justin.tv will certainly have people broadcasting all the networks. The site strikes me as highly illegal (for example, last night I used it to watch the World Series, including the "no rebroadcasting or retransmission" disclaimer), but it would be the rebroadcaster whose ass went in the sling if a case went to trial, not the viewer.
For my election night Obama Pyjama Party, I plan to have CNN on the tellie and three computers running three different justin.tv feeds. Plus coffee, popcorn, and champagne on ice.
They don't provide any earthly reason why they block anyone who is not logging in from a US IP address. Totally blocks off military service members living overseas, and other American expats. Annoying as all hell, and completely pointless.
Interesting reading the discussion on this article. Many/.ers write with the attitude that, because African languages don't matter to them, they don't matter.
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 the/. commentariat on those questions, since the technical experience of the slashdot readership might lend a lot to the discussion of how to create the social and technological infrastructure necessary to really launch such projects and maximize their impact.
I was planning to make a smart-ass comment by simply going to the Walmart corporate website and posting some fluff. I was surprised to find a rather interesting article instead. It seems that they are finally responding to pressure and will start selling Plan B nationwide. They are still going to allow their pharmacists to exercise their ridiculous right to "opt-out" of filling Plan B prescriptions (which sometimes results in rape victims being forced to continue with their pregnancy at least as long as it takes to get an abortion), but it does show that they recognize that, if they are going to do business in blue states, they have to follow blue state business practices. Here's their news release:
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. today confirmed that all of its pharmacies will begin carrying Plan B contraceptives, effective March 20. The company is currently required to sell the product in Illinois and Massachusetts, and pressure to introduce similar mandates is building in Connecticut and New York.
"We expect more states to require us to sell emergency contraceptives in the months ahead," said Ron Chomiuk, vice president of Pharmacy for Wal-Mart. "Because of this, and the fact that this is an FDA-approved product, we feel it is difficult to justify being the country's only major pharmacy chain not selling it."
Chomiuk said the company will maintain its conscientious objection policy, which is consistent with the tenets of the American Pharmaceutical Association. This policy, except where prohibited by law, allows any Wal-Mart or SAM'S CLUB pharmacy associate who does not feel comfortable dispensing a prescription to refer customers to another pharmacist or pharmacy.
"This decision has been made after careful consideration and in the belief that we are doing what is best for the business, while respecting our individual associates," Chomiuk said.
I've been to India a few times over the past 22 years, and I am absolutely amazed at the changes that have been taking place there. India continues to have millions upon millions of people living in dire poverty, but the country is taking aggressive steps to address its problems. Meanwhile, the infrastructure is improving by leaps and bounds. For example, no matter where I've gone in India I've been able to find local calling centers where I can make calls throughout the country for reasonable prices - and a functioning telecom system is vital for participation in the global economy.
Sure, India has a long way to go. But the country has some of the world's best scientists and has become a significant center for global technological innovation. Why shouldn't they put their skills to work in space?
Of course, it all may be about ego, about promoting national pride. Americans, though, are hardly in a position to judge others about that. After all, our entire space program was built on beating the Soviets to the moon!
Are you implying that Democrats are not for sale? They are equally involved in the scandals, but the news media won't tell you that.
You might find this article interesting - it is written by one of the most reliably conservative Republicon columnists in one of America's most conservative Republicon journals. The key quote:
"[T]his is, in its essence, a Republican scandal, and any attempt to portray it otherwise is a misdirection."
Stores will not accept a card number. No way no how.
That depends on the store. My auto mechanic once rang up $650 of repairs from a credit card number I recited to him because I'd left my wallet at home. I guess it helps that he's been fixing my cars for over a decade. However, if you think back to the old days when you used to order from catalogues over the phone, instead of the internet, you always just read out your credit card number and they'd ship off your product. I'm sure they still do that, but no/.er would ever find out:)
Oh yes, when worthy political campaigns call my house asking for $$, I'll sometimes give them my credit card number over the phone. Granted, the people I'm donating to don't count as a store, but I'm sure that Republicons do the same thing, and the news is full of stories these days showing that the Republicon Party politicians are totally up for sale.
