[Foundation-l] small Wikipedia projects - follow-up to Jimmy Wales' talk

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2010/7/18 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> Amir, we talked about issues with right to left languages at Wikimania in
> Gdansk, that is another can of wurms where we need people to pick up the
> slack. At translatewiki.net we are looking for developers who are able and
> willing to help solve technical issues that have to do with allowing
> structures commons to languages. Examples are multiple plural forms,
> addressing people by their gender, addressing people in a formal or informal
> way.

OK. This is certainly important and i am willing to hear more thoughts
about that. Another significant technical issue about which i would
want to read is how do such outreaching wiki-activists cope with poor
or non-existent network infrastructure in such places.

But i am particularly curious not about the technical issues, but
about people's experiences - if there are any - with the actual
content.

For example, i can quite easily imagine teachers in some countries
saying: "Why should we write encyclopedia articles or textbooks in our
local language? Textbooks should be written in English / Russian /
French / Spanish / Portuguese." Did anyone have to cope with that?

I am not even talking about countries where it is a question of
language preservation; for example, in regions of Russia such as
Tatarstan or Sakha most people know Russian and many know Russian
better than their regional language. In this case, writing a Wikipedia
in Tatar is not an immediate educational necessity, because Russian
textbooks are accessible to people. It is rather a question of
preserving the local culture; i strongly support that, but there are
worse cases.

I am rather talking about countries in, for example, Africa, where
people don't necessarily know English or French well, but where
education nevertheless functions mostly in a foreign language. Do
people there even imagine that it's possible or desirable to write an
encyclopedia in their language? Given all the technical tools and
support, will they actually think that it's worth doing it?

These are the challenges about which i am most curious.

There are, of course, many other issues, technical and non-technical:
lack of words for modern and foreign things, lack of standard
orthography, low literacy rates, etc. I am willing to hear about all
the aspects.

-- 
אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
Amir Elisha Aharoni

http://aharoni.wordpress.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore