Submissions/Having Wikipedias compete on equal footing

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.

Title of the submission: Having Wikipedias compete on equal footing

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): presentation

Author of the submission: Gerard Meijssen

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences): gerard.meijssen@gmail.com

Country of origin: the Netherlands

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Personal homepage or blog: http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal): It is often assumed that the Wikipedias in different languages technically compete for attention on an equal footing. Once they have their Wikipedia, they log on to the Internet and edit in their language. When they do well, they grow their articles, their editors and their traffic. This conception is wrong.

This presentation will show the many things that go wrong for the languages that have a Wikipedia and, it will go into what prevents several hundred languages from getting a Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is in a position to ensure that at least our own languages are enabled to fully function in this digital age.

When these technical hurdles are overcome, hundreds of millions of people will be affected because their language will have gained equal access to the Internet. For our projects it will mean that Wikipedia is known as the catalyst for these changes, this will gain us much attention and this will help us attract new editors, new articles and consequently more traffic.

I will make the case that we can easily triple our active editors for all the languages that are affected in this way.

Track (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure): Collaboration/Infrastructure

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).