Google isn't much better. Let's try a little experiment. I have a work account that sends a backup copy of incoming emails to a gmail account. I don't usually check that account unless I'm on the road. I haven't looked at it for at least a week. I am about to open it, and the test is, how much spam is in the regular inbox, instead of in the spam folder?
Ok, actually not that bad. Gmail seems to have learned a bit in the last week. Last time I cleared out the inbox was on Dec. 15, and since then I've had 720 mails filtered into the spam folder, and only about 50 unfiltered spams in the inbox. Many of those are in Korean or Russian, but also a bunch of Penny Stox, cialis, fresh moms pictures, etc. Still, that's better than last week, when I had hundreds of unfiltered spams, a pattern that had been going on since Thanksgiving weekend.
Moral is, these programs can learn to get rid of spam, but the spamholes will always figure out a way to bust through - so don't bet the farm that any one of these services will be "the best" on spam at any given time.
Sure, the Wright Bros. pictured WWI sorts of military applications - aerial recognizance, shooting guns from the cockpit, dropping explosive cannonballs. But planes the size of ocean liners? Supersonic fighter jets? They weren't even dreaming about these sorts of creations while they were in Kitty Hawk risking their lives to prove that heavier-than-air flight was even possible.
At a public library computer lab, the most common use of the machines is people gawking at other people's pictures on myspace. At any given time, this is about 70 percent of the usage.
Henry Ford probably never envisioned Hummers driving over curbs to get to the best parking spaces at the mall.
The Wright brothers probably never envisioned people flying massive airplanes into buildings as weapons.
The inventors of the television probably never envisioned "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire."
Thomas Edison, when he invented the phonograph, most certainly did not imagine gangsta rap.
Inventions happen, but what happens when they are released into the wild is not in the hands of the inventor. And really, why should it matter what the inventor was thinking of when s/he first developed the innovation?
" Most college courses explicitly ban use of any encyclopedia as a reference."
As a college professor, I would not ban any particular reference that a student chooses to consult. Regarding encyclopedias, Wiki or print, I would suggest that students refer to them as a jumping-off point for further research. In fact, one of the strengths of a good Wiki article is the reference list at the end, which, if it includes actual books, can get students to the library where they should be doing much of their research.
Sometimes a student should make a quick check of a quality internet resource and use that as a source. For example, were a student to be writing a paper about attitudes toward race in early 20th century literature, and wanted to make a quick point about the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v Ferguson, it would be perfectly appropriate for her to use and cite a reference like Wiki to check her facts and add a bit to her knowledge.
However, were the assignment specifically to discuss Plessy v. Ferguson, and the student simply cribbed off the Wiki article, I would fail the student in a New York minute.
When you grade papers, you can usually tell whether a student has done original research or if she has simply gone to the most convenient website. And when in doubt, a Google search for key phrases will often ferret out the slackers. After all, if students can use Wiki to seek out facts, their professors can too.
TV on the mobile - this is an idea that will thin the herd. Pedestrian strolling down the street watching Friends re-runs on tiny cellphone screen. Traffic light flashes the big red hand, but Monica just said something funny to Chandler. Ha ha! Bam! Pity the SUV didn't notice you when you stepped off the curb, but seriously, what did you expect, the driver was watching the game on satellite.
Seriously, have you noticed that people don't even know how to share a flight of stairs or a sidewalk when they are yapping on their phones, they'll just bump right into you if you don't jump out of their way? Imagine what happens when you add moving pictures to the mix?
This is exactly the sort of initiative that is needed in poorer countries. The reason so many people remain poor around the world is that they don't have skills that are of value in the global marketplace, and for the most part they don't have the opportunity to get those skills. When you get the kids wired, they get the opportunity to learn the same skills that people in wealthier countries make dang sure to give their own kids - and we're all the better off for it.
