On 2/1/2011 5:50 AM, Ashwin Baindur wrote:
To conclude, I do not take it as a given that every
thing is hunky
dorey. Without meaning disrespect for the absolutely wonderful work
and colossal efforts put in by the SOS Children's village Wikipedia
team, I personally would like to tweak it so as to suit the Indian
palate. I too am part of the world movement but I consider it a glocal
one, not a global one. At this point of the time, I'm looking at how
to make the world relevant to our locality.
The other albeit obvious thing to note is that beyond perhaps the "local
relevance" of articles, there are vast differences in article QUALITY
cross-languages. That is, certain articles may have been excluded from
the SOS version due to poor quality rather than importance/relevance,
and this of course could and would work both ways across language
projects. So, we need to make sure there are structures in place to
rate article quality within a given language project which we want to
place into the offline versions.
On another note - I STRONGLY agree that creating offline versions in the
native languages is of utmost importance. If we can do this, the
distribution will not only be better received, but could actually be
much more impactful at large. UNESCO wrote a report in 2005 which stated:
/"Denial to access to information in one's mother tongue is equivalent
to a denial of a human right...In terms of pedagogy, how do children
learn best? In their mother tongue."[1]/
The creation of quality-filtered offline materials in many languages is
an incredibly important project and one that Wikimedia is uniquely
positioned to tackle. Glad we are working so actively on figuring this out.
Jessie
[1]
http://en.childrenslibrary.org/about/mission.shtml [admission: I've
never been able to find this actual report, although I haven't spent a
significant amount of time looking. I'll track it down soon enough...]
--
Jessie Wild
Special Projects Manager
Global Development
Wikimedia Foundation