A person language is a key part of their culture, their knowledge, and their identity to truly understand a concept its best shared in its original language. Since our goal is to freely share the sum the all knowledge we should be endeavouring to encourage every culture to use its own language. Indigenous languages have and continue to be suppressed by the colonial languages making any decision to deny a language project, or to translate an article based on one written in another language is political decision that has greater impact. Wikipedias have by the very nature of what we have created become to be seen as part of a languages(cultures) recognition and online identity.
Tim its not hard to imagine a community of 100,000 who are held back because there is no Wikipedia in their language when you look at how much Wikimedia projects are now at the centre of knowledge systems on the web. For the last four years I have been working with the Noongar community to establish a Wikipedia in Noongar. The noongar language is widely used within English language here in Western Australia such is impact that we have over 2 million people who use noongar in their daily lives yet it gets called Australian english. The influence of noongar goes beyond the words and permeates through the Western Australian culture to understand that impact one needs to be able to access that knowledge.
So how do those people who are monolingual interact with computers at the moment, its really quite simple they dont computer literacy in Indigenous communities is well behind that of the colonial based language communities in the same country. In the process of reaching out for that knowledge we need to ensure we do more than just take.
On 28 February 2018 at 07:25, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
I was not trying to say that everybody should learn English. The point I was trying to make there is that knowing English is a privilege and that it is easy to not notice it.
I agree with that, too. How is teaching language different relative to the Foundation Mission than teaching subjects of encyclopedia articles?
On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 1:11 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
2018-02-27 21:23 GMT+02:00 James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com:
Languages are taught by authoritative dictionaries (after people, and ahead of almost all other similar reference books.)
... Yeah, and building an authoritative dictionary is considerably harder than building a (de facto) authoritative encyclopedia. Despite, I have enormous respect for Wiktionary, and great (great!) hopes about Lexical Wikidata.
Wiktionary has multiple teaching functions whether we want it to or not: https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/efe362e1-fe80-4c90- bc1e-4ab2d9bbae20/1/
Why not :)
Amir, you know it would not be losing focus because of what you said in your talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_xJaqQV71s
Um... thanks for the publicity :)
But no, that's not what I said. I was not trying to say that everybody should learn English. The point I was trying to make there is that
knowing
English is a privilege and that it is easy to not notice it. Of course,
if
that point didn't come through, it's my fault.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
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