Relying on a group to tutor as well as maintain a website doesn't work
very
well when we branch from an internet forum to an encyclopedia. The
Public
Policy Initiative team did an amazing job in setting up standards for education programs and has expanded well in North America and the UK and will continue to grow. Growth means learning, and I think that we
learned
from the India project on the English Wikipedia that international
projects
need a bit more time and structure before we dive into creating content.
The west has a nasty habit of considering every Middle East country as
just
speaking Arabic with little regard to Semetic languages. I believe there is a reason that the Arabic Wikipedia is vastly underused, staffed, and content: people like writing in their native language. The Indian
project
is a different matter- I'd say the exception to the rule. I can
understand
Egypt and a couple other countries being interested in the Arabic
project,
but in my amateur opinion such an undertaking by the WMF's education program should hold off for a bit until there's a solid community to
help.
We can't use wikis and Wikimedia projects as educational tools without guidance from a solid community.
+1
As someone a bit more familiar with Middle-east, I couldn't agree more.
Regards Theo
I don't want to open a hornet's nest, but as someone who has actually lived most of his life in the middle east, I couldn't disagree more.
Local dialects/languages have not been formally adopted in any Arabic speaking country that I know of as an everyday *written* language, so I don't know how ppl would love to write in their native dialect/language when they have never been writing it before. And the Egyptian Arabic wikipedia that Gerard refers to as doing 'relatively well' suffers from exactly the same issues as the Arabic wikipedia in general on a smaller scale (add to that antagonism by a lot of ppl as evident on OTRS not familiar with reading their spoken dialect and thinking it's weird). Issues that has nothing to do with the dialect the material is written in.
Let's please not derail the conversation from the good initiatives being developed.