[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Andre Engels]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000
> articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of
> 2009.  The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African
> language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than
> 13,000 Wikipedia articles.  Can poverty and illiteracy alone
> explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?

Poverty, or better said, lack of internet access, is probably the main
factor. Here in Europe and North America, we are used to having fast
internet from the home 24/7. In those countries it may well be (I am
not sure, never having been there) that dial-up speeds paid per minute
at some internet cafe is the norm. That would considerably lessen
people's interest in writing the material, and if it is not written,
people will not read it either.

But another issue could be a lack of expectancy of having material in
the own language. I have heard this plays a role with the languages
from India, and it may well have the same, or even stronger so, with
the African ones: the daily language for speaking is the local
language, but when one is writing or looking for something on the
internet, one is more likely to use English (or in other parts of
Africa, French). It may well be that many Swahili speakers use English
when they are on the internet - either because that is the language
they learned reading and writing in (although people for which that is
true are probably not the generation using internet the most), or
because they found that they can get so much more information (on the
internet as a whole) in English than in Swahili, that it well
outweighs the linguistic disadvantage. They come to the English
Wikipedia, not the Swahili one, and when they find that here too there
is much more in English, that's where they stick.

In the case of Swahili there is yet another factor, namely that
Swahili itself is rarely a mother tongue and much more often a second
language. Because of that, the relative size of the disadvantage of
using English is even smaller.

> But Swahili is far from the worst.  Swahili has twice as many
> speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are
> huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k),
> but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs
> 172 k).  Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in
> more detail.  For the speakers of these languages, in which
> proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio
> broadcasts) to get news and knowledge?  Do they ever use (printed)
> encyclopedias?

Taking a look at Wikipedia, I see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Nigeria and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Kenya. For Nigeria
about 32 newspapers are given - from their titles, 80% seem to be in
English. The 3 or 4 mentioned for Kenya are all in English, and
although the articles mention some of the papers have Swahili sister
publications, the English language newspapers seem to have by far the
greatest market share. This I think confirms my hypothesis above, that
another reason for African languages to do so poorly is that in the
countries and regions where they are spoken, there is a large
competition from the languages of the former colonizers - especially
in the area of written communication.


-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com