[Foundation-l] African Languages Wikipedia Bashing on Slashdot

[Jeff V. Merkey]

Hi Martin,

I did some research this afternoon and located your swahili dictionary 
and a large number of on-line references and lexicons written by others. I
also noticed only 1000+ swahili articles on the sw.wikipedia.org 
website. I will spend some time further this week with my spiders 
pulling down and constructing swahili lexicons and grammar references 
and hopefully in a week or so, I can make some runs against 
sw.wikipedia.org as a test. I'll even import the whole of wikipedia for 
you to review at my site after I make several machine translation runs 
into this language. Won't be perfect, but its better than 1000+ articles 
and could be a good basis for a test of this system. I note a lot of 
similarities between the projects.

I think after looking over it you may have a different view and will be 
able to grasp the possibilities. A lot easier to correct calculus 
textbooks for
grammar here and there than to try to convince people 5000 miles away to 
try to find a computer somewhere to log in. At any rate, would be a much
faster way to entice editors to a site somewhere.

I have some strange ability to assimilate and understand languages very 
rapidly, being raised trilingual my have had something to do
with it. I find swahili fluid, musical, and beautiful and very much like 
our language (but not quite as synthetic or structured).

Jeff