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.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se