>> Reformatted for readibility. I love webmail.<<
Pay experts for their knowledge? What a bad idea!
> Paying experts in this way would inevitably result in a two-class society.
Yes, and in another way than stated already:
We would have a class of fools, still doing things for free,
out of love for an ideal, and a class of savy experts,
who know what makes the world go around,
have no inner motivation to share their knowledge
with lay people and need to be bribed into this silly affair.
A fool like me might come to his senses and think twice
before contributing for free what can be bought on the market.
> I think it is beyond silly that the Hindi and Arabic Wikipedias are still so small.
How many of our top ten Wikipedias were faring really well
a year before now? Marvel at what has been achieved in such
a short time, and have the patience to see other Wikipedias,
and underdeveloped areas in the existing ones,
grow up the wiki way. Wikipedia is not a household name yet,
but it will be in a year time, thanks to Google.
Surely some arabists, art historians and chromosome watchers
will catch the opportunity to show off.
Surely more photographers will relish the prospect of a world
stage to make their marks upon.
Maverick is worried that Arabic and Hindi Wikipedias are nowhere
near where they should be. The same could be said for the Chinese
Wikipedia only a few monthes ago, yet they got going for real recently,
and will almost certainly be within our top ten in less than half a year from now.
As for nearly dead languages: very nice to preserve them for posterity,
a wiki might help. Only I would like to see the surviving speakers
do their part because they care, not because the XBox II is not theirs' yet.
We receive a couple of thousands very much needed dollars and
suddenly everybody goes crazy. Once all dying languages are resuscitated
we might save the wales (no pun intended) and help
the Ethiopians to put a man on the Moon.
I say: lets keep our feet on the ground and talk about goals
that are of benefit for a lot of people and that can not be reached in any other way. Hardware is a clear case and more of that will be needed soon.
Administrative labour is a borderline case to me,
but what will happen if Brion is struck by fatherhood or any other disability
(God forbids), is too sad to even envision.
Certainly a print or CD edition will require some cash.
Once we educated the billion or so people that regard
education a luxury item (not to speak of food),
and would not be harmed by some readily available knowledge,
they will all jump happily to the task
of preserving dying languages, I'm sure.
Erik Zachte