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The Struggle of an African-language Wikipedia
A reader writes to mention an International Herald Tribune article discussing the troubles an African-language Wikipedia faces in getting underway. While there is a lot of interest, the primary obstacle is that of exposure: the majority of people on the continent of Africa do not have internet access. From the article: "What use is an encyclopedia when literacy rates among a language's speakers approach zero? (This is not a problem for Swahili.) And who should control the content in a local language if not enough native speakers are inclined, or able, to contribute? If it had been native speakers only who contributed to the Swahili version, that Wikipedia might not exist at all."
Why not pick out some important articles, or high quality articles from the other languages, taking into account relevency to africans, just trnaslate them over as seed material.
Why just one wiki for Africa?
Many people in the US think Africa is a country...it's a continent!
MANY languages.
MANY cultures.
MANY countries.
Imagine if Wikipedia said "OK, Asia only gets one Wikipedia; Europe only gets one Wikipedia."
Yeah, right...like that would fly.
This is where Africa usually gets the shaft: it's treated as a whole; any effort usually benefits the populous/popular countries.
(eg. world response to massive genocide.)
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
Well, they should have no problems with Nigerian...
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
I mean, he knows a lot about Africa, like that fact the elephant population has tripled in the last six months. But Wikipedia banned him. Sounds like biting the hand that feeds Africa.
What's this about controlling the content of different groups? I thought the point of a Wikipedia was that people were free to contribute, not be locked out because of race or color.
Great! Now we can look to the Wikipedia as a tool for promoting discrimination.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Translators.
Wincopy
Language has largely lliterate people? Make a multimedia encyclopedia, including articles on how to read and write!
And that bit about academics who look down on contributions from amateurs just frosts me, their sole purpose and job is to teach: providing leadership, correction, quality improvement, and encouragement to amateur contributors to a resevoir of knowledge should be looked on as a wonderful opportunity, not a distraction or annoyance.
I hate to sound like a troll, but who cares? No, seriously, if there's a language which too few of its speakers can possibly care about Wikipedia (since too few of them can access it) then who cares?
Too few people. The number of articles on a language 'partition' of Wikipedia reveals how many people really care about it, and when you have 1,000 articles for a language, it means that very few people can possibly care about it, and so we shouldn't care about that whole issue.
And if such a language partition of the Wikipedia gets written mostly by non-native speakers, it shows that there are even fewer native speakers who can possibly care.
I claim that this whole thing is a non-issue
You just got troll'd!
Okay, first, I speak, read and write 6 languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish) so please don't accuse me of language bigotry.
But if their literacy rate is approaching zero, why not teach the kids english alongside their language? English is the lingua franca of the world and they will have a lot more content at their hands than if they simply learned their language.*
I'm not saying that they shouldn't learn their language, it is important that they do to keep their culture alive. However, there is not one African language, but many - a ton of local language, moreso than Europe. A common English language will also help them communicate with each other better and will be a win/win for all concerned.
How do you create an online encyclopedia in a language in which few native speakers have access to the Internet?
Thats an easy question to answer. You wait. Rome wasn't built in a day. Until there's a critical mass of people capable of creating the resource then it's not going to happen. I'm sure that's an answer someone in Martin Benjamin's position won't like, but it's the only one that makes sense.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
In Africa, most people speak English, French, and Dutch, FYI. That's what years of colonization gets you.
The article describes a twofold problem: no readers, too few writers. On Wikipedia, the readers are the writers, so in this case these two problems are actually one problem. It's also a problem which Wikipedia has already been designed to solve--when readers want content, they push it onto the wiki. If the content isn't there, obviously the demand is not great enough to make it happen. Isn't that the way of wikipedia?
WIKI is for "what I know is." If it were "what we want you to know is", we'd be calling it WWWYTKIpedia. I think we should simply lay this topic to rest and move on to something reasonable, such as "if wikipedia isn't the right tool to help educate African people, what other tools are possible?"
