Google's core motive isn't to get people using Wikipedia in Kiswahili, rather it is to get a large body of Kiswahili text (corpus) for their "organizing information" mission. They need it for machine translation/spelling-correction/etc and soon after for speech synthesis/recognition as well.

The good news is that Kiswahili, as a language, won't get left behind simply because it doesn't have a sizeable corpus freely available (there are some non-free ones available and they're also not that large).

From the public's perspective: it doesn't really matter if anyone uses it, the point is that it's there *if* anyone ever needs it. And from a research perspective: a huge Kiswahili corpus *freely availble* (for any use).

From this it's a short leap to having a functioning mobile-phone spellcheck (and complete locale) for Kiswahili. Nokia, as the runaway leader in mobile phones today (especially in the developing world), should be at the forefront of this.

But everyone stands to benefit anyway since Wikipedia will be the guardian of the data, not Google.

With respect to Google, even though they have lots of content, I think I'd have to say:

"Content is not king. Strategy is king."

Saidi

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 2:21 AM, Odhiambo Washington <odhiambo@gmail.com> wrote:


On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 12:35 AM, Dennis Kioko <dmbuvi@gmail.com> wrote:
Not that I wish to pour water on this initiative, but am I the only one with the following observations?
  1. Most swahili internet users have a good grasp of English
  2. Most people find english easier to read than Kiswahili.
  3. most people who know kiswahili but not english can barely read and thus rarely use the internet by themselves.
Nevertheless, I think the effort will be much appreciated in Tanzania.

 I was about to say so, and further ask: How many people (running M$ Windows) are willing to use it with language set to Kiswahili?


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Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254733744121/+254722743223
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