[Wikipedia-l] Re: Conference report from South Africa

[Andy Rabagliati]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Timwi wrote:

> Angela wrote:
> > 
> >     * Spoken Wikipedia by cell phone.
> 
> Heh! All the more incentive to get more people to participate in
> [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia]] (shameless plug)! Nobody
> really wants machine-generated spoken versions when a real human-spoken
> version is available. :)

There was some discussion of that. Two (very real) problems :-

* Editing. Voice editing sounds clumsy, and would sound like CamelCase :-)

* Accents. If an Indian is trying to understand what a Geordie or
  someone from Barbados is saying, it might as well be in Afrikaans :-)

Transcription, and machine-generated, please ?

> This is assuming that the larger part of the cost of textbooks is
> copyright licenses. I would imagine that it is instead the production
> costs of actual books, and obviously free content won't help that.

Having had (almost) direct experience of this in Africa, much of the
problem is bureaucracy and supply.

Cheers,    Andy!