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What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
the sample.

Danny
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On 04/09/06, daniwo59@aol.com <daniwo59@aol.com> wrote:

> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
> the sample.


It'll be amusing when US contributors are a minority on en:, they'll
find out how UK contributors sometimes feel ;-p


- d.
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The same interest I have. Also a similar data of "edits within
country" in the Eastern Asia will be instructive.

Some Malay/Indonesia based editors I have known by chance said one
problem they faced was font (un)availability. They said that it was
relatively easy to find US-EN input method installed PCs but a bit
hard to find the local language font and input method, specially this
language is not "official language of governent". To promote such
projects, we need to provide information not directly related to wiki,
like "how you can get the font for your language", supposedly.

On 9/4/06, daniwo59@aol.com <daniwo59@aol.com> wrote:
> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
> the sample.
>
> Danny
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


--
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* vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *
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On 9/4/06, daniwo59@aol.com <daniwo59@aol.com> wrote:
> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
> the sample.

We haven't sampled the Indian native languages yet. Please read the
disclaimers at the top of the page. :)

Kelly
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daniwo59@aol.com wrote:

>What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
>which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
>percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
>would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
>the sample.
>
I agree. The Indian situation is far more significant than the
Australian one. It is understandable that there would be very little
participation from speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages because
each has such a tiny speaker base. It is less understandable that
Indian languages with a million or more speakers have had so little
development.

When a person from India looking at Australian edits in other languages
than English presumes that we are talking about other European languages
this suggests that the influence of the Raj is still alive and well, and
that the educated people of India have bought into the idea that their
own native languages are somehow inferior.

Ec

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On 9/4/06, daniwo59@aol.com <daniwo59@aol.com> wrote:
> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
> the sample.

nonononoononon

Read the caveats on the page.

I didn't collect data for the native languages of India.

The data provided suggests that 99% of edits made by people in india
*to the wiki's I collected* were to en. This is not at all surprising
since I didn't collect the wikis in the native languages.

I didn't bother reporting on smaller language Wikis because greater
care must be taken to avoid revealing personally identifiable
information.. but Kelly's reporting makes that information important
and addresses the privacy issues.

I will collect this data later.
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Kelly:
> Some observations
> * NL and BE are language sluts.

Thanks for the compliment.
We can't help being better educated than most in this respect ;)
It is forced upon us. Blame the system.

In all honesty, did you remove bot edits?
The interwikibot (a Dutch invention) might be a partial explanation.

Cheers, Erik Zachte

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Ray Saintonge wrote:
> daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
>
>> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
>> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
>> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
>> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
>> the sample.
>>
> I agree. The Indian situation is far more significant than the
> Australian one. It is understandable that there would be very little
> participation from speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages because
> each has such a tiny speaker base. It is less understandable that
> Indian languages with a million or more speakers have had so little
> development.
>
> When a person from India looking at Australian edits in other languages
> than English presumes that we are talking about other European languages
> this suggests that the influence of the Raj is still alive and well, and
> that the educated people of India have bought into the idea that their
> own native languages are somehow inferior.
>

I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see
the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want
anything to do with them?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>When a person from India looking at Australian edits in other languages
>>than English presumes that we are talking about other European languages
>>this suggests that the influence of the Raj is still alive and well, and
>>that the educated people of India have bought into the idea that their
>>own native languages are somehow inferior.
>>
>>
>I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see
>the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want
>anything to do with them?
>
This is one plausible explanation. So too is the idea that it is
important to have excellent English to get ahead in the world. But
where will fluent Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati or even Hindi get you?

Ec

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> >
>
> I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see
> the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want
> anything to do with them?
>

Caste system is a closed system, Wikipedia is not. We can use bots to write articles in native languages. However number of articles is not a big problem. The big problem is number of users who know that languages.

Przykuta
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I talked with Indian editors why they prefered Enwiki and not so much
Hindi, which population is very large.

