[Wikipedia-l] Lingala Wikipedia

[Jimmy Wales]

Mark Williamson wrote:
> I think the question we should be asking ourselves is : what will
> somebody in Kinshasa think coming across this website? It claims to be
> the Lingala version of Wikipedia, but the interface is bilingual, and
> most of the articles are in French. It will be of little to no help to
> a monolingual Lingala speaker.

What are the odds of a monolinqual Lingala speaker coming across the
site?  How do those odds compare with a bilingual French/Lingala speaker
coming across the site?

I don't know the answer, so this isn't a rhetorical question.

Eventually of course we wish to have a thriving independent pure-Lingala
site.  No one doubts this.  The question is: what's the most effective
way to get there?

Here's a quote from this month's National Geographic:

"Few countries in the world have collapsed as disastrously by the
wayside -- regressed so starkly into preindustrial ruin - as Congo.
Once called Zaire, the nation was picked clean during three decades of
misrule by the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, then gutted by more than six
years of anarchy and civil war.  Today Congo is the shell-shocked
colossus of central Africa - a country almost the size of Western Europe
that seems to have sleepwalked into some feverish dream of the
post-Apocalypse.
[...]
What words can be uttered about those roads? [The roads of in eastern
Congo]  Clogged with mud, strangled by bush, reduced in many cases to
absurd footpaths, they slither for hundreds of miles through a tropical
forest second in size only to the Amazon.  They span a landscape where
the 20th century has ebbed like a neap tide, leaving behind the detritus
of modernity: towns with trees growing from roofs, factories crumbling
like Mayan ruins, coffee planatations run wild."

> I don't know what action needs to be taken, but I'm pretty sure that
> something should be done.

How about letting the people who are working there continue their work,
and let's make some kind of a concerted effort to get more help for
them.  I wonder if we can't find a dozen or so academics who are fluent
in Lingala and French (or Lingala and English).

If you can find them for me on the Internet, I will personally phone the
ones who speak English, and I'm sure Anthere or another French person
will be happy to phone the ones who speak French.

> 2) when confronted about these facts by an anonymous user, the
> administrators stated that it's important that French is in the
> interface because most of the contributors have poor Lingala. Keep in
> mind that there are only 3 active contributors, one of whom seems to
> speak pretty good Lingala.

It should be left up to them to determine the best way forward, lacking
some really compelling evidence that this is problematic.