Mark Williamson ti 2004/11/8 ChS 02:00 sia-kong:
In addition, I have personally found so far that there are at least a few Wikipedias where we already have Wikipedians who are fluent in the language but do not contribute to it because they either don't know of its existance or are busier with another Wikipedia. This is true with some of the Wikipedias in South African languages (people contribute instead to the English or Afrikaans Wikipedias), some of the Wikipedias in Indic languages (people mostly contribute to hi: and ur: instead of their local language with the major exceptions being ta:, kn:, and ks: and to a smaller degree a couple of others), European minority languages (I have a strong suspicion that there are at least a couple of speakers of French minority languages on the French Wikipedia who do not contribute to that Wikipedia, same with Russian and Italian minority languages, and with Saami speakers on Scandinavian-language Wikipedias). The problem of simple lack of awareness would be fairly easy to remedy, but if somebody doesn't want to work on a Wikipedia in their own language, there is no forcing them.
And that is the "problem", isn't it. There are quite simply a lot more incentives to working on a Language of Wider Communication than a more regional one. It's amazing how many Internet-savy elites in ex-colonies/incorporated regions prefer an LWC as a badge of their identity. The best we can do is (1) consistenly advertise the existence or possibilities of those Wikipedias (and hope for the best); and (2) on a more long-term basis, attempt to bridge the "digital divide" so that "non-elites" speaking those languages will be able to access Wikipedia. i.e. Allow the very local to access the global, hopefully without losing their identity in the process. But that's beyond Wikimedia's mission. And ultimately, of course, I respect people's choice.
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BTW, also be mindful of the fact that Unicode and typographic technologies for some scripts are still evolving (adoption rate probably much lower). That could be a reason why an WP is under-utilized: it's difficult or impossible to correctly input and/or output certain scripts in a Unicode-compliant way. Or else a legacy encoding scheme and associated font is still dominant. (Ironically the mere existence of an WP in those scripts may help to accelerate the transition toward Unicode, provided there's some content.)