2010/7/18 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>: > Amir, we talked about issues with right to left languages at Wikimania in > Gdansk, that is another can of wurms where we need people to pick up the > slack. At translatewiki.net we are looking for developers who are able and > willing to help solve technical issues that have to do with allowing > structures commons to languages. Examples are multiple plural forms, > addressing people by their gender, addressing people in a formal or informal > way.
OK. This is certainly important and i am willing to hear more thoughts about that. Another significant technical issue about which i would want to read is how do such outreaching wiki-activists cope with poor or non-existent network infrastructure in such places. But i am particularly curious not about the technical issues, but about people's experiences - if there are any - with the actual content. For example, i can quite easily imagine teachers in some countries saying: "Why should we write encyclopedia articles or textbooks in our local language? Textbooks should be written in English / Russian / French / Spanish / Portuguese." Did anyone have to cope with that? I am not even talking about countries where it is a question of language preservation; for example, in regions of Russia such as Tatarstan or Sakha most people know Russian and many know Russian better than their regional language. In this case, writing a Wikipedia in Tatar is not an immediate educational necessity, because Russian textbooks are accessible to people. It is rather a question of preserving the local culture; i strongly support that, but there are worse cases. I am rather talking about countries in, for example, Africa, where people don't necessarily know English or French well, but where education nevertheless functions mostly in a foreign language. Do people there even imagine that it's possible or desirable to write an encyclopedia in their language? Given all the technical tools and support, will they actually think that it's worth doing it? These are the challenges about which i am most curious. There are, of course, many other issues, technical and non-technical: lack of words for modern and foreign things, lack of standard orthography, low literacy rates, etc. I am willing to hear about all the aspects. -- אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l