Whenever a serious problem raises and after years of hesitation I
finally realize that I have to speak about it publicly, I have a drive
to drink some rakija, feel good and forget all of the stress the new
issue would give to me.
But this is very important and we have to start talking about it.
This issue lasts for years. I was first approached with this problem
during the Wikimania in London. Because of my firm belief into the
random nature of the nature, I thought it would be solved randomly.
Of course my intuition was wrong. Two years later nothing has changed.
Serbia has 7 millions of inhabitants, India has 1.3 billion. In few
years India will have 2000 times more inhabitants of Serbia.
And when I see what a mess good people from the West [1][2] are making
in Serbia, multiply that number with 2000 and realize that I have a
number of Wikimedia friends from India, my anxiety freaks out.
We are not the worst, it's likely we are even the best, but we are
mostly doing the same things that has been proved to be plainly wrong.
Fortunately, it's just "mostly", not "completely", as we have the
way
to see what is wrong.
The problem we have there is bigger than any inequality gap we have in
all OECD countries combined, as Wikimedia is doing poor job in solving
any problem for approximately 1.2 billion of humans.
I will start with with the simple fact that Hindi, the fourth language
by number of speakers [3] has Wikipedia at the 58th place by number of
articles [4]. And, no, Hindi Wikipedia is not at all in the category
"smaller number of very good articles".
I will continue with my completely unscientific approximation that 1/7
of the world population has been constantly represented on Wikimanias
by 1/7 Wikimedians if we count genetics and 0 (zero) if we count
social reality.
For those who didn't yet get it, if the upper classes of India consist
even 20% of population, we don't have any representation of 1 billion
of humans.
I could continue here with the background of the issue, various
problems mentioned to me, frustration expressed to me, but I don't
think it's useful at all.
What I think it's most useful is to start fixing the problem *now*. I
want to hear Indian Wikimedians what they see as problems that should
be solved, how they think that they should be solved, as well as WMF
and other Wikimedia movement bodies to start tackling that problem.
This is the part of the bigger problem. All of us have similar
problems in our own societies. And I think everybody should follow the
resolution of this problem and think how to do the similar things in
their own capacities in their own societies. (Hint for American
Wikimedians: Trump supporters are your next target for positive
discrimination.)
[1]
https://newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international-development-an…
[2]
http://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someone_shut_up_and_l…
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
--
Milos