Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Anthere wrote:
Hello
How having servers in Africa would help the goal ?
Ant
Hoi, African ISP's pay for traffic coming from America or Europe. Consequently the speed of American and European websites is really poor. Within Africa, African websites perform as we would expect them to. By having servers in Africa the speed in which we serve our pages would be dramatically better. I would argue that we should have our projects in African languages completely in Africa and do caching for English and French as well.
By dramatically, what do you mean ? Do you have statistics to show the speed of delivery for a same page, in USA, in the Netherlands and in South Africa ?
Hosting in Africa is not as cheap as in either America or Europe. Bandwidth is much more expensive. It would be good to find a partner who would pay the hosting of our content. There are plenty of universities and NGO's who could provide part of such a service. Universities can provide expertise and NGO's the funding.
But would the drawbacks of finding and coping with a partner be significant with regards to the current percentage of readers for which there would be an improvment and for the level of improvement ?
The signal value of us having servers in Africa is very important. It would help us not only in getting more readers,
Frankly... I do not follow you here. Whether the site is hosted in Africa or hosted somewhere else is likely to be invisible to the great majority of reader. I gather most will not care... nor even ask themselves who host the site. Actually most readers have no idea what hosting means...
it would help our
localisation effort.
I do not see how hosting the site on the African continent (say South Africa) will increase the percentage of translation of the software...
It would help the adoption of MediaWiki as a
platform to provide information.
Which might be nice, but is not the goal of the Foundation.
The marketing value for our projects is
really big.
I am not convinced. We also have hosting provided in Korea. Do you think it improved marketing value of our projects in Asia ? Do you have figures ?
It would also help make the use of African languages
acceptable by providing content.
I certainly see the benefit of having mediawiki interface translated, I just fail to see how hosting Wikipedia and other sites in Africa will help use of African languages more acceptable :-(
Thanks, GerardM
PS these are the latest *localisation *statistics and the problematic messages: http://nike.users.idler.fi/betawiki/Localisation_statistics http://nike.users.idler.fi/dev/problems.txt
Interesting data !