Perhaps Wikipedia could learn from the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler - um, assuming of course that the wikipedia entries on these guys are in any way accurate.
It is never wise to fight a battle on more than one front. Focus! Do one thing well and then expand once you've got it right. The English version of Wikipedia has a long way (years of work) to go before it approaches being a valuable reliable source of data.
By the time that the quality and reliability issues are fixed, Most Africans will have broadband and be able to create any pages they like.
Yes, of all the things wrong with Africa, we should definitely put this on the top of the list. I'm shocked that anyone would waste time and resources on hunger, AIDS, anarchy, when most Africans DON'T HAVE INTERNET ACCESS. I mean it's barbaric to think some starving AIDS victim can't Google or read Slashdot.
The people trying to create this thing are separated from the very people they claim they are doing it for. Until critical mass is reached its pointless to worry about an African wiki coming into being. When it is necessary it will happen. Just because a bunch of people who "know better" than the natives doesn't make it right.
// the wiki guys // but damn if doesn't sound like a bunch of elites trying to bring religon to the savages all over again.
A wiki is a great idea but it also eats a lot of leisure time. Many in those nations don't have the luxury of that time let alone the means to even access it.
I know its not what they want
Feed them, clothe them, and give them the means to do so themselves. The rest will tend to itself. We've come a long way in 200 years but we were trying as a whole, Africa has been fractured for so long it will take them hopefully less than half the time to do the same, they just have to see it as a goal. First needed is freeing the people from the dictatorships that keep their societies backwards.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Show us that this is easier than writing the article from scratch. Have you even tried reading the output of Babel Fish on a typical Japanese page?
Reviving broadcast television after the advent
of Internet video!
http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/videos.html
You apparantly did not read it carefully because had you done so you would have known it was originally published in the New York times.
Thanks,
GerardM
Most contributions to the African Wikipedia is probably made by the liberals and left-wingers in San Francisco. If not, it could be a good project for them- since there's nobody else to read these articles, they could create another nice and politically correct community for themselves on the web.
Swahili is a trade language. It has relatively few native speakers, but it is the secondary language for many in east Africa. So it is not really surprising that the native speakers alone wouldn't contribute a lot.
It's an encyclopedia of popular consensus, not scholarship.
Not only that, but when a certifiable nut case throws some money at them, they immediately bend over backwards to please him, even if it means throwing away relevant facts that displease said nut case (such as the fact that Jeff Merkey "deliberately describes his own, separate reality") and banning anyone who would dare to insert these facts into his page.
What use is an encyclopedia when literacy rates among a language's speakers approach zero?
I'm a fan of Wikipedia (see my sig) but in this case raising the literacy rate using old-fashioned methods (ie books) surely has to have priority over getting some (token) entries into Wikipedia. It's not that the two are mutually exclusive, but until there's a certain level of literacy within the native language group, Wikipedia articles (presumably written by non-native speakers) are going to look at bit like encyclopedic colonialism.
The price of Wikipedia is eternal vigilance
It is a waste of time to make entries in each and every language. I found that despite even on the etnries concerning russia and russian culture I use english wiki (despite russian being my primary language and such) -simply because english articles are better in quality. I feel pity for all that time people spend translating articles instead of adding new ones.
- I know many people fluently speak more than one language since childhood and as a consequence can effortlessly master many more without much effort (if by the age of 6 you spoke more than one language your brain is "wired" well for learnign additional ones). Even those who stuck with only one language can learn one (and they should make it English).
That's the thing about popular consensus - it can be bought for real money.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
The grandparent said Africans, as in those who are probably still in Africa. Only you had to go and add Black American stereotypes (not African Americans, but your traditional National Lampoon Black Man (tm)).
Flamebait was a good mod for you, previous Anonymous Coward.
dont incourage this kind of ignorance. this is disrecpectful and childish. mod this flamebait, not funny.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
I can attest to this. I've spent last 10 years of my life creating the Klingonese version of wikipedia, but there's just no support for it.
