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

"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?

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.