Thanks Ian, Was not aware Wikipedia is available local African languages. Would love to get involved in those.
On Sunday, June 28, 2015, Ian Gilfillan wikimediaza@greenman.co.za wrote:
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.
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