Klingons won't even come to Earth and talk with us about it, so most of the content in there is created by Star Trek fans.
The problem is even worse when no cross-planet ISP exist that can transmit the content to Klingon so Klingons can browse it.
What use is an encyclopedia when no one can read it or access it?
Oh wait. Why is this a problem again?
So, call me crazy here, but in the face of literacy rates and scant internet access, why put forth the time and effort to create a lame-duck African-language Wikipedia? There are plenty of Wikimedia efforts that could use those intellectual man-hours, if the world isn't ready for an African Wikipedia at the very moment.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
Multimedia is a language in itself.
Complex and challenging both to teach and to lean. Those who can use it effectively are rare. Sesame Street
Wow. And in other news, sales of Ferraris have dropped to a precipitous low on Tanzania, a Starbucks franchise is having real trouble getting off the ground in the Congo, and the Sierra Leone division of Sharper Image reported a record quarterly loss.
Wikipedia exists due to a vast army of bored office drones, programmers and college students. Surfing (and contributing to) it is like the most bourgeois thing. I don't find it all that surprising that a continent with ten million orphans, a complete lack of basic health care and sanitation, and insanely corrupt political regimes, can't find the time to log on and post a couple articles.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
In the Congo, there are a number of tribal languages (a couple of hundred, if I remember correctly) and several major trade languages that are common across large regions (I was in the Peace Corps there a ways back and my electricity bill came in seven languages). But Mobuto (President at the time) spoke Lingala and was pushing it hard as the primary official language. The people in the eastern part of the country (where Kiswahili was the lingua franca) resented it more than a bit, and especially resented the administrators who would come to the area and who spoke no Kiswahili at all. Of course, this is linked in with tribalism as well as resentment of Mobutu (who was not a nice person). As a result, the common language that really unified the country was French (which most educated people spoke quite well).
Wikimedia Foundation projects are broken out by languages, not countries. French wikipedia http://fr.wikipedia.org/ is edited from every continent, because the language is spoken in so many different places. Norwegian is less-widely spoken, and has two different wikipedias due to two different spelling systems (Nynorsk http://nn.wikipedia.org/ and Bokmål http://no.wikipedia.org/).
So Wikipedia is available in more than 220 languages already (complete list of current languages/projects http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix. More than two dozen of those languages are spoken in Africa, and more languages are actively under development. It's not that Africa is treated as a monolithic whole; it's that some languages have more people online and interested in developing a 'pedia for themsleves than others.
Language has largely lliterate people? Make a multimedia encyclopedia, including articles on how to read and write!
[sarcasm] Because although they are illiterate they have plenty of access to the internet, multimedia computers, and good computer training. [/sarcasm]
A better idea would be to take some of those $100 laptops and put a really good locally tailored learn-to-read program on them and give them to very poor rural villages. This is assuming the $100 laptop has good enough sound to handle the task.
Did you guys read his comment? Why is it modded "Funny"? It's not even meant to be so...
Cut him some slack; his father was killed by non-pulmonic consonants.
English is easier said than done.
If not many people are interested, then not many people will mourn its absence, no?
Aren't there plenty of other languages there? Arabic? All the colonial languages? Afrikaans?
Cripes, to watch those Michael Palin travel shows, you'd think English and French were the official languages. :)
What we really need is a Coptic Wikipedia. Just because.
I'm a bureaucrat at the Vietnamese-language Wikipedia. Back in late 2003 there were few contributors (actualy just me and one other person). We slowly built the contents and the formatting. Slowly, more people came. We reached a critical point in late 2005 when we reached 1000 users. By the end of the year, we had more than 10000 contributors. We reached 10000 articles recently. One thing we've learned is in order to attract native speakers, focus on the help pages. Spell out the policies, describe how to create new pages, and make newcomers feel welcomed. If you use the English version of the project pages, then only those who can speak English as well as that language can contribute. The discussion pages also need to be in that language, else it will exclude a majority of native speakers.
