This thread brought me to think of an article I wrote on Norwegian Wikipedia about a year ago. It was about the Allex Project (African Languages Lexical Project), a project where universities in Oslo, Gothenburg and Harare cooperated in developing monolingual text corpus based dictionaries for shona and ndebele languages in Zimbabwe.
The project resulted in a dictionary in shona, establishing a lexicographic institute at the university of Zimbabwe, African Languages Research Institute, 10 doctor degrees for zimbabwians and much more. Shona and ndbele were lifted from spoken language to university level and acknowledged as education language. There is a wikipedia in shona language. It has 3106 articles. If one could engage some of the people that worked in the Allex Project to do a paid translation job, it would benefit about 14 million speakers, shona is the most spoken Bantu language, Zulu is next to shona, spoken by 10 million, according to our articles. https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALLEX-prosjektet Greetings from frozen, sunny Norway Harald Haugland 2018-02-28 15:03 GMT+01:00 Jean-Philippe Béland <jpbel...@wikimedia.ca>: > The Wikimedia movement is more than encyclopedias... We already have > Wikiversity for teaching, no? Are efforts to contribute to Wikiversity and > other sister projects making us lose focus? I'm not sure to understand what > you are saying. > > JP > > On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 2:32 AM Amir E. Aharoni < > amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: > > > 2018-02-28 1:25 GMT+02:00 James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com>: > > > > > > I was not trying to say that everybody > > > > should learn English. The point I was > > > > trying to make there is that knowing > > > > English is a privilege and that it is easy > > > > to not notice it. > > > > > > I agree with that, too. How is teaching language different relative to > > > the Foundation Mission than teaching subjects of encyclopedia > > > articles? > > > > > > > > We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles. We are making it possible to > > write them and to read them. It is not the same thing as teaching > subjects. > > > > Should we do teaching? Maybe, but since it's different from making it > > possible to write and read, I'm afraid it would be losing focus. > > > > Is there anything bad about teaching languages? Of course not. It's > great. > > I'm just not sure that it's the right thing for Wikimedia to do, when > > Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki > > articles. > > > > -- > > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי > > http://aharoni.wordpress.com > > “We're living in pieces, > > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
