Blogs and Wikis: Ushering in an Era of Change
Q: How is Wikipedia encouraging use of its applications and tools in developing countries?
Wales: The biggest obstacle in reaching people in developing countries is their lack of access to computers. Like all Wikipedia contributors, the people who are contributing from those countries are smart people who want to make a humanitarian contribution. They are also volunteering on Wikipedia because it’s a lot of fun and an intellectual pastime. We have volunteers around the world who have worked to develop open source software in 100 languages. We are very strong in all the European languages, particularly English and German, as well as Japanese and Chinese. Many of the communities in all these languages are active, with about 62 languages containing more than 1,000 articles. These are not translations, but independently written articles entered in those languages.
Some languages in developing countries take longer to work out. Creating the Wikipedia in Hindi was complicated because in India most current contributors speak English and work on English keyboards. You can’t type Hindi on an English keyboard, so that needed to be resolved. Many African languages have only about 1,000 articles entered. Another example is Arabic, where it took us more than a year to develop the right-to-left reading and writing functionality. We now have about 5,000 articles now in Arabic. Within the next year, Wikipedia is planning to hold a conference to promote contributions from Arabic academics and users in Arabic-speaking countries.
One of the most important things in this area is to not re-invent the wheel. What I see sometimes is that people imagine that, in order to enable this kind of work, they need a very complicated content management system that will cost millions of dollars to create. In reality, all you need is a wiki and social rules. People are always concerned about things like “Who is allowed to do what” and “we need the software with permission models to support all that”. You don’t really need all that. You just tell people “don’t edit this unless you’re authorized” and then they don’t, especially if you have some kind of log-in passwords. Wikis work great because they are very quick and easy.
Q: What are the most innovative licensing arrangements a developing country can adopt to allow decentralized knowledge production?
Wales: In most cases, free licenses, such as those available through GNU and Creative Commons, should be the focus to allow people to modify and redistribute versions. This is particularly important for educational material. One of the worst things I’ve seen is when government funds are spent on an educational project where people cannot use the end product because they are not allowed to.
Q: Will Wikipedia format its content for e-learning so that every person in the developing world can have access to a Wikipedia?
Wales: We have an ongoing discussion within the community about how we can identify particular versions of articles to be part of a stable product for print or for burning CD-ROMs or DVDs. This would be absolutely applicable to the developing world because, in a lot of places in these countries, people only have access to old computers where they could use CD-ROMs but not affordable Internet access. We have volunteers who are promoting this idea. For instance, there’s a gentleman in South Africa who is a school volunteer normally fixing printers and so on. He is also taking along a Wikipedia CD-ROM and installing it locally so that kids can use it!
Wales: The biggest obstacle in reaching people in developing countries is their lack of access to computers. Like all Wikipedia contributors, the people who are contributing from those countries are smart people who want to make a humanitarian contribution. They are also volunteering on Wikipedia because it’s a lot of fun and an intellectual pastime. We have volunteers around the world who have worked to develop open source software in 100 languages. We are very strong in all the European languages, particularly English and German, as well as Japanese and Chinese. Many of the communities in all these languages are active, with about 62 languages containing more than 1,000 articles. These are not translations, but independently written articles entered in those languages.
Some languages in developing countries take longer to work out. Creating the Wikipedia in Hindi was complicated because in India most current contributors speak English and work on English keyboards. You can’t type Hindi on an English keyboard, so that needed to be resolved. Many African languages have only about 1,000 articles entered. Another example is Arabic, where it took us more than a year to develop the right-to-left reading and writing functionality. We now have about 5,000 articles now in Arabic. Within the next year, Wikipedia is planning to hold a conference to promote contributions from Arabic academics and users in Arabic-speaking countries.
One of the most important things in this area is to not re-invent the wheel. What I see sometimes is that people imagine that, in order to enable this kind of work, they need a very complicated content management system that will cost millions of dollars to create. In reality, all you need is a wiki and social rules. People are always concerned about things like “Who is allowed to do what” and “we need the software with permission models to support all that”. You don’t really need all that. You just tell people “don’t edit this unless you’re authorized” and then they don’t, especially if you have some kind of log-in passwords. Wikis work great because they are very quick and easy.
Q: What are the most innovative licensing arrangements a developing country can adopt to allow decentralized knowledge production?
Wales: In most cases, free licenses, such as those available through GNU and Creative Commons, should be the focus to allow people to modify and redistribute versions. This is particularly important for educational material. One of the worst things I’ve seen is when government funds are spent on an educational project where people cannot use the end product because they are not allowed to.
Q: Will Wikipedia format its content for e-learning so that every person in the developing world can have access to a Wikipedia?
Wales: We have an ongoing discussion within the community about how we can identify particular versions of articles to be part of a stable product for print or for burning CD-ROMs or DVDs. This would be absolutely applicable to the developing world because, in a lot of places in these countries, people only have access to old computers where they could use CD-ROMs but not affordable Internet access. We have volunteers who are promoting this idea. For instance, there’s a gentleman in South Africa who is a school volunteer normally fixing printers and so on. He is also taking along a Wikipedia CD-ROM and installing it locally so that kids can use it!
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