What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages, which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99 percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in the sample.
Danny
On 04/09/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages, which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99 percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in the sample.
It'll be amusing when US contributors are a minority on en:, they'll find out how UK contributors sometimes feel ;-p
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
On 04/09/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages, which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99 percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in the sample.
It'll be amusing when US contributors are a minority on en:, they'll find out how UK contributors sometimes feel ;-p
In case you hadn't noticed there are more than two English speaking countries in the world. :-(
Ec
The same interest I have. Also a similar data of "edits within country" in the Eastern Asia will be instructive.
Some Malay/Indonesia based editors I have known by chance said one problem they faced was font (un)availability. They said that it was relatively easy to find US-EN input method installed PCs but a bit hard to find the local language font and input method, specially this language is not "official language of governent". To promote such projects, we need to provide information not directly related to wiki, like "how you can get the font for your language", supposedly.
On 9/4/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages, which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99 percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in the sample.
Danny _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 9/4/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages, which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99 percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in the sample.
We haven't sampled the Indian native languages yet. Please read the disclaimers at the top of the page. :)
Kelly
daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages, which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99 percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in the sample.
I agree. The Indian situation is far more significant than the Australian one. It is understandable that there would be very little participation from speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages because each has such a tiny speaker base. It is less understandable that Indian languages with a million or more speakers have had so little development.
When a person from India looking at Australian edits in other languages than English presumes that we are talking about other European languages this suggests that the influence of the Raj is still alive and well, and that the educated people of India have bought into the idea that their own native languages are somehow inferior.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages, which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99 percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in the sample.
I agree. The Indian situation is far more significant than the Australian one. It is understandable that there would be very little participation from speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages because each has such a tiny speaker base. It is less understandable that Indian languages with a million or more speakers have had so little development.
When a person from India looking at Australian edits in other languages than English presumes that we are talking about other European languages this suggests that the influence of the Raj is still alive and well, and that the educated people of India have bought into the idea that their own native languages are somehow inferior.
I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want anything to do with them?
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
When a person from India looking at Australian edits in other languages than English presumes that we are talking about other European languages this suggests that the influence of the Raj is still alive and well, and that the educated people of India have bought into the idea that their own native languages are somehow inferior.
I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want anything to do with them?
This is one plausible explanation. So too is the idea that it is important to have excellent English to get ahead in the world. But where will fluent Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati or even Hindi get you?
Ec
I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want anything to do with them?
Caste system is a closed system, Wikipedia is not. We can use bots to write articles in native languages. However number of articles is not a big problem. The big problem is number of users who know that languages.
Przykuta
I talked with Indian editors why they prefered Enwiki and not so much Hindi, which population is very large.
Each of them had different reasons, but no one mentioned caste directly. If I recall correctly,
- If he or she writes in English, he would write to a broader audience than in the Indian language. (Now you have to be aware that Enwiki is the most frequently translated project among us). To spread information, Enwiki is the most powerful tool on this project. - Hindi is surely a big language, and he or she can speak it fruently, but it isn't his or her native language at all; not attractive, actually. In this point of view, writing in English as the second language is more acceptable than writing in Hindi as the second language for their nationalism. - Of course, he or she is interested in their native language project. But it is not so much a fun to work on a small project for some folks, yes). On Enwiki he or she can find more easily chances of collaboration. - And infrastructure. There are surely many so-and-so language speakers, but they have no PC at home; and if they have, bandwidth is narrow and edit is not confortable (I know an editor who was then living in Thailand. He declined my nomination just because of the same reason; "PPP on SLIP is too much hard for me to use sysop priviledge" said he)
Some will be improved with good promotion, others will need efforts extended from our virtualworld community. And it would be a possible task and challange for the Foundation, but for that, a careful and thoughtful approach, collaboration of other organizations both local and global etc will be expected.
On 9/5/06, Przykuta przykuta@o2.pl wrote:
I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want anything to do with them?
Caste system is a closed system, Wikipedia is not. We can use bots to write articles in native languages. However number of articles is not a big problem. The big problem is number of users who know that languages.
Przykuta _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 05/09/06, Aphaia aphaia@gmail.com wrote:
Some will be improved with good promotion, others will need efforts extended from our virtualworld community. And it would be a possible task and challange for the Foundation, but for that, a careful and thoughtful approach, collaboration of other organizations both local and global etc will be expected.
Has anyone asked Free Software Foundation India if they're interested in this? It's not absolutely part of their primary mission, but open content is quite related to open software, and it's under the GFDL, which is an FSF licence; and pride in local content can be developed into pride in local software (under a free licence), not least in helping Mediawiki localisation.
- d.
Aphaia wrote:
I talked with Indian editors why they prefered Enwiki and not so much Hindi, which population is very large.
Thanks for the survey, Aphaia!
I'll add my very small sample size of two Indian Wikipedians I'm friends with,
* One major reason they edit Wikipedia is to spread Indian culture and history, and that's most effective in English. * Their university education is all in English, as with most prestigious universities in India. Therefore when editing articles on technical subjects they have expertise in, they're most comfortable with English---they don't even know how to say some technical things in Hindi. * From a language-pride perspective, they don't have any interest in Hindi, and actually some mild hostility---it's not their native language, and English is actually preferable because it's "neutral" from the perspective of domestic language politics. * They do have more pride in their native languages (two different ones), but say it's "not practical" to write encyclopedias in them---and they know even fewer technical words in those languages than in Hindi. Plus they're even more useless for spreading Indian culture and history, since nobody can read them except the people who already are part of the culture.
(Obviously the usual caveats due to exceedingly small sample size.)
-Mark
On 9/4/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages, which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99 percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in the sample.
nonononoononon
Read the caveats on the page.
I didn't collect data for the native languages of India.
The data provided suggests that 99% of edits made by people in india *to the wiki's I collected* were to en. This is not at all surprising since I didn't collect the wikis in the native languages.
I didn't bother reporting on smaller language Wikis because greater care must be taken to avoid revealing personally identifiable information.. but Kelly's reporting makes that information important and addresses the privacy issues.
I will collect this data later.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org