With all due respect to the notion that many hands working can accomplish
more than one, the FOSS community has been working with ELCOT to ensure this
scheme was not hijacked by the proprietary vendor lobby (which nearly
happened even in this round of distribution), and at least at one point in
the past, the inclusion of localised wikipedia was an integral part of that
plan, hence, the creation of a 'source' offline wikipedia was a
fantastically worthwhile project.
I make this statement particularly in response to a discussion on this list
just a few days back where a Wikipedian made a point of asserting that FOSS'
goals and that of Wikipedians do not match. My point being, while separate
movements may have individual objectives, at least when the common goal of
open knowledge is at stake, a spot of coming together is needed.
That statement was really distressing to read. No war, especially not a war
of ideas, can be considered won when a battle or two is over.
Again, in the runup to the WikiConference 2011, it is being said time and
again that FOSS goals have no place in the conference. Not only is this a
poor intellectual construct, it appears to me that a deliberate movement
exists to exclude FOSSers from even assisting (if they continue to support
FOSS platforms). It really seems very peculiar to me - not that I think
Jimmy Wales is the world's greatest saint or evangelist that ever lived, but
he is the first person to ask the community to understand how using FOSS
tools is a practical and worthwhile part of the Wikipedia experience.
Just yesterday or day before, another thread discussed the current features
of Mailman, our list software tool, which just happens to be FOSS. Somebody
wanted more features - but building in features is exactly the kind of
community-facing endeavour that characterises the difference between the
intellectual approaches to building tools, between FOSS and proprietary. I
could see no indication (so far) that the users concerned were in
conversation with active Mailman devs to see these features become a
reality.
Is it just me, or is there some disconnect or discomfort here?
On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 6:56 AM, Hisham <hisham(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Oct 3, 2011, at 2:14 AM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan wrote:
9,12 lakh Laptops will be completely distributed by the end of the Academic
year.
We are trying to establish a line of communication with ELCOT to discuss
how we could have Wikipedia Offline installed on these computers.
After all this nonsense, I ask a few questions to several groups of people:
This isn't nonsense! It's fantastic context!!! Many many thanks!
1> The chapter, the Foundation office, and board members. This includes
Hisham Mundol, Bishakha Dutta, Achal Prabhala, Shiju Alex, Nitika Tandon et
al.
Are you willing to launch any school student oriented plan in South India,
[not limited to TN]?
I'm not asking for anything similar to the Campus Ambassadors program, but
more of a series of Seminars, workshops, academies, meetups, tutorials etc.
We need your support for such a mass scale program, as individually we
cannot achieve anything.
Yes! Happy to discuss and see how best we can help out. Let me know when
we can talk.
2> South Indian wikipedians, especially the Bangalore, Chennai and Kerala
communities.
Are you open to helping us out?
Especially Kerala, you are the most advanced in the Indic wiki sphere, will
you please help out your neighbour TN?
I'm willing to do as much as possible from my side[I'm not too good at
arranging meetups, when I say Wikipedia, people stare at me blankly, and I
can't explain it to them in Tamil, even though it is my mother tongue].
Please do consider this Golden opportunity.
There is plenty of potential out here.
The laptops run on Linux, which means, a big boost to Open Source software.
The primary target is school students, which means, more young editors [and
oldies in their late teens like me].
I couldn't think of how to say this, but somehow I just typed it and sent
it.
Once again, Thank You for this!
hisham
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Vickram
Fool On The Hill <http://communicall.wordpress.com>