[Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India

Wed Nov 30 14:30:07 UTC 2011

(oops. sorry for the repeat mail, the previous mail was incomplete)

Gerard,

1) dont generalise from one language to another in India. Each has its own
peculiarities and features. Trying to generalise, that too from a 3 digit
samle size is dangerous

2) Your information on the literary scene is wrong. For instance if i said
that in Tamil Nadu, people who dont know how to read Tamil will be
interested in read Tamil literature (contemporary or classical), i will be
laughed at and rightly so. I am pretty sure malayalam wikisource's patrons
are people who already know and love to read malayalam written works and
loves them. Both these languages have rich literary traditions and robust
contemprory literary scenes that are shunned by the "we speak english only"
group. I will go ahead and safely say, you wont find any patrons for
regional language literature from the "we know only english" crowd. (let me
repeat, at least for tamil, this premise is laughable) Films yes, but
literature hell no.

3) What you are describing is a social issue - Wikimedia shouldnt be in the
business of social engineering. Instead of running after a tiny tiny
minority who may or may not be willing to learn to read and write its
mother tongue, we can save our breath for the remaining super majority.

4) *Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is something
they can do if they choose* - This is the slippery slope, which we want to
avoid. What next? giving a latin script version of indic wikipedias?. Let
me tell you upfront, you go down this road, you will irreparably damage
both the languages and wikipedias. I dont know about other languages, but
in Tamil, such shenanigans will lead to irreparable damage to the image of
wikipedia and probably kill the wikipedia completely. (Am pretty sure Tamil
Wikipedia will get burnt in effigy in public, if we try to pull such a
stunt).  All this for what? the 1-2% of people who refuse to learn mother
tongues?.

5)* Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed* - broadly
agreed . If you are under the impression, the minority population which
knows only english can be persuaded to learn mother tongue through
literature, i would it is a far fetched premise.

I will repeat this
a) you met a tiny number of people at two cities in India
b) formed your opinions from them and are now generalising
c) You are trying to form a technical solution for a social issue, which
will potentially change the way the language is used and will definitely
create a huge controversy and be counter productive on a massive scale.

This is a dangerous dangerous road to take.

-
Bala

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
>
>    - You agree with me that these people exist.
>    - The Malayalam Wikisource is getting more attention then the
>    Malayalam Wikipedia
>    - It is relatively easy to learn to read the script.
>    - Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is
>    something they can do if they choose
>    - Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed
>
> There are no losers here. Yes, there may be more effective ways of finding
> people to transcribe. Do that. The key thing we should not forget is that
> these people ARE already part of our community. They can make a difference
> for the Indic languages and they are even willing to do so, they have done
> so.
>
> Bala would you not agree with me that the people we already know to be
> part of our community are at least relevant?
> Thanks,
>       Gerard
>
> On 30 November 2011 14:53, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> *One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they
>> are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the
>> people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically
>> capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our
>> language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many
>> more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
>> automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
>> also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
>> of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*
>>
>> As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even
>> a tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your
>> assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the
>> Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live
>> in India).  How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your
>> description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on
>> Mediawiki?.
>>
>> Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100
>> people. This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of
>> time because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
>> gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hoi,
>>> During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari.
>>> He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to
>>> read
>>> the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the
>>> difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we
>>> looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ...
>>> Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a
>>> linguist.
>>>
>>> Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue
>>> I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me
>>> cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their
>>> culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn
>>> to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
>>>
>>> They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles;
>>> English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of
>>> their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would
>>> welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read
>>> and start reading the literature of their culture.
>>>
>>> One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they
>>> are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the
>>> people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically
>>> capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our
>>> language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many
>>> more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
>>> automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
>>> also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
>>> of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.
>>> Thanks,
>>>       GerardM
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
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