Frederick Noronha wrote:
My wager is that en.wikipedia.org would be far, far more representative of India than, say hi.wikipedia.org Sad but true. And there are reasons for that.
Have you seen the way Indians interact with themselves? If meeting outside the North Indian belt, there's a good chance they (we?) would be taking to each other in English. There are just so much diversity here, that like it or not, English often serves as a link language.
Added to this, many of the Wikipedia contributors would be college/university-educated types, often more comfortable to express ideas in English than, say, in an Indian language. I've made hundreds of edits in English [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Fredericknoronha] but am litterally struggling to get a Konkani Wikipedia going (Konkani is India's smallest "national" languages, with between 1.5 to 5 million speakers, depending whose estimates one accepts).
Getting a Wikipedia developed in some languages can be difficult until you can build a critical mass of contributors. Sometimes the results are surprising. One would expect that the central role of Hindi would result in it having the biggest Wikipedia in an Indian language, but at this point Telugu with its 26,132 articles has more than twice as many as second place Bengali. Manipuri, Marathi and Tamil also have more articles than Hindi. The growth can be unpredictable.
Your observations are perfectly sensible, and I would understand if many Indians were more resistant to learning Hindi than English. Although there are parallels I think that the issues of systemic biases are qualitatively different than those about the growth of smaller languages. It would be extremely difficult for us foreigners to learn enough of any Indian language to the point where we could write articles in that language, but it is within our grasp to research the notability of many topics about India.
Ec