ICTworks by Inveneo

That is what I think many good intentioned people do when they install computer systems without locally relevant content - they deploy the equivalent of a computer lab filled with the Star Trek cannon in Klingon.

Think about it. If your users are not literate in English, if they cannot read and write in the Internet's main language, what they see on screen makes as much sense as Klingon does to you or I.

And before you think users will find or create content in their own language, let us look at the article per language count on Wikipedia. If we add in the number of people who know each language, you can quickly see that many African languages are grossly under-represented online.

Now the Wikipedia isn't the entire Internet, but it is a good proxy for user-generated content online. And if your users speak Kiswahili, Luganda, Chichewa, or Xhosa, giving them a computer lab with English-only content is as useful as Klingon.

Back in 2009, we were excited about the WikiReader from Openmoko. This $99 device has the 3+ million Wikipedia articles at your fingertips with only a micro-SD card and 2 AAA batteries - no Internet required. We proclaimed it an Offline Digital Library of Alexandria that could fit in your pocket. Here is our video review:

The WikiReader comes with the entire Wikipedia as content and great functionality to surf it all, offline. Now the WikiReader also supports the complete Project Gutenberg library of 33,000 eBooks, making it an amazing cheap and long-lasting eBook reader. And since eReaders will transform the developing world, I am wondering if the WikiReader is the killer app for that.

Benefits

Beyond deep content, the WikiReader is amazingly cheap - just $99 for the device itself, 3 AA batteries that last a year. It is also dead simple to use, with just three buttons that navigate the Wikipedia and eBooks with ease. Give it to a student or a teacher and they can be browsing and learning in seconds.

Usage?

If you can say anything bad about the the WikiReader is that its just a browser for the Wikipedia and eBooks. The hardware is great, but it has no other use. So is that enough? Would you or have you bought a WikiReader? Have you used it in a project? And if not, what would it need to lure you to buy one?

Tanzania, this is your opportunity to bring Africa's information online by creating Wikipedia articles in Kiswahili.

You are the wellspring of Kiswahili in East Africa. Show your paossion for the language by translating English Wikipedia articles into Kiswahili or by writing your own articles from scratch, building a richer online experience for 100 million African users who speak Kiswahili.

Prizes includes laptops, mobile phones, prepaid internet access modems, Google T-shirts, and more. Participants will also receive certificate of participation.

But you better hurry - it looks like Kenya is already dominating the contest.

Learn more here: Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge, sponsored by Google

It should not come as a surprise that Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Most of their articles are written by people personally interested in a subject, and subjects close to home interest most people. And most people online are in the global North, so Wikipedia articles put to a map might look something like this:

But what is shocking is the analysis from Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content. Mark Graham found a information imbalance that should give us all pause:

Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia).

Now I think Africa's low ICT penetration rate is the root cause of this distortion, and as Africa comes online, we'll see this map darken the "Dark Continent", but that's a long term solution. In the near term, there are projects like Wikimedia by moulin that are getting Wikipedia out to African communities, but unless there is relevant content, end users will not see Wikipedia relating to them - now or in the future.

Which means its time for all of us to do our share to make information available and relevant - to Africans and the world - on Wikipedia now. If you're reading this article, you're most likely someone who both knows about Africa and has the Internet skills to contribute to Wikipedia.

So start a new article on a African topic of your choice today!

No matter how much bandwidth comes via the new fiber optic cables, there still will be massive offline areas in Africa. So there will still be a great craving for the world's knowledge in classrooms and living rooms from Accra to Lusaka.

Openmoko has just released what might be the killer app to supply a large portion of that knowledge to offline areas - the WikiReader. This $99 device has the 3+ million Wikipedia articles at your fingertips with only a micro-SD card and 2 AAA batteries - no Internet required.

Intrigued? Then listen to Pat Meier-Johnson explain it in this exclusive ICTworks Interview:

Openmoko has been behind large open-source initiatives such as the openmoko opensource wireless phone, and have a greater purpose for the WikiReader. They say:

NGOs and governments in emerging countries are key to the core value of the WikiReader. We believe an uncomplicated device with long battery life and no strings attached could bring this vast repository of knowledge to many people around the world who otherwise could not access it.

I can see this being an amazing resource for educators in rural schools. They would now have access to the Wikipedia's wealth of knowledge at a fraction of the cost for computers or Internet access. In addition, with the Parental Control feature, they don't have to worry about young prying eyes seeing too much.

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