Hi,

I am not surprised at the low edit rate of Hindi. What surprises me is the high and comparable rates in other wikis :)

I assume that web users just sign up in many sites with expectations like some premium features etc., The biggest barrier to increasing contribution to Wikipedia is that even long time and educated users don't know that they can edit Wikipedia.

Ravi


Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 8:49 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

Hoi,
What you write is completely beside the point. My operating system is in English and I am perfectly able to see the characters in the Wikipedias we have because I installed the font support for them. The small percentage of people who edited have created a user on the Hindi Wikipedia. They are only able to do this when they can navigate the user interface and for this they must have support for the Devanagari script.

Gautam John wrote about the issues with Unicode. It is possible to provide a keyboard map for Hindi showing on the screen. It is possible to create a proper Unicode font that is free for to use as a web font.

All this has been argued before. What Frank shows with his numbers is something that is no surprise. Looking for answers to those questions will start him on the same journey that I have been on for some time. I would welcome him and in him the Wikimedia Foundation to go this route that will make the Indian Wikipedias flourish. I am sure that there is a pent up demand for good information in the language from India. It takes a level playing field for them to take off. The good news is there is a lot that can be done technically to make this happen.
Thanks,
        GerardM