2005/5/27, Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com>om>:
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.
--
Esperu cxiam!