[Foundation-l] MMORPG and Wikimedia

[Noein]

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Thank you for this analysis, Milos. I think you should definitely take
the time to explain yourself more often since 1/ your bold statements
are not unanimously intuitive 2/ we need to share visions, skills and
knowledge to understand what we're talking about when we talk about
wikimedia and the world.

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

*** warning: long reasoning ***
I was talking yesterday with a french woman who went for two years to
help peasants of the Choco in Colombia. They are of oral traditions.
Some are descendant of white colons. Some are Amerindians. Some are of
African roots. No villager can read, only some bachelors from the
cities. Internet doesn't reach the agricultural communities in this
jungle where you only travel by boat.
The only way my friend found to inform them and communicate was by
creating role-playing scenarii with local, more educated inhabitants
from the city; then go with them to the villagers in the jungle and
communicate through the role-playing games.

This understanding of the situation and this roleplay idea has a
potential. Is it urgent? Is it immediately feasible? Does it concern the
WMF? I don't know. But I think it is linked with the bigger problem of
outreaching people, which is one of the core problems of the WMF (and
mankind).

What I know is that as long as we are alphabetized, educated,
computerized, living in the comfort of occidental life, we're some kind
of rich, literate elite (this not an insult nor an arrogance); we need
to establish bridges with the 5 billions people who work with different
minds and conditions, without imposing our culture or forcing our values
into them.

One of the first fundamental questions to think about the supreme goal
of the WMF is: "do every human WANT to access mankind knowledge?"
In my opinion, it is too late to preserve most ethnic cultures from say,
capitalism or western culture. Admittedly, I have very limited
knowledge, even if I constantly try to learn about this problem, so I
know that I may be wrong. However, I have lived and traveled in South
America long enough to see the crushing of traditions and culture by one
dominant, predatory culture.

Since it is too late for them, since their virginity is only a memory, I
can accept the goal of reaching every human, even if they didn't ask for
it, to give them a way to know what they want to know about the world
they're being anyway sucked into.
Because if I had to ask just one question to another being it would be
"is it really what you want?", because of that I think bringing
knowledge to analphabets, poors and minorities is justified, it gives
them the choice.

For this particular targeted public, my limited mind concludes that the
WMF needs humanitarian, pragmatic volunteers who want and know how to
deal with real, non-occidental people. I don't think it would cost that
much to ally with people already accomplishing ethnological or
humanitarian missions: WMF would just have to provide the internet
devices and software to facilitate an access to knowledge during
interaction with ethnies.
Etc.
(A lot more could be discussed about this idea. I feel that coherent
projects can be developed and built from this seed, and I know some
potential partners, but this is just a coincidence of my eclectic
knowledge. I'm personally more interested in black holes, so don't take
my mail as proselytism for a personal agenda).

Please forgive the time I'm stealing from you with my considerations.
I'm not a natural english speaker and an additional effort from your
part may be required in order to understand me.

I think we need to solve diary problems AND discuss long term goals, in
this very mailing list: in my opinion, both poles of reflection/action
should go hand in hand so that when the implementation reaches the goal,
it IS what we wanted.


If I'm not in the right list for this kind of talk please redirect me.
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