The issue with Hindi goes beyond what is mentioned in the previous mails. The account creation in Hindi Wikipedia should not be mistaken as the account created by the native language users. After global account is enabled, lot of automatic account creations are happening. And for many people outside India , Hindi Wikipedia represent whole of India. For them the first wiki they register among Indian languages is Hindi. All these account to the total number of registered users.

Added to this the total number of speakers of Hindi is always exaggerated. The speakers of few languages like Bhojpuri, Maithili, Rajastani, Chhatisghari, and so on (and many other languages spoken in Hindi belt) are treated as Hindi speakers. And it will go like that in official records. Even though most of the speakers of the above languages can speak Hindi, their mother tongue is one of the above languages. That is, they speak one of the above language at home, and outside they speak Hindi.  All this will reflect in the contribution to Hindi wikipedia. More over as Salmaan said, in North India among educated class, their is a preference on English over Hindi. For Hindi, there might be good growth from metros (for example, Delhi and Mumbai). But for that the speakers of that language should have willingness to contribute in Hindi wiki projects.

I foresee growth for Bhojpuri, Maithili, Rajasthani, Chhatisghari,... wikipedias when Wikipedia's message reach the speakers of that language. Bhojpuri is already moderately active.


So the browser and the operating system would be in English, most online communities and local blogs are also primarily in English.

User interface of browser or OS being in English is not a barrier to contribute to language wikipedias. For most of us (who contribute to language wikipedias) it is like that. Also not all of language are using Windows. Many language wikipedians in India prefer GNU/Linux over Windows. Apart from philosophical reason GNU/Linux has better support  for Indic scripts. Most of the solutions developed for Indic scrips (whether it is for wiki or for general purpose) are developed by GNU/Linux developers.

Shiju Alex

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 6:13 PM, theo10011 <de10011@gmail.com> wrote:
Well by that logic all north Indians are native speakers/writers of Hindi, the thing is Windows didnt have proper support for Hindi up untill SP2 on Windows XP. I would assume that 90% maybe higher percent of the PC's run primarily on an english Operating system. So the browser and the operating system would be in English, most online communities and local blogs are also primarily in English. In fact, they would have to be well educated individuals with internet access to even be on the Hindi Wikipedia, demographic-wise they would be going half way around only to edit the Hindi Wikipedia.

Regards

Salmaan


On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 6:07 PM, Gautam John <gautam@prathambooks.org> wrote:
On 21 September 2010 17:56, theo10011 <de10011@gmail.com> wrote:

> First Hindi is dominant in only half the country, its has 400-500 million
> speaker in India, around half the total population.
> The South on the other hand has a mix of quiet a few popular languages and
> Hindi is looked upon as rather Superfluous

Sure and that would explain the relatively lower sign up rates for
Hindi (though it would be nice to see sign up rates for other
languages too) but doesn't quite explain 90% don't edit post that.
Would it be a fair assumption that creating an account on Hindi
Wikipedia is to say that the user is a native Hindi speaker/writer? No
other reason to create an account, no?

Thank you.

Best,

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

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