[Foundation-l] We're not just here to run a hideously popular andexpensive website, after all

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
One of the things we are doing is localising MediaWiki. This will lower the
barrier to entry for many of the language projects. For many projects
including some big projects like Italian, Hindi, Polish and Spanish a lot
more work needs doing. When you wonder how this impacts the not so connected
world, we cannot provide off line content if it is not created on line
first. All the work that we do to ease the use of MediaWiki will help.

Another project that the WMF has been pushing is to develop software that
allows for the export of MediaWiki content in the PDF format. In this way we
can extract information off the Internet, print it and use it off line. This
is surely of relevance for projects like Wikibooks. Obviously in this way
much of thel formatting like Wikilinks are lost. There are multiple projects
that have produced information for off line usage on memory stick or CD/DVD.
I have a German, an English and a Farsi off line version of the Wikipedias
for instance.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 8:03 PM, mike.lifeguard <mike.lifeguard at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Agreed. I seem to remember a talk [1] where Jimmy said "We're very
> interested in the digital divide, poverty worldwide..." and so on,
> indicating that we're not going to be just a website, but rather a genuine
> effort to get knowledge out to the whole world. If that's the case, what
> are
> we doing to reach beyond the internet-connected world?
> -Mike.lifeguard at enwikibooks
>
> [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/37
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard at gmail.com]
> Sent: March 5, 2008 6:38 AM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List; English Wikipedia
> Subject: [Foundation-l] We're not just here to run a hideously popular
> andexpensive website, after all
>
> http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/23906
>
> (in the bush in Africa)
>
> "Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine that was the only video camera owned by
> a local resident for miles around. The marginal benefit that one
> uncommon piece of technology can have when no others are around must
> be immense."
>
> Getting our content and the requisite technology out to the world has,
> as far as I recall, always been expressly part of what we're all doing
> here.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
>
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