2009/5/31 Anthony <[email protected]>: > On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 9:33 PM, Brian <[email protected]> wrote: > >> How does Google Wave help the WMF achieve its goals? > > > Not sure, it doesn't really exist yet. I'm sure there will be numerous ways > in which it can do it, though.
While we could move this mailing list over to Waves and get access to fancy games of su-doku while we flame each other, I can't see any great ways it can help, at least directly. I'm open to being surprised, though. > Wikipedia has already become a dominant information source for the 1.5 >> billion people with Internet access thanks to Google. >> > > How does being a dominant information source for people help the WMF achieve > its goals? I don't think being dominant helps in any way, but being an information source for people basically *is* the WMF's goal. > We need to focus on getting Wikipedia to the 5.2 billion people who can't >> access it. >> > > Indeed. What languages do these 5.2 billion people speak? Are they > connected to the Internet? If not, what's stopping them? Do they have a > telephone, a computer, electricity, television, running water? If not, what > is stopping them from being able to get these things? Are the problems > things that are well geared toward the expertise of the WMF, or are we > better off letting other non-profits with more specialized expertise fix > them? > > Personally, I didn't even know the number was 5.2 billion. Should I do this > further research myself, or can someone answer these questions for me? Wikipedia [1] tells me there are 1.58 billion internet users world wide. It also tells me [2] there are 6.78 billion people in the world. That leaves 5.20 billion non-internet users. If we look at [1] we see the countries with the lowest percentage of people with internet access are North Korea (well, actually that's unknown, but I think we can safely assume it is as close to zero as makes no odds) and Myanmar - there probably isn't a great deal we can do to help them. Countries a little higher up the list we might be able to help with OLPC-style schemes. Printed versions of Wikibooks might be useful. While we can't directly help with things like getting people access to clean water, education is a very important part of any long term scheme to get people out of poverty, and we can certainly help there. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
