I am guessing that at least a couple of those who attended the
conference were native or fluent speakers of some of South Africa's
_other_ official languages.
Do these people know that we have Wikipedias in their mother tongue? I
somehow doubt it. If they do know, do they care? I know that there are
some people who don't care about the Wikipedia in their mother tongue,
but most people I have told said they didn't know and went to work on
it right away.
It seems to me that African-language localisation is an important part
of open-content and open-source in South Africa (see translate.co.za
), yet very few of these people seem to know about these Wikipedias.
In fact, I did a spot check, and it seems that many of the
contributors to the Afrikaans Wikipedia are South Africans with Zulu,
Xhosa, etc names and in some cases obviously speak one of these
languages (User:Alias, for example, has contributed a little bit to
the Zulu Wikipedia; others have heavily edited articles on what might
be their mother tongue, or say it on their userpage). I suspect the
reason for involvement with the Afrikaans Wikipedia only rather than
their mother tongue(s) is that the Afrikaans Wikipedia is still
relatively small, but I'm sure at least some of the people at the
conference or the Afrikaans Wikipedia would edit these Wikipedias if
they knwe bout them, but they don't.
Mark
On 25/04/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Ronald Chmara wrote:
On Apr 25, 2005, at 5:26 AM, Andy Rabagliati
wrote:
There was some discussion of that. Two (very
real) problems :-
* Editing. Voice editing sounds clumsy, and would sound like
CamelCase :-)
* Accents. If an Indian is trying to understand what a Geordie or
someone from Barbados is saying, it might as well be in Afrikaans :-)
Wikipedia is not paper. Or one tape deck.
Thus, one word, say "aluminium" could have several pronunciation entries.
That only helps the person using the term. It's a one-way feature. The
person hearing the term used in another dialect will still have no idea
what is being said. How can he transcribe anything which is
unintelligible to him?
Ec
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