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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.
Well, they should have no problems with Nigerian...
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
UK and US shares one wiki, the english. It is shared with all english speaking countries, and all english speakers across the world. Country-based wikis is not needed IMHO, but naturally you'll need one for every language.
The blurb even discusses a specific language, so thus your comment is not rooted in the article: It is neverthless an important notice, because we tend to forget.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
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
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?"
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.
This looks like a job for the Gates Foundation, or maybe Google. Create some automated translation software, so that ready-made articles (admittedly these will tend to not be about local african topics) can be automatically translated into local indigenous languages. Then, humans will only have to clean up the errors that are inherent in any automated translation system.
Some languages (Latin, German?) would be better to translate from than others which have many ambiguous interpretations (English, Engrish).
It is important to preserve small languages, as language is the medium which directs perspective. If we all spoke the same language, the diversity of perspectives would be much smaller. There's a recent book called "Spoken Here", which talks about efforts to preserve dying languages. In it, he brings up the point of perspective. In some languages, words are classified in relationships that we can't even imagine in the Western world. The significance of these relationships dies out when the languages do.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
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?
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.)
There isn't. Just skimming the list, I see Afrikaans, Swahili, Kongo, Somali, and Luganda.
In the case of Swahili, I think they're a lot closer to the true reason when mentioning Internet access. It's not that no one has Internet access at all - you'd be surprised who has an email address and what places have an Internet café. But it costs maybe 1,000 Tanzanian schillings (~ $.75) per hour. Tanzania's GDP per capita is $700, so an hour of Internet access costs the "mean person" 40% of his money for that day. I think that GDP figure's deceptive because many of the tribespeople don't even use money during an average day, so let's quadruple it. An hour of Internet access takes 10% of your money for the day. You're still not going to be sitting down at the computer pumping out wiki article after wiki article. The people who can afford to are all fluent in English. It's an official language of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Many of the schools teach in it, and people are eager to practice using it.
On the other hand, after OLPC gets into East Africa (not soon, I fear), there will be many, many people with plenty of computer time. They'll be able to download articles, modify them offline, and upload new revisions later. If they find a Swahili wikipedia valuable, it will take off.
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.
Afrikaans is not Dutch. It is a language spoken in Africa since the 1700's. It evolved into a distinct language. NB you forgot Arab, Portuguese and Spanish..
Thanks, GerardM
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).
Indeed most Africans do not have Internet at home. There are Internet cafe's doing brisk business. It is possible to bring Wikipedia content to mobile telephones.. They do have mobile telephones in Africa.. Thanks, GerardM
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
(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.)