4 ms·
Presumably a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the English-speaking world has been picked. So Wikipedia really needs to draw contributors from outside Anglosphere
by Hyena 15y ago
Presumably a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the English-speaking world has been picked. So Wikipedia really needs to draw contributors from outside Anglosphere to flesh out history and culture articles.
- hugh3 15y agoMore importantly, it needs to draw contributors from outside the Anglosphere to work on languages other than English. English wikipedia has 3.7 million articles. Spanish has only 810,000, Chinese just 300,000-ish, and Hindi less than one hundred thousand. That's the top four most spoken languages in the world right there.
- _delirium 15y agoFor Hindi in particular, there's a big competition-with-English issue. There was a study at some point that Wikimedia commissioned that found that most educated Hindi-speakers preferred to read and contribute to the English Wikipedia. IIRC, one of the reasons was that they felt it promoted Indian culture to a more international audience if they wrote an article about an Indian location, or novel, or historical figure, in English. Another reason is that a lot of higher education in India is in English already. (Also, anecdotally, the South Indians I know would rather use English than Hindi; their own native-language Wikipedias, like Kannada, are too small for them to consider them viable, and they see English as more "neutral" than Hindi in domestic political terms.)
- eru 15y agoYou can go and translate articles from the other languages' Wikipedias.
- Hyena 15y agoI do it on a regular basis, actually. What's surprising to me is that others don't seem to: I often come across articles in other languages which are dwarfed by their English companion. I'd think that someone would have bothered using Google Translate to guide a conversion of the page from English, but I guess I'd think wrong.
- eru 15y agoI often come across articles in the German Wikipedia that are translated from English. Not as often as would be beneficial, though.
- justincormack 15y agoThe styles for some of the languages seem quite different, had an issue with a translation from the French wikipedia being very informal in style, compared to English...
- bugsbunnyak 15y agoAgreed. Given the scope constraints, a successful Encyclopedia should be expected to have sigmoid growth. Less-to-contribute will inevitably invite fewer contributors.