

Hungry for New Content, Google Tries to Grow Its Own in Africa  - jsm386
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/technology/25link.html

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quant18
_Translation could be the key to bringing more material to non-English
speakers. It is the local knowledge that is vital from these Kenyan
contributors, the thinking goes, assuming that Swahili-English translation
tools improve._

As alluded to in the paragraph following this quote, the only way "local
knowledge" gets successfully added to English Wikipedia is if it was already
printed in an English newspaper which also puts its articles online. If it's
uncited, or cited to a blog, "anti-vandal" patrollers remove it. And even if
it's cited to a Swahili (or worse yet, other local vernacular) newspaper,
plenty of Wikipedia editors will claim it's "not notable" because they
personally can't read it:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability/Archi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability/Archive_37#Are_English_sources_required_for_notability.3F)

But aside from the quirks of Wikipedia, I'd agree incentivizing Swahili-
English bilinguals to put content online in English, and then Google or
whoever translating it themselves into Swahili, is probably a more effective
way of getting Swahili content for the foreseeable future. The main point is
that most Swahili-speakers with internet access are bilingual in English too,
and so have a choice of what language to use to generate content that others
might search for. (And their choice of language is heavily influenced by the
topic domain.)

