Le 2013-03-18 13:01, Fae a écrit :
I suggest you step away from the technology component before this
becomes a mantra. Given a span of 100 years, assumptions become
rather
large. We can start to assume that within one or two decades,
*everyone* on the planet is data-connected, we can assume that
language barriers break down or become irrelevant, we can assume that
connection and hardware costs become vanishingly small and we can
assume that engagement with human knowledge is fully immersive.
Your assumptions seems really big to me.
I won't discuss the "*everyone* on the planet is data-connected", I
hope you are right, but to my mind it sounds like a very optimistic
point of view. This depend a lot on the global economic developpement,
as well as mankind ability to find a way to sustain such a huge energy
requirement: electronic devices for everyone imply electricity for
everyone (hopefuly clean produced/stored/delivered).
Now "language barriers break down or become irrelevant". That statement
is so big that I am wondering wether I am misintrepreting an ironic
statement as a serious one or not. After all I am not an english native
speaker, so excuse me if you were ironic, but otherwise this is just a
real case example of how huge the "language barriers" are.
They are many challenges on the language barriers. And to my mind we,
as wikimedia contributors, can play an important role in this
challenges. We know that many language are disapearing right now,
impoverish human culture. Unfortunately I discovered that even on this
present list some people were using metric like "how many scientific
papers where published in this language last year" to evaluate wether it
was an "important language" or something which we may let completely
disapear (sum of all human knowledge?). So not only there is work to
preserve language (and culture) diversity, but there's even work to do
to convince people that it's important in the first place (for
scientific-centric mind, think about what you need to realize works in
anthropology and history, for example).
An other thing in which we will, to my mind, be really helpful, will be
the wikiomega/wiktionnaries integration into wikidata. This will enable
to see which concepts are covered into which languages, and possibly
help to build equivalent neologisms with respect to the equivalent
etymological path/construction in the target language. Moreover this
could help build new languages, possibly yet another attempt for an
"international language". Not that I would be enthusiast with such a
project, I'm fine with learning esperanto which as far as I know is the
current most successful project in this category. Now, many linguistic
critics (and also non-linguistic ones, not relevant here) where
published on esperanto, so maybe some linguists may come with something
better and that they could be helped with a the semantic cartography
wikidata could become. It doesn't look like UNO and other international
organsiation are realy interested to give ressources to build and
promote an international language, so may be __we__ could do it.
Developing a strategy would require some big thinking of scenarios:
* Does Wikimedia get subsumed into a new ecology of open knowledge
organizations?
* Does "operations" become irrelevant as it will be naturally
factored out?
* In a future of cheap as chips access, does "access" mean
socialization and education?
Classically, one might bounce around environmental scenarios such as
religious division, hyper-connection social instability (meme
threats), population crisis etc.
It's a big talk, and above was mentioned spending 5 years on this.
Consider how darn slow us unpaid Wikimedia volunteers are to nit-pick
our way forward, thinking of how we take longer than a year+ to reach
some conclusions is not unreasonable, and it is not as easy as saying
"quote examples" as if this was a discussion short-cut.
Are refering to something like "Basic income guarantee" ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
--
Association Culture-Libre
http://www.culture-libre.org/
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