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

[Delirium]

Aphaia wrote:

>I talked with Indian editors why they prefered Enwiki and not so much
>Hindi, which population is very large.
>  
>
Thanks for the survey, Aphaia!

I'll add my very small sample size of two Indian Wikipedians I'm friends 
with,

* One major reason they edit Wikipedia is to spread Indian culture and 
history, and that's most effective in English.
* Their university education is all in English, as with most prestigious 
universities in India.  Therefore when editing articles on technical 
subjects they have expertise in, they're most comfortable with 
English---they don't even know how to say some technical things in Hindi.
* From a language-pride perspective, they don't have any interest in 
Hindi, and actually some mild hostility---it's not their native 
language, and English is actually preferable because it's "neutral" from 
the perspective of domestic language politics.
* They do have more pride in their native languages (two different 
ones), but say it's "not practical" to write encyclopedias in them---and 
they know even fewer technical words in those languages than in Hindi.  
Plus they're even more useless for spreading Indian culture and history, 
since nobody can read them except the people who already are part of the 
culture.

(Obviously the usual caveats due to exceedingly small sample size.)

-Mark