As well as wrong and bad.)
> 
> Free software has enough interest for organisations to form (FSF India).
> Perhaps FSF India would be a good place to drop a line about this to.

The Indian language wikis suffer from the fact that most of the people
in India with Internet access speak English. In fact, according to this
article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1719346.stm

...most keyboards in India have a US layout, and keyboards designed for
Indian languages are unstandardized. Choice of language is a political
issue, see e.g.

http://www.languageinindia.com/feb2004/langnewsfeb2004.html

I think the production of content accessible to less well educated
people who aren't connected to the Internet is a goal in line with
Wikipedia's mission. Much closer to our mission than a producing a
species database, in any case. Perhaps there might be funding available
for generating content in these languages.

I think it would be great if Wikimedia could ignore distracting grant
opportunities to provide content for already well-resourced populations,
such as biologists or American 10 year olds, and concentrate on its core
premise. We have a method for cheap content generation, now how can we
use that method to do the most good? How can we use scarce funds as
leverage?

Perhaps the answer in the Indian case is with advertising, promotion and
lobbying. We could start with a small budget in the $10-20K range, spent
mostly on market research and promotion. Then we could use statistical
measures of the success of that campaign to request the funding of a
full-time administrative position and a continuation or scaling up of
the advertising.

-- Tim Starling