Andre Engels hett schreven:
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Lars Aronssonlars@aronsson.se wrote:
Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000 articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of 2009. The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than 13,000 Wikipedia articles. Can poverty and illiteracy alone explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?
Poverty, or better said, lack of internet access, is probably the main factor. Here in Europe and North America, we are used to having fast internet from the home 24/7. In those countries it may well be (I am not sure, never having been there) that dial-up speeds paid per minute at some internet cafe is the norm. That would considerably lessen people's interest in writing the material, and if it is not written, people will not read it either.
But another issue could be a lack of expectancy of having material in the own language.
Another important factor: If your language has no localized version of Windows, of Office, of Google or of equivalent softwares, this almost excludes all people not speaking at least one foreign language from using a computer. If understanding a foreign language is a prerequisite to using computers, there are no native-onlys - who have the most interest in native content - to write native content, and there are no native-onlys to read the native content. The bilingual people have less interest in creating content. And then in many societies which have bilingualism between the people's languages and a non-native official language, there is some amount of elitarism. Good knowledge of the official language and good education provide you a certain social status. Educating the native masses could endanger this social advantage. The more social and general insecurity exists in an area, the more elitarist are the educated.
And creating content for the benefit of everybody is a leisure time activity. Poor people rather try to earn money instead of writing content for free. And rich people in under-developed countries ususally won't contribute too, cause to become rich in a poor country, you must be rather callous and not be too "social".
I guess, it would be possible to greatly improve the number of contributions to several of our Wikipedias, if we established some kind of reward system, in which contributors get paid for their work. E.g. Burundi has a per capita income of less than 150 $ a year. If it would be possible to make some dollars a day by writing Wikipedia articles, you could easily gain some full-time editors with just a few thousand dollars. Rundi Wikipedia article count would surely skyrocket if the Foundation would provide let's say 100,000 $ for a project like that (of course a native Rundi project manager would be needed to ensure the quality of the contributions). Wouldn't it be great if the Wikimedia Foundation could go to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and say "Hey, with 100,000 $ you can help us to create a 100,000 entry encyclopedia for 10 million speakers of Chichewa, where before there was exactly _no_ encyclopedia-like content in that language!"?
Marcus Buck User:Slomox