[Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language

[Ilario Valdelli]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 4:47 PM,  <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
> A single dedicated person could be enough to put a project in motion.
> A dean of a Nigerian college who integrates Wikipedia article creation
> in the instruction plan ("if you create 200 Nigerian pidgin Wikipedia
> articles this semester you'll get X extra credit points for your
> degree") could be enough to get the project to 100,000 articles in a
> year (200 articles*2 semesters*250 students = 100,000 articles in a
> year).
>

I don't agree. Wikipedia is a "collaborative" encyclopedia, it's not
an encyclopedia.

It means that one person cannot "drive" the project because he will
impose a single point of view.

It makes sense where there are no encyclopedia in this language and
Wikipedia can be the first one, but it should be interesting to
analyze why there were no encyclopedias before.

I have experienced this solution in some minor languages and it
doesn't work. It's difficult to aggregate people around a small core
of articles because they are attracted by more active languages or
because they don't have sufficient knowledge of their daily language
to put their ideas in written sentences. It seems strange, but if
someone should use their daily language (technically it's a "change of
linguistic register") to write something, they like to switch language
and to use English or Hindi or Chinese.

Some languages don't have a literature, don't have words to translate
technical words of legal words, don't have a dictionary or a formal
grammar. It means that the community should build their written
language around Wikipedia in order to start to contribute. It's
another project.

Ilario