On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 8:35 PM, Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
I am wondering why Tagalog is not mentioned
(there is a Tagalog
Wikipedia).
Though I am certain it's correct that a significant number of Filipinos
speak/write sufficient English to edit (and some of them may not even
know Tagalog), it would seem possible many people might prefer editing
in their mother tongue
I suspect a bunch of reasons.
1. English is actually an official language of the Philippines, and
taught in school. Despite the fact that people in Philippines might be
secondary speakers, they're potentially a good group to invite to join a
geography-specific WikiProject. Unlike targeting say, a U.S. state, the
population to draw from is enormous.
2. To my understanding, Tagalog Wikipedia suffers from confusion and
conflict over which orthography to really use, which among other reasons
keeps it small. This was one of the smaller projects studied as part of the
WikiHistories undertaking, and there's more detail at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiHistories_fellowship/Tagalog#L…
Our assumptions were similar to Steven's suspicions. But also we've been
seeing growing anecdotal evidence (and I'd love to have a citation for
this, some day) from talking to people in Anglophone Global South countries
like Kenya and the Phillippines, and to researchers like Heather Ford who
study Wikipedia in the Global South, that points to the idea that people
often want to contribute to projects with wide readership. If you speak
and write 2 languages equally well, but one will be read by many many more
people both locally and internationally, this can be a motivating factor.
When Tanvir did the Small Wiki Engagement Project (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_Wiki_Editor_Engagement_Project), for
example, one of the things he noticed that many people come to Bangla
Wikipedia via English Wikipedia. They start reading in English (because of
word of mouth, or what Google preferences in returns, or because many
searchers don't have Bangla fonts enabled for input, I don't know), they
create their first account in English, and only later do they learn about
the Bangla version and start getting engaged in Bangla. I've heard this is
true in India as well. If so, it may be a good reminder to think about
English as an entry-point for other language wikis, and expect there is
room for further experimentation on that front, as well as in
local-language wikis - we'd love to see similar experimentation in Tagalog,
if anyone is inspired by this, of course!
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Siko Bouterse
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