QUOTE(blissyu2 @ Tue 23rd October 2007, 3:21pm)
As for helping "poor, starving people in Africa" by giving them Wikipedia, I think that a lot of people misunderstand what economic indicators really mean. Economic indicators, such as Gross Domestic Product and average wage are indicators of wealthy items, such as computers, TVs, luxury cars and the like, and are not an indicator of how many people are starving, the amount of actual luxury, or the difficulty to get by. I mean some countries live on US $100/year average income, while others live on US $40,000/year. Can you imagine living on US $100/year? It wouldn't happen. But in countries where you live on US $100/year, you can get a meal for US $0.05 . Truer indicators are such things as:
- What proportion of the average salary goes towards the basics