Talk:India Program/Indic Languages/Hindi/Discussions/2011

This is wonderfully insightful. Thought I'd share my summary of the broad themes that I see emerging

Motivators for joining Indic Language Projects

Awareness mostly through search engines not through outreach or media
It's not been about parochial (sic) notions about preserving culture or a language or lofty ambitions about knowledge access; but about core Wikipedia basics of building a knowledge repository
Wanting to stay away from antagonistic, aggressive en-wp edit environment
Helping the Indic language project - as the number of volunteers were low (especially when compared to en-wp which has higher numbers of volunteers)

Community

Very low community meet up attendance
Not finding meet-ups as they are currently run useful as the discussions are not engaging or relevant
Collaboration is weak (especially on articles) - and more about process

Activities

Doing a lot of clean up after damage done by bots
Categorisation, copyvio clean ups
Perform a different role on Indic projects (a lot of support work instead of article content) as compared to their roles in en-wp (where they edit articles on subjects of interest)

Barriers

Technical issues are not *such* a major challenge; though awareness that technical solutions exist is low.
Basic awareness of projects
Lack of reliable sources online

Suggestions

Media coverage on Indic language media vehicles (e.g., local language newspapers, etc.) to build basic awareness of the very existence of Indic language projects as well as invitation to edit
Tie-ups with education system of various kinds (colleges, teachers, state government bodies, etc.)

Hmundol 10:24, 25 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

// It's not been about parochial (sic) notions about preserving culture or a language or lofty ambitions about knowledge access; but about core Wikipedia basics of building a knowledge repository//

This varies from language to language. Personally I started editing in Wikipedia only because a wikipedia is available in my mother language (Malayalam). Infact I stared my wiki editing in Malayalam. Editing in en wiki happned much later. After talking with many Indic language wikipedians, I found I am not alone. The case of Hindi might be different.--Shijualex 17:01, 26 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]