[Wikimediaindia-l] Supporting the languages of India

Wed Nov 30 14:17:02 UTC 2011

Gerard,
while what you are saying is true, I am forced to agree with Bala.
You need to work with someone who knows the language to the purest of its
form, knows it in and out, and also knows technology. I doubt you'd've come
across MANY of those at either WCI or the Hackathon.
--~~~~

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
>
>    - You agree with me that these people exist.
>    - The Malayalam Wikisource is getting more attention then the
>    Malayalam Wikipedia
>    - It is relatively easy to learn to read the script.
>    - Having native speakers type text that they could decipher is
>    something they can do if they choose
>    - Everybody benefits when more literature is transcribed
>
> There are no losers here. Yes, there may be more effective ways of finding
> people to transcribe. Do that. The key thing we should not forget is that
> these people ARE already part of our community. They can make a difference
> for the Indic languages and they are even willing to do so, they have done
> so.
>
> Bala would you not agree with me that the people we already know to be
> part of our community are at least relevant?
> Thanks,
>       Gerard
>
> On 30 November 2011 14:53, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> *One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they
>> are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the
>> people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically
>> capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our
>> language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many
>> more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
>> automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
>> also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
>> of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.*
>>
>> As far as Tamil is concerned, this isnt true. You have scratched not even
>> a tiny portion of whatever pyramid you might be looking for. Again your
>> assumption is based on a sample size of what 50-100 that showed up at the
>> Mumbai hackathon? (a place that is 2000 km from where Tamil speakers live
>> in India).  How hard have you tried to find other people who fit your
>> description - people who know Tamil and are interested in working on
>> Mediawiki?.
>>
>> Please stop generalising India from a single visit and meeting 100
>> people. This is extremely dangerous and will result in massive wastage of
>> time because of wrong understanding of the ground situation.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
>> gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hoi,
>>> During my visit to India, Amir started to teach me to read Devanagari.
>>> He did not teach me all the characters but I now have an idea on how to
>>> read
>>> the script. One of the things we looked at were things like the
>>> difference in writing characters for Marathi and Hindi. Effectively we
>>> looked at words that were transliterated from English like Coca Cola ...
>>> Amir taught himself to read Devanagari during this visit.. Amir is a
>>> linguist.
>>>
>>> Many of the people who are functional illiterates in their mother tongue
>>> I met at the hackathon. The way they speak about their language makes me
>>> cringe. To them English is superior. I find it sad because they lose their
>>> culture in this way. I asked two of them if they wanted their kids to learn
>>> to read and write their mother tongue; they said they did.
>>>
>>> They said that they would not be tempted to read Wikipedia articles;
>>> English is better. They might be interested in reading the literature of
>>> their language. I know this is a long shot but I am an optimist. I would
>>> welcome and applaud these people when they make the effort to learn to read
>>> and start reading the literature of their culture.
>>>
>>> One of the reasons why these people are so relevant to me is that they
>>> are part of the top of the pyramid that is our communities. They are the
>>> people who work on our technology. We need people who are technically
>>> capable and interested in working on MediaWiki. We need them as part of our
>>> language communities because their effort has the ability to enable so many
>>> more people. We need people to work on our fonts, our keyboard methods,
>>> automatic transliteration .... It is not only the WMF Localisation team but
>>> also the language communities themselves that have to work towards the goal
>>> of making any language / your language as easy to edit as English.
>>> Thanks,
>>>       GerardM
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
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-- 
Regards,
Srikanth Ramakrishnan.
Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore
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