[Foundation-l] Edits by project and country of origin

[Aphaia]

I talked with Indian editors why they prefered Enwiki and not so much
Hindi, which population is very large.

Each of them had different reasons, but no one mentioned caste
directly. If I recall correctly,

- If he or she writes in English, he would write to a broader audience
than in the Indian language. (Now you have to be aware that Enwiki is
the most frequently translated project among us). To spread
information, Enwiki is the most powerful tool on this project.
- Hindi is surely a big language, and he or she can speak it fruently,
but it isn't his or her native language at all; not attractive,
actually. In this point of view, writing in English as the second
language is more acceptable than writing in Hindi as the second
language for their nationalism.
- Of course, he or she is interested in their native language project.
But it is not so much a fun to work on a small project for some folks,
yes). On Enwiki he or she can find more easily  chances of
collaboration.
- And infrastructure. There are surely many so-and-so language
speakers, but they have no PC at home; and if they have, bandwidth is
narrow and edit is not confortable (I know an editor who was then
living in Thailand. He declined my nomination just because of the same
reason; "PPP on SLIP is too much hard for me to use sysop priviledge"
said he)

Some will be improved with good promotion, others will need efforts
extended from our virtualworld community. And it would be a possible
task and challange for the Foundation, but for that, a careful and
thoughtful approach, collaboration of other organizations both local
and global etc will be expected.

On 9/5/06, Przykuta <przykuta at o2.pl> wrote:
>
> > >
> >
> > I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see
> > the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want
> > anything to do with them?
> >
>
> Caste system is a closed system, Wikipedia is not. We can use bots to write articles in native languages. However number of articles is not a big problem. The big problem is number of users who know that languages.
>
> Przykuta
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