[Foundation-l] Promoting non-en Wikipedias (was In defence of Google)

[David Gerard]

On 22/01/07, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:

> The low representation of Indian citizens surprises me. I met one or two at
> the english wikipedia / commons, perhaps they tend to prefer the english
> wiki above their local languages?


This appears to be the case. The educated classes tend to learn in
English and to talk to each other in English. There are many native
languages in India, but the one that all educated people are likely to
speak is English, so that's the one that gets spoken. English is
regarded as higher status than the local languages.

These are languages with tens or hundreds of millions of speakers, by the way.

I'm not sure how to approach this. We'd need people who know the local
situation to work on it. Presumably it would need a core of language
advocates to push the local language wikis along.

Are there any plans for a local chapter in India? I know the UK
chapter is all for advocating both UK-relevant content and the local
native languages that aren't English.


-d.