[Wikimediaindia-l] Question for Hindi Wikipedians

[Shiju Alex]

The issue with Hindi goes beyond what is mentioned in the previous mails.
The account creation in Hindi Wikipedia should not be mistaken as the
account created by the native language users. After global account is
enabled, lot of automatic account creations are happening. And for many
people outside India , Hindi Wikipedia represent whole of India. For them
the first wiki they register among Indian languages is Hindi. All these
account to the total number of registered users.

Added to this the total number of speakers of Hindi is always exaggerated.
The speakers of few languages like Bhojpuri, Maithili, Rajastani,
Chhatisghari, and so on (and many other languages spoken in Hindi belt) are
treated as Hindi speakers. And it will go like that in official records.
Even though most of the speakers of the above languages can speak Hindi,
their mother tongue is one of the above languages. That is, they speak one
of the above language at home, and outside they speak Hindi.  All this will
reflect in the contribution to Hindi wikipedia. More over as Salmaan said,
in North India among educated class, their is a preference on English over
Hindi. For Hindi, there might be good growth from metros (for example, Delhi
and Mumbai). But for that the speakers of that language should have
willingness to contribute in Hindi wiki projects.

I foresee growth for Bhojpuri, Maithili, Rajasthani, Chhatisghari,...
wikipedias when Wikipedia's message reach the speakers of that language.
Bhojpuri is already moderately active.


So the browser and the operating system would be in English, most online
> communities and local blogs are also primarily in English.
>

User interface of browser or OS being in English is not a barrier to
contribute to language wikipedias. For most of us (who contribute to
language wikipedias) it is like that. Also not all of language are using
Windows. Many language wikipedians in India prefer GNU/Linux over Windows.
Apart from philosophical reason GNU/Linux has better support  for Indic
scripts. Most of the solutions developed for Indic scrips (whether it is for
wiki or for general purpose) are developed by GNU/Linux developers.

Shiju Alex

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 6:13 PM, theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well by that logic all north Indians are native speakers/writers of Hindi,
> the thing is Windows didnt have proper support for Hindi up untill SP2 on
> Windows XP. I would assume that 90% maybe higher percent of the PC's run
> primarily on an english Operating system. So the browser and the operating
> system would be in English, most online communities and local blogs are also
> primarily in English. In fact, they would have to be well educated
> individuals with internet access to even be on the Hindi Wikipedia,
> demographic-wise they would be going half way around only to edit the Hindi
> Wikipedia.
>
> Regards
>
> Salmaan
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 6:07 PM, Gautam John <gautam at prathambooks.org>wrote:
>
>> On 21 September 2010 17:56, theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > First Hindi is dominant in only half the country, its has 400-500
>> million
>> > speaker in India, around half the total population.
>> > The South on the other hand has a mix of quiet a few popular languages
>> and
>> > Hindi is looked upon as rather Superfluous
>>
>> Sure and that would explain the relatively lower sign up rates for
>> Hindi (though it would be nice to see sign up rates for other
>> languages too) but doesn't quite explain 90% don't edit post that.
>> Would it be a fair assumption that creating an account on Hindi
>> Wikipedia is to say that the user is a native Hindi speaker/writer? No
>> other reason to create an account, no?
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Gautam
>> ________
>> http://social.prathambooks.org/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
>> Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
> Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/attachments/20100921/7613ba1a/attachment.htm