Hi,
Le Wednesday 22 September 2004 11:28, Henry H. Tan-Tenn a écrit :
Yann Forget wrote:
It's surprising that Bengali Wikipedia didn't start yet. There are probably more than 200 millions people speaking Bengali, although I don't how many among these have Bengali as their monther tongue (190M according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language, 207M according to other sources). And Bengali people have also a strong reputation for cultural awareness, and the Bengali language has a long tradition of poetry and literature.
Apparently Windows just got around to supporting Unicode Bengali with their SP2 release this year (see http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/bengali.html). So I'd _guess_ the Internet-using elite is still largely using a legacy encoding (assuming Windows dominance in Bengali computing). I've certainly run into Indic sites that render text with graphics files (as is still occasionally done with Chinese characters).
Actually Minnan has the same issue: transitioning from legacy encoding to Unicode. Community growth is to an extend limited by the will to switch, i.e. how desperately people need Wikipedia ;)
Each of Assamese, Burmese, Gujarati, Kannada, Khmer, Nepalese, Oriya, Panjabi, Pashtu, Sindhi, and Telugu have more than 10 millions speakers. However most of these speakers have a poor Internet connectivity at the best. So it just a matter of time when Internet connections become easily available in these parts of the world.
So it would seem that connectivity is necessary but insufficient for accessing less-well supported/unsupported Unicode standards.
Yes, localization of computers is one of the necessary steps before people could contribute.
Literacy is another one. As an example, in Gujarat, about 30 % of the population is illetrate, but that figure is a poor indication of the capacity to contribute to an encyclopedia.
I have a friend who is graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, a school with a worldwide reputation (teachers come from Havard, etc.), but can't read or write Gujarati, her mother tongue.
Today in India, it is fashionable to send children to English medium schools, which are usually more expensive and of higher quality than local languages schools. So educated people are perfectly fluent in English, but illetrate in their mother tongue.
Regards, Yann