The Struggle of an African-language Wikipedia 234
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."
So, why only native speakers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Africa is not a country.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
A non-issue (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Not going to be PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Wait.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Misplaced interest (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
Truth isn't sign of a troll. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
0% Literacy Rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:A non-issue (Score:5, Insightful)
So... (Score:2, Insightful)
What insight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:A non-issue (Score:2, Insightful)
And if you look here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
For example, the Polish version has about double the amount of articles as the Spanish version, although Spanish is arguably used and spoken by far more people all over the world. Same thing with Esperanto and Arabic.
Re:Not going to be PC (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the instructors would have to know English. Africa is full of little farming villages where few people, if any, speak either of the big international languages (English and French). So in many cases, there simply isn't anyone to teach those languages.
Re:obvious answers to some issues raised in articl (Score:4, Insightful)
[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.
Re:Not going to be PC (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes me think if some countries are violent now when they CAN'T understand each other, just imagine the bloodshed when they DO.
Re:So, why only native speakers? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the use? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not going to be PC (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, I think it would be far better if the entire world speaks mandarin. So, we can have only one version of wikipedia. Deal again?
Of course I'm not serious. But man, is the guy FTA serious? And is the parent serious? I mean, if there *are* concerned readers, they *will* fix the articles, right? And if there are *not* concerned readers, just never mind that! Isn't it the basic idea of an Wiki?
Re:So, why only native speakers? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are many small size Wikipedias which are really just a collection of Q&D translated articles from the english or french version which is a bit sad to see.
Define master? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the primary obstacle?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not going to be PC (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you think that the United States would have survived if the country was Balkanized? English here, German there, 100 aboriginal languages, Gaelic over there, Spanish, Swedish, French, Russian, Hmong, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Persian, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum?
No, it would not have lasted 20 years.
Countries need a single common language if they are to survive, much less prosper.
Re:Not going to be PC (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point of what Ndesanjo Macha said in the interview:
There are at least some Swahili speakers who don't want to use English all the time. And on the flip side, there are people who speak English just fine, and want a Wikipedia in their own language (Welsh, for instance).
What matters isn't "efficiency" or "degree of worldwide readability" or any other such metric. What matters is that the Wikipedia project is committed to openness and to helping any language community, no matter how small at the beginning, start a Wikipedia:
That means that if you think that all Wikipedias should be in English, even if you're well-intentioned in that belief, then it's not the project for you. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you have the best interest of Africans at heart when you state that you think it would be better if all Africans learned English. But we might as well say "Hey everybody on planet Earth, let's all speak Volapük! [wikipedia.org]" (Although there are 117,966 articles in Esperanto... I digress.)
As the bureaucrat from the Vietnamese wikipedia mentioned in another comment, it's not possible to predict when a language will hit the critical mass that's necessary for a Wikipedia to start gaining momentum. Now, I don't have a clue what this statistics page on the Vietnamese Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] is saying, but the digits tell the story, right?
It's the same situation for African languages. Amharic, for instance, a language with something like 30 million speakers, from one of the poorest countries on the planet (Ethiopia), nonetheless has a Wikipedia that has made significant progress over the last couple of years (this also in spite of the fact that the writing system of Amharic presents significant technical hurdles for a potential contributor to overcome -- keyboard layouts, etc). Now there are 412 articles. Not a lot, but something -- and growing. Slowly, but surely. And it's speeding up.
Africa is actually farther ahead on Wikipedia than North and South America: Quechua and Nahuatl have just a couple hundred articles each. Navajo, the biggest native language in my country, the US, doesn't seem to have many at all.
But there's a front page!
You can't predict what will happen with those Wikipedias, and it makes no sense to simply rule out the possibility of any one of them picking up steam. And besides (I'm not going to be PC) it's not your decision to make, and that's how Wikipedia works.
Au contraire (Score:5, Insightful)
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.