Slashdot Mirror
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."
In Africa, most people speak English, French, and Dutch, FYI. That's what years of colonization gets you.
Why just one wiki for Africa? [snip (rant about Africa being diversified)]
The author (Noam Cohen) of the original article know that. The wikipedians know that. You know that. I know that. Probably even most likely the majority of /.'s readers know that. The only people so far to conclusively prove that he/she has no clue at all, is the original submitter (Sharon Weinberger), and the slashdot editor Zonk. If you feel like blaming someone, blame them, not Noam Cohen or the wikipedians involved.
Stupid idea. But no one is saying that. Try RTFA. (Yes, the Slashdot summary says "the troubles an African-language Wikipedia faces" ... but that does not imply there is ONLY one African wikipedia, and TFA mentions that 38 already exist.)
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).
UK and US shares one wiki, the english.
Us Scots have our own wiki at http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, and we're part of the UK.
Wow, I didn't think there was a klingon wikipedia.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Spanish is a unique case, as a significant portion of the Spanish Wikipedia userbase split off to form the Enciclopedia Libre some time ago. You can read more about that here.
audioLibre - freedom of music
I was in Kenya recently teaching computers to schools. One primary school we visited in Mombassa actually forbid the children from speaking Kiswahili while in school, they had to speak english instead. This was to encourage them to speak english. English is very prevelant in lots of Kenya.
(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.)