Thanks for putting this together Douglas.
An idea for the next survey are some questions on editing Wikipedias in
languages besides English. Something like:
- Are you aware that Wikipedia exists in (list languages here)
- If yes, have you ever edited one of them? Which?
- If no (the question above), why not?
And then linking these results with the respondent's first language. It
would be interesting to see what percentage of respondents that speak a
language as a first-language edit that wikipedia vs English, what
percentage of non-first language speakers, etc.
ian
On 27/06/2015 15:07, Douglas Scott wrote:
Hi Frank,
That is a good question and I suspect it might have made a small difference
if the survey was done in other languages however I doubt it would have
made much of a difference to people answering the question or even the
results. Largely because English is the default lingua franca of South
Africa which a great many people in South Africa can understand and
converse in.
The other reason I doubt it is because apart from Afrikaans Wikipedia all
the other African language Wikipedias (isiXhosa, isiZulu, and so on) have
go so few articles and editors on them that they are basically dead. I
hope that this will change in the future as it would be fantastic to have
vibrant Wikipedia's in all of South Africa's languages. This is another
indicator that there just arent likely to be very many people who speak
those languages at a first language level out there editing Wikipedia. But
that is just a theory.
Ultimately the only way to truly know for sure would be to do the next
survey in as many different languages as possible and need to budget for
the extra cost and time of organising its translation (which should not in
any way be an excuse not to translate).
Cheers,
Douglas.