[Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing

[Marcus Buck]

Christiano Moreschi hett schreven:
> No it doesn't. The greatest tool for the education of those poor sods in the 3rd world is the English Wikipedia, plus Spanish, French, etc. But mostly en. 
Well, from a totalitarian point of view, that would be the best. A 
totalitarian system gives precendence to what is supposed to be the best 
for the society in its entirety (or its dominant faction...). A sytem 
that applies the principle of 'freedom' lets the people decide what's 
best for them.

Let's make a reality check: I live in Germany. In German public schools 
English is in the curriculum for all pupils. You can't graduate from 
school (even the most basic degree) without being confronted with 
English for several years. I don't know since when. At least since the 
1930s. Perhaps even earlier. So almost every German had English lessons 
at some point in his life. But de facto opinion research instutes gain 
results of about 50 to 60 % when they make representative polls in 
Germany about whether people speak English. So roundabout 50 % of all 
Germans do not speak English. And we should keep in mind, that "speaking 
a foreign language" in many peoples minds is connected to "holidays" 
etc. Many of those people who state, that they speak English, could ask 
for directions in English-speaking places or they are able to buy 
groceries at Wal-Mart or something basic like that. But that doesn't 
mean, they would be able to understand encyclopedic content in English. 
Numbers are hard to estimate. Perhaps 20 % of all Germans can read and 
understand encyclopedic material in English? And even less are able to 
_write_ encyclopedic content in English. I'm quite sure this number will 
be clearly less than 10 % for Germany. Germany is a fully industrialized 
country with a well functioning education system. I guess numbers will 
be notedly lower in many other areas of the world.

At least 80 % of the human population on earth does not understand 
English. Let's think about it: What's easier? To teach billions of 
people English or to create good encyclopedias in many languages?

I cannot estimate the effort it needs to teach all people English. At 
least in Germany 70 years of teaching wasn't enough to make the Germans 
fluent in English. And the Romans and later the French and Spanish are 
trying to assimilate the Basque since 2000 years and Basque is still 
around and vivid. So I can say: It needs _much_effort to make one 
language known to all people.
The effort necessary to create a reasonsable encyclopedia is easier to 
estimate. English Wikipedia met the milestone of 100,000 articles in 
February 2003. According to 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_frequency> there were 
107 persons with at least 100 edits in the month of February 2003. 100 
edits a month is a rough measure of "users dedicated to the project", I 
guess. That means 107 dedicated contributors were able to create a 
100,000 entry encyclopedia in two years (actually it were even less 
users most of the time). That should be feasible for smaller languages 
too. If there is good and efficient public outreach it should even be 
doable for languages with less than 100,000 speakers, to create a 
100,000 entry encyclopedia in two years. In western societies about one 
percent of the total population is teachers. The number of retired 
teachers will range somewhere between 0.5 to 0.3 compared to the number 
of active teachers. So there are 3 to 5 retired teachers per 1000 
inhabitants. So in a population of 20,000 there will be around 100 
retired teachers. If we could reach all those retired teachers and 
convince them to do something for Wikipedia in their free time (of which 
there is much for retired people) it should be possible to create a 
100,000 entry encyclopedia in two years. Including other retired 
academics, non-academics, non-retired people, students etc. it should be 
possible for languages with even fewer speakers. Of course only with 
very good outreach...

And off course from a totalitarian point of view it's still a waste of 
time. But from a cultural positive point of view it's feasible.

Marcus Buck