[Foundation-l] One Wikipedia Per Person (regarding the distribution of and the ability to read Wikipedia)

Sun May 31 10:50:06 UTC 2009

2009/5/31 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> Given currently existing technology, and technology that we can reasonably
> assume to be available within the next decade, how can the WMF best achieve
> its goal of giving every person free access to our current best summary of
> all human knowledge?

Dead tree technology. Wikipedia based encyclopedias in the most widely
used languages.

Select the 40K most important articles (that will be fun). 40K was
2002 encarta and most people I knew who used it felt that that was a
fairly complete encyclopedia. There are a number of languages with
less than 40K articles. The problem ones are:

Bengali (19K)
Hindi (32K)
Punjabi (1.4K)
Javanese (19K)
Tamil (18K)
Marathi  (23K)
Sindhi (.3K) very low
I'm not sure there is a Berber language wikipedia. Can't find it nor a
Tamazight one. Anyone know what's going on here?
Oriya (.5K) again very low
Kannada (6K)
Azeri (20K)
Sundanese (14K)
Hausa (.1K) very low
Pashto (1.3K) although you might have a hard time finding volunteers
to distribute anything in those areas.
Uzbek (7K)
Yoruba (6K)
Amharic (3K)

Strangely Telugu and Malayalam do break the 40K barrier.

I've not included the various Chinese languages in this list because I
don't understand how spoken languages map to written languages in
china.

Now a lot of those languages are Indian which since they tend to be
fairly closely related and bilingualism is fairly common Bengali,
Hindi, Punjabi and English should cover most cases.

So how to fill the gaps? Auto translation is one option but not one I
like.. Seeing if we can obtain funding to pay people to write articles
is another.

-- 
geni