(oops. sorry for the repeat mail, the previous mail was incomplete)

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 wrong. For instance if i said that 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 read malayalam written works and loves them. Both these languages have rich literary traditions and robust contemprory literary scenes that are shunned by the "we speak english only" group. I will go ahead and safely say, you wont find any patrons for regional language literature from the "we know only english" crowd. (let me repeat, at least for tamil, this premise is laughable) Films yes, but literature hell no.

3) What you are describing is a social issue - Wikimedia shouldnt be in the business of social engineering. Instead of running after a tiny 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 indic wikipedias?. Let me tell you upfront, you go down this road, you will irreparably damage both the languages and wikipedias. I dont know about other languages, but in Tamil, such shenanigans will lead to irreparable damage to the image of wikipedia and probably kill the wikipedia completely. (Am pretty sure Tamil Wikipedia will get burnt in effigy in public, if we try to pull such a stunt).  All this for what? the 1-2% of people who refuse to learn mother tongues?.

5) Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed - broadly agreed . If you are under the impression, the minority population which knows only english can be persuaded to learn mother tongue through literature, i would it is a far fetched premise.

I will repeat this
a) you met a tiny number of people at two cities in India
b) formed your opinions from them and are now generalising
c) You are trying to form a technical solution for a social issue, which will potentially change the way the language is used and will definitely create a huge controversy and be counter productive on a massive scale.

This is a dangerous dangerous road to take.

-
Bala

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> 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@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@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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