This thread brought me to think of an article I wrote on Norwegian
Wikipedia about a year ago. It was about the Allex Project (African
Languages Lexical Project), a project where universities in Oslo,
Gothenburg and Harare cooperated in developing monolingual text corpus
based dictionaries for shona and ndebele languages in Zimbabwe.
The project resulted in a dictionary in shona, establishing a lexicographic
institute at the university of Zimbabwe, African Languages Research
Institute, 10 doctor degrees for zimbabwians and much more. Shona and
ndbele were lifted from spoken language to university level and
acknowledged as education language.
There is a wikipedia in shona language. It has 3106 articles. If one could
engage some of the people that worked in the Allex Project to do a paid
translation job, it would benefit about 14 million speakers, shona is the
most spoken Bantu language, Zulu is next to shona, spoken by 10 million,
according to our articles.
Greetings from frozen, sunny Norway
Harald Haugland
2018-02-28 15:03 GMT+01:00 Jean-Philippe Béland <jpbeland(a)wikimedia.ca>ca>:
The Wikimedia movement is more than encyclopedias...
We already have
Wikiversity for teaching, no? Are efforts to contribute to Wikiversity and
other sister projects making us lose focus? I'm not sure to understand what
you are saying.
JP
On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 2:32 AM Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
2018-02-28 1:25 GMT+02:00 James Salsman
<jsalsman(a)gmail.com>om>:
I was not
trying to say that everybody
should learn English. The point I was
trying to make there is that knowing
English is a privilege and that it is easy
to not notice it.
I agree with that, too. How is teaching language different relative to
the Foundation Mission than teaching subjects of encyclopedia
articles?
We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles. We are making it possible to
write them and to read them. It is not the same thing as teaching
subjects.
Should we do teaching? Maybe, but since it's different from making it
possible to write and read, I'm afraid it would be losing focus.
Is there anything bad about teaching languages? Of course not. It's
great.
I'm just not sure that it's the right
thing for Wikimedia to do, when
Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki
articles.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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