[LINK] The New York Times on the Future of Facebook and Wikipedia: "Keep Globalizing"

[rfmcdonald]

Two articles of some note about how mainstays of the English-language Internet are starting to permeate even more the non-Anglophone Internet popped out at me recently, both from the New York Times.

In "Facebook Makes Headway Around the World", Miguel Helft suggests that rather than different social networks continuing to dominate their portions of the world alongside facebook--Orkut in Brazil, say, or Friendster in Southeast Asia--Facebook is emerging as dominant everywhere, thansk to efforts to recruit users to produce variants of Facebook in different regional and language versions.

It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to eight million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

[. . .]

Just over two years ago, Facebook was available only in English. Still, nearly half of its users were outside the United States, and its presence was particularly strong in Britain, Australia and other English-speaking countries.

The task of expanding the site overseas fell on Javier Olivan, a 33-year-old Spaniard who joined Facebook three years ago, when the site had 30 million users. Mr. Olivan led an innovative effort by Facebook to have its users translate the site into more than 80 languages. Other Web sites and technology companies, notably Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, had used volunteers to translate their sites or programs.

But with 300,000 words on Facebook’s site — not counting material posted by users — the task was immense. Facebook not only encouraged users to translate parts of the site, but also let other users fine-tune those translations or pick among multiple translations. Nearly 300,000 users participated.

“Nobody had done it at the scale that we were doing it,” Mr. Olivan said.

The effort paid off. Now about 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the United States. And while the number of users in the United States doubled in the last year, to 123 million, according to comScore, the number more than tripled in Mexico, to 11 million, and it more than quadrupled in Germany, to 19 million.

Noam Cohen's "How Can Wikipedia Grow? Maybe in Bengali", meanwhile, describes how Wikipedia's core supporters are trying to make the encyclopedia more credible. It may not be professionally respectable--experts can be difficult to recruit, at least so far--but the various non-English-language Wikipedias can always expand their content and user base. "One, two, three, a thousand Wikipedias!"

On Saturday, a representative of Google, Michael Galvez, described the company’s various efforts to “seed” the smaller Wikipedias in languages like Swahili. Because search engines are useful only when there is an abundance of researched and reliable material, the company has paid translators and offered Google translation kits to foster content in many languages that are underrepresented on the Internet, including Arabic and many in South Asia.

Users contributed millions of words in these languages, Mr. Galvez told the audience of 100. But he added, “We had some people welcome us, and others who said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ”

A shift in perspective came quickly. A report by A. Ravishankar of the Wikipedia in Tamil — one of the underrepresented South Asian languages — noted that in mid-2009, the site’s administrators suddenly noticed articles appearing out of nowhere. Only months later did the Wikipedians learn that they were witnessing the benefits of Google’s project to improve their site and increase the amount of content online in Tamil.

In understated phrasing, Mr. Ravishankar explained what the surge in content was lacking. For example, the entries covered “too many American pop stars and Hindi movies, which Tamils may not need as a priority.” There was sloppiness in language and coding. And the content was mostly not original, having been translated from English Wikipedia entries.