Each of them had different reasons, but no one mentioned caste
directly. If I recall correctly,

- If he or she writes in English, he would write to a broader audience
than in the Indian language. (Now you have to be aware that Enwiki is
the most frequently translated project among us). To spread
information, Enwiki is the most powerful tool on this project.
- Hindi is surely a big language, and he or she can speak it fruently,
but it isn't his or her native language at all; not attractive,
actually. In this point of view, writing in English as the second
language is more acceptable than writing in Hindi as the second
language for their nationalism.
- Of course, he or she is interested in their native language project.
But it is not so much a fun to work on a small project for some folks,
yes). On Enwiki he or she can find more easily chances of
collaboration.
- And infrastructure. There are surely many so-and-so language
speakers, but they have no PC at home; and if they have, bandwidth is
narrow and edit is not confortable (I know an editor who was then
living in Thailand. He declined my nomination just because of the same
reason; "PPP on SLIP is too much hard for me to use sysop priviledge"
said he)

Some will be improved with good promotion, others will need efforts
extended from our virtualworld community. And it would be a possible
task and challange for the Foundation, but for that, a careful and
thoughtful approach, collaboration of other organizations both local
and global etc will be expected.

On 9/5/06, Przykuta <przykuta@o2.pl> wrote:
>
> > >
> >
> > I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see
> > the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want
> > anything to do with them?
> >
>
> Caste system is a closed system, Wikipedia is not. We can use bots to write articles in native languages. However number of articles is not a big problem. The big problem is number of users who know that languages.
>
> Przykuta
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>


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* vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *
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On 05/09/06, Aphaia <aphaia@gmail.com> wrote:

> Some will be improved with good promotion, others will need efforts
> extended from our virtualworld community. And it would be a possible
> task and challange for the Foundation, but for that, a careful and
> thoughtful approach, collaboration of other organizations both local
> and global etc will be expected.


Has anyone asked Free Software Foundation India if they're interested
in this? It's not absolutely part of their primary mission, but open
content is quite related to open software, and it's under the GFDL,
which is an FSF licence; and pride in local content can be developed
into pride in local software (under a free licence), not least in
helping Mediawiki localisation.


- d.
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Aphaia wrote:

>I talked with Indian editors why they prefered Enwiki and not so much
>Hindi, which population is very large.
>
>
Thanks for the survey, Aphaia!

I'll add my very small sample size of two Indian Wikipedians I'm friends
with,

* One major reason they edit Wikipedia is to spread Indian culture and
history, and that's most effective in English.
* Their university education is all in English, as with most prestigious
universities in India. Therefore when editing articles on technical
subjects they have expertise in, they're most comfortable with
English---they don't even know how to say some technical things in Hindi.
* From a language-pride perspective, they don't have any interest in
Hindi, and actually some mild hostility---it's not their native
language, and English is actually preferable because it's "neutral" from
the perspective of domestic language politics.
* They do have more pride in their native languages (two different
ones), but say it's "not practical" to write encyclopedias in them---and
they know even fewer technical words in those languages than in Hindi.
Plus they're even more useless for spreading Indian culture and history,
since nobody can read them except the people who already are part of the
culture.

(Obviously the usual caveats due to exceedingly small sample size.)

-Mark

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On Tue Sep 5 20:13:59 UTC 2006 David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com wrote:

>> Some will be improved with good promotion, others will need efforts
>> extended from our virtualworld community. And it would be a possible
>> task and challange for the Foundation, but for that, a careful and
>> thoughtful approach, collaboration of other organizations both local
>> and global etc will be expected.

>Has anyone asked Free Software Foundation India if they're interested
>in this? It's not absolutely part of their primary mission, but open
>content is quite related to open software, and it's under the GFDL,
>which is an FSF licence; and pride in local content can be developed
>into pride in local software (under a free licence), not least in
>helping Mediawiki localisation.


I'm just joining the thread, but I can answer your question to some extent.

I am a bureaucrat of the Bengali Wikipedia (bn), which has increased
in size from 500 articles in March 2006, to 8970 articles as of now.
This phenomenal growth has been achieved via a full scale media
campaign in Bangladesh, which has 75-80% (150 million) of all Bengali
language speakers. Bangladehs Open Source Network, a proponent of
Bangla localization and other open source technology, has promoted
this a lot.

