Delirium wrote:
This actually doesn't surprise me too much. Hindi is a lingua franca of sorts in India, but so is English. In particular, the Hindi speakers most likely to be editing an encyclopedia on the internet (middle to upper class, well-educated) are highly likely to also speak very good English. Anecdotally, there are indeed a lot of Indians making good contributions on the English-language Wikipedia,
This is the case in Scandinavia too. I would say that a majority of the Scandinavian contributors speak excellent English, even if the user base is starting to expand to older, less educated contributors. Some Scandinavian wikipedians think the Scandinavian language versions are jokes, and only contribute to the English Wikipedia. But the more Scandinavians who contribute to the English Wikipedia, the more contributors spill over to the "native" languages, of which 4 are among the top 20 languages at Wikipedia. Danish with 5 million speakers has 47,000 articles.
So even if these supposedly young, male, upper-class wikipedians in India speak good English, that is not enough to explain why Hindi is lagging behind. Perhaps the issue is if they grew up with an English or Hindi encyclopedia in their parents' bookshelf. Do they consider Hindi to be "a language of encyclopedias"? I don't see the word "Hindi" in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_encyclopedias
I also don't see the word "encyclopedia" in any of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi_literature or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_literature
In the longer run, I hope Wikipedia should not only have a full good Hindi version, but one edited by the right proportions of gender, class, and age. We probably have a very long way to go.