 | |
| Type of site | Internet encyclopedia |
|---|---|
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| URL | bm.wikipedia.org |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 2005; 20 years ago (2005) |
| Content license | Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL) Media licensing varies |
The Bambara Misplaced Pages is the edition of Misplaced Pages in the Bambara language, spoken in Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal. This edition of Misplaced Pages contains 841 articles.
History
The Misplaced Pages was started in the beginning of 2005, along with the Wolof Misplaced Pages and the Fula Misplaced Pages. Kasper Souren, a Dutchman who worked with Geekcorps, established this Misplaced Pages while working in a mission in Mali. In December 2007 the Bambara Misplaced Pages had 142 articles and the Misplaced Pages in Fula had 28 articles. According to Souren, he was volunteering in Mali in 2005 when he first encountered the Bambara language.
Souren wrote in a report to an open source conference a Geekcorps Mali volunteer had created a side project where a person who wrote for the Misplaced Pages received $1 U.S. per article. Souren went to Bamako and met people at a community center. He paid each person willing to write an article $1 U.S. The authors had no internet connections and no Misplaced Pages usernames. They wrote articles in Microsoft Word and gave the files to Souren. Souren uploaded each article and credited the authors. Souren wrote "I can’t understand 100 percent of what they wrote, but I could estimate that it was right. It is a Misplaced Pages anyway, so I hope they can correct it."
The total expenses of the project amounted to fewer than $100 U.S. In regards to the payment, Ndesanjo Macha, a Wikipedian who speaks Swahili, argued that it is unnecessary to pay editors for their efforts, and he believed he was speaking for everyone in Africa. Noam Cohen of The New York Times wrote "Most of the people who have heard about Mr. Souren's decision to pay for entries lauded his goal but questioned his tactics, saying that they undercut the Misplaced Pages spirit, and that, ultimately, a Bambara Misplaced Pages would work only if there was a voluntary community to support it." This project resulted in the partial translation of the interfaces of the Bambara and Fula Wikipedias and the creation of some articles for those Wikipedias. Souren wrote that after 2005 the Bambara and Fula Wikipedias had "only sparse activity". In December 2007 the Bambara Misplaced Pages had 142 articles and the Misplaced Pages in Fula had 28 articles.
In 2013 Valentin Vydrin, lead creator of the "Bamana Reference Corpus (BRC)", wrote that "The Bambara Misplaced Pages counts a couple of hundred entries, most of them rudimentary and often written without any respect for the rules of orthography."
Notes
- ^ Lih, p. 158. Partial preview of relevant content, starting with "Nevertheless, one of those kick-start seed communities in Africa"
- ^ Cohen, Noam. "African Languages Grow as a Misplaced Pages Presence." (Print) The New York Times. August 26, 2006. Retrieved on April 5, 2014.
- Vydrin, Valentin (October 2013). "Bamana Reference Corpus (BRC)". Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences. 95: 75–80. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.10.624.
References
- Lih, Andrew. The Misplaced Pages Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. Hyperion, New York City. 2009. First Edition. ISBN 978-1-4013-0371-6 (alkaline paper).
External links
- (in Bambara) Bambara Misplaced Pages (Mobile)
- Geekcorps Mali (Archive)