On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 1:09 PM James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles. > > What is the difference between delivering the text of an encyclopedia > article and teaching it? Depending on one's understanding of "teaching", and its expected outcomes, the difference can be significant. It can, for example, imply a different exposition of information, or include comprehension questions and drilling. It can include student assessment (grading), statistics, etc. > Encyclopedias are not written to be > accompanied by a lecturer, tutor, or teacher. That's true. They're designed for self-study. But that does not mean an encyclopedic article is the best vessel for teaching a topic. Certainly, most people cannot effectively pick up a language from reading the Wikipedia articles about its morphology and syntax. > Knowing any language is a privilege, and suggesting that there is any > reason to narrow the Foundation's focus away from language instruction > seems completely absurd to me. > I think there can be no doubt that languages are knowledge, and that therefore language instruction falls squarely within the Wikimedia mission "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." But being within our mission is not enough to be actively pursued, and I assume that by "the Foundation's focus", you're referring not just to the mission, but to the set of things the Foundation is actively pursuing and investing in, i.e. to its current strategy and goals. It seems to me that the main argument for adding *language instruction* to the set of goals the Foundation (or wider movement) actively pursues would be some demonstration that the Wikimedia movement is *well-equipped to do it very well*, especially compared to the relatively rich set of products and solutions in the language instruction space. I acknowledge that very few of those are free/libre. But most people don't use Wikipedia because it's free/libre; they use it because it's free of cost and because it's really, really useful. Likewise, we'd need to convince ourselves we can do significantly better than Duolingo, Babbel, Mondly, Mango, Busuu, etc., to make it a worthwhile pursuit for the Wikimedia movement at this time, being as it would be (as always) at the cost of pursuing other goals. > Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki > articles. > > Why? We are already the best at that. Why not make the wiki articles > in Wiktionary better by not just playing audio recordings of words, > which volunteers (not the Foundation) already provide, but meeting > that initiative by recording utterances and predicting whether they > are intelligible pronunciations, and doing the same with recording > gadgets in Wikipedia's pronunciation articles? http://j.mp/irslides I think that's a very interesting direction. I would suggest that it would only make sense to invest in, if at all, once we have Lexical data entities in Wikidata. (soon!) A. (personal capacity) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
