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.
----
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.)