On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Timwi wrote:
Angela wrote:
* Spoken Wikipedia by cell phone.Heh! All the more incentive to get more people to participate in [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia]] (shameless plug)! Nobody really wants machine-generated spoken versions when a real human-spoken version is available. :)
There was some discussion of that. Two (very real) problems :-
* Editing. Voice editing sounds clumsy, and would sound like CamelCase :-)
* Accents. If an Indian is trying to understand what a Geordie or someone from Barbados is saying, it might as well be in Afrikaans :-)
Transcription, and machine-generated, please ?
This is assuming that the larger part of the cost of textbooks is copyright licenses. I would imagine that it is instead the production costs of actual books, and obviously free content won't help that.
Having had (almost) direct experience of this in Africa, much of the problem is bureaucracy and supply.
Cheers, Andy!