[Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language (Milos Rancic)

[WereSpielChequers]

I agree Meta would be the right place for such a table. But a few
other columns would be helpful:

1 Technical barriers. Do we need to make changes to Media Wiki
Software, and are we dependent on changes to Lynux etc in order to
enable people to edit in that language?
2 Literate population. This almost certainly influences our ability to
recruit an editing community, and will be a major determinant as to
the importance of getting workable text to speech interface for that
language.
3 Current Online population, plus mobile penetration.
4 Political barriers. If almost all the people who speak a particular
language live in a country that blocks the Internet or our parts of it
then all we can do is lobby, or wait for reform.
5 Is there someone else already doing what we do for that language,
and if so can we cooperate with them or are there aspects of there
operation that are incompatible with our mission or ethos.
6 How many of these people are monolingual and how many are fluent in
another language where they can access Wikipedia?

There's no point beating ourselves up if there are languages that we
can't support until they change their Government. But if the barriers
are under our control then that should be a different thing.

Whilst I agree that the eventual target is to make Wikipedia available
to everyone, it would be good to set some intermediate targets:

We are likely to reach each of the following on the way to our target,
and it would be great to announce them when we reach them:
1 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
2 95% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
3 99% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a
language that they understand
4 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language
5 95% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language
6 99% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in
their native language

WereSpielChequers

> On 05/22/2011 01:28 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>> Good work generally, but regarding this last list...
>>
>> Afghanistan has many languages in use (Pashto, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek);
>> Algeria  uses Arabic, Berber, and French; Jordan's official language
>> is Arabic (though the spoken one is a dialect); and generally so
>> forth.
>>
>> Can you break this out by which languages we are missing, not just by
>> country, as country isn't specific enough?
>>
>> Thank you.
>
> Here is the table with all missing languages with more than 1M of
> speakers. See notes about usage (especially in the case of Arabic
> languages), as well as my reply to Denny about importance of native
> languages in primary education. Note also that we have a number of
> incubator projects in Arabic languages.
>
> If any of you find some factual problem, please let me know.
>
> It is likely that I'll put the complete list at Meta in the future.
>