I roposepay a Igpay Atinlay Ikipediaway. Llaay uoyay ouldway eednay siay a otbay hattay opiescay hetay Nglisheay Ikipediaway, utbay hangescay hetay etterslay otay ebay igpay atlinlay.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Very well said! I'd give you an Insightful point if I could ;-)
You just got troll'd!
...for the first topical use of AYBABTU ever in a Slashdot post.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The second major point I'd like to raise is the absurdity of geekdom and the crazy notion that a geek solution is what is needed. No need for clean water, roads and basic education. Nope: give them computers & wikipedia. If you really want to help an African, go to him and ask him what he needs first.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's too bad some the mods modded down the GP and that you were offened because you are unfamiliar with African culture. The way the GP expressed how he heard their language is exactly how their languange sounds to Western ears. See this movie:
The Gods Must Be Crazy
It's very funny, pokes fun at Western consumerism, and has some wonderful African songs - I had a fantacy of moving there myself!
Jeezuz. Man leeve dem afficans alone enuff already. Wat is it wid wiite peeplu dat thinc watt dey got eberbody els wat 2? O dat bi gibbn afficanz watt wiite peepl got dey heppin aficanz b mo wiite n mo betr. Butt aficanz doont kaar bout kno whackopediah so wy wiit peepl kaar iz bynd mee. Ihya meen affika is a ho diffnt plasc an tiim an aint nuffin liik wiit wurld n duohnd wana b. Soh fuk off b4 wyt peepl gib uhs ah suppa wallmahrt. Den wee b fukd juz liik wiite peepl. EN OH !
FROM THE DESK OF IKECHUKWU GODWIN.
NIGERIAN NATIONAL PETROLEUM
CORPORATION.
LAGOS-NIGERIA.
E-MAIL:ikechukwugodwin101@yahoo.de
TEL:234-803-815-805-7
I am very ill and dying of cancer. I have been a loyal contributor to African language Wikipedias, but my work can no longer continue because of my illness. Your help is urgently needed to continue this important work. I have a $25,000,000 DOLLAR life insurance policy that is to be used to fund the writing of African Wikipedia articles. It is very important that this encyclopedia, a charity, be flushed out, and I need your help to see that it gets completed. Please reply by e-mail to ikechukwugodwin101@yahoo.de with your language and bank account information and we can begin the process of getting you set up as a contributor and have you designated as a beneficiary for your contributions to the articles.
But seriously, is access to Wikipedia really the most pressing issue when you can't feed your kids and your town is plagued by genocidal maniacs from alternating rival groups every other day?
I think we need to talk about the re-distribution of wealth and creating political stability first, then we can talk about Internet access. I'm not saying education isn't an important ingredient in solving Africa's plight, but humans are fairly bad learners if their weight is smaller than the very book (or laptop, in Wikipedia's case) they are studying.
if I were you I would want someone to correct me on these:
"I feel I master the language" should be "I feel I have mastered the language"
"If people is to learn to read" should be "If people are to learn to read" (similarly, from your other post, "Country-based wikis is not needed" should be "Country-based wikis are not needed")
"gets written down - in a open content" should be "gets written down - as open content" ("a content" is never correct, and in any case you should use "an" before "open")
Otherwise, an insightful post.
Of course 'objective' information sources like wikipedia ahould be accessible to africans, but I doubt there are much africans reading african wikipedia pages. If they've got internet access, and they know about wikipedia, and they are interested in reading encyclopedia articles, chances are they know enough english to understand wikipedia anyway.
:p
I simply don't believe people would figure out how to use the internet _and_ discover wikipedia, without some basic knowledge about the english language. Putting the english page through a translator would probably give them more information (side-by-side with the original) than those three-sentence translated pages
Also, I think people writing non-english wikipedia pages are pretty much wasting their time: just compare the dutch and the english wikipedia, while you were writing the second of those three paragraphs in dutch, your children were already agreeing that 'reposts leave the impression of incompetence.' in the english wikipedia article.
If you really want some information you shouldn't go looking on the internet unless you know (how to read) english.
