On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, guaka@no-log.org wrote:
I was too optimistic about what would be the right incentive (200 CFA is too little).
An issue I have, though, is: how many speakers of Bamana and Fulfulde have access to the internet, to actually read these articles? How many even have access to a computer?
- Very very little.
- A bit more.
Another question: how many speakers of Bamanan and Fulfulde are actually able to read?
Quite some more, but only very very optimistic estimations are higher than 30%. It's more likely to be 10% or so.
And can they also speak French ?
wider dissemination of internet technologies in Mali, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Guinea...?
However, wikipedia does not need Internet.
Put a copy of fr and Bamako on a Linux box there,
There is a lot activity there as well. Often one internet connection is shared by radio station, hospital, CLIC and municipality office. BTW, most Geekcorps Mali partner radios aren't equipped with internet yet. Geekcorps first wants to make sure that people at the radio actually use the computer for their radio shows. However, I did add the wik2dicted French and Bambara Wikipedias to
I see you have done that ..
Kunnafonix, the one-question-GNU/Linux-installCD. With fellow Geek Sebastian I also added the creation of Debian packages to wik2dict, in order to make it easier to get this stuff spreaded.
I must check that out. Sounds great.
Maybe some of you know of another compressed hypertext format that does include images? I like DICT for its spead and simplicity, but it lacks images...
No pictures ? Still very useable.
The possession rate of mobile phones in Mali is probably something like 1%. But many mobile phones are often used by entire families, just like fixed lines in the rich world. And an African family is somewhat larger than a western family...
And mobile phones are much more commonplace than landlines.
But maybe this all sounds too optimistic. But it also seems interesting to get in touch with African mobile phone operators to set up a service where people can access information. The colonial language Wikipedias are already interesting enough to get this done. Read out live even by flesh-and-blood persons when there's no ogg version yet.
Discussions and conference in Pretoria talked about SMS'ing your request, and a voice callback with the first para of the article.
Another thing to take a look at is text-to-speech synths. It's a challenge to write an interface to access Wikipedia, that can be used by people who are not able to read.
What I haven't mentioned in this message yet: The existence of an encyclopedia in their own language, written by themselves, will probably give people a boost of confidence in their language.
I think you are right.
Cheers, Andy!