Draft Recommendation #4: Indian languages on Wikipedia deserve individual focus and analysis

Shiju Alex [[1]] has been compiling monthly reports that encapsulate statistics from major Indian-language Wikipedias:

October 2009: http://shijualexonline.googlepages.com/2009_10_Indic_Lang_Wiki_Statistics.pdf November 2009: http://shijualexonline.googlepages.com/2009_11_Indic_Lang_Wiki_Statistics.pdf December 2009: http://shijualexonline.googlepages.com/2009_december_en.pdf

Ravishankar from Tamil Wikipedia reports that Wikipedians who work on Tamil language pages are tracking their internal quality statistics, among other measures employed across Indian language pages at large.

There are several interesting conclusions one can draw from broad trends across different Indian languages. Mostly, these have to do with quality and quantity. Given that these language Wikipedias have an underlying representation of anywhere between 10 and 200 million language-speakers, it seems only appropriate that each language be treated as an individual entity. Certainly, there are common issues - such as working with Indian scripts - but by and large, existing differences in quality and quantity trends suggest that there is significant difference too.

To assess and grow Indian language Wikipedias, it might be prudent to: (a) assess each individual situation in terms of what's working, how and why, (b) develop specific strategies to address what's not working and to augment what is, (c) build Wikipedian language communities through outreach, nationally and beyond.

Report on Telugu wikipedia and related telugu wikipage shows the active wikipedians (5 or more edits per month) is average of 30 people, out of a registered wikipedian base of 332. This is about 10%. As the bloggers are much more, we need to encourage bloggers to contribute to wikipedia more.

Your recommendation:

...each language be treated as an individual entity...

is a very good recommendation. Instead of treating all the Indian Wikis as one entity, special treatment is required for each indian language Wiki.

Since I am following the growth of most of the Indian language wikis for the past 3 years, I can very well say why separate treatment is required for each Indian language Wiki. I will take the classic example of 2 Indian Language Wikipedias.

• Punjabi
• Odia (Oriya)

Punjabi has 88 million speakers world wide and it is the First Indian language Wikipedia. It is started way back in June 2002, much before Hindi/Tamil, Malayalam, or any other Indian language wikipedias. And with out saying, you might be knowing the internet penetration among Punjabi people worldwide. But surprisingly, it is one of the Indian Wikipedia with very less number of articles. Even though Punjabi Wikipedia is in existence for more than 6 years now, It has only 1500 articles.

In the case of odiya language, it has 31 million speakers. And oriya wiki was also started much before Hindi/Tamil/Malayalam, or any other Indian language wikipedias. But still the number of articles is less than 500. That wiki is in existence for more than 6 years now.

You should also note that, even ancient languages like Sanskrit and Pali language wikipedias have more active users and number of articles than Punjabi and odiya.

So it is NOT the number of speakers or the internet penetration is deciding the growth of a wikipedia. There might be individual and specific reason for each language.