[Foundation-l] Opinions/suggestions for "outside" members of the board?

[Anthere]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> 
>>Hello
>>
>>How having servers in Africa would help the goal ?
>>
>>Ant
>>  
> 
> Hoi,
> African ISP's pay for traffic coming from America or Europe. 
> Consequently the speed of American and European websites is really poor. 
> Within Africa, African websites perform as we would expect them to. By 
> having servers in Africa the speed in which we serve our pages would be 
> dramatically better. I would argue that we should have our projects in 
> African languages completely in Africa and do caching for English and 
> French as well.

By dramatically, what do you mean ? Do you have statistics to show the 
speed of delivery for a same page, in USA, in the Netherlands and in 
South Africa ?

> Hosting in Africa is not as cheap as in either America or Europe. 
> Bandwidth is much more expensive. It would be good to find a partner who 
> would pay the hosting of our content. There are plenty of universities 
> and NGO's who could provide part of such a service. Universities can 
> provide expertise and NGO's the funding.

But would the drawbacks of finding and coping with a partner be 
significant with regards to the current percentage of readers for which 
there would be an improvment and for the level of improvement ?

> The signal value of us having servers in Africa is very important. It 
> would help us not only in getting more readers,

Frankly... I do not follow you here. Whether the site is hosted in 
Africa or hosted somewhere else is likely to be invisible to the great 
majority of reader. I gather most will not care... nor even ask 
themselves who host the site. Actually most readers have no idea what 
hosting means...

it would help our
> localisation effort.

I do not see how hosting the site on the African continent (say South 
Africa) will increase the percentage of translation of the software...

It would help the adoption of MediaWiki as a
> platform to provide information.

Which might be nice, but is not the goal of the Foundation.

The marketing value for our projects is
> really big.

I am not convinced. We also have hosting provided in Korea. Do you think 
it improved marketing value of our projects in Asia ? Do you have figures ?

  It would also help make the use of African languages
> acceptable by providing content.

I certainly see the benefit of having mediawiki interface translated, I 
just fail to see how hosting Wikipedia and other sites in Africa will 
help use of African languages more acceptable :-(

> Thanks,
>     GerardM
> 
> PS these are the latest *localisation *statistics and the problematic 
> messages:
> http://nike.users.idler.fi/betawiki/Localisation_statistics
> http://nike.users.idler.fi/dev/problems.txt

Interesting data !