Feel free to point out speelng/grammar errors, tomorrow I'll just blame my drunkiness, if I bother to read <4 replies at all(which I probably will)
**TODO** [X] Steal someone elses sig.
It does; see the hardware specification. Might need headphones if you're doing something full-duplex (like VOIP) but otherwise excellent audio. It even has S/PDIF out.
why bother with a language almost no one speaks? while we are at it lets have wikipedia entires in latin, sanskrit heck klingon works too.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
...the many African dialects.
Swahili
Zulu
Chenyanja
Fanagalo
etc.
Chimbudzi miombo basopa njoka!
(if you shit in the woods, watch out for snakes)
The term "ngwenya" means "crocodile" in some dialects and "snake" in others, while it is "njoka" or nyoka" in others for snake.
See the problem?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
"...taking into account relevency to africans..."
Africans or Africaans? One is a nationality, the other a language spoken mostly in South Africa.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
That's funny because my father was killed by implosive affricates.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
There were less than 5 errors in that post. If you scored him against native english speakers, he'd be in the 99th percentile.
paintball
"While there is a lot of interest, the primary obstacle is that of exposure: the majority of people on the continent of Africa do not have internet access."
Um, no, the primary obstacle is that the vast majority of the people on the African continent are behaving as if they're only about half a step up the evolutionary ladder from complete and utter savages; they have no use for technology -- yet.
When they stop killing each other, move to where the goddamned food is and settle down for a while, then maybe they can work on curing malaria and after that, start on the Wikipedia Africanica.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
I'm tired of these motherf***ing njoka on this motherf***ing plane!
With that out of my system, what part of "mmm-click-clicky-click-mmm-click" do you not understand?
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
The recurring theme of the /. conversation is, why should people waste their time creating African language Wikipedias if the languages have low literacy and few computer users? However, the original NYT article was written about a discussion that has moved well beyond that level. The questions that the people working on African language Wikipedias (most of whom have spent a great deal of time in Africa, speaking African languages and thinking/ acting on the issues) are asking are more like these:
- Can some of Africa's entrenched economic difficulties relate to the fact that many of her people do not have access to literacy in the languages they speak and use on a daily basis?
- How much of the lack of literacy in many languages is related to the lack of a systematic effort to produce written materials in those languages?
- If a critical mass of written materials were produced for a given language, would it create the necessary foundation for widespread literacy in that language among speakers of that language?
- If speakers of a given language were to develop literacy in that language, rather than having to learn an entirely different language (such as English or Arabic) in order to engage in written communications (send emails, write blogs, read newspapers, get commodity market and weather reports relevant to the crops they grow, apply for jobs, evaluate the truth claims of politicians, etc), might that literacy be a key to overcoming the continent's persistent economic difficulties?
- Given the certified failure of print publishers and government agencies (colonial and post-colonial) to produce literacy materials in most African languages during the past 150 years, and the rapid success of the Wikipedia model in producing vast amounts of knowledge material quickly, might the resources of the Wikipedia world be a way to address the issues of creating literacy materials for those languages?
- If One Laptop Per Child is indeed a foreseeable reality, and if Wikipedia is going to come prebundled, and if having literacy materials in the language a child speaks is a key to the ultimate success and usefulness of OLPC, isn't creating a good Wikipedia in that child's language an issue of somewhat immediate concern?
- If any or all of the above, but also given the slow pace of African language Wikipedias to date, what have the barriers been thus far, and how can those barriers be overcome in a timely and systematic way?
That is the discussion the NYT was reporting on. It would be interesting to read the thoughts of theIf you build it, they will come...
how can the first post in an article be redundant? flamebait maybe, but this isn't redundant isn't redundant.
Look at the Scots wikipedia: http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki ... they're actually serious about it!
