Wikipedia Co-Founder, President of Wikia, and Chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, Jimmy Wales, has had an article published in Forbes India.
The knowledge-sharing we take for granted in English — we just assume we have easy access to any information we want — has not been true for many other languages.
Take Africa. The number of books published in African languages, the number of newspapers, the number of outlets of information, they’re quite small. Say you speak Wolof, a language in Senegal; the information available is much less than if you could speak in English or French or German. But now, thanks to the efforts of volunteers (and started, incidentally, by a chap in Switzerland), there is a Wolof Wikipedia with over a thousand entries.
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Connectivity via mobile will reduce the digital divide. While it is true that right now, being able to access the Internet through a smart phone isn’t the same experience relative to accessing via a computer, I think it’s just a matter of stages, as devices get cheaper, for that to improve.
And, meanwhile, the growth of English as the second language for the rest of the world will accelerate. In a more connected world, the incentives for ordinary people to learn English only become stronger. For example if you’re a Bengali speaker, and you’re interested in talking to people in Thailand, English is the natural choice.
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