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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.
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 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).
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.
It is not controversial at all.
There are quite a few languages in Africa, that, for all practical purposes, do not exist in a written form. As peculiar as this may seem there is little interest to change that. In countries where there are perhaps ten major ethnic groups with distinct languages, there is a point in that the written language is that of the former colonial power (normally French or English). Elevating one of the domestic languages to official status could be recipe for disaster (unless this one language is dominant enough).
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.