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.
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.
We need to focus on getting Wikipedia to the 5.2
billion people who can't
access it.
Indeed. What languages do these 5.2 billion people speak? Are they
connected to the Internet? If not, what's stopping them? Do they have a
telephone, a computer, electricity, television, running water? If not, what
is stopping them from being able to get these things? Are the problems
things that are well geared toward the expertise of the WMF, or are we
better off letting other non-profits with more specialized expertise fix
them?
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.
If we look at [1] we see the countries with the lowest percentage of
people with internet access are North Korea (well, actually that's
unknown, but I think we can safely assume it is as close to zero as
makes no odds) and Myanmar - there probably isn't a great deal we can
do to help them. Countries a little higher up the list we might be
able to help with OLPC-style schemes. Printed versions of Wikibooks
might be useful. 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.
1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users
2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population