On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 1:34 PM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.comwrote:
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 1:39 AM, Barry Newstead <bnewstead@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Hi Katie, Just to build on Moushira's response to tackle your questions a bit further.
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 5:26 AM, aude aude.wiki@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?
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