My uncle Alan his girlfriend have been working for years to get computers into the hands of South Africans, specifically in schools. It is a noble effort and has had some very good results. But my lord, the stories they bring back of trouble on so many levels. Getting computers through customs is very difficult, there's always someone there who will hold the goods up until you grease their palms. Travelling across the land you come across more questionable patrols that demand money to let you pass. Once in the school, there are so few technical people that it is very difficult to even keep a small local network running, forget about the internet. Theft is very high. Even teachers steal the computers to keep them at home... and not even to use: just to have as a decorative status symbol!
My uncle and his girlfriend are very tenacious and clever, so they've been able to succeed so far, but the problems are bigger than one would expect. Just sending computers or money or whatever won't help by itself. There's a whole layer of social disfunction that's got an amazing foothold, and it eliminates almost any motivation for the locals to be ethical. And South Africa is probably one of the easier places in Africa to do this kind of thing.
Anyways, I'm all for helping each other out, but there are political and social issues that need to be worked out before higher level stuff will have a major impact. Heck if I know how to do it.
I have wanted to help them put together a website of their experiences, but we haven't had the time yet.
Cheers.
Grandparent post is funny because he asks not to "incourage" ignorance.
this is already the situation in most countries in africa - they adopted the language of the colonial powers as the official language. Take Ghana for instance. they gain their independence from the british and adopted english as their official language.
the problem is that though an average person with some basic education can understand english, they don't know enough to expres themselves comfortably in their day to day activities. what's worse, due to years of neglect to develop any of the country's native languages by encouraging its use in academia, there's now generation that can't express themselves well in their native language either, in terms of reading and writing.
in the case of ghana, i think the country would have been better of if it chose to develop any of its major native language, such as akan, instead of adopting a new language altogether - a language that continues to be foreign to the average person.
Translate them over into what? Africa isn't a monolithic culture, nor is is there an 'African' language to translate into. Africa (the continent) has hundreds (thousands?) of each.
Great idea. Got a translator's dictionary for the language "African"?
I didnt mean to imply there was only one african language.
nothing i said, nor the article, nor the slashdot title implies there is only 1 african language. My suggestion stands for any language just copy the statement N times and start replacing with each instance of the group "african languages"
If nothing you said implied that - I wouldn't have answered how I did, would I have?
Greetings. Please learn how to copy and paste properly. Warmest regards.
Nigerian language? Well, is it like the Belgian language?
On the contrary. People fear the most that which they don't understand. And most importantly, self-serving politicians have a far easier time telling you lies about stuff you don't know and don't understand.
, and even a lot of educated people might just believe it. It doesn't, btw. I've read a translation, and it's no worse than any other religion. But that's just the point: once you _can_ understand what the others _are_ saying, and in what context the phrases were said that the politicians try to agitate you with, it becomes a lot harder for someone to come and present them as demons to you.
If I were to post here that the internet is evil and run by little imps hauling your packets through tubes, probably everyone on Slashdot would immediately know that it's bullshit. But try it with bullshit like that the Koran demands terrorism/paedophilia/whatever-scare-of-the-month
Or let's put it this way: when was the last time you saw someone in the USA wanting to go to war with Canada or the UK? I mean, heck, you understand what they're saying all right. If understanding all the evil stuff they're saying would want people to go to war, you'd have more of a Casus Beli agains those than against Iraq by now. But in practice, once you do understand them, it turns out that they're people just like you.
It's easier for someone to pick one extremist Arab loonie out of context, and mis-represent it as being representative of Arabs as a whole, and you might even believe it because you have no clue what the other Arabs are saying. Maybe they are saying the same things after all, right? Even if you've travelled there once or twice, who knows what evil things they were saying around you in that language of theirs, right? (Actually, wrong.)
Whereas even if someone would cherry-pick one or two loonies from the UK or Canada (every country has theirs), there'll be _plenty_ of people who were there, understood what those people were saying, read some Canadian news agency's website, maybe watched some Canadian TV station if they're close to the border. They'll immediately point out, basically, "wtf, that's one isolated nutcase that noone else takes seriously. That't _not_ what the rest of Canada is thinking."
