Talk:Timeline of Hindi on the web

Review by Vipul on 2024-01-01

General standalone evaluation comments

This timeline looks very good! Just one comment:

• Please add inclusion criteria for the full timeline (I'm sorry I forgot about this in previous reviews).✔

Duplicate row issues

• I see two rows for the launch of Webdunia, one dated to 1999 and one dated to 2000. Please check if the 2000 row is a duplicate with incorrect date, and if not, clarify more explicitly the situation.✔ (Sebastian: Some sources point to 2000. However, according to most sources and who.is, webdunia.com was registered on 1999-07-31).

Review by Vipul on 2023-12-02

General standalone evaluation comments

This is a great timeline and pretty impressive!

• You have a lot of rows where you talk about Indian vernacular languages overtaking English. It's probably worthwhile to remind the reader in these rows that this is aggregating across all Indian languages, and does not mean that any single language (in particular Hindi) has overtaken English. Of course, when Hindi has overtaken English, you can and should mention this (as you do in some cases).✔ (I added clarification in a number of rows).

Duplicate row issues

• I see two rows about Twitter launching in Hindi, one for September 2011 and one for June 2012. It would be good to add clarity on how the rows differ, as well as provide connection between them.✔ (Sebastian: 2012 row has only one source, very likely fake or the same 2011 news posted in 2012)
• I see a likely duplicate pair of rows for Netflix introducing a Hindi interface (both in August 2020, one for August 7 and one for August 10; moreover, they are adjacent). Please consolidate into one row.✔
• I see a duplicate row off by one decade about Google introduced a handwrite search feature: the original row is from August 2013, which is the correct date but fails to mention the "handwrite" part, and a row that incorrectly gives a date in August 2023 (one decade later) but does mention the handwrite part. Please consolidate into one row with the correct year.✔

Other line-level comments

• For Amazon Prime Video, you mention their first original Hindi movie, but perhaps you can also mention their first (or one of their early) produced Hindi TV shows. As far as I understand, Amazon Prime Video (and Netflix) are more active in self-producing TV shows than movies.✔ (Inside Edge added).
• It may be worth mentioning Hotstar✔, Zee5✔, and SonyLiv✔ as some of the other✔ online/streaming platforms that include a lot of Hindi content.

External evaluation

ChatGPT

I asked ChatGPT for a timeline of Hindi on the web. It gave a timeline largely inferior to this one. It did include a few names not mentioned in this timeline, but I'm not sure if they were all genuine, and in any case they seem unimportant (it did prompt me to add Hotstar to the list in the preceding section, though).

Previous review by Vipul

• Timeline of Hindi on the web (Requested on June 27, 2019 on Messenger group "Vipul Naik, Issa Rice")
  • Vipul: It may help to have, in both the big picture and full timeline, a few background events on the development of Hindi. Hindi as currently understood is a relatively new language, a fork of the original Hindustani, with the other fork being Urdu (that is very similar as a spoken language but has a different script). The standardization of Hindi was tied to Indian independence and partition from Pakistan (where Urdu became the version for Pakistan, though Urdu script was still used in India in creative industries till as late as the 1990s). See Hindi and History of Hindustani✔
  • Vipul: Adding to the above, it may also be worth noting the status of Hindi as an official language (along with English) but not the national language of India, and that there are several other languages in India many of which don't share roots with Hindi and are very different (the so-called Dravidian languages). It may be worth mentioning the Anti-Hindi agitations of Tamil Nadu that played a role in preventing Hindi from becoming the national language and being imposed. This is relevant because even though Hindi is the single most widely spoken language in India, it is still spoken by < 50% of Indians which means that making Hindi content on the web isn't a surefire way of being able to reach everybody. Moreover, for a lot of content, making it in English allows for wider geographic reach, while limiting it to more educated and (usually) more affluent people. So, when the Internet was more expensive to access, it made sense for content production to be in the English language because limited to more educated and affluent people, English had wider reach across India than Hindi did. This is a factor in addition to the technical barriers you mention, so it really was important for the cost of Internet access and mobile devices and computers to drop enough to make Hindi content production worthwhile.✔
  • Vipul: Governments and social services in countries with Hindi-speaking minority populations had started putting up Hindi translations of their websites in the 2000s. See if you can find any references for this, or e.g., if there is a Hindi version of a UK government health services site, you can use the Wayback Machine to find out when it started.✘
  • Vipul: Look for the launch of YouTube channels that have all or a large portion of their content in Hindi; for instance, music videos (T-Series) or Hindi news and online discussion sites.✔
  • Vipul: Facebook launch of Hindi interface (if date available)?✔
  • Vipul: At some point, NCERT✘ (the big publisher of school-level textbooks) and IGNOU✔/✘ (an open university for college education) put all their textbooks online for free; this included textbooks in the Hindi language as well (both for learning Hindi and for learning other subjects). Check for dates. This would be significant in terms of improving the base of online knowledge in Hindi.
  • Vipul: Text-to-speech improvements making it easier to use voice to search (you already have some discussion of voice search, but if there are more events there it would be good).✔
  • Vipul: This may be hard to find: improvements in Google Search in Hindi that allowed for looser spelling by doing more automatic correction of spelling. This would make it easier for people searching on phones with limited input capability, or people whose written Hindi wasn't that good. ज (j) vs. ज़ (z), for instance, differ only in a little dot and sometimes people may not know the correct version to use, or making ज़ (z) on their phone may be tricky.✘
  • Vipul: Hindi tools, fonts, keyboard, standardization to Unicode improving interoperability of reading and writing Hindi and leading to more written content creation; this is mentioned in the big picture but not covered much in the full timeline. It may be worth checking for dates of Unicode support on browsers, Unicode support on operating systems (such as Windows in Notepad), as well as blogging platforms (such as WordPress) supporting unicode and Hindi.✔
  • Vipul: Netflix and Amazon Prime getting into Hindi original content creation? (First Netflix original in Hindi, first Amazon Prime original in Hindi)✔