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List:       wikipedia-l
Subject:    Re: [Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number
From:       Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen () gmail ! com>
Date:       2006-04-05 15:37:20
Message-ID: 4433E430.6020700 () gmail ! com
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Mark,
I do not care for Internet Explorer until I can get the ear of a 
developer at Microsoft, this should however be doable. I am convinced 
that we can get attention at the Mozilla Foundation. But most of all I 
want MediaWiki to just work and work well for all languages. You know 
how difficult the first editing efforts are. When it becomes really 
screwy only a few will preservere. As to economic motivation, when we 
can create a cool project we can find money for things like fonts and 
scripts. It then becomes a question if someone does it for free or for a 
fee. The other cost is that some languages are just not economic and 
therefore without merit; this is an argument Microsoft loved to not have 
gotten into in many instances...

What we can do as a Wikimedia Foundation is limited. We cannot bring a 
computer to every house of this world but we can make our software ready 
for the moment when the people from these houses find their way to a 
computer.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Mark Williamson wrote:
> Assuming you're speaking about complex script rendering, part of this
> is dependent on software -- There is nothing that will make Internet
> Explorer properly render traditional Mohawk hieroglyphic narrative
> script, for instance, unless it is represented as an image. Even if a
> font existed, the rendering is simply so complex that it would really
> need some programmers to concentrate on it, and there is really no
> economic motivation for this.
>
> Hebrew is generally well-supported nowadays in software. Arabic,
> Farsi, Hindi, etc. are a little bit farther behind.
>
> But I think in many of these cases, it's not our issue so much as it
> is the issue of developers of browers and operating systems. Granted,
> we do have problems with BiDi, which Gangleri is always working on.
> But even with that, only a tiny fraction of the problems with BiDi
> have ever been on our end, many of them simply aren't fixable by us.
>
> That aside, none of the languages of South America that I know of, a
> minority of the languages of Africa, and really mostly only the
> languages of South and Southeast Asia (ie, excluding languages of
> Central Asia, North Asia) are written in complex scripts. This means
> that population-wise, if we concentrate on complex scripts, we are
> more specifically concentrating on Indic languages, Southeast Asian
> languages (Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese), minority languages in China
> (Tibetan, Mongolian), and Arabic-script languages (Arabic, Farsi,
> Urdu, Uyghur, Balochi, S. Azeri). Certainly these are very
> population-heavy languages. But I think the root of the issue is
> internet access. With many of these languages, it seems that people
> are trying to resolve script problems before access is really
> widespread, which is certainly lamentable, but at the same time makes
> it clear that problems with rendering are certainly not one of the
> major reasons for current numbers for most of these languages.
>
> Mark
>
>
> On 05/04/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hoi,
>> I have read the thread as it was published so far and I am amazed that
>> nobody mentioned one simple reason why people do not edit or add content
>> to the Arab, the Farsi, the Hebrew and Assamese projects .. It is too
>> bloody hard. When you say "everybody can edit", it is as if it is the
>> same effort is involved. I read somewhere where an African president
>> said; "we do not have scripts yet for all of our indigenous languages.
>> When the yi.wikipedia celebrated its 1000th article Gangleri was thanked
>> for his hard work to make this technically possible. When I created some
>> Farsi training material on Wikibooks, I needed two browsers to complete
>> certain tasks; both Internet Explorer and Firefox were not up to the task.
>>
>> Gangleri does a great job, he is imho one of the most valuable
>> Wikimedians because he tries to make it possible to have information in
>> all languages. To take things to the next level, we need more
>> developers; people of all the language families and make sure with them
>> that MediaWiki is up to the task. So far we have been self
>> congratulatory about how well we do. We profess that we want to do
>> better in Africa Asia and South America. We can if we make it a priority.
>>
>> For me improving these issues /is/ a priority. http://WiktionaryZ.org
>> requires good support for all languages. I am happy that we initiated
>> the "Multilingual Mediawiki" project as it will further improve the
>> multilingual capabilities of MediaWiki. It will still not do all the
>> things that are necessary to make MediaWiki as easy to edit as it is for
>> us. For that I need people that speak Hindi Assamese Twi Farsi Arab
>> Hebrew and help us define what /their /problem with our software is and
>> when we are lucky help us fix these issues.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>     GerardM
>>
>>
>> Mark Williamson wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi everybody,
>>>
>>> While it's sort of obvious, given the digital divide, that the number
>>> of articles in Wikipedias is not proportional to the number of
>>> speakers, for example Hindi has a much smaller number of articles
>>> compared to speakers than most active Wikipedias; German has more.
>>>
>>> However, something that people may not notice as much is the
>>> incongruency between popularity of a particular language version and
>>> the number of articles in that version.
>>>
>>> The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
>>>
>>> 1 English (65%)
>>> 2 German (10%)
>>> 3 Japanese (6%)
>>> 4 Spanish (3%)
>>> 5 French (2%)
>>> 6 Polish (2%)
>>> 7 Chinese (2%)
>>> 8 Arabic (2%)
>>> 9 Italian (1%)
>>> 10 Hebrew (1%)
>>> 11 Turkish (1%)
>>> 12 Dutch (1%)
>>> 13 Portuguese (1%)
>>> (all others combined total 1% of visits)
>>>
>>> On the other hand, the list of Wikipedias ranked by number of articles is:
>>> 1 English (1048.7K)
>>> 2 German (376.9K)
>>> 3 French (261.1K)
>>> 4 Polish (223.8K)
>>> 5 Japanese (196.3K)
>>> 6 Dutch (156.9K)
>>> ...
>>> 8 Italian (146.8K)
>>> 9 Portuguese (123.8K)
>>> 10 Spanish (105.0K)
>>> ...
>>> 12 Chinese (61.48K)
>>> ...
>>> 17 Hebrew (34.35K)
>>> ...
>>> 29 Turkish (19.94K)
>>> ...
>>> 37 Arabic (12.03K)
>>>
>>> What this says to me is that these Wikipedias are not attracting new
>>> pages proportional to views when compared with other Wikipedias. This
>>> may be because people don't want to write new pages, but it seems to
>>> me more likely that people simply don't know they can.
>>>
>>> How can this be fixed? Perhaps a site notice inviting people to write
>>> quality pages or register, or a drive to recruit new Wikipedians from
>>> the academic community.
>>>
>>> Mark

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