Frederick "FN" Noronha wrote:
"It's not as bad as it was a year ago. We had almost nothing then. Now, languages like Bengali, Kannada, Marathi are in the 3,000-5,000 article range. Hindi, Assamese over 1,000. But Hindi, a very large language, has only 1,500 entries. That's a little surprising," Wales told IANS.
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, so it seems that many seem to prefer to put their efforts there, probably for a variety of reasons (bigger base to start from; feeling that their contribution will have more global impact; etc.).
-Mark