Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-13/News and notes

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Yesterday I was helping a new editor on the English Wikipedia, and their first language was Bangla. They were clearly struggling with English, so I gave them a link to the Bangla Wikipedia, and suggested it might be easier to contribute there. They said they were already aware of the existence of the Bangla Wikipedia, but were only interested in contributing on the English one, despite the language problems. Being utterly uncurious about such things, I didn't ask why. But one can speculate that search engine results might have a lot to do with it. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 11:01, 14 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Demiurge1000, the editor you came across had better skills in Bangla, but wanted to contribute in English. It might be due to the reason that IT education in India is given only in English. Students are not taught to "type" in regional or national languages and if they wish to, they have to go for special classes which are not in the syllabus (which anyone will avoid as studies are not easy in India). This might be one of the reasons why they wished to stay on enwiki. TheSpecialUser ^TSU 14:22, 14 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Typing in vernacular languages is what has kept me away from Bengali and Hindi Wikipedia. Learning to use the free software is a daunting task. Wonder if the Wikimedia India Chapter can arrange for typing classes for those interested in editing in vernacular languages in India.-- Forty two 17:57, 18 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The language typing help is part of the standard coverage of Wiki Academy conducted for Non English audiences by Wikimedia India. As phonetic input methods are supported natively in Wikipedia, it is even more easier for people to overcome this hurdle. --Arjunaraoc (talk) 05:10, 21 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This is a fascinating look into the community base of a small Wikipedia project associated with a major world language in a multinational population which is increasingly using Internet communication. I encourage anyone who is interested in the topic of expansion of Wikipedia into new languages to consider the extent to which this study accurately depicts the user base which establishes new projects. In every way that I have considered this data I found it very encouraging. I hope that this study has a follow up because I think this report is meaningful and that Bangla language would be an excellent target for Wikimedia development because of the great need and great potential. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:07, 14 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Style note: It might be helpful to spell out acronyms such as "FDC" at the point where they are first used. ~ Ningauble (talk) 14:59, 14 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've done a lot of clean-up work on South Asian topics. I've also interacted with IPs from South Asia. Finally, I used to be an admin on Meta (our cross-wiki coordination site) and I did clean-up work across many small language Wikipedias - mostly spam removal. My observations:

I've been amazed by how much Wikipedias for some major language groups are languishing. Bangla is a prime example. Yes, most of those 200 million speakers are poor and many may be poorly educated -- yet 100,000s have doctorates and millions more are very well-educated.
We have 1000s of very active South Asian editors -- both established accounts and IPs. Probably most of those people aren't editing South Asian language Wikipedias.
I've only run cross-wiki contribution checks on anonymous vandals and spammers; I've noticed that the South Asian IPs seldom have done any editing on the South Asian Wikipedias. On the one hand, that's good -- we're drawing some undesirable edits away from these smaller projects. But it's also bad, since most of those are shared IPs (colleges, Internet cafes, dial-up modems) used by multiple people to edit Wikipedia, so I see so many good edits from those IPs -- also not being made on South Asian wikis.
I've sometimes wondered if perhaps the South Asian intelligentsia look to English for educational and technical topics at work or school, then use their native languages out in town or at home. Could this be why our English Wikipedia has such a vibrant South Asian readership and editing community?
I've noticed this English vs. local language gap most with South Asian contributors. Tens of millions speak Yoruba and our Yoruba Wikipedia is tiny and not very active, yet Nigerians, Togolese and Beninois seem proportionally less active on the English Wikipedia than South Asians.
These are just observations and speculation. I've never even been to South Asia although I am appreciative of how much my own country and even my own street have been enriched by immigration from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka (still no Bhutanese in my town).

Some suggestions:

For our South Asian topics (geography, culture, Bollywood, etc.) -- ditch the fund-raising banner ads. Instead, serve up banner ads cross-promoting the associated Wikipedia. In some cases, the language for promotion will be obvious -- Tamil culture article, Tamil Wikipedia. In other cases, there may be multiple languages -- our India article covers a country with dozens of languages; in such cases, maybe have the banner ad lead to a landing page with links to all the candidate projects.
- A variation on this idea requiring a little work on the server side: tailor the banner ad to the originating IP address -- if it's a Bangladesh IP, serve up a banner ad promoting the Bangla language. If it's a generic Indian IP, serve up a banner ad leading to a multi-language landing page.
Conduct a study of edits per language area in each language by Wikipedia to determine which projects have the biggest gap between English language and native language participation. Compare that with the languages and areas that have the least gap. Use that as a starting point to better understand what's going on.
The English Wikipedia was initially seeded with a lot of public domain content such as the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. There may be similar resources in some of these other languages that are in the local public domain (government documents, etc.)
Similar things can be done with other languages (such as Yoruba) as well.

--A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:59, 15 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here's an example of what I pointed out above --115.248.130.148, located in Mumbai, is the source of 829 English Wikipedia edits and just 5 combined edits to our Hindi and Telugu Wikipedias. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 11:40, 15 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

re: Questia accounts Kudos to Ocaasi for his work on getting the community much needed sources for referencing our articles. Referencing is difficult work, but our reliability depends on it. His proposed WP:The Wikipedia Library will be a great resource for improving our quality and I thank him for his dedication in this area. 64.40.54.119 (talk) 19:22, 15 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Comments and questions.
AB is right, I suspect. Ironically, those with university degrees and in professional and management positions are more likely to have a knowledge of English, which is seen as prestigious because it opens up the outside world. They are among those who you'd want to attract into the Bangla-WP editing community. BUT, alongside those people there is surely a demographic of educated, motivated, internet-connected people who can be motivated to contribute to Bangla. How can their motivation be reinforced? And what is the state of internet connections in the language area—possibly an important part of the jigsaw puzzle for us to know.
Perhaps it should be a multi-pronged approach, both through real-life activities by the Bangladesh and Indian chapters, and through explicit invitations at relevant en.WP article talk pages to translate and/or improve equivalent articles in the Bangla WP. What kind of chapter activities would be the most effective? Is there scope for collaboration between the two chapters, and if so, are key personal relationships being built as a platform for serving the Bangla-language community? What inhibiting factors work against the participation of women? And more: who's got ideas for building the narrative of the inside world of Bangla-speakers? Tony (talk) 02:00, 16 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Not too many people search in world wide web in Bengali language too! --Tito Dutta ✉ 18:06, 16 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]