pinco ti 2005/2/23 ChS 07:51 sia-kong:
According to my experience in Tanzania, students who
have access to
internet belong to the English-speaking and culturally non-african
africans (they are called "black whites"). Obviously, I can be wrong!
The process of "obtaining" Internet access may well change how one
chooses to access information and the sort of information deemed worthy
of access. Still the idea that Wiki*edia could try to fulfill the needs
of the African elite class is intriguing. Better still, though, would
be to have their participation even though the risk of introducing
systematic bias is amplified by the socioeconomic realities on the
ground -- which might have led to a wider "digital divide", among other
associatd divides. Whereas in the Euro-Anglo-East_Asian world "going
on-line" says more about a person's age group than wealth or education,
elsewhere there might be a closer link between having Internet access
and belonging to a social, economic, racial and/or political class, with
their associated values (such as a preference for a Language of Wider
Communications (LWC) to one's native language). Nevertheless Wiki*edia
decreases its overall systematic bias through the greater participation
from this corner of the world -- the particularity of the participants
within their own countries being (arguably) less important than little
or no participation. The same could be said of the benefit of greater
participation from people living in the Andes, southwestern China, the
the Phillippines' Muslim south, the St. Lawrence Island, to name a few.