[Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from the Third World

[Ray Saintonge]

Mark Williamson wrote:

>3) Among the population of the Earth, a very, very large portion live
>in societies that are not highly literate or which don't place a high
>importance on writing. Most societies don't record every aspect of
>life the way we do. Yes, there are newspapers in India (although to
>the best of my knowledge there are no newspapers in Igbo or Aymara or
>Afar), there are books in Nepal, but if you look it up, the sheer
>volume of materials published in the First World per-capita far, far,
>far, far exceeds that of anywhere else.
>
>Here, if someone sees an insect doing something strange, they write a
>paper or a book about it, and if they don't, somebody else will! But
>in most countries, this is not the case. Books cost money to make.
>People in developing countries often don't have this money. There are
>no or (comparatively) few publishers there, and those that do exist
>cannot afford to put out the sheer volume of books put out by
>publishers here because the demand tends to be much lower (especially
>for non-fiction books). They do not have Amazon.com or massive
>real-life bookstores, so "specialty" books would not sell because they
>would have no way to reach their intended audience!
>
Most of us in developed counties would take the costs of producing a 
small pamphlet for granted.  We might consider that spending $20.00 to 
produce 500 copies of a pamphlet on matters of local concern to be a 
bargain.  In some third world countries that's equivalent to two months 
of income.  500 copies is already too many to reproduce with 
[[hectograph]]y.  There may indeed not be someone close-by with the 
equipment to do the job.

Ec