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

[Jimmy Wales]

Tim Starling wrote:
> 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.

I can confirm this based on chatting with a group of Wikipedians and
potential Wikipedians when I was in India earlier this year.  At the
conference I was attending I hosted a special session on "Hindi
Wikipedia" and people told me that there's a major obstacle in that
typing Hindi on an English keyboard is quite difficult, and there is no
standard Hindi keyboard which is widely available.

> 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.

I agree completely.

> 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?

I agree with you although it is not clear to me what you mean by
"distracting".  I spend a lot of time talking to NGOs in Africa and
about Africa.  I will be going to Africa in November with a specific eye
towards learning more about what we might usefullly do.  I share with
you the notion that this is one of our most important missions.

> 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.

It is possible, but it is of course also possible to waste a lot of
money for no good purpose.

Even so, yes, I think that we should understand that by *some methods*
which we don't yet understand, it is likely to be necessary for us to
spend money (which means, necessary for us to raise money) to make some
solid progress in some of these areas.

--Jimbo