On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 5:26 AM, aude <aude.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Erik, Sue, Frank, et al,
Can you please say more about the plans for a Middle East education
program? (yes I have read notes from the recent trip on outreach
wiki)
What is the timeframe? Who is going to run it? Will you establish a
"trust" there? Where will the office be?
We are planning a pilot in Cairo, but have not yet firmed up the
details.
Frank, Annie and Moushira will spend a week in Cairo in December to
investigate the opportunity further and see when it would make
sense to run
a small pilot. We are hoping for February, but want to make sure the
conditions are right for success.
If the program is to be duplicated, I certainly hope there are not
the
same issues with quality, as has happened in Pune. What lessons
have
you learned and what will you do differently?
We do not plan on duplicating the Pune experience. For one, we want
to do a
much smaller pilot. We also want to dig into questions regarding
copyright
and student writing ability in Arabic before we start the pilot.
Nitika
has captured a series of lessons on the pilot [1] and we are doing
further
detailed evaluation work to ensure we mine the pilot fully.
Knowing that there is quite a backlog, last time I checked, with
pending changes on Arabic Wikipedia, I am very concerned for the
ability of volunteers there to handle a massive influx of new
content.
This is a concern we share...and we discussed this with the community
members in Doha as Moushira mentioned. No easy solutions here and
we'll
need to innovate.
Forgive me if I've missed something, I don't have time in the day to
follow
all the links I'm provided in emails.
Why exactly are we focusing on the Arabic Wikipedia and not localized
dialects and languages?