It must be nice to live in a fully networked bubble, but much of the world does not have instant broadband/ wi-fi 24/7. And, many people who do have pretty good network access still have to pay for their minutes online. For such people, having their email always on the web is either a major hassle, a major expense, or a huge impossibility.
2 more reasons why "just edit it" is inadequate in this case:
1) According to Wikipedia policy, you are not supposed to write your own biography or be actively involved in the production of articles that feature you as a key player.
2) If you simply "edit it," the previous scurrilous information still appears in the article history, leaving the slander in the archive.
And a third reason - editing a Wiki entry requires a fair amount of technical competency. Though no Slashdot readers would have problems figuring out how to register and edit entries, is it fair to demand that a senior citizen who might barely know how to email go through the entire Wiki learning curve, just to protect his or her good name?
I don't think the gentleman's intent is to sue anybody. His reason for getting the entry changed was to make sure his reputation remained unbesmirched. His reason for writing the USA Today article was to point out to the public the difficulties he encountered - he is trying to stimulate discussion, not quash it.
Burton might have had a few reasons for calling Swahili a pidgin - it is possible he didn't know it all that well (his linguistic expertise mostly involved Indian languages and Arabic), the fact that he knew Arabic and Indian languages might have led him to jump to assumptions about the language because of the many words in Swahili that have roots in those languages, or perhaps the nature of exploratory travel in the interior meant that the Swahili he encountered was the rudimentary language of trade as spoken by people with other mother tongues rather than the complex language with ancient roots spoken along the coast. In any case, his is a very partial picture of a linguistic scene from 150 years ago, which has almost no bearing on the situation today.
For a more thorough history of the Swahili language, check out The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500 by Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear. You might also want to read "The World of the Swahili" by John Middleton. As you'll see, quite a lot of scholarship about Swahili has been done since the time of Sir Richard, and even in the 45 years since Moorehead. It is an interesting reference, though - thanks for bringing it up, it really shows how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go, in Euro-American attitudes toward Africa and African languages.
The interest level in African institutions in quite high, but if there are any "funds to spare," I haven't heard about them. The real potential funding sources are intergovernmental organizations, private foundations, and individual donors. Unfortunately, Africa just doesn't have the equivalent of the Japan Foundation. Private foundations tend to have highly specific criteria for their grants - for example, some foundations only fund projects in certain countries, while other only fund certain types of activities such as hospitals or orphanages. A scholarly Swahili educational project has thus far seemed a little too esoteric for the foundations we've investigated, and certainly doesn't fit into any of the pre-existing categories of their mission statements.
As to private donors: http://www.justgiving.com/pfp/swahili . So far, no dot.angel has emerged, though quite a few people have been extremely generous in helping keep the project going with relatively small donations.
Funding basically involves staffing, for programming and for editorial work. The more funding available, the more technically ambitious the project can be, and the more content we can provide. We would ideally like to expand the model to other languages, but, because the quality of the project demands scholarly oversight, we would need to actually hire people to work on additional languages and additional tasks. It's a case of getting what you pay for - the project aims to produce quality educational resources, which means that professional scholars need to give their time, and if they are giving the sort of time necessary to get the resources online this century, they need to be paid so they can buy food and pay the rent. Hosting costs are minimal - Yale is quite generous with server space. Publishing costs will be borne by the publishing house, when we eventually get to the point of producing print dictionaries, although we've got some problematic issues ahead because publishing houses are wary of printing something that is also available for free online. The project has a proven record of spending its money wisely and producing results, but it does need some sort of cash flow to keep doing the things it does!
"Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I recall reading, is not Swahili itself basically a pigin of various languages, including Arabic, developed along the Zanzibar slave trade routes?"
pilgrim23, you are wrong. The history of Swahili is actually quite similar to the history of English, reflecting the movements and interactions of people over thousands of years. Swahili has a rich vocabulary with influences from various African tongues, Arabic, and some terms from European languages, Persian/Farsi, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond. The grammar is quite complex, so the language takes years to learn well.
The myth that Swahili is a simple or pidgin language is quite common in the US and Europe. Perhaps that is because of the Tarzan movies, where the Swahili used resembles the "me Tarzan, you Jane" quality of the English. Or perhaps it is because Swahili speakers tend to be very forgiving listeners, so visitors to East Africa get the feeling that they are communicating with just a few words of the language, because their hosts twist their ears in order to understand.
"ki" is a syllable that appears frequently in Swahili. In many cases, it is a noun class prefix that, as kahei says, has no formal semantic payload. In other cases it is an object infix, again without a specific meaning. In yet other cases it is a verb tense marker for the conditional tense, so it specifically indicates "if" or "when" something will happen. At other times "ki" is just a syllable that happens to appear in a word, such as the verb "kimbia" that means "run." Swahili also uses "ki" to create diminutive forms of nouns, and the syllable appears in certain adjectival formations. When it comes to discussing languages, "ki" IS a prefix that essentially flags a word as a language. For more information on the word "Kiswahili" in particular, see http://research.yale.edu/swahili/serve_pages/quest ions/swahili_vs_kiswahili_en.php
Swahili is a lot less fragmented than kahei believes. "Standard" Swahili is quite widely spoken, and most of the terms in the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary currently are Standard. However, several other dialects (certainly not zillions) are spoken, and the project supports multiple dialects through its Edit Engine. At this point the Dialects feature is underused, but we are developing search tools to make the feature more useful and user friendly, so I'd expect increasing dialect information in the dictionary as the project goes forward.
Benin is in West Africa. Not to put too fine a point on it, though, there are airports and internet services in every country in Africa, and people do travel from one side of the continent to the other every day. Even Swahili-speaking professional ecologists working for international organizations are allowed on these airplanes when their jobs demand that they transfer from one country to another. The cool thing about the Internet is that it connects people in virtual communities to overcome the limitations of physical location, thus making it possible for an ecologist who used to live in East Africa to continue to participate in the intellectual life of the region he left behind. The Kamusi Project aims to provide a forum in which this sort of interaction occurs regularly.
"We've done all the programming work that's possible, and I can envision hitting the print key in about two years," Benjamin said.
-- Actually, that's a misquote. We've done almost all the programming work that's possible given our current budget (the project goes belly-up at the end of the year without further funding), but we've got a task-list/ wish-list a mile long.
Why not find a few AFRICAN ORGANIZATIONS to pay for it?
-- Simple - most African organizations don't have the money to fund this sort of work. Those that have the money invest in other priorities, like health and emergencies. If you know of any African organizations with funds to spare, by all means please let them know about the project!
About Kamusi-in-a-Box: if this happens, it will be in association with the Tanzanian school system, and all the software would be going to schools that have already been set up with computers running the Swahili versions of Linux, OpenOffice, and Firefox. So yes, the market is there - the market is a whole bunch of computers at educational institutions around East Africa that are ready and waiting for learning content.
The dictionary does not re-create the language, it documents it. It is a "living" dictionary, meaning that it is designed to remain extremely current to the language as it is used, through the submissions of users who have their ears to the ground. However, only words that can be documented, through printed sources, radio broadcasts, contemporary Swahili music, etc, are accepted for inclusion in the dictionary. It is intended as a reference resource, not the word of God.
As to whether anyone will know the difference about the accuracy of the entries, that surely depends on your definition of "anyone." The population of the Swahili-speaking world is roughly the same as that of the German-speaking world. Would you make such a comment about a project for German?
