[Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia

[jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Yann Forget <yannfo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> 2010/5/7 Noein <pronoein at gmail.com>:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
> > Now, one of the unsolved questions of the WMF is: how do we plan to
> > communicate with analphabets?
>
> Thinking that analphabets would get encyclopedic knowledge through VR
> shows a big misunderstanding of how the cause of analphabetism.
> If people are analphabets is because they lack the resource to have a
> proper education, so they won't get any access to a computer, much
> less to Internet and VR worlds.
>

I can tell you of my experience with people from Kosovo who are not native
english speakers, many of  have a hard time reading anything longer than 140
characters. The dont like to read and books are very expensive, and the
written language is very different than the spoken one.


But they *will* watch videos, or listen to some talk, even in english or
german or do something interactive.
That is why we need videos of people (or computers) reading articles to them
that they can pop into their dvd player or have share.  more people have
some form of ability to play dvds.

The mit ocw distributes hdds of data to schools with no internet access,
they include video lectures and alot of material. very good stuff.

I can imagine, but may be wrong, that in most villages in world, even the
poorest, where 99% of the people done have computers and such, at least one
person or school in town will have some form of dvd player. In fact, you
could distribute articles in image format for a normal dvd player as well.

mike