pinco ti 2005/2/23 ChS 07:51 sia-kong:

According to my experience in Tanzania, students who have access to internet belong to the English-speaking and culturally non-african africans (they are called "black whites"). Obviously, I can be wrong!

The process of "obtaining" Internet access may well change how one chooses to access information and the sort of information deemed worthy of access. Still the idea that Wiki*edia could try to fulfill the needs of the African elite class is intriguing. Better still, though, would be to have their participation even though the risk of introducing systematic bias is amplified by the socioeconomic realities on the ground -- which might have led to a wider "digital divide", among other associatd divides. Whereas in the Euro-Anglo-East_Asian world "going on-line" says more about a person's age group than wealth or education, elsewhere there might be a closer link between having Internet access and belonging to a social, economic, racial and/or political class, with their associated values (such as a preference for a Language of Wider Communications (LWC) to one's native language). Nevertheless Wiki*edia decreases its overall systematic bias through the greater participation from this corner of the world -- the particularity of the participants within their own countries being (arguably) less important than little or no participation. The same could be said of the benefit of greater participation from people living in the Andes, southwestern China, the the Phillippines' Muslim south, the St. Lawrence Island, to name a few.