[Foundation-l] Waste of money, Wikipediacentrism. - Brazil

[Mathias Damour]

Le 25/01/2012 14:51, Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton a écrit :
> Dear all,
> Well as you know, Brazil is a priority, but when spending is a waste.
> We have a volunteer group that operates in Brazil since 2008 in direct
> contact with the problems of Brazil, know much about the free national
> culture, know a lot about education in the country, and their projects, they
> can tell the reasons why Brazil has poor performance on Wikipedia. Wikimedia
> Foundation conducted several interviews with the group, I was interviewed
> three times and had several conversations with several different employees.
> Also recently a person was hired to do a search on this, already operating in
> Brazil.
> And yesterday they announced the arrival of two more employees to ask only
> that, again. [1] They already have the answer to these interviews, what
> they are asking again?
>
> And what I find worse is the fact that there is a prohibitive message for
> explanation of other Wikimedia projects. As for the local group that
> Wikipedia is not central. And there will be an office of WMF, only to
> activities for Wikipedia. And many Brazilians criticize the model of the WMF,
> and that centralization in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is only the tenth seventh most
> visited site in the country. Need better, yes, but the problem is the
> community that is not healthy, and that the WMF does not interfere on that. So
> it's skating, and spending resources unnecessarily.
>
> Several staff members say the Wikipedia impact is larger than the other
> projects.
> Which has more impact for you?
> "The Movement Wikimedia projects through education, created free
> educational resources available in Wikibooks, and classes on Wikiversity,
> this could change the lives of thousands of poor children" or
> "The Movement Wikimedia succeeded in creating an encyclopaedia in
> Portuguese high quality "
>
> Unfortunately I live in a country that 38% of teens lives in extreme
> poverty [2], how they want to create a program just with universities, to
> share knowledge if people that never walk inside one university? Or not be
> able to read the contents of Wikipedia because they were not properly
> literate. I'm not talking to literate Brazilians, I'm talking to create free
> educational resources, and create classes, and encourage businesses
> and organizations
> to do that change, this is a collaborative work.
>
> With the money spent to keep three people six days in Brazil from the U.S.A.,
> we could fund a fellow to start a social work with teachers to create this
> material.What is the interest of the WMF on this? "Our priority is Wikipedia
> "
>
> *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
> sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
> *
> I'll keep imagining, and having to push myself very hard to see this world.
> That will never be reached by Wikipedia alone.Especially in Brazil.

That's interesting. What kind of "free educational resources" would you 
like to be developed ?
What about a Wikikids in portugese ?

By the way, on that subject, I'd like to point out this discussion I had 
on simple.wikipedia about Wikikids/Vikidia :
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_talk/Archive_96#WikiKids_-_Vikidia

However, even if this project is doing well in two languages yet 
(wikikids.nl and fr.vikidia.org), I'm not sure it can be endorsed or 
just supported by the WMF !

-- 
Mathias Damour
[[User:Astirmays]]
http://fr.vikidia.org/
49 rue Carnot
74000 Annecy
France
00 (33)4 57 09 10 56
00 (33)6 27 13 65 51
mathias.damour at laposte.net