[Foundation-l] Fwd: NYTimes.com: African Languages Grow as a Wikipedia Pr...

[James Hare]

Yes... we need to help out these Wikipedias. I suggested on the Wikipedia
mailing list one time something that would allow people who don't use the
Internet to mail in articles for Wikipedia. The proposal generally specified
for improvements of the English Wikipedia, but I think we should focus more
on having "wiki ambassadors" in these regions to help collect articles and
upload them to their respective Wikipedia.

On 8/27/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> I have a lot of sympathy and fondness for African languages. However, I
> think the attitude we are taking is paternalistic. The same problems exist
> for
> languages in many other corners of the world. Identifying this issue as
> uniquely
> "African" is paternalistic and, quite frankly, a tad racist. Why do we not
> make the same efforts for Khmer (the official language of Cambodia, 66
> articles), Burmese (the official language of Myanmar, with 32 million
> speakers,  and
> just 66 articles), or Assamese (an official language of India with 20
> million speakers and only 6 articles)?
>
> So, for starters, I would like to suggest that we replace  the term
> "African
> languages" with "languages in developing regions."  Speakers of Pashto,
> Tajik,
> and Malayalam stand to benefit from a strong  Wikipedia just as much as
> the
> speakers of Swahili.
>
> Danny
>
>
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