[Foundation-l] MENA Education Program?

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Muhammad Yahia <shipmaster at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> I don't want to open a hornet's nest, but as someone who has actually lived
> most of his life in the middle east, I couldn't disagree more.
>
> Local dialects/languages have not been formally adopted in any Arabic
> speaking country that I know of as an everyday *written* language, so I
> don't know how ppl would love to write in their native dialect/language
> when they have never been writing it before. And the Egyptian Arabic
> wikipedia that Gerard refers to as doing 'relatively well' suffers from
> exactly the same issues as the Arabic wikipedia in general on a smaller
> scale (add to that antagonism by a lot of ppl as evident on OTRS not
> familiar with reading their spoken dialect and thinking it's weird). Issues
> that has nothing to do with the dialect the material is written in.
>
> Let's please not derail the conversation from the good initiatives being
> developed.
>
>
>
>
No hornet's nest, Muhammed.  Thank you for your input on dialects.  I think
it's safe to say Arabic is international in written form and that all makes
perfect sense.

I was not attempting to derail to conversation.  I fully support the global
education projects.  I was expressing concern that we may not be quite
ready for another program.  By not quite ready yet, I mean just a few
months down the road.  We learned a lot on the English Wikipedia from the
opportunities that arose with the India program this past month.  This
involved working with English articles rather than localized language, and
the English community is not near as tight nit and we were unprepared.  But
we organized and cleaned up (the process is still ongoing).  I would like
to see the organization and structure on the Arabic Wikipedia worked out
with volunteers well before the program is launched, and not work it out as
it progresses.

As long as we've had time to think it through from lessons learned and
being learned as the Global Educations program gets set up we'll have
success and build projects.  It's important to use prudence.

-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan