[Wikipedia-l] Re: Paid-for-articles WPs in smaller languages (was: bambara)

[Anthere]

V. Ivanov a écrit:
> 2005/5/27, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>:

Hi

>>I am interested in your experience...
>>I went to see the wiki (difficult, I mostly see ??? on my computer), and
>>I saw that aside from ip contributions, the main two contributors are a
>>bot (it could be hidden if you wish this) and Amikeco.
> 
> 
> I am also very happy about the users Alard and Ruslan (the letter name
> in Cyrillic): Alard helps immensely as a native speaker from a smaller
> town of Alagir; he works at an IT firm and is always on line, I can
> consult him via ICQ at any time; Ruslan is a native speaker of Digor
> dialect and he contributes about the places in western Ossetia, where
> the dialect is been spoken. He also promises a comprehensive article
> about Digor for the speakers of the main form.

All right

>>Are you Amikeco or is it one of the authors you mentionned ?
> 
> 
> ru, os, eo, av, cv:Amikeco/m:Slavik IVANOV

Ahah, you do not make things easy :-)


>>If Amikeco is not the direct author of the article, does that mean he
>>copied in wikipedia the article written by another ?
> 
> 
> As for the articles coming from the South Ossetian teachers, I get
> them by e-mail and put them to WP (after wikifying; they come as a
> simple text file or a Word file).

Just a side comment. Perhaps you should mention in the comment box the 
name of the original author.

I would see two benefits
First it is more honest toward the author, who is credite is work.
Second, it is good image to show several people are contributing.


>>I was also wondering if you set a sort of "validation" of the articles
>>written (a check of the quality of the article)?
> 
> 
> Well, the validation is really simple by now:
> 1. Check numbers as far as it's possible (first of all dates of birth
> and death for biography articles);
> 2. Give the text to a native speaker from the North to test how
> understandable it is. Sometimes a phrase or two are not well composed
> and we change word order or do similare editing.
> I also have to pay attention to spelling: I have learnt the language
> by books and newspapers, so my spelling is very good (for me the
> Ossetic is first of all a written language), but for most Ossetians
> the language is first of all a spoken one -- and they often do
> spelling mistakes.

Nod. This seems a good process to me.

>>Can you tell me how
>>many people are behind this experience?
> 
> 
> 1 active teacher (female under 30), two more interested but not writing yet.
> Other people involved are:
> - volunteer co-ordinator in Tshkhinval (local journalist, ethic
> Ossetian): he helps us interact with the writers via e-mail;
> - volunteer co-ordinator at the Ossetic WP (me): putting the texts,
> wikifying them, spell-checking, finding proof-readers, raising funds,
> writing articles to Ossetia-related sites like iriston.ru, iryston.com
> and ossetia.ru, etc.
> - proof-readers (3 native speakers), sponsors (4 persons).

It is pretty impressive

>>Did they contacted teachers
>>they knew otherwise, or did a sort of list out of a university or high
>>school?
> 
> 
> The journalist informed the locals about the "first encyclopedia in
> Ossetian"; some of them got interested. Neither computers, nor
> Internet are widely available in S.Ossetia -- so the interest could
> rest just the interest, but then the bright idea appeared... :) And we
> proposed the payed writing for the persons, who were, as we had
> already known, really interested.
> We didn't advertised the project much because of 2 reasons:
> - we don't have much funds: maybe 5-20 articles a month are our limit;
> - we wouldn't like to make other people think that writing for WP must
> be payed; may they write for free if they can.

Nod. Both arguments are fair. I would like to know whether these 
teachers have themselves good internet access ? Presumably quite limited ?


>>I can perceive several ways to push the idea. Possibly organising a
>>presentation in a school or university,
> 
> 
> You see, the schools and universities of a higher quality group are at
> Vladikavkaz. There Ossetians no longer use the language for scientific
> or similar purposes: the Russian is prevailing. The task of the
> Project is not only to find chip writers, but also to find the last
> literate speakers of Ossetian and pay them for being used.
> 
> Among our further plans is looking for such people in the villages of
> North Ossetia, where exists at least one highly literate group: the
> teachers of the Ossetian language. But most of them are not at all
> good computer users... So we have many interesting challenges.

Perhaps a collaboration with computer offer ?

> We are also planning to meet authorities of the North Ossetian State
> University in order to organize presentations of Wikipedia at several
> faculties. The future Ossetian philologists and journalists might get
> much experience from writing texts in WP. Still such a presentation
> does not seem possible in the nearest future, for it's not easy for me
> to go to Vladikavkaz now. Born there, I live in St.Petersburg at the
> Baltic Sea at the moment.
> 
> Sl.

Can you tell me more about the reasons why this does not seem possible 
in the nearest future ?

I think your experience sounds very professional. I would like that with 
Danny, we try to know more about it, and see how we could help. Some 
organisations we met were suggesting rather similar schemes, and it 
would be very interesting to outline the whole thing a little bit more.

Anthere