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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 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.
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.