On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Neil Harris <[email protected]> wrote: > On 22/05/11 18:29, WereSpielChequers wrote: >> >> We are likely to reach each of the following on the way to our target, >> and it would be great to announce them when we reach them: >> 1 90% of literate people have a version of wikipedia available in a >> language that they understand
I like this idea for milestones. > This raises the interesting prospect of bringing Wikipedia to the > billion or more people who are currently illiterate, as the cost of > access to mobile phones and network connectivity continues to fall to > the point where it is becoming available even to some of the poorest Yes. Improving literacy is one way to proceed, but has a number of points of failure: you have to have a good program, you have to convince people to undertake it, and they have to find the time (and have that much time in connectivity or access to the material) to successfully become literate. Another way is to develop good text-to-speech in each language -- a finite problem -- and a way for illiterate people to search for what they want to know. [is there a visual way to do this? does it require speech-to-text, which is a distinctly harder problem to solve that is multiplied by dialects?] I think we should start being more conscious of the state of TTS in each language we care about, once we have developed good ways to offer it to our visitors on various platforms. A mobile client that can [locally, on your phone] render text into speech would be a tremendous step forward. > providing a Web-based [English or other language] literacy course that > could start with very simple video lessons to give an elementary > vocabulary first, and then allow the user to slowly bootstrap their > language sophistication It seems to me that most countries in the world have it in their interest to develop excellent intro-literacy courses to help people learn their language, which could then be disseminated far and wide. As Casey says, Wikiversity would be a great place to host such work. SJ -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
