“You didn’t mention that, in several countries in Africa (especially those which are former British colonies), English (or some other Indo-European language that isn’t spoken natively by the population) is the default language of media (including Internet), education, government, and business, while languages such as Yoruba and isiZulu which are spoken at home but rarely taught outside with text-centricity don’t enjoy the same recognition. The only Niger-Congo language which may come close to such a status is KiSwahili, particularly because it was promoted in “British East Africa” by the British and by the subsequent national governments post-independence; as a result, it is an official language in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the bordering Democratic Republic of the Congo (by order of state recognition).
Hausa may be as big as KiSwahili in the number of native and secondary speakers in the Sahelian region, but in none of the countries where it is spoken (save for Nigeria, where it is promoted exclusively in some of the northern states) is it promoted by the national government or similarly-overarching institutional forms:
- Niger
- Nigeria (only the state governments)
- Benin
- Burkina Faso
- Cameroon
- Ghana
- Sudan
- Togo
Yoruba, like Igbo, may also have such a large presence on their own wikis because of 1) Nigeria’s population and 2) the fact that such languages are promoted by the local and state governments. They don’t have the wikipresence of KiSwahili (currently the largest African-language wiki besides, possibly, the Afrikaans wiki) because the languages are not promoted by more than one government.
In South Africa, isiZulu and isiXhosa are the two largest-spoken Niger-Congo languages with official status, and they are promoted to a certain extent on SABC-owned media outlets. Outside of that, very little promotion of such languages exists (even Afrikaans is waning as an influence), and the de-facto language of education in the country is English; isiZulu may only have greater media recognition than isiXhosa because 1) it possesses more native and secondary speakers in KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng and 2) the music industry, particularly Kwaito, which is particularly embracive of Zulu lyrics.
It depends more, IMO, upon the prior promotion of the languages rather than the sort of model used for the distribution of information. Most sub-Saharan African national governments and their local first-tier subdivisions haven’t pushed or encouraged their local population’s home languages or lingua franca to a similar degree as have countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There is a lack of social or financial incentive to promote their own home languages or lingua franca at the expense of the main languages which unite them with the former colonial power, be it the UK (Commonwealth of Nations), France (la Francophonie), Portugal (Community of Portuguese Language Countries), etc.
This may also explain why English also emanates from India (a former British dominion) as the primary source of written Internet language for Indians, even when communicating with each other on that same medium; this comes at the expense of Hindi (the other official language of the federation and the most locally-spoken language of a majority of the population), Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, etc. Such local languages have their own amply-supplied wikis under the Wikimedia banner for those who understand the text, but most blogs written by Indian people are in English, and not Hindi or other local languages.
And that you make an indirect nod to China, I suppose (“So get ready for the time in which non Euro-Americans will discuss on THEIR media whether keeping en.wiki on-line makes sense or not.”), brings to mind the fact that written Chinese is the only standard that keeps “Chinese languages” like Mandarin and Cantonese even remotely mutually intelligible with each other.
Oh…nevermind, there’s actually more than one “Chinese” Wikipedia, and none of them are anywhere near being moved to the Incubator, but only the Vernacular, “official” one is the largest…at slightly less than 200,000 articles (about as much as the Romanian and Czech Wikipedias):
Again, I believe that a successful non-English Wikipedia depends upon the promotion of literacy in the language at home and abroad; it also depends upon the ease of access to the Internet. Most of the African, Indian and Asian language wikis suffer from the lack thereof in the places where they are most spoken.
Should we blame this on the nature of the technology that we’re using here in the West and exporting to the other countries, that it is not geared to the populations’ cultures?
No. Why should we blame the technology that came from the West for a deficiency that lies almost squarely within the Third World’s court? The technology that we have exported over the Internet has failed to make inroads into the regions of sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, etc., while it has made strong inroads into such countries as Japan and Singapore, only because the Internet and prerequisite communication mediums have failed to make inroads to a multitude of countries while penetrating the very heart of a few.
We who create and edit wikis just can’t apologize for things which are out of our hands. I can only say that the resources of the West has failed to work out better means of communication for the Third World’s populations, where several countries’ governments and cultures already place severe restrictions on such “elitist” “Enlightenment” features as “freedom of speech”, “assembly”, “belief”, etc.
I do agree with you on the mobile thing. Wikis and mobile devices currently don’t mix well, at least because wikis are a set of documents and most documents aren’t designed to be viewed and accessed for mobile, pocket-sized displays.”
