[Foundation-l] Wikipedias by page views

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When you read about the official languages of India, it is quite clear that
there has been a movement to make Hindi the official language of India and
replace English as such. At this time this is, according to the article, not
likely to happen any time soon. What is of relevance here is that it is only
now that the Hindi language is getting its localisation for MediaWiki.

The languages of India are really doing well for localisation. I am really
interested to learn how this will affect the acceptance of these projects.
At this stage we are moving towards the point where we support all the
official languages of India.

The Bangla wikipedia is the biggest corpus in that language on the Internet.
It would not surprise me that this is one reason why we can expect the
Bangla Wikipedia to continue to do well. When the Indian language
communities find a friendly competitive spirit, we can expect them to do as
well as the European languages.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> Aude wrote:
>
> > I'm finding with some languages including Arabic and major
> > languages in India, that the Wikipedia sites in those languages
> > (as well as readership) are drastically smaller than they should
> > be given the number of speakers.
>
> There are so many variables that can explain differences in use.
>
> It was discussed earlier that Hindi is traditionally not a
> language for encyclopedias.  When Hindi speakers advance in
> society to the level where you buy an encyclopedia, you typically
> buy one in English because that has been considered the high
> status language. Promoting the Hindi Wikipedia thus means you have
> to introduce *two* novel concepts: a free online encyclopedia
> *and* a major encyclopedia in Hindi.
>
> This was the state in northern Europe in the late 1800s.  Well
> educated and wealthy Swedes and Russians would have the German
> Brockhaus or Meyers Enzyklopädie at home.  Prestigious printed
> encyclopedias in the local language was a novelty (Nordisk
> familjebok, 1875; Brockhaus-Efron, 1890), that went hand in hand
> with nationalism and widened education.  The first 10 volume
> encyclopedia in Finnish in the 1910s came with a brochure that
> explained what to expect from an encyclopedia.  The wealthy
> classes in Finland spoke Swedish, but to speakers of Finnish this
> was a new concept.
>
> Just like Californians are often more extreme than most Americans,
> this also goes when comparing Scandinavia to Germany.  The Germans
> are careful and conservative, but the Scandinavians descend from
> those Germans who boldly went farther north than anybody had done.
> In the late 1990s, Sweden had a dotcom boom and crash, pretty much
> like California.  Germany didn't have this.  Internet usage became
> commonplace earlier in Sweden than in Germany.  An Internet search
> for an actor's name would give several hits in Swedish, but
> nothing in German.  When the Internet finally started to catch on
> in Germany around 2003, the German Wikipedia became an instant hit
> because it was the first German-speaking resource in many fields.
>
> There are similiarties in the development between many countries
> and languages, but only if you move the timeline.  Hindi in 2010
> might, in some limited respect, be similar to Finnish in 1910.
> This could mean you should not only make a brochure in Hindi about
> the free online encyclopedia, but also a brochure in Hindi of what
> to expect from an encyclopedia in the first place, or why an
> encyclopedia should be available in their own language rather than
> just English.  Maybe this is an idea that Ratan Tata can support?
>
> Whether you compare the number of articles, the size of articles,
> the number of contributors or the number of visitors, you're only
> comparing what has been done.  Our focus should be on what needs
> to be done.  For example, Arabic and Chinese are languages spoken
> in countries where free access to knowledge and neutral
> information really needs to be promoted.
>
>
>
> --
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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