No it doesn't. The greatest tool for the education of those poor sods in the 3rd world
is the English Wikipedia, plus Spanish, French, etc. But mostly en. Here's why.
1. It's the biggest. It's the best. You learn the most.
2. You get to practice reading English at the same time. English is THE global language
and will become even more so, mostly because of the economic dominance of the US and the
fact that it's so easy to learn. You can learn to speak understandable English in a
month: even if/when China takes over economically, we'll still do business in English.
I know hundreds of people who can speak English as a second language: I know not one
non-Chinese who speaks fluent Mandarin. Mr Botswana will do far better economically from
en than he will from botswanian wiki.
3. It is not run by monomaniacal ethnic zealots, who find smaller wikis laughably easy to
take over. Even ru wiki has a problem with this, I've heard. On en, people like me
spend hours making sure that history is not distorted by fanatics and that our narratives
offer an accurate, rational fair picture. There's little food for fundamentalists. God
knows what crap you find on smaller wikis with less editorial oversight. In the wake of
the terrorist attacks in Bombay, this seems particularly relevant.
Conclusion: let them all fail, bar the big ones.
CM
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:04:43 +0100
From: effeietsanders(a)gmail.com
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Please, speak for yourself :) I *do* care, and if there is an easy and
definite solution, I'd love to embrace it. I think we should care about our
little siblings, about the smaller languages as we call them, and support
them if possible. I can only hope you were being extremely ironic :)
Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work of
human knowledge really adds something. In the large languages, we already
had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better
sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are living
in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky) there is very little material
available... and now there is an encyclopedia... In YOUR language! Even if
it only contains 1000 articles, you can already learn a lot from it. You can
improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in competition with the
western world. It won't do miracles of course, but every tiny little bit
helps.
And now imagine that this goes for all languages. And not only
encyclopediae, but also learning books, dictionaries and perhaps one day
even other collections. Wikipedia *does* make a difference. (and I'd almost
add: donate now ;-) )
Best regards,
Lodewijk
2008/11/30 Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk>
Do we care that 80%
of our projects are failing?
Thanks,
GerardM
No. Why should we? Nobody actually reads shit like the albanian wikibooks
(doesn't matter if that doesn't exist, you get my point). Such projects
exist purely the monomaniacal benefit of the editor(s), not any readers. Let
them all fail, with the exception of Wikipedias en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt and
commons.
CM
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