[Foundation-l] Priorities

[Brian McNeil]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>On 10/24/07, SJ Klein <sj at laptop.org> wrote:
>> You don't address the case of large languages with small wikis; and many
>> speakers who have no other fluent language, but don't use wikipedia.
>
>I think you are making an assumption about them not using Wikipedia.  :)
>
>Honestly, by the numbers its fairly clear that computer/internet
>access and simple literacy are bigger barriers to Wikipedia access
>than WP not being useful in a particular language.
>
>For example, What percentage of Swahili speakers do not speak one of
>English, French, Portuguese, Spanish or Arabic?

I think you are not being fair. Speaking a language does not always mean you
have good reading comprehension.

>> We could use a hotlist of language communities that obviously need
>>support
>> (active online, few secondary languages, active in non-WP communities,
>> slow-growing wiki; with extra weight given to languages whose
>> speakers have to overcome many obstacles to edit wikipedia, and are
>> often only able to read static, offline, perhaps smuggled mirrors).
>
>But use it for what?
>
>There is a simple and natural mechanism to ensure that resources are
>appropriately distributed: Do nothing beyond setting up the site.   If
>a language needs and can use a Wikipedia it will develop.   This
>pretty little theory falls down in some cases: places where there
>isn't internet access, places with oppressive governments.  Soliving
>those problems is outside of our scope, and better accomplished by
>other orgs, such as OLPC. Ever heard of them? ;)

Here you have a point. However the point you are making is one that suggests
the foundation should spend very limited funds in these areas.

Localisation. This seems to be pretty much what you're arguing is the only
thing that should be funded. But I disagree. The foundation needs to work
with projects like OLPC (as you say). For them I suspect phase one is
getting the information *to* people. Phase two is getting people in these
countries to use their newly acquired IT skills to share their knowledge.

You need to think, there's some village in a 3rd world country. They've got
their OLPC machines with a slimmed down Wikipedia (mainly in English), but
they speak <whatever> as a first language. What's the easiest homework
assignment you can give them? Simple, translate an English article into
<whatever>. It may require the foundation providing interfaces to allow
things like that to make their way back into the main repository, a
check-out check-in process for countries where the only net access may be
batched sharing of dial-up. Would that not be a good investment? After all,
you're arguing these wikis would be low-traffic, perhaps they should have
special interfaces to cope with the poor communications infrastructure of
the countries where these languages are spoken.

I'm just blue-sky speculating here. I can imagine a local school having a
small server that the OLPC machines link up to and runs an instance of
MediaWiki. They can build a wiki for their community, run a mirror of their
local-language wiki, and important bits of Wikipedia in their main 2nd
language. I believe most wikis have an {{editing}} tag to say you're
spending a while working on an article. Every code management system
effectively enforces that, so why couldn't the kids say "I'm going to
write/edit <this article> tonight" and it is locked until they check in
their new version in the morning?

My interpretation of Jimmy's video is he sees the foundation as making it
possible for people who suffer from the "knowledge gap" to overcome that by
helping themselves. The way the foundation helps is not by spoon-feeding out
information, but by setting up useable infrastructure that allows wiki
communities to bootstrap themselves. When you start looking at the 3rd world
it can get a bit more complicated and expensive.


Brian.