Hoi,
You added some pearl of wisdom at the end. It is obviously wasted for the
people like me who do not understand Latin. In a similar way, if these other
people do not read and understand English Spanish French etc, they are not
informed with our pearls of wisdom..
Thanks,
GerardM
2008/11/30 Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk>
No it doesn't. The greatest tool for the education of those poor sods in
the 3rd world is the English Wikipedia, plus Spanish, French, etc. But
mostly en. Here's why.
1. It's the biggest. It's the best. You learn the most.
2. You get to practice reading English at the same time. English is THE
global language and will become even more so, mostly because of the economic
dominance of the US and the fact that it's so easy to learn. You can learn
to speak understandable English in a month: even if/when China takes over
economically, we'll still do business in English. I know hundreds of people
who can speak English as a second language: I know not one non-Chinese who
speaks fluent Mandarin. Mr Botswana will do far better economically from en
than he will from botswanian wiki.
3. It is not run by monomaniacal ethnic zealots, who find smaller wikis
laughably easy to take over. Even ru wiki has a problem with this, I've
heard. On en, people like me spend hours making sure that history is not
distorted by fanatics and that our narratives offer an accurate, rational
fair picture. There's little food for fundamentalists. God knows what crap
you find on smaller wikis with less editorial oversight. In the wake of the
terrorist attacks in Bombay, this seems particularly relevant.
Conclusion: let them all fail, bar the big ones.
CM
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:04:43 +0100
From: effeietsanders(a)gmail.com
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing
Please, speak for yourself :) I *do* care, and if there is an easy and
definite solution, I'd love to embrace it. I think we should care about
our
little siblings, about the smaller languages as
we call them, and support
them if possible. I can only hope you were being extremely ironic :)
Because bear in mind, especially in those languages, a complemented work
of
human knowledge really adds something. In the
large languages, we already
had encyclopediae and dictionaries of good quality. Wikipedia is better
sure, and has improved our lives. But now just imagine that you are
living
in Botswana, and on school (if you're lucky)
there is very little
material
available... and now there is an encyclopedia...
In YOUR language! Even
if
it only contains 1000 articles, you can already
learn a lot from it. You
can
improve your knowledge, and increase the odds in
competition with the
western world. It won't do miracles of course, but every tiny little bit
helps.
And now imagine that this goes for all languages. And not only
encyclopediae, but also learning books, dictionaries and perhaps one day
even other collections. Wikipedia *does* make a difference. (and I'd
almost
add: donate now ;-) )
Best regards,
Lodewijk
2008/11/30 Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk>
>
> Do we care that 80%
> > of our projects are failing?
> > Thanks,
> > GerardM
>
> No. Why should we? Nobody actually reads shit like the albanian
wikibooks
> (doesn't matter if that doesn't
exist, you get my point). Such projects
> exist purely the monomaniacal benefit of the editor(s), not any
readers. Let
> them all fail, with the exception of
Wikipedias en,fr,de,ru,etc + wikt
and
commons.
CM
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