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