A perceptive question. In the case of the ecologist, we're dealing with a trusted source who is one of the leading authorities on Swahili ornithology terminology. Therefore, most of the vetting of those entries indeed involves making sure everything looks right - that all the data are in the correct fields, that all the plural forms agree, etc. After the editor approves the entries, they are "live" - but anyone with better information can always submit a correction, at which point the editor will put the term up for question on the site's discussion forum.
Non-trusted users get much more detailed oversight. Many entries are sent back to the submitter with a request for actual usage examples. Or, the editor checks various online and print sources. Editing a submission can involve quite a lot of work on the editorial end.
Unlike Wikipedia, there is a firewall between the users and the dictionary. Someone who submits joke submissions is simply wasting their own time.
For more details on the process, read the explanation for the project's Edit Engine here:
http://research.yale.edu/swahili/serve_pages/edite ngine_en.php
Slashdot Mirror
justin.tv will certainly have people broadcasting all the networks. The site strikes me as highly illegal (for example, last night I used it to watch the World Series, including the "no rebroadcasting or retransmission" disclaimer), but it would be the rebroadcaster whose ass went in the sling if a case went to trial, not the viewer. For my election night Obama Pyjama Party, I plan to have CNN on the tellie and three computers running three different justin.tv feeds. Plus coffee, popcorn, and champagne on ice.
They don't provide any earthly reason why they block anyone who is not logging in from a US IP address. Totally blocks off military service members living overseas, and other American expats. Annoying as all hell, and completely pointless.
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 theSure, India has a long way to go. But the country has some of the world's best scientists and has become a significant center for global technological innovation. Why shouldn't they put their skills to work in space?
Of course, it all may be about ego, about promoting national pride. Americans, though, are hardly in a position to judge others about that. After all, our entire space program was built on beating the Soviets to the moon!
Are you implying that Democrats are not for sale? They are equally involved in the scandals, but the news media won't tell you that.
You might find this article interesting - it is written by one of the most reliably conservative Republicon columnists in one of America's most conservative Republicon journals. The key quote:
"[T]his is, in its essence, a Republican scandal, and any attempt to portray it otherwise is a misdirection."
Stores will not accept a card number. No way no how.
That depends on the store. My auto mechanic once rang up $650 of repairs from a credit card number I recited to him because I'd left my wallet at home. I guess it helps that he's been fixing my cars for over a decade. However, if you think back to the old days when you used to order from catalogues over the phone, instead of the internet, you always just read out your credit card number and they'd ship off your product. I'm sure they still do that, but no /.er would ever find out :)
Oh yes, when worthy political campaigns call my house asking for $$, I'll sometimes give them my credit card number over the phone. Granted, the people I'm donating to don't count as a store, but I'm sure that Republicons do the same thing, and the news is full of stories these days showing that the Republicon Party politicians are totally up for sale.
Ok, actually not that bad. Gmail seems to have learned a bit in the last week. Last time I cleared out the inbox was on Dec. 15, and since then I've had 720 mails filtered into the spam folder, and only about 50 unfiltered spams in the inbox. Many of those are in Korean or Russian, but also a bunch of Penny Stox, cialis, fresh moms pictures, etc. Still, that's better than last week, when I had hundreds of unfiltered spams, a pattern that had been going on since Thanksgiving weekend.
Moral is, these programs can learn to get rid of spam, but the spamholes will always figure out a way to bust through - so don't bet the farm that any one of these services will be "the best" on spam at any given time.
Sure, the Wright Bros. pictured WWI sorts of military applications - aerial recognizance, shooting guns from the cockpit, dropping explosive cannonballs. But planes the size of ocean liners? Supersonic fighter jets? They weren't even dreaming about these sorts of creations while they were in Kitty Hawk risking their lives to prove that heavier-than-air flight was even possible.
Henry Ford probably never envisioned Hummers driving over curbs to get to the best parking spaces at the mall.
The Wright brothers probably never envisioned people flying massive airplanes into buildings as weapons.
The inventors of the television probably never envisioned "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire."
Thomas Edison, when he invented the phonograph, most certainly did not imagine gangsta rap.
