David Gerard wrote:
All major languages of India?!
That's ... amazing. (As well as wrong and bad.)
Free software has enough interest for organisations to form (FSF India). Perhaps FSF India would be a good place to drop a line about this to.
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. Choice of language is a political issue, see e.g.
http://www.languageinindia.com/feb2004/langnewsfeb2004.html
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. Much closer to our mission than a producing a species database, in any case. Perhaps there might be funding available for generating content in these languages.
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?
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.
-- Tim Starling