NSK wrote
... what is WMF's
position on bringing free knowledge in the Third World and what do you
think
that residents of Europe, North America and Oceania
can do via the
Internet
for the rest of the planet?
I wonder how well-informed you are on Wikipedia. Jimbo Wales typically
mentions a whole-planet view when he is interviewed. I would say that it is
a *given* in serious discussion of WP, that it is a vehicle to do just this;
if debates seem to be on 'knowledge' and 'implementation' it is because
there is less consensus on those. Unfortunately, defining knowledge (as if
we had to) seems to take up 95% of the bandwidth.
In perspective, Wikipedia has succeeded in under four years in drawing
together:
- an admirable tech support team that works for nothing
- a fundraising mechanism that has worked in some well-judged campaigns
- hardware that is only under pressure so much because the demand always
absorbs the supply on a timescale of weeks
- very good word-of-mouth publicity
- recently, some high-profile media publicity
- an effective program to break out of the linguistic monopoly of English
(barring some early troubles)
- the best interwiki solution ever (because it's simple and the problem in
general is hard)
- last but not least, a large community who write, edit and do admin chores,
some of whom are the kind of driven people who are needed to make a
voluntary project get somewhere.
I'm not quite sure what difficulty you see yourself addressing on this list.
Perhaps you could phrase it in terms that make more sense to those who share
my perspective.
Charles