2005/5/27, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com:
I am interested in your experience... I went to see the wiki (difficult, I mostly see ??? on my computer), and I saw that aside from ip contributions, the main two contributors are a bot (it could be hidden if you wish this) and Amikeco.
I am also very happy about the users Alard and Ruslan (the letter name in Cyrillic): Alard helps immensely as a native speaker from a smaller town of Alagir; he works at an IT firm and is always on line, I can consult him via ICQ at any time; Ruslan is a native speaker of Digor dialect and he contributes about the places in western Ossetia, where the dialect is been spoken. He also promises a comprehensive article about Digor for the speakers of the main form.
Are you Amikeco or is it one of the authors you mentionned ?
ru, os, eo, av, cv:Amikeco/m:Slavik IVANOV
If Amikeco is not the direct author of the article, does that mean he copied in wikipedia the article written by another ?
As for the articles coming from the South Ossetian teachers, I get them by e-mail and put them to WP (after wikifying; they come as a simple text file or a Word file).
I was also wondering if you set a sort of "validation" of the articles written (a check of the quality of the article)?
Well, the validation is really simple by now: 1. Check numbers as far as it's possible (first of all dates of birth and death for biography articles); 2. Give the text to a native speaker from the North to test how understandable it is. Sometimes a phrase or two are not well composed and we change word order or do similare editing. I also have to pay attention to spelling: I have learnt the language by books and newspapers, so my spelling is very good (for me the Ossetic is first of all a written language), but for most Ossetians the language is first of all a spoken one -- and they often do spelling mistakes.
Can you tell me how many people are behind this experience?
1 active teacher (female under 30), two more interested but not writing yet. Other people involved are: - volunteer co-ordinator in Tshkhinval (local journalist, ethic Ossetian): he helps us interact with the writers via e-mail; - volunteer co-ordinator at the Ossetic WP (me): putting the texts, wikifying them, spell-checking, finding proof-readers, raising funds, writing articles to Ossetia-related sites like iriston.ru, iryston.com and ossetia.ru, etc. - proof-readers (3 native speakers), sponsors (4 persons).
Did they contacted teachers they knew otherwise, or did a sort of list out of a university or high school?
The journalist informed the locals about the "first encyclopedia in Ossetian"; some of them got interested. Neither computers, nor Internet are widely available in S.Ossetia -- so the interest could rest just the interest, but then the bright idea appeared... :) And we proposed the payed writing for the persons, who were, as we had already known, really interested. We didn't advertised the project much because of 2 reasons: - we don't have much funds: maybe 5-20 articles a month are our limit; - we wouldn't like to make other people think that writing for WP must be payed; may they write for free if they can.
I can perceive several ways to push the idea. Possibly organising a presentation in a school or university,
You see, the schools and universities of a higher quality group are at Vladikavkaz. There Ossetians no longer use the language for scientific or similar purposes: the Russian is prevailing. The task of the Project is not only to find chip writers, but also to find the last literate speakers of Ossetian and pay them for being used.
Among our further plans is looking for such people in the villages of North Ossetia, where exists at least one highly literate group: the teachers of the Ossetian language. But most of them are not at all good computer users... So we have many interesting challenges.
We are also planning to meet authorities of the North Ossetian State University in order to organize presentations of Wikipedia at several faculties. The future Ossetian philologists and journalists might get much experience from writing texts in WP. Still such a presentation does not seem possible in the nearest future, for it's not easy for me to go to Vladikavkaz now. Born there, I live in St.Petersburg at the Baltic Sea at the moment.
Sl.