[WikiEN-l] "Hungry for New Content, Google Tries to Grow Its Own in Africa"

[Gwern Branwen]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/technology/25link.html

"But Google can do something that cowboys can’t: create more real
estate. The company is sponsoring a contest to encourage students in
Tanzania and Kenya to create articles for the Swahili version of
Wikipedia, mainly by translating them from the English Wikipedia. The
winners are to be announced Friday, with prizes including a laptop, a
wireless modem, cellphones and Google gear.

So far the contest, Google says, has added more than 900 articles from
more than 800 contributors.

“Our algorithms are primed and ready to give you the answer you are
looking for, but the pipeline of information just isn’t there,” said
Gabriel Stricker, Google’s spokesman on search issues. “The challenge
for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our
ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and
lack of quantity of material on the Internet.”

Sitting in a Google cafeteria, Mr. Stricker outlined all the ways
information eludes the search engine — wrong language, not digitized,
too recent, doesn’t exist but should. Feeding the maw is clearly an
obsession of Google’s. After all, the search engine’s
comprehensiveness is an edge against a new, well-financed competitor,
Bing from Microsoft.

In e-mail interviews, two of the finalists in the Swahili contest said
the arrival of Google on their campuses changed them from passive
users of Wikipedia to active contributors. Still, they expressed mixed
feelings about receiving material rewards for sharing knowledge.

One of the finalists, Jacob Kipkoech, a 21-year-old from the Rift
Valley of Kenya who is studying software engineering at Kenyatta
University in Nairobi, has created 17 articles so far that were given
points. Among the topics were water conservation, Al Qaeda and
afforestation, the process of creating forests.

“Wikipedia has been a good online research base for me,” he wrote,
“and this was a way I could make it possible for people who can’t use
English to benefit from it as well.”

Another finalist, Daniel Kimani, also 21, is studying for a degree in
business information technology at Strathmore University in Kenya. He
said that contests were an effective way to attract contributors but
that “bribing,” or paying per article, “is not good at all because it
will be very unfair to pay some people and others are not paid.”

“I believe in Wikipedia,” he said, “since it is the only free source
of information in this world.”

Swahili, because it is a second language for as many as 100 million
people in East Africa, is thought to be one of the only ways to reach
a mass audience of readers and contributors in the region. The Swahili
Wikipedia still has a long way to go, however, with only 16,000
articles and nearly 5,000 users. (Even a relatively obscure language
like Albanian has 25,000 articles and more than 17,000 contributors.)

Mr. Kimani and Mr. Kipkoech represent one of the challenges for
creating material in African languages. The people best equipped to
write in Swahili, or Kiswahili as it is sometimes known, are
multilingual university students. And yet Mr. Kimani wrote that he
used “the English version more than Kiswahili since most of my school
work is in English.”

Translation could be the key to bringing more material to non-English
speakers. It is the local knowledge that is vital from these Kenyan
contributors, the thinking goes, assuming that Swahili-English
translation tools improve.

Mr. Kimani wrote one entry in English and Swahili about drug use in
Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya. It says that the “youth in
this area strongly believe that use of bhang or any other narcotic
drug could prevent one from suffering from ghosts attacks.”

Now the article lives in English and Swahili, although the English
Wikipedia editors have asked for citations and threatened to remove
it."

-- 
gwern