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

[Yann Forget]

Hi,

Le Sunday 5 June 2005 16:11, Tim Starling a écrit :
> 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.

FSF India and local LUGs are usually well aware of Wikipedia.

> 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

I agree very much with Tim and I am very interested to work on this.
I have started looking for language specialists in Indian universites and 
other local personal contacts which could act as local lobbyists. But it 
seems that the problem is even more complicated than explained by Tim.

Many people in India are still using old computers with Win9x which are not 
Unicode compliant. The majority of Indian language web sites are still using 
proprietary fonts which only work on Windows. This is a vicious circle: 
people can't switch to free software because their computer doesn't support 
it and/or because they can't read the existing web sites with it. These web 
sites are not interested to switch to Unicode, open standard and free fonts 
because they have a captive audience. It seems that most Indian language web 
sites using Unicode are not based in India (BBC, American universities, 
Wikipedia, etc.). Since there is very little Unicode content, users stay with 
non Unicode systems.

So a multi-step approach is needed. Lobbying both content providers and users. 
Providing users with an alternative which allows them to access Unicode 
content and proprietary system: live CD, double boots, etc.

Yann

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