And that goes both ways, btw. It's also easier for some Arabs to get hyped up against the Americans or Israel or whatever, when they don't really understand the language, the country, or the culture. Don't think that the small minority that throws bombs and whatnot are the intellectual elite there. It's the people who don't know any better, and are the easiest manipulated.
Not understanding each other is basically a vicious circle, as violence goes. There'll be plenty of self-serving manipulators on both sides willing to translate only the conveniently belicose parts of what the others say. One loonie on side A says "let's bomb side B!" Everyone there laughs in his face, but on side B someone finds it convenient to translate only that as "look what side A says." Now someone on side B says, "oh yeah? let's see how cocky they'd be when they get a load of cruise missiles on their capital!" And someone on side A finds convenient to translate that, but ommit in what context it was said. Lather, rinse, repeat.
So if anything, starting to understand each other might just put a bit of a brake on that vicious circle.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I suspect that part of the problem may be caused by the small minority of amateurs who simply refuse to listen to those who know better. I remember one article about wikipedia had a quote from some sort of expert in some particular field. He rewrote the wikipedia article about something or other that he had been directly involved with. Within a month, pretty much everything he had contributed had been replaced by stuff that was inaccurate, or in some cases outright lies. I wish I could be more specific as to the details, but alas my memory fails me once again.
Santa's suicide mission go!
If I had mod points this week, I'd use them. Most of the posts above are missing or ignoring key points.
I think a lot, at first, will depend on educated Westerners who have learned an African language and want to contribute to the future of those cultures and peoples. Nothing's stopping me from learning Swahili or Yoruba and writing Wikipedia articles (in fact, I plan to learn an African language one day). In the long run, once the ball is rolling, these people will have much unique information of their own to contribute to Wikipedia.
Another part of the problem is that the elite minority in many African countries would very much like to keep government, science, and mass communication in a foreign language (English, French, Portuguese, etc.) to keep the general populace from threatening their superiority. The more Africans are empowered in their own languages, the better.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
(Yes, of course.)
News sites use African languages; blogging sites or community sites make sense in African languages; but for encyclopedias the barrier is higher, since what you write there is supposed to be objective, universal, noncontroversial, understandable by anybody. The language itself has to be universal enough. Swahili meets that criterion: almost all Tanzanians speak it, and this is the case in several other countries, so by writing in Swahili you do write for everybody. For most other African languages the situation is more complicated because they are not spoken nation-wide. When writing encyclopedia articles about Nigeria, I guess most Nigerians might prefer English.
(This can be checked, of course - just look at the representation of Africa in en.wikipedia.org and fr.wikipedia.org.)
well, in terms of numbers (of languages), even "european language" would be no match
Idha khatabahum lijahiluna qalu salaman
How may phones do we have to get to make the USA a.... oh he means the NAME dictatorship fails.
If most african countries have retained colonial English or French as the languages of business and government because they realize they can't deal wth 100 tribal languages, why should the internet be different?
Not that it isn't a good thing that linux was converted to Sotho relatively easily and it would be great if there could be lively sites dedicated to every language group -- but Wikipedia? Lt. Uhura knew Swahili but spoke English on the bridge.
I've never gotten nor agreed with the entire idea of 'internet for everyone'. The LAST thing people over in africa need is internet access - what most of them need is a) to stop killing each other and b) a good job. The rest will follow. The interent comes AFTER that - it's not going to get them either. Well, I guess unless you count all the great chinese farmer & nigerian scams they can work for - gee that helped the world.
This shoehorns nicely into the whole idea that every child needs a laptop. Mostly every child needs a swift kick in the ass and for the liberals to stop trying to brainwash them (oh god no competition in school, no tag, no dodgeball, everyone wins, blah blah blah cause that's the way it is in the real world...um..well..not really - but it is a good way to get you on welfare). Education in this country (US) has been steadily on the decline - let's see, the liberals pretty much run the education system and have for a LONG time. We continue to funnel more and more cash into it with no effect. Gee, sorta sounds like the CA power grid (well except for the money part). Yet another liberal experiment that has fallen flat on it's face. So obviously we should givem them all laptops and internet access (exactly what is on the net that EVERY child in school needs to see on their OWN laptop? and don't you DARE say research - there are VERY few sites that you can assume are facts. I love the 'well I saw it on the internet so it must be true').