Inventions happen, but what happens when they are released into the wild is not in the hands of the inventor. And really, why should it matter what the inventor was thinking of when s/he first developed the innovation?
As a college professor, I would not ban any particular reference that a student chooses to consult. Regarding encyclopedias, Wiki or print, I would suggest that students refer to them as a jumping-off point for further research. In fact, one of the strengths of a good Wiki article is the reference list at the end, which, if it includes actual books, can get students to the library where they should be doing much of their research.
Sometimes a student should make a quick check of a quality internet resource and use that as a source. For example, were a student to be writing a paper about attitudes toward race in early 20th century literature, and wanted to make a quick point about the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v Ferguson, it would be perfectly appropriate for her to use and cite a reference like Wiki to check her facts and add a bit to her knowledge.
However, were the assignment specifically to discuss Plessy v. Ferguson, and the student simply cribbed off the Wiki article, I would fail the student in a New York minute.
When you grade papers, you can usually tell whether a student has done original research or if she has simply gone to the most convenient website. And when in doubt, a Google search for key phrases will often ferret out the slackers. After all, if students can use Wiki to seek out facts, their professors can too.
Seriously, have you noticed that people don't even know how to share a flight of stairs or a sidewalk when they are yapping on their phones, they'll just bump right into you if you don't jump out of their way? Imagine what happens when you add moving pictures to the mix?
We need this, we really need this.
This is exactly the sort of initiative that is needed in poorer countries. The reason so many people remain poor around the world is that they don't have skills that are of value in the global marketplace, and for the most part they don't have the opportunity to get those skills. When you get the kids wired, they get the opportunity to learn the same skills that people in wealthier countries make dang sure to give their own kids - and we're all the better off for it.
Think global, but keep your email local.
1) According to Wikipedia policy, you are not supposed to write your own biography or be actively involved in the production of articles that feature you as a key player.
2) If you simply "edit it," the previous scurrilous information still appears in the article history, leaving the slander in the archive.
And a third reason - editing a Wiki entry requires a fair amount of technical competency. Though no Slashdot readers would have problems figuring out how to register and edit entries, is it fair to demand that a senior citizen who might barely know how to email go through the entire Wiki learning curve, just to protect his or her good name?
I don't think the gentleman's intent is to sue anybody. His reason for getting the entry changed was to make sure his reputation remained unbesmirched. His reason for writing the USA Today article was to point out to the public the difficulties he encountered - he is trying to stimulate discussion, not quash it.
For a more thorough history of the Swahili language, check out The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500 by Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear. You might also want to read "The World of the Swahili" by John Middleton. As you'll see, quite a lot of scholarship about Swahili has been done since the time of Sir Richard, and even in the 45 years since Moorehead. It is an interesting reference, though - thanks for bringing it up, it really shows how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go, in Euro-American attitudes toward Africa and African languages.
As to private donors: http://www.justgiving.com/pfp/swahili . So far, no dot.angel has emerged, though quite a few people have been extremely generous in helping keep the project going with relatively small donations.
Funding basically involves staffing, for programming and for editorial work. The more funding available, the more technically ambitious the project can be, and the more content we can provide. We would ideally like to expand the model to other languages, but, because the quality of the project demands scholarly oversight, we would need to actually hire people to work on additional languages and additional tasks. It's a case of getting what you pay for - the project aims to produce quality educational resources, which means that professional scholars need to give their time, and if they are giving the sort of time necessary to get the resources online this century, they need to be paid so they can buy food and pay the rent. Hosting costs are minimal - Yale is quite generous with server space. Publishing costs will be borne by the publishing house, when we eventually get to the point of producing print dictionaries, although we've got some problematic issues ahead because publishing houses are wary of printing something that is also available for free online. The project has a proven record of spending its money wisely and producing results, but it does need some sort of cash flow to keep doing the things it does!
pilgrim23, you are wrong. The history of Swahili is actually quite similar to the history of English, reflecting the movements and interactions of people over thousands of years. Swahili has a rich vocabulary with influences from various African tongues, Arabic, and some terms from European languages, Persian/Farsi, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond. The grammar is quite complex, so the language takes years to learn well.
