Swahili Wiki-Dictionary?

Martin Benjamin writes "The Hartford Courant just published a feature article on the Kamusi Project Internet Living Swahili Dictionary. This project is using the Net to put together dictionaries that are as scholarly as any university publication, yet with a secure participatory model that draws on knowledge from users around the world. Now the project is developing learning tools that will build on the Kamusi model of collaborative scholarship."

Comments

you know what

[phiberoptik3]

I know a lot of college student who would use this. I for one have been using the yale kamusi project for a longtime. And hell yea african can use computers i know lots of them. Africa is not what you see on the discovery channel. When I came to this country I was appalled by the ignorance of American one of my teachers thought that Kenya was in the carribean and i had one kid ask me "how does it feel to wear clothes".

Another farce

[teslatug]

"Benjamin compares his project to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia drafted largely by a band of worldwide literati. He emphasizes, however, that, unlike Wikipedia, he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes, before he posts them."

Yeah you could do that with Wikipedia too when it had 100 new entried a month, but once you reach 100 a second I'd like to see how he'd cope.

P.S. There is a Wiktionary in Swahili right here: http://sw.wiktionary.org/ It hasn't attracted too many contributors, what makes this guy think he can do better?

Re:"he vets every entry for accuracy"

[Malangali]

A perceptive question. In the case of the ecologist, we're dealing with a trusted source who is one of the leading authorities on Swahili ornithology terminology. Therefore, most of the vetting of those entries indeed involves making sure everything looks right - that all the data are in the correct fields, that all the plural forms agree, etc. After the editor approves the entries, they are "live" - but anyone with better information can always submit a correction, at which point the editor will put the term up for question on the site's discussion forum. Non-trusted users get much more detailed oversight. Many entries are sent back to the submitter with a request for actual usage examples. Or, the editor checks various online and print sources. Editing a submission can involve quite a lot of work on the editorial end. Unlike Wikipedia, there is a firewall between the users and the dictionary. Someone who submits joke submissions is simply wasting their own time. For more details on the process, read the explanation for the project's Edit Engine here: http://research.yale.edu/swahili/serve_pages/edite ngine_en.php

Re:What about..

[xs650]

Bull pucky. It's had a written form for over 150 years.

http://www.dinecollege.edu/cds/04_nlprogram.html

Re:Racist

[Frnknstn]

I seriously doubt that the computer:student ratio is better than that.

Not nessesaraly, and it doesn't need to be. Take for example Somalia, where *complete* deregulation (that is, no central government whatsoever) has lead to a telecomunications boom. The warlords may burn the books, but nobody burns the computers, because they are important to everybody.

So much so, that the BBC maintains a Somali language website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/somali

In fact, I am writing this message from (*gasp*) Africa! And how do you think all those internet scammers operate if they don't have Internet access?

No, there was EXACTLY such a project: Nupedia

[dpbsmith]

Nupedia, Wikipedia's predecessor, was exactly such a project.

You didn't hear very much about it because after two years and $250,000 invested, it had a grand total of "24 articles that completed its review process" and 74 more that were well along.

Many of Wikipedia's organizational principles and policies originated in Nupedia, and Larry Sanger maintains that the success of Wikipedia stemmed from the fact that it had its start in a community of people who were thoroughly steeped in Nupedia ways of doing things.

Still, it is hard to see how Nupedia can be described as other than a "failure."

Re:Horrible mistake in article - NOT

[Malangali]

"ki" is a syllable that appears frequently in Swahili. In many cases, it is a noun class prefix that, as kahei says, has no formal semantic payload. In other cases it is an object infix, again without a specific meaning. In yet other cases it is a verb tense marker for the conditional tense, so it specifically indicates "if" or "when" something will happen. At other times "ki" is just a syllable that happens to appear in a word, such as the verb "kimbia" that means "run." Swahili also uses "ki" to create diminutive forms of nouns, and the syllable appears in certain adjectival formations. When it comes to discussing languages, "ki" IS a prefix that essentially flags a word as a language. For more information on the word "Kiswahili" in particular, see http://research.yale.edu/swahili/serve_pages/quest ions/swahili_vs_kiswahili_en.php

Swahili is a lot less fragmented than kahei believes. "Standard" Swahili is quite widely spoken, and most of the terms in the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary currently are Standard. However, several other dialects (certainly not zillions) are spoken, and the project supports multiple dialects through its Edit Engine. At this point the Dialects feature is underused, but we are developing search tools to make the feature more useful and user friendly, so I'd expect increasing dialect information in the dictionary as the project goes forward.

Re: Pidgin

[Malangali]

"Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I recall reading, is not Swahili itself basically a pigin of various languages, including Arabic, developed along the Zanzibar slave trade routes?"

pilgrim23, you are wrong. The history of Swahili is actually quite similar to the history of English, reflecting the movements and interactions of people over thousands of years. Swahili has a rich vocabulary with influences from various African tongues, Arabic, and some terms from European languages, Persian/Farsi, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond. The grammar is quite complex, so the language takes years to learn well.

The myth that Swahili is a simple or pidgin language is quite common in the US and Europe. Perhaps that is because of the Tarzan movies, where the Swahili used resembles the "me Tarzan, you Jane" quality of the English. Or perhaps it is because Swahili speakers tend to be very forgiving listeners, so visitors to East Africa get the feeling that they are communicating with just a few words of the language, because their hosts twist their ears in order to understand.

Re: African funding

[Malangali]

The interest level in African institutions in quite high, but if there are any "funds to spare," I haven't heard about them. The real potential funding sources are intergovernmental organizations, private foundations, and individual donors. Unfortunately, Africa just doesn't have the equivalent of the Japan Foundation. Private foundations tend to have highly specific criteria for their grants - for example, some foundations only fund projects in certain countries, while other only fund certain types of activities such as hospitals or orphanages. A scholarly Swahili educational project has thus far seemed a little too esoteric for the foundations we've investigated, and certainly doesn't fit into any of the pre-existing categories of their mission statements.

As to private donors: http://www.justgiving.com/pfp/swahili . So far, no dot.angel has emerged, though quite a few people have been extremely generous in helping keep the project going with relatively small donations.

Funding basically involves staffing, for programming and for editorial work. The more funding available, the more technically ambitious the project can be, and the more content we can provide. We would ideally like to expand the model to other languages, but, because the quality of the project demands scholarly oversight, we would need to actually hire people to work on additional languages and additional tasks. It's a case of getting what you pay for - the project aims to produce quality educational resources, which means that professional scholars need to give their time, and if they are giving the sort of time necessary to get the resources online this century, they need to be paid so they can buy food and pay the rent. Hosting costs are minimal - Yale is quite generous with server space. Publishing costs will be borne by the publishing house, when we eventually get to the point of producing print dictionaries, although we've got some problematic issues ahead because publishing houses are wary of printing something that is also available for free online. The project has a proven record of spending its money wisely and producing results, but it does need some sort of cash flow to keep doing the things it does!