The nature of contributions on smaller wikis
The Times of India has a brief article about the major contributor to the Gujarati Wikipedia and Gujarati Wiktionary. (Gujarati is the language of Gujarat, an Indian state in the northwest of the country.) As the article notes, the primary contributor (Yann Forget, who recently ran for the WMF board ) is not Indian, but French; there’s a charming story about how he came to know the Gujarati language, but I will defer to the article for that.
I’m not intimately familiar with every WMF wiki, but several smaller ones seem to have a similar story as the Gujarati wikis mentioned here — all the work is done by one or two very dedicated individuals, and if that core leaves, the project goes silent. Of course, we can blame much of this on either issues of scale (few speakers), issues of availability (few people with free time and decent Internet connectivity), or some combination of the two. Sadly, those issues are beyond the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The next best hope for some smaller wikis, then, would be emigrants, expatriates, students, and foreigners. The Gujarati wikis, for example, might benefit from Gujarati speakers who live in the UK (especially around London, Leicester, Coventry, and Bradford). To get these people to contribute to Gujarati wikis, though, they first need to know that Gujarati wikis exist. (The Times of India article helps with that, though they could have at least posted a link.) On top of this, UK-based Gujarati speakers need to be nudged to spend more time on the Gujarati wikis than on the English Wikipedia; after all, the Gujarati wikis need a lot more help than en.wp.
It doesn’t help, of course, that the North American press tends to focus on the English Wikipedia. (Seriously, the only non-enwiki mentions I’ve seen lately have been about dewiki’s flagged revisions test; dewiki’s adventures in paper publishing; the ten millionth Wikipedia article, which was posted in huwiki; and an occasional en.wikinews story that “makes it” to the mainstream media.) Whenever possible, we should be reminding the press about the existence of other wikis — and not just the English projects!
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