Pay experts for their knowledge? What a bad idea!
Paying experts in this way would inevitably
result
in a two-class society.
Yes, and in another way than stated already: We
would have a class of fools, still doing things for
free, out of love for an ideal, and a class of savy
experts, who know what makes the world go around,
have no inner motivation to share their knowledge
with lay people and need to be bribed into this
silly affair.
A fool like me might come to his senses and think
twice before contributing for free what can be
bought on the market.
I think it is beyond silly that the Hindi and
Arabic Wikipedias are still so small.
How many of our top ten Wikipedias were faring
really well a year before now? Marvel at what has
been achieved in such a short time, and have the
patience to see other Wikipedias, and underdeveloped
areas in the existing ones, grow up the wiki way.
Wikipedia is not a household name yet, but it will
be in a year time, thanks to Google. Surely some
arabists, art historians and chromosome watchers
will catch the opportunity to show off. Surely more
photographers will relish the prospect of a world
stage to make their marks upon.
Maverick is worried that Arabic and Hindi Wikipedias
are nowhere near where they should be. The same
could be said for the Chinese Wikipedia only a few
monthes ago, yet they got going for real recently,
and will almost certainly be within our top ten in
less than half a year from now.
As for nearly dead languages: very nice to preserve
them for posterity, a wiki might help. Only I would
like to see the surviving speakers do their part
because they care, not because the XBox II is not
theirs' yet.
We receive a couple of thousands very much needed
dollars and suddenly everybody goes crazy. Once all
dying languages are resuscitated we might save the
wales (no pun intended) and help the Ethiopians to
put a man on the Moon. I say: lets keep our feet on
the ground and talk about goals that are of benefit
for a lot of people and that can not be reached in
any other way. Hardware is a clear case and more of
that will be needed soon. Administrative labour is a
borderline case to me, but what will happen if Brion
is struck by fatherhood or any other disability (God
forbids), is too sad to even envision. Certainly a
print or CD edition will require some cash. Once we
educated the billion or so people that regard
education a luxury item (not to speak of food), and
would not be harmed by some readily available
knowledge, they will all jump happily to the task of
preserving dying languages, I'm sure.
Erik Zachte
I entirely agree with you Erik
Btw, we have an India specialist on the fr wiki. I
hope all his articles will someday help the indian
wiki to take off. We also make a lot of effort to
attract arab/french speaking people. I am optimistic.
And I am sure Brion will be a great father (attention
� ne pas poser la b�cane trop lontemps sur les genoux Brion).
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