On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, guaka(a)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?
1) Very very little.
2) 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!