[Wikimediaindia-l] Question for Hindi Wikipedians

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
What you write is completely beside the point. My operating system is in
English and I am perfectly able to see the characters in the Wikipedias we
have because I installed the font support for them. The small percentage of
people who edited have created a user on the Hindi Wikipedia. They are only
able to do this when they can navigate the user interface and for this they
must have support for the Devanagari script.

Gautam John wrote about the issues with Unicode. It is possible to provide a
keyboard map for Hindi showing on the screen. It is possible to create a
proper Unicode font that is free for to use as a web font.

All this has been argued before. What Frank shows with his numbers is
something that is no surprise. Looking for answers to those questions will
start him on the same journey that I have been on for some time. I would
welcome him and in him the Wikimedia Foundation to go this route that will
make the Indian Wikipedias flourish. I am sure that there is a pent up
demand for good information in the language from India. It takes a level
playing field for them to take off. The good news is there is a lot that can
be done technically to make this happen.
Thanks,
        GerardM

On 21 September 2010 14:43, 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/
>>
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>
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