[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Marcus Buck]

Andre Engels hett schreven:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
>   
>> Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000
>> articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of
>> 2009.  The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African
>> language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than
>> 13,000 Wikipedia articles.  Can poverty and illiteracy alone
>> explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?
>>     
>
> Poverty, or better said, lack of internet access, is probably the main
> factor. Here in Europe and North America, we are used to having fast
> internet from the home 24/7. In those countries it may well be (I am
> not sure, never having been there) that dial-up speeds paid per minute
> at some internet cafe is the norm. That would considerably lessen
> people's interest in writing the material, and if it is not written,
> people will not read it either.
>
> But another issue could be a lack of expectancy of having material in
> the own language.
Another important factor: If your language has no localized version of 
Windows, of Office, of Google or of equivalent softwares, this almost 
excludes all people not speaking at least one foreign language from 
using a computer. If understanding a foreign language is a prerequisite 
to using computers, there are no native-onlys - who have the most 
interest in native content - to write native content, and there are no 
native-onlys to read the native content.
The bilingual people have less interest in creating content. And then in 
many societies which have bilingualism between the people's languages 
and a non-native official language, there is some amount of elitarism. 
Good knowledge of the official language and good education provide you a 
certain social status. Educating the native masses could endanger this 
social advantage. The more social and general insecurity exists in an 
area, the more elitarist are the educated.

And creating content for the benefit of everybody is a leisure time 
activity. Poor people rather try to earn money instead of writing 
content for free. And rich people in under-developed countries ususally 
won't contribute too, cause to become rich in a poor country, you must 
be rather callous and not be too "social".

I guess, it would be possible to greatly improve the number of 
contributions to several of our Wikipedias, if we established some kind 
of reward system, in which contributors get paid for their work. E.g. 
Burundi has a per capita income of less than 150 $ a year. If it would 
be possible to make some dollars a day by writing Wikipedia articles, 
you could easily gain some full-time editors with just a few thousand 
dollars. Rundi Wikipedia article count would surely skyrocket if the 
Foundation would provide let's say 100,000 $ for a project like that (of 
course a native Rundi project manager would be needed to ensure the 
quality of the contributions). Wouldn't it be great if the Wikimedia 
Foundation could go to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and say "Hey, 
with 100,000 $ you can help us to create a 100,000 entry encyclopedia 
for 10 million speakers of Chichewa, where before there was exactly _no_ 
encyclopedia-like content in that language!"?

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox