[Foundation-l] The sad story of training material to learn Farsi

Sat Feb 18 17:33:24 UTC 2006

Hoi,
A long time ago, I have worked hard creating teaching material for
people to learn Farsi. Farsi or Persian is the language spoken in
Iran. The material was the material used by a teacher that I know.

The material was created at http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Farsi. It was in
the days when everything was still there. The original material had
one basic flaw; it was written left to right while Farsi is written
from left to right.  While working on this material, it struck me that
it is really sad that you have to create teaching material that is as
basic as this for every language.

As we were creating the concepts for what was called "Ultimate
Wiktionary" but what is currently known as WiktionaryZ, it came to me
that we should not have the Dutch words there as the translation for
the Farsi content, but that we should have the translation of the
Farsi words in the language of the student. This would mean that
everybody can use the material.

Today I was asked by someone where the Farsi lessons were, somebody
actually wants to use it.. This means that all this effort had people
use it... It meant that all the pronunciations were going to be
listened to... The material is not there anymore .. it is not useful
anymore ..

I do not doubt that the people who worked on it intended well, but at
this moment it is not Farsi / Dutch, it is not Farsi / English it is
certainly unusable.

The timing could have been worse; Brion is busy with the integration
of the namespace manager. It is therefore possible to have pages in
the fa.wikibooks that are specific for the Dutch language and pages
specific for the English language. Alternatively we could have a
namespace for Farsi content in the nl.wikibooks. This would mean
however that we should be able to have a namespace that is oriented in
a different direction from the other namespaces in a database. I do
not know if we can do this already, I am sure however that we will
want something like this for the right to left languages like Farsi in
WiktionaryZ.

Now there is one practical question remaining; what will we do with
the Farsi lessons in the fa.wikibooks that were originally intended to
teach Dutch people Farsi.

Thanks,
    GerardM