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."

"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:"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: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.

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".

Incredible

[JeanBaptiste]

Just the other day, I was lamenting to my friend how the internet seems to have everything except for a good Swahili Wiki-Dictionary.

Looks like my chum went to great lengths to collect on our 50 Rand wager.

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.

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: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?

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.

Re:What about..

[xs650]

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

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