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

[Oliver Keyes]

There's an en-wiki project I'm getting involved in that is planning
"outreach" to smaller wikis. Would you like me to give you a ping when we
launch?

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 12:45 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> 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
>
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