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

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.