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

Re:Racist

[rubycodez]

nope, you just have a chip on your shoulder. From the article: "With more than 80 million speakers in East and Central Africa, Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, though a fully updated dictionary of the language has not been produced for 30 years."

Re:Racist

[DigiShaman]

How is it racist? Be honest with yourself. How many people thing "high tech" when Africa comes to mind. Untill their ecconomy changes, I will still see the vast portion of Africa as tribal. Even as such, that does not make then any less human. So again, I fail to see how this story is racist. Sounds like your just walking on eggshells when it comes to political correctness crap.

Re:Racist

[TubeSteak]

Ditto, he's playing the race card.

"I brought a bunch of English magazines to read myself to sleep at night, and this teenage kid, Ernest Kidenya, whom I've known since he was knee high, was looking through them wanting to learn some of the words," Benjamin said. "Then I realized, `How are kids in Africa going to ever learn a language if there is one dictionary for every 400 students?'"

1 dictionary for every 400 students...
I seriously doubt that the computer:student ratio is better than that.

Re:Is he re-creating the language?

[Malangali]

The dictionary does not re-create the language, it documents it. It is a "living" dictionary, meaning that it is designed to remain extremely current to the language as it is used, through the submissions of users who have their ears to the ground. However, only words that can be documented, through printed sources, radio broadcasts, contemporary Swahili music, etc, are accepted for inclusion in the dictionary. It is intended as a reference resource, not the word of God. As to whether anyone will know the difference about the accuracy of the entries, that surely depends on your definition of "anyone." The population of the Swahili-speaking world is roughly the same as that of the German-speaking world. Would you make such a comment about a project for German?

A welcome improvement

[o'reor]

on the previous cooperative Wikipedia-style initiatives on the Net :

1. Moderators for the submitted articles
2. A (scientific ?) reviewing committee

This was definitely lacking in the other initiatives.

Of course, this supposes that a committee of reliable people (typically, university researchers, professionals, etc.) culls the articles as they are submitted, and it does require a lot of time. They already do this for peer-reviewed scientific or technical journals, with the difference that they probably get paid for doing it.

Still, I believe in a serious technical/scientific committee donating their time in order to review the validity of articles submitted to online encyclopediae, and being given the rights to prevent the modification of the online articles unless those modifications have been approved. This would be a great step towards reliability in the Wikipedia publishing process.

And besides, to compare this with another great cooperative project, would Linus Torvalds let pieces of the Linux code be updated by any anonymous coward without a proper code review done by a trusted person ? This is the direction that ought to be taken for Wikipedia.