[Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from the Third World

[Ray Saintonge]

Frederick Noronha wrote:

>My wager is that en.wikipedia.org would be far, far more
>representative of India than, say hi.wikipedia.org Sad but true. And
>there are reasons for that.
>
>Have you seen the way Indians interact with themselves? If meeting
>outside the North Indian belt, there's a good chance they  (we?) would
>be taking to each other in English. There are just so much diversity
>here, that like it or not, English often serves as a link language.
>
>Added to this, many of the Wikipedia contributors would be
>college/university-educated types, often more comfortable to express
>ideas in English than, say, in an Indian language. I've made hundreds
>of edits in English
>[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Fredericknoronha]
>but am litterally struggling to get a Konkani Wikipedia going (Konkani
>is India's smallest "national" languages, with between 1.5 to 5
>million speakers, depending whose estimates one accepts).
>
Getting a Wikipedia developed in some languages can be difficult until 
you can build a critical mass of contributors.  Sometimes the results 
are surprising.  One would expect that the central role of Hindi would 
result in it having the biggest Wikipedia in an Indian language, but at 
this point Telugu with its 26,132 articles has more than twice as many 
as second place Bengali.  Manipuri, Marathi and Tamil also have more 
articles than Hindi.  The growth can be unpredictable.

Your observations are perfectly sensible, and I would understand if many 
Indians were more resistant to learning Hindi than English.  Although 
there are parallels I think that the issues of systemic biases are 
qualitatively different than those about the growth of smaller 
languages.  It would be extremely difficult for us foreigners to learn 
enough of any Indian language to the point where we could write articles 
in that language, but it is within our grasp to research the notability 
of many topics about India.

Ec