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

What about..

[gcnaddict]

How about a dictionary in Navajo or Iroquois? Heck, even pig latin would do!

"he vets every entry for accuracy"

[dpbsmith]

"he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes..."

How, exactly, does he do this? It sounds like quite a trick.

He mentions "Then there's the professional ecologist major in Benin - he's a birder. He's sent in hundreds of bird entries, every type of thrush or crow ever spotted in East Africa, with their English and Swahili names." How does he "vet" these entries if he's not an ecologist himself?

Wikipedia regularly receives all sorts of hoax and joke definitions, neologisms, fraternity-house in-jokes, and so forth. It takes more than "minutes" to sort some of them out.

Does he just go on his personal intuition, which entries sound right and "feel" right to him? Or what?

Something doesn't add up

[Dekortage]

From the article: "We've done all the programming work that's possible, and I can envision hitting the print key in about two years," Benjamin said. You've done ALL the programming work that's possible? Clearly you are not dreaming big enough.

FTA: Biersteker and Benjamin have applied for several grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities. But they won't know anything until the spring, so they need stopgap funding. Why are you looking for American sources? Why not find a few AFRICAN ORGANIZATIONS to pay for it? If this is so useful to those who speak Kiswahili, then it shouldn't be hard to find a few African businesspeople or governments to back this thing. (...and I speak as someone who works with nonprofits in Africa, and can think of a few possible agencies that I will pass it on to.) At least he's looking to a Tanzanian university for some options (see below).

FTA: Benjamin returned with a new vision; he's calling it "Kamusi in a Box," a Swahili instruction CD-ROM kit for Internet-less villages. He's also interested in other learning projects, including some with the University of Dar Es Salaam. Hmm. I hope he checks the market first... unless he expects to include it with Negroponte's $100 laptop.

Re:Something doesn't add up

[Malangali]

"We've done all the programming work that's possible, and I can envision hitting the print key in about two years," Benjamin said. -- Actually, that's a misquote. We've done almost all the programming work that's possible given our current budget (the project goes belly-up at the end of the year without further funding), but we've got a task-list/ wish-list a mile long. Why not find a few AFRICAN ORGANIZATIONS to pay for it? -- Simple - most African organizations don't have the money to fund this sort of work. Those that have the money invest in other priorities, like health and emergencies. If you know of any African organizations with funds to spare, by all means please let them know about the project! About Kamusi-in-a-Box: if this happens, it will be in association with the Tanzanian school system, and all the software would be going to schools that have already been set up with computers running the Swahili versions of Linux, OpenOffice, and Firefox. So yes, the market is there - the market is a whole bunch of computers at educational institutions around East Africa that are ready and waiting for learning content.

Wiktionary

[merphant]

This can happen at Wiktionary (English version here). That is the first thing I thought of when I read the title of this articll the Wikipedia people thought of a multilingual wiki dictionary a while back, when thye still had to go around saying "please expand this article, Wikipedia is not a dictionary". I see that Wiktionary only has about 5 English entries for Swahili words. Hopefully this guy will make the content on his site available under a GFDL-compatible license so that it can be assimilated into Wiktionary.

Re:Uh Oh

[cyberon22]

We are doing something similar for Chinese at http://www.adsotrans.com/ and it hasn't been a mistake opening the project to user contributions. When mistakes happen they generally tend to be because of human confusion in how the editing system works or the way the backend dictionary is integrated with other software.

So if the Swahili project is anything like ours, I'd assume the big issue is encouraging people to become active contributors rather than passive users. Their community of contributors is probably relatively small and generally self-selecting to people reasonably fluent in the language, so the system would probably be self-policing even without an elaborate software system governing access issues. The problems we face aren't technical issues so much as questions of finding the resources and time to improve the project.

So good luck for them in attracting funding/participants. And if anyone is studying Chinese please do check us out. We have a language-learning blog at http://www.newsinchinese.com/ which may also be useful to intermediate/advanced students looking to get away from their textbooks and savouring the poetic eloquence of the the Xinhua News Agency.

Good model for Open Source Textbooks?

[Safe Sex Goddess]

Would this make a good model for Open Source Textbooks? If we get the $100 laptops to all kids, and they can downlaod Open Source Textbooks/Learning Software, we can eliminate a major expense for school districts in our country and around the world.

Free text books means more money can be put into teacher salaries so we get the best and the brightest, and so children can have facilities that don't look like they've been abandoned for 25 years.