The myth that Swahili is a simple or pidgin language is quite common in the US and Europe. Perhaps that is because of the Tarzan movies, where the Swahili used resembles the "me Tarzan, you Jane" quality of the English. Or perhaps it is because Swahili speakers tend to be very forgiving listeners, so visitors to East Africa get the feeling that they are communicating with just a few words of the language, because their hosts twist their ears in order to understand.
Swahili is a lot less fragmented than kahei believes. "Standard" Swahili is quite widely spoken, and most of the terms in the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary currently are Standard. However, several other dialects (certainly not zillions) are spoken, and the project supports multiple dialects through its Edit Engine. At this point the Dialects feature is underused, but we are developing search tools to make the feature more useful and user friendly, so I'd expect increasing dialect information in the dictionary as the project goes forward.
Benin is in West Africa. Not to put too fine a point on it, though, there are airports and internet services in every country in Africa, and people do travel from one side of the continent to the other every day. Even Swahili-speaking professional ecologists working for international organizations are allowed on these airplanes when their jobs demand that they transfer from one country to another. The cool thing about the Internet is that it connects people in virtual communities to overcome the limitations of physical location, thus making it possible for an ecologist who used to live in East Africa to continue to participate in the intellectual life of the region he left behind. The Kamusi Project aims to provide a forum in which this sort of interaction occurs regularly.
"We've done all the programming work that's possible, and I can envision hitting the print key in about two years," Benjamin said. -- Actually, that's a misquote. We've done almost all the programming work that's possible given our current budget (the project goes belly-up at the end of the year without further funding), but we've got a task-list/ wish-list a mile long. Why not find a few AFRICAN ORGANIZATIONS to pay for it? -- Simple - most African organizations don't have the money to fund this sort of work. Those that have the money invest in other priorities, like health and emergencies. If you know of any African organizations with funds to spare, by all means please let them know about the project! About Kamusi-in-a-Box: if this happens, it will be in association with the Tanzanian school system, and all the software would be going to schools that have already been set up with computers running the Swahili versions of Linux, OpenOffice, and Firefox. So yes, the market is there - the market is a whole bunch of computers at educational institutions around East Africa that are ready and waiting for learning content.
The dictionary does not re-create the language, it documents it. It is a "living" dictionary, meaning that it is designed to remain extremely current to the language as it is used, through the submissions of users who have their ears to the ground. However, only words that can be documented, through printed sources, radio broadcasts, contemporary Swahili music, etc, are accepted for inclusion in the dictionary. It is intended as a reference resource, not the word of God. As to whether anyone will know the difference about the accuracy of the entries, that surely depends on your definition of "anyone." The population of the Swahili-speaking world is roughly the same as that of the German-speaking world. Would you make such a comment about a project for German?
A perceptive question. In the case of the ecologist, we're dealing with a trusted source who is one of the leading authorities on Swahili ornithology terminology. Therefore, most of the vetting of those entries indeed involves making sure everything looks right - that all the data are in the correct fields, that all the plural forms agree, etc. After the editor approves the entries, they are "live" - but anyone with better information can always submit a correction, at which point the editor will put the term up for question on the site's discussion forum. Non-trusted users get much more detailed oversight. Many entries are sent back to the submitter with a request for actual usage examples. Or, the editor checks various online and print sources. Editing a submission can involve quite a lot of work on the editorial end. Unlike Wikipedia, there is a firewall between the users and the dictionary. Someone who submits joke submissions is simply wasting their own time. For more details on the process, read the explanation for the project's Edit Engine here: http://research.yale.edu/swahili/serve_pages/edite ngine_en.php