On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
2009/5/31 Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>rg>:
On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 9:33 PM, Brian
<Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>
wrote:
How does Google Wave help the WMF achieve its
goals?
Not sure, it doesn't really exist yet. I'm sure there will be numerous
ways
in which it can do it, though.
While we could move this mailing list over to Waves and get access to
fancy games of su-doku while we flame each other, I can't see any
great ways it can help, at least directly. I'm open to being
surprised, though.
If Waves works anything like email, then it will be possible to use it when
not directly connected to the Internet. How's that for helping get
Wikipedia to people without Internet access?
Wikipedia has already become a dominant information
source for the 1.5
billion
people with Internet access thanks to Google.
How does being a dominant information source for people help the WMF
achieve
its goals?
I don't think being dominant helps in any way, but being an
information source for people basically *is* the WMF's goal.
The goal is for the information to get to the people. Being the source is
only the means to that goal.
Personally, I
didn't even know the number was 5.2 billion. Should I do
this
further research myself, or can someone answer
these questions for me?
Wikipedia [1] tells me there are 1.58 billion internet users world
wide. It also tells me [2] there are 6.78 billion people in the world.
That leaves 5.20 billion non-internet users.
Ah. :( That's not very helpful... What does it mean to be an "internet
user"?
While we can't directly help with things like getting
people access to clean water, education is a very
important part of
any long term scheme to get people out of poverty, and we can
certainly help there.
I'd say education is lower on the list than most people think, unless you
mean education as a means to get the hell out of the place you're living in.