Wikimedia projects, African Languages

From What The Wiki?!

This conference was about a project of building a wikipedia in a local african language spoken in some countries of West-Africa such as Mali, the country where in fact this project is being developed. The language is called Bambara and is one of the many national languages spoken there besides the official one, French. The idea here is to give to this people some skills so that they can by themselves develop a project of creating a wikipedia in one of the several african languages, on this case in Bambara spoken in west-african countries such as Mali, where this project is being developed. On this part of Africa the official language of this countries is the french as they are all are antiques french colonies. But, in all of them, also coexist several other local languages that are as important as the official one. And the Bambara is one of those which is spoken by about 10 million people. So, the idea here is to propose to those people to develop themselves also this wikipedia about their reality in their own language. And for that he had to convince local people of the importance of this projects. His first approach was with the students but things didn't workout so he changed his strategy and went to a poor area and offered some time on the internet in some internet-cafés. This means that he decided to use the internet-cafés as a social and at the same time professional platform for the developing of the project, and at the same time he gave the possibility for those participants to access to internet and discover some new other things.

One curiosity: this project as begun as a personal project of Kasper Souren that decided this was a good idea to develop and enthusiasm those people about their own culture and language.

Ana 30 July 2005 22:53 (CEST)