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.
--
Best Regards,
Muhammad Yahia