Gwern Branwen wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/technology/25link.html
"But Google can do something that cowboys can’t: create more real
estate. The company is sponsoring a contest to encourage students in
Tanzania and Kenya to create articles for the Swahili version of
Wikipedia, mainly by translating them from the English Wikipedia."
Interesting. Why not translations from English knols to Swahili knols?
“Our algorithms are primed and ready to give you the
answer you are
looking for, but the pipeline of information just isn’t there,” said
Gabriel Stricker, Google’s spokesman on search issues. “The challenge
for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our
ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and
lack of quantity of material on the Internet.”
Ah, maybe that's why. Knols are about quantity and they forgot that
allowing people to type into your site doesn't actually guarantee quality?
Another finalist, Daniel Kimani, also 21, is studying
for a degree in
business information technology at Strathmore University in Kenya. He
said that contests were an effective way to attract contributors but
that “bribing,” or paying per article, “is not good at all because it
will be very unfair to pay some people and others are not paid.”
“I believe in Wikipedia,” he said, “since it is the only free source
of information in this world.”
Smart lad.
Swahili, because it is a second language for as many
as 100 million
people in East Africa, is thought to be one of the only ways to reach
a mass audience of readers and contributors in the region. The Swahili
Wikipedia still has a long way to go, however, with only 16,000
articles and nearly 5,000 users. (Even a relatively obscure language
like Albanian has 25,000 articles and more than 17,000 contributors.)
Mr. Kimani and Mr. Kipkoech represent one of the challenges for
creating material in African languages. The people best equipped to
write in Swahili, or Kiswahili as it is sometimes known, are
multilingual university students. And yet Mr. Kimani wrote that he
used “the English version more than Kiswahili since most of my school
work is in English.”
Kiswahili as it is correctly known, but tell my publishers that. The thing is,
not to be a wet blanket, that literate people in East Africa may well read English. They
may need Kiswahili because if you travel 50 miles the local language can change.
Translation could be the key to bringing more material
to non-English
speakers. It is the local knowledge that is vital from these Kenyan
contributors, the thinking goes, assuming that Swahili-English
translation tools improve.
Mr. Kimani wrote one entry in English and Swahili about drug use in
Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya. It says that the “youth in
this area strongly believe that use of bhang or any other narcotic
drug could prevent one from suffering from ghosts attacks.”
Now the article lives in English and Swahili, although the English
Wikipedia editors have asked for citations and threatened to remove
it."
This article has some point, doesn't it? Yes, I found this issue in
discussing with Luganda-speaking friends: they saw exactly the troubles
with sourcing the matters that they felt they would like to post. Our
system favours what's already in print (we know it does, and the
"ethnological" idea that we might record what can only be found out by
field work was discarded quite some time ago).
By the way, copyright notices on sites sometimes mean something.
Charles