I agree theres a bunch of reasons.

First Hindi is dominant in only half the country, its has 400-500 million speaker in India, around half the total population. Its especially dominant in North India, where economic factors and technological divide also come into play. the educated metropolitan population prefers English as almost their first language for most purposes.

The South on the other hand has a mix of quiet a few popular languages and Hindi is looked upon as rather Superfluous, so Hindi would be the wrong language to judge the retention and edits rates of new editors from Souther states. I covered most of these during the post I did for Gerard's blog if anyone cares to look.

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/07/state-of-wiki-in-india-part-1.html


Regards

Salmaan



On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 5:45 PM, Gautam John <gautam@prathambooks.org> wrote:
On 21 September 2010 17:38, Barry Newstead <bnewstead@wikimedia.org> wrote:

>on to make an edit within 10 days.  It was surprising to see that Hindi Wikipedia had a very different rate that some other projects >(see below). Can anyone share an explanation?

I doubt there is any one explanation but I wonder how many of them
give up and go home when they realise the difficulties, for a new
user, of Hindi (and other Indic) language input systems and the maze
of options that exist. Also, anecdotally, most Indian publishing
workflows and print shops do not use Unicode encodings for text
either.

I'm sure there are more data points that just this?

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam
________
http://social.prathambooks.org/

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