[Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2008/12/1 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>:
> Milos - you wrote: "To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful
> Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian
> Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles
> than en.wp." Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes
> sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful
> than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm
> curious to know what data changed your mind.

I don't know how exactly Milos arrived at this conclusion, but i have
a half-educated guess.

<original-research-and-educated-guesses>
Many - quite possibly most - readers arrive at Wikipedia through a
search engine. Now the question is - which language they use to search
the web. It's quite natural that a significant number of people in
Serbia will search the web in Serbian. The same goes for Israel/Hebrew
and Russia/Russian.

The problem is with less privileged languages. Belarusian is official
in Belarus and the (arguable) statistics say that most people there
consider it to be their native language, but in practice Russian is
considerably more popular in the published media, so when they google
for something, they do it in Russian, because they don't expect to
find anything useful in Belarusian.

Or take Hindi. The second most spoken language in the world and the
main official language of a country where many people are online. (1%
of India's population is MANY.) Yet the Hindi Wikipedia has less than
30,000 articles (if i read the Indic digits correctly...)

Now, these are languages which have millions of speakers, rich
literature and an official status; when it comes to languages which
are even less privileged, people go straight to the English WP (or
French or Spanish.)
</original-research-and-educated-guesses>

Speaking in Linguistic terms, it is a question of [[Pragmatics]].

-- 
Amir Elisha Aharoni

heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore