Milos, I hope this wasn't the participation you expected when you said you wanted to hear from Indian wikipedians. ;)
While I know where Milos, Gerard and even Amir are coming from, I don't know about this talk of "lower-class". Unless you are not talking about economics and income level here, but actual class - a caste system, which I doubt.
I don't know if it's inconsiderate, or some weird sort of political-correctness where you make people feel uneasy about their own identity, unintentionally I assume. You had indian wikipedians at wikimania for a long time, you still do. There is the indian chapter, random wikipedians from India and Asaf, still has CIS staff coming and going I presume. I'm not sure if they fulfil this quota of "lower-class", for you to feel truly represented. Your typical version of indian, shouldn't be able to speak english? just one indian language, that you then feel you are helping? Would it have to fulfil some other stereotype about the way they dress, sound or behave - "Indian". If I apply that standards within US or anywhere else, they sound incredibly prejudiced. Are you less of a serb because you speak english or are in a particular income-level?
Then as others said, is that who "we" are? Is social outreach and diversity relevant to dispensation of free knowledge? Why aren't there more homeless and people from low-income households from the US, Europe, Australia at wikimania? should we reserve scholarships now based on income-levels?(but then everyone would just mark it as low). I suppose it's a whole host of identical problems affecting those groups that affects Indians. Some are more complex and compounded, as I rant on about below, but the largest are same as any other country. Every country would have its own "lower-class".
I also fail to see how getting your typical imagined version of "lower-class" indian to a wikimania will have a measurable effect? Will attending a 3 day conference in another country change his/her life? change wikipedia?
Also, first time I am hearing of these WMF activities in India. Nice. Research on new readers, in my city of all. I would be interested to see the results. I don't know about the team member "in India", in-charge of partnerships, sounds vague and historically, not a good direction. I hope you steer away from hiring too many consultants this time. ;)
I would also invite Milos, Gerard and anyone else interested to consider spending some time in India itself before they start talking about how to fix problems (real or imagined) of my country. As I wrote on Gerard's blog 6 years ago[1], It's not as simple as you think it is. Rather uninteresting and long rant below, for those linguistic questions you asked.
== Rant: tl;dr version (for non linguaphiles) - 99 problems, english isn't one. ==
As for the sociolinguistic, ethnolinguistic, socio-economic factors, they are too varied. It's like this. India has a great degree of language fragmentation. Going from different dialects and borrowed words to entirely different syntax, alphabets and language systems. There is still some degree of homogeneity based on language belts around the country, similar to social belts in other countries. Language belts yield several groups of sub-languages and dialects that are similar but differ greatly outside that particular language belt.
The dominant problem, as others cited, is economical. Chances are, if someone is able to find a computer and get online, they know english, though smartphones have been highly disruptive of this trend in the last decade. It is highly compounded by the fact, India is highly bilingual. The most basic form of primary education in school covers english, just like it covers some form of maths or science. This is necessary within India itself. Primary education where children are taught to read and write their own mother-tongue usually almost always has some degree of english lessons. At times, this becomes the only lingua-franca within India itself. If I travel to the south of my country or to the east, most times the only language I would be able to communicate easily in, would be english. If you travel within India, majority of the billboards and even road signs outside metros that you will encounter, will be either in english or bilingual, as would official communications from courts, government bodies and so on.
Languages also have a tendency of dividing the population. Some take their linguistic identity as a sign of pride but there have been right-wing campaigns to promote division based on the same linguistic lines. It's not always bad, linguistic pride lead to a lot of good effort for the projects. Wikitionary and wikisource benefited a lot when I saw a few years ago. In those cases, highly educated, socially mobile individuals used our projects as a platform for protecting and promoting their languages. But the communities were small, between 10-30 active users. Their efforts were short-lived, compounding an encyclopedia is giant task that isn't complete in the largest language yet, no matter how much effort such a small group would put it, it would never get enough attention to be usable. This is where wikisource and wiktionary excel at. Any effort directed towards that direction usually yielded enormously beneficial results, even years later. The books uploaded, translated or words added were highly relevant.
Then there is the issue of writing scripts. With so much linguistic homogeneity in India, it has a large degree of heterogeneity in writing scripts. For example. Khariboli dialect[2], on which hindi and urdu are based on, are phonetically identical, yet written in two very different scripts. One utilising persian/arabic alphabets and the other using sanskrit. The problem of entering these scripts using keyboards is a draconian task for many (me included). The latin alphabets and english system is entirely alien to how these alphabetic systems work, though support has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade thanks to Google, Microsoft and other standardisation/localisation bodies - it is still no easy task. There is just too much ease in using english alphabets, given familiarity with english, it creates linguistic-mobility between these two systems. The indian youth for example, came up with things like "hinglish"[4] utilising the same words phonetically, just written in latin script using english keyboards. It's popularity was short-lived.
The system overall works, hindi speaker base isn't threatened or contracting, it's actually growing very fast. It was/is the fourth largest in the world after english[3] like it has been for a long time. Both living separately and not encroaching on each other's base.
The dominance here is actually not of phonetic languages but the alphabets. I would point to the first picture on the article here[5] for reference. The established and dominant alphabet system is english. This creates a linguistic mobility where moving in-between two writing system and languages becomes inherent. The issue therefore, is a complicated one.
Amir, you said certain sociolinguistic factors make the dominant language more dominant. Well, hindi would be the dominant language within india, with over 300 million native speakers and half a billion or more, who use it as a second language. It's only behind english in terms of native speakers[3]. It's also not in any shape or form of decline. Do you think you find evidence of that on Wikipedia? Is it larger or better than German one? the fragmentation you have is within india, so many languages prohibit easy exchange. Social mobility adds a english as a deciding factor.
What is the priority for our readers? to find the best and most information about a subject, or finding it in one of the two languages they already know? Also, to consider, Google translate has improved by leaps and bounds in indian languages, running an english language article through a local machine translation usually yields a very coherent translation making most efforts in this direction, moot.
I think this is enough rant for now. Apologies to those who read it all.
Kind regards (looking forward to being robocalled for the survey) Theo
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/07/state-of-wiki-in-india-part-1.ht... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khariboli_dialect [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016, Adele Vrana avrana@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Milos and everyone.
I just want to quickly add that in addition to the New Readers research project, the Global Reach team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Reach is also working to expand Wikimedia’s readership and awareness in India. We have contracted VotoMobile https://www.votomobile.org/, an international phone survey company to reach out to people across India on their mobile phones. We have chosen to conduct phone surveys to eliminate the internet access dependency; this way we can reach people who are not online or that are online but not using Wikipedia, Wikisource or any of our projects.
As we speak, we are surveying 6000 people across almost all regions of India (see list below). This survey is being offered in 11 local languages (Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Odia, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada) plus English in order to include as many different people and perspectives as possible.
The purpose of this survey is to to learn more about how people in India use mobile phones and the internet to access knowledge and information. During the survey, we ask questions about smartphone and network availability, whether they have ever heard of us, what barriers they experience, and how they use Wikipedia and the internet. The survey results for India will be available on our Meta page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Reach/Insights this July-August.
Last but not least, our Global Reach team has a member - Smriti Gupta - who is based in India. Smriti works to build partnerships across Asia. Currently, she is exploring different types of partnerships, including a pilot with the local government in India that would help our editing community increase the Gujarati content for Wikimedia projects.
Please feel free to reach out our team if you would like to learn more about our work in India and elsewhere.
Best regards,
Adele
List of regions targeted by the India phone survey:
Maharashtra
Gujarat
Punjab
Haryana
Himachal Pradesh
West Bengal
Assam
Madhya Pradesh
Odisha
Chhattisgarh
Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Prades
Tamil Nadu
Kerala
Karnataka
Telangana
Uttar Pradesh
Bihar
Rajasthan
Jharkhand
Uttarakhand
Jammu and Kashmir
Delhi
NE states (Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura)
On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Àlex Hinojo alexhinojo@gmail.com wrote:
I completely agree with Amir.
Wikipedia is an unachievable goal itself. And this is precisely what it takes us to do It. we have shown the world that only starting things,
they
move forward. Let's improve coverage, one edit at a time.
As a tip: keep in mind other people's interests while editing articles ( geographical, cultural, linguistical or event political) trying to
discover
and understand the others while editing is one of the greatest prices Wikipedia can give to us everyday. This could also bring some -needed- empathy to the movement itself.
Best
Àlex Hinojo Amical Wikimedia
El 28 juny 2016, a les 21:37, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> va escriure:
I am quite amused; it doesn't happen to me much that people take so
much
care to protect my privacy. I do appreciate it, though.
In case nobody guessed it, I am (probably) "Mr. Western Wikipedian".
The
language gap in Wikipedias has always concerned me since the very first
day
I tried editing Wikipedia in 2004—as a volunteer, and later as a WMF
staff
member. I exchanged a few words about this with Mr. Rancic at Wikimania because I know he cares about it. (In case you're wondering, I don't
know
who are the other people that Mr. Rancic is mentioning.)
The problem is fairly easy to
It is a problem that some of the most spoken languages of the world
have
very little information online. In Wikipedia and on other websites. I'm talking about Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Indonesian, Tagalog, and a few others. India is just the biggest of the countries in question, but certainly not the only one. There's even less information online in
smaller
languages, which is just as bad, even though they are smaller. It's a
deep
social problem that bothers me more and more as the years go by, and
as I
learn about these languages, about the countries in which they are
spoken
and about the people who speak them—especially those of them who don't speak any other language.
The WMF could solve _some of it_. I am not entirely sure how. It's a vicious circle of sociolinguistics making dominant languages even more dominant, and less demanded languages even less demanded. It has a lot
to
do with culture and politics, a bit of which I understand, and a lot of which I don't.
As a developer of the Content Translation tool and other related
things,
I
very naïvely hope that I (not alone, of course!) am helping to
resolving
a
tiny bit of it. But I cannot resolve all of it, and WMF alone cannot resolve all of it. Even though Wikimedia's famous "every single human being" motto definitely puts this problem in Wikimedia's declared
scope,
it's way too big and complex to be resolved with the resources the WMF currently has. It's better to acknowledge that we cannot solve all of
it
quickly, even though we'd love to, then to pretend that we'll save the world the next week. (Bringing other people to Wikimania will also not
save
it, certainly not by itself. That said, variety is a good thing.)
On an optimistic note, I have to reiterate that the recently started research project that Anne Gomez mentioned is probably the best step
that
the WMF ever made in this direction. I've been waiting for something
like
this to happen since 2012 or so. It's an important acknowledgement that there are a lot of things that we don't know, and that we want to try
to
learn them. It's only a small first step, but a truly good one, and I'm eager to see how it develops.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2016-06-28 21:43 GMT+03:00 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
My last mail for today, so Anne, just to say that I really appreciate what you've done, but I'll comment in a bit more detail tomorrow.
On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 8:01 PM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
I'll leave the "defensive" bit aside, and just reiterate that I
*still*
do
not understand exactly what problem you're trying to focus discussion
on.
In the piece of text Asaf quoted, you used the words "it" and
"reports."
I
don't know what you intend by those words. Maybe for some reason you
feel
it's Asaf's job to clarify that for the rest of the list's readers;
maybe
so. I don't have more to contribute on this point.
The background goes this way...
I've been approached privately two years ago about the issues that bother significant part of Indian Wikimedian community. As I think that's in the range of quite solvable issues, my instinct was to talk with the relevant people inside of the Wikimedia movement (not just WMF). I thought it's been solved and I forgot for that. However, two years later I am listening about the same problems. So, I am pissed off enough to start talking about that on this list.
However, if I say everything I know, I would for sure harm a number of people. And I am not willing to do that no matter how pissed off or drunk I am. The situation is not good, but far from being any kind of catastrophe.
But I want to see the problem solved. So, I am giving quite enough of information about the problems (cf. my first email, then my response to Risker) and expect the beginning of communication. The responses are telling me what's safe to talk about and what's not. I also expect to be convinced that the most of Indian Wikimedians will be content at the end of this process.
So, the research is very good thing and I am again positively surprised by the attitude of WMF. However, that's not enough.
I also want to say that what I said in my first email and in my response to Risker is the core of the problem. Many particular issues are not useful (and could be harmful). I understand that many people on this list don't realize how those issues are important, but they *are* vitally important to the Indian part of our movement.
In other words, although I am not disclosing all of information I have, mostly to protect privacy of some people, I am not cryptic at all. It is just a matter of what's perceived as important to a Western and what to an Indian Wikimedian.
-- Milos
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