Another main barrier that has to be lowered is the software... That is I
think one of the main issues that prevents a *lot* of people from editing.
Today I heard from a prominent Wikimedian "I wouldn't dare to send a teacher
to the English Wikipedia. He would get totally lost." indicating all the
templates that are being used, not even mentioning the not-nice attitude
that is normal with regards to sources etc (which might be necessary, but
are throwing up a barrier, especially as the reference system is so
complicated and makes things look even more like computer coding)...
BR, Eia
2008/3/5, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>om>:
Hoi,
One of the things we are doing is localising MediaWiki. This will lower
the
barrier to entry for many of the language projects. For many projects
including some big projects like Italian, Hindi, Polish and Spanish a lot
more work needs doing. When you wonder how this impacts the not so
connected
world, we cannot provide off line content if it is not created on line
first. All the work that we do to ease the use of MediaWiki will help.
Another project that the WMF has been pushing is to develop software that
allows for the export of MediaWiki content in the PDF format. In this way
we
can extract information off the Internet, print it and use it off line.
This
is surely of relevance for projects like Wikibooks. Obviously in this way
much of thel formatting like Wikilinks are lost. There are multiple
projects
that have produced information for off line usage on memory stick or
CD/DVD.
I have a German, an English and a Farsi off line version of the Wikipedias
for instance.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 8:03 PM, mike.lifeguard <mike.lifeguard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Agreed. I seem to remember a talk [1] where Jimmy
said "We're very
interested in the digital divide, poverty worldwide..." and so on,
indicating that we're not going to be just a website, but rather a
genuine
effort to get knowledge out to the whole world.
If that's the case, what
are
we doing to reach beyond the internet-connected world?
-Mike.lifeguard@enwikibooks
[1]
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/37
-----Original Message-----
From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard@gmail.com]
Sent: March 5, 2008 6:38 AM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List; English Wikipedia
Subject: [Foundation-l] We're not just here to run a hideously popular
andexpensive website, after all
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/23906
(in the bush in Africa)
"Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine that was the only video camera owned by
a local resident for miles around. The marginal benefit that one
uncommon piece of technology can have when no others are around must
be immense."
Getting our content and the requisite technology out to the world has,
as far as I recall, always been expressly part of what we're all doing
here.
- d.
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