Gerard,
1) dont generalise from one language to another in India. Each has its own
peculiarities and features. Trying to generalise, that too from a 3 digit
samle size is dangerous
2) Your information on the literary scene is incomplete. For instance if in
Tamil Nadu, people who dont know how to read Tamil will be interested in
read Tamil literature (contemporary or classical), i will be laughed at and
rightly so. I am pretty sure malayalam wikisource's patrons are people who
already know and love to re
3) It is a social issue - Wikimedia shouldnt be in the business of social
engineering. Instead of running after a tiny minority who may or may not be
willing to learn to read and write its mother tongue, we can save our
breath for the remaining super majority.
4) *Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is something
they can do if they choose* - This is the slippery slope, which we want to
avoid. What next? giving a latin script version of wikipedias?. Let me tell
you upfront, you go down this road, you will irreparably damage both the
languages and wikipedias.
5)* Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed* - broadly
agreed . If you are still under the impression, the minority population who
knows only english can be persuaded to learn mother tongue through
literature, i would it is a far fetched premise.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Hoi,
- You agree with me that these people exist.
- The Malayalam Wikisource is getting more attention then the
Malayalam Wikipedia
- It is relatively easy to learn to read the script.
- Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is
something they can do if they choose
- Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed
There are no losers here. Yes, there may be more effective ways of finding
people to transcribe. Do that. The key thing we should not forget is that
these people ARE already part of our community. They can make a difference
for the Indic languages and they are even willing to do so, they have done
so.
Bala would you not agree with me that the people we already know to be
part of our community are at least relevant?
Thanks,
Gerard
On 30 November 2011 14:53, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle(a)gmail.com> wrote:
*One of the reasons why these people are so
relevant to me is that they
are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the
people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically
capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our
language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many
more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*
As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even
a tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your
assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the
Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live
in India). How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your
description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on
Mediawiki?.
Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100
people. This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of
time because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari.
He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to
read
the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the
difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we
looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ...
Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a
linguist.
Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue
I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me
cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their
culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn
to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles;
English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of
their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would
welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read
and start reading the literature of their culture.
One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they
are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the
people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically
capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our
language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many
more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.
Thanks,
GerardM
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