We have regular updates in the local (Bangladeshi) news media, and a
BBC Bengali World service programme (radio) covered the movement in
this May. Actually, we had set a target of 10,000 total articles and
1000 total good quality ones by May 2007, but with a lot of efforts,
and somewhat semi-automated imports, the 10k article will probably be
reached within 15 days from now.

Access to the Internet is a privilege in Bangladesh ... until a few
months ago, the country only had satellite linkage (V-SATs) to the
Internet, only got submarine cable connection 2 months ago. So,
Bangladesh Open Source Network has taken up an office, and arranged so
that interested writers can send content via postal mail, which can be
entered into bn-wiki by people who have Internet. I myself have
received articles via email (from people with offline Internet
access), and added them.

So, we have a huge number of interested people in Bangladesh, and the
Bengali Wikipedia development is gaining a lot of media coverage
there. This shows up in the statistics from Kelly Martin, where,
Bangladeshi editors have added up to 60% of total edits. Around 25%
came from the US, but that's most likely the few (2 or 3) Bangladeshi
and West Bengali expatriates here (including me), who are very active.

Definitely, we are planning to open a Wikimedia chapter in Bangladesh
soon. A limited edition of Bengali wikipedia on CD is also planned for
the Language Movement commemorative Book Fair in February 2007.

Thanks

Ragib

(en:Ragib , bn:Ragib )

--
Ragib Hasan
PhD Student
Dept of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
201 N Goodwin Avenue
Urbana IL 61801

Website:
http://www.ragibhasan.com
http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/www
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Ragib Hasan wrote:
> On Tue Sep 5 20:13:59 UTC 2006 David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com wrote:
>
>
>>>Some will be improved with good promotion, others will need efforts
>>>extended from our virtualworld community. And it would be a possible
>>>task and challange for the Foundation, but for that, a careful and
>>>thoughtful approach, collaboration of other organizations both local
>>>and global etc will be expected.
>
>
>>Has anyone asked Free Software Foundation India if they're interested
>>in this? It's not absolutely part of their primary mission, but open
>>content is quite related to open software, and it's under the GFDL,
>>which is an FSF licence; and pride in local content can be developed
>>into pride in local software (under a free licence), not least in
>>helping Mediawiki localisation.
>
>
>
> I'm just joining the thread, but I can answer your question to some extent.
>
> I am a bureaucrat of the Bengali Wikipedia (bn), which has increased
> in size from 500 articles in March 2006, to 8970 articles as of now.
> This phenomenal growth has been achieved via a full scale media
> campaign in Bangladesh, which has 75-80% (150 million) of all Bengali
> language speakers. Bangladehs Open Source Network, a proponent of
> Bangla localization and other open source technology, has promoted
> this a lot.
>
> We have regular updates in the local (Bangladeshi) news media, and a
> BBC Bengali World service programme (radio) covered the movement in
> this May. Actually, we had set a target of 10,000 total articles and
> 1000 total good quality ones by May 2007, but with a lot of efforts,
> and somewhat semi-automated imports, the 10k article will probably be
> reached within 15 days from now.
>
> Access to the Internet is a privilege in Bangladesh ... until a few
> months ago, the country only had satellite linkage (V-SATs) to the
> Internet, only got submarine cable connection 2 months ago. So,
> Bangladesh Open Source Network has taken up an office, and arranged so
> that interested writers can send content via postal mail, which can be
> entered into bn-wiki by people who have Internet. I myself have
> received articles via email (from people with offline Internet
> access), and added them.
>
> So, we have a huge number of interested people in Bangladesh, and the
> Bengali Wikipedia development is gaining a lot of media coverage
> there. This shows up in the statistics from Kelly Martin, where,
> Bangladeshi editors have added up to 60% of total edits. Around 25%
> came from the US, but that's most likely the few (2 or 3) Bangladeshi
> and West Bengali expatriates here (including me), who are very active.
>
> Definitely, we are planning to open a Wikimedia chapter in Bangladesh
> soon. A limited edition of Bengali wikipedia on CD is also planned for
> the Language Movement commemorative Book Fair in February 2007.
>
> Thanks
>
> Ragib
>
> (en:Ragib , bn:Ragib )

I am glad to read that :-)

ant

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