On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 4:47 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > A single dedicated person could be enough to put a project in motion. > A dean of a Nigerian college who integrates Wikipedia article creation > in the instruction plan ("if you create 200 Nigerian pidgin Wikipedia > articles this semester you'll get X extra credit points for your > degree") could be enough to get the project to 100,000 articles in a > year (200 articles*2 semesters*250 students = 100,000 articles in a > year). >
I don't agree. Wikipedia is a "collaborative" encyclopedia, it's not an encyclopedia. It means that one person cannot "drive" the project because he will impose a single point of view. It makes sense where there are no encyclopedia in this language and Wikipedia can be the first one, but it should be interesting to analyze why there were no encyclopedias before. I have experienced this solution in some minor languages and it doesn't work. It's difficult to aggregate people around a small core of articles because they are attracted by more active languages or because they don't have sufficient knowledge of their daily language to put their ideas in written sentences. It seems strange, but if someone should use their daily language (technically it's a "change of linguistic register") to write something, they like to switch language and to use English or Hindi or Chinese. Some languages don't have a literature, don't have words to translate technical words of legal words, don't have a dictionary or a formal grammar. It means that the community should build their written language around Wikipedia in order to start to contribute. It's another project. Ilario _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
