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

[Ray Saintonge]

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

When I became involved with English Wikipedia it had fewer than 50,000 
articles, and many of them were stubs.  [[Special:WantedPages]] was very 
useful in finding things to write about.  It is currently disabled, and 
has not been updated since last October.  It counted the number of red 
links to a title, and listed the 50 with the most links.  Wikifying, was 
an important task for any editor; they were encouraged to create links 
to anything that might reasonably be expected to have an article.  This 
feature should be made more prominent in the smaller wikis.
> 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?
>   

It's not just teachers. Some governments and religions have actively 
suppressed minority languages.  In Canada the residential school system 
was nothing less than cultural genocide.  The practice has stopped, but 
its effects remain.  The dominant colonial languages are still seen as 
the means to make a better life for oneself.  To those who hope to feed 
their families cultural matters take a back seat.
> 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.
>   

For some languages the script that was developed by anthropologists a 
century ago was more suited to the needs of anthropologists trying to 
impose Greco-Roman grammatical concepts where they didn't belong.

> 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?
>   

Our techies can easily solve questions of tools for writing these 
languages.  We need to ask the people what is important to them about 
their language. Forget about translating the details of nuclear physics 
or modern mathematics; if native English speakers have difficulties in 
these subjects in their own language it won't be any easier in these 
other languages.  An article about basic agricultural techniques may be 
more to the point.

Ray