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

[Charles Matthews]

Gwern Branwen wrote:
> 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."
Interesting. Why not translations from English knols to Swahili knols?
> “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.”
>   
Ah, maybe that's why. Knols are about quantity and they forgot that 
allowing people to type into your site doesn't actually guarantee quality?
> 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.”
>   
Smart lad.
> 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.”
>   
Kiswahili as it is correctly known, but tell my publishers that. The thing is, not to be a wet blanket, that literate people in East Africa may well read English. They may need Kiswahili because if you travel 50 miles the local language can change. 

> 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."
>
>   
This article has some point, doesn't it? Yes, I found this issue in 
discussing with Luganda-speaking friends: they saw exactly the troubles 
with sourcing the matters that they felt they would like to post. Our 
system favours what's already in print (we know it does, and the 
"ethnological" idea that we might record what can only be found out by 
field work was discarded quite some time ago).

By the way, copyright notices on sites sometimes mean something.

Charles