Tim Starling wrote:
The Indian language wikis suffer from the fact that most of the people in India with Internet access speak English. In fact, according to this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1719346.stm
...most keyboards in India have a US layout, and keyboards designed for Indian languages are unstandardized.
I can confirm this based on chatting with a group of Wikipedians and potential Wikipedians when I was in India earlier this year. At the conference I was attending I hosted a special session on "Hindi Wikipedia" and people told me that there's a major obstacle in that typing Hindi on an English keyboard is quite difficult, and there is no standard Hindi keyboard which is widely available.
I think the production of content accessible to less well educated people who aren't connected to the Internet is a goal in line with Wikipedia's mission.
I agree completely.
I think it would be great if Wikimedia could ignore distracting grant opportunities to provide content for already well-resourced populations, such as biologists or American 10 year olds, and concentrate on its core premise. We have a method for cheap content generation, now how can we use that method to do the most good? How can we use scarce funds as leverage?
I agree with you although it is not clear to me what you mean by "distracting". I spend a lot of time talking to NGOs in Africa and about Africa. I will be going to Africa in November with a specific eye towards learning more about what we might usefullly do. I share with you the notion that this is one of our most important missions.
Perhaps the answer in the Indian case is with advertising, promotion and lobbying. We could start with a small budget in the $10-20K range, spent mostly on market research and promotion. Then we could use statistical measures of the success of that campaign to request the funding of a full-time administrative position and a continuation or scaling up of the advertising.
It is possible, but it is of course also possible to waste a lot of money for no good purpose.
Even so, yes, I think that we should understand that by *some methods* which we don't yet understand, it is likely to be necessary for us to spend money (which means, necessary for us to raise money) to make some solid progress in some of these areas.
--Jimbo