It never ceases to amaze me how some of these people stay in power for years and years and yet manage to dodge all the blame for what has gone on. It seems to me that EVERY congressman and senator from BOTH parties that has been in office more than 10 years BEARS 90% of the blame for what has occurred in this country - THEY were the ones running it, weren't they? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome. So, by all means go vote the same stupid people in to office by hitting that party line over and over again.
who says you need an internet or any kind of network to make a multimedia encyclopedia useful? for that matter, you wouldn't even need personal ownership of a computer.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The fact that the average cost of a kb/S in Africa is 4 to 8 USD ( ( http://event-africa-networking.web.cern.ch/event-a frica-networking/cdrom/Joint_Internet2_IEEAF_works hops/EnhancingAfricanResearchandEducationNetworks/ 20050505-AFRICA-STEINER.pdf ) as opposed to about 12 cents in the US, may have a lot to do with the relative
scarcity of African Wikipedists.
If it cost you 50 times as much every time you logged onto the net, you too might waste less time contributing to a free encyclopedia. Even if you weren't poorer, which most Africans likely are.
Mostly I'll aggree with what you're saying, but sometimes that word is simply not translatable like that.
E.g., anyone who's been in the USSR can tell you that their "sovyets" weren't anything like your city council. The word does mean "council" all right, and the meaning of "USSR" indeed does mean "union of council-run republics". Yet the meaning and how they worked in practice were fundamentally different from what a western-world city council operates.
The communist elite were not like your average elected councilmen, but more like a feudal aristocracy. Or in a perverted sense, it actually resembles the organization and hierarchy of a giant corporation. (So if anything, communism was just an illustration of what happens when a corporation isn't accountable or responsible for anything.)
The ones far enough at the top were pretty much above the law, and indeed had free run to change the law as they saw fit. (The USSR constitution was changed several times, and permanently was just a description of the current status quo, rather than actually placing any limits on those in power.) They were in no way bound to please or represent their citizens. They were just a self-serving non-elected aristocracy, really.
And moving down the hierarchy pyramid, the lower officials and councils (e.g., city councils) had relatively little power, couldn't really take any meaningful decisions of their own, and could be replaced by their superiors on a whim. Again, note the important difference there: they weren't elected or replaced by the people of that town, but by their superiors in the party hierarchy. They took their orders from above, and reported to those above, which is quite the opposite of the (admittedly utopic idealist) notion of a council in a democracy. And they had no power or incentive to oppose those above.
Basically, think of it this way: let's say that someone wanted to build an, I don't know, ammonium nitrate factory right in the middle of your town. In a western democracy the city or state council could say, basically, "whoa, guys, that factory stinks of ammonia to high heavens. Put a filter on it. NOW." Or they could say that since that thing is explosive in case of a fire, please kindly build it outside the town. Stuff like that, hopefully for the good of the town.
In the USSR or indeed all of Eastern Europe, the order would just come from above "build a factory without filters THERE" and that would be it. The _only_ feedback that the "city council" was supposed to give there was "yes, SIR!" That's it. Raising any objection to a superior's decision was just a sure way to get fired and replaced with someone who does say "yes, SIR!" Possibly even judged as a traitor and saboteur, if you really got that superior annoyed enough.
So to end this already huge rant, their "councils" didn't work like any western-world city council, and translating it as "council system" or "council-run" would have been even more misleading. They were anything _but_ run by what westerners would call a "council".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That seems very unlikely.
Can't Mark Shuttleworth find any? They could try contacting the universities.
Certainly not. You're free to project your preconceptions and assumptions on anything you wish. Doesn't mean that's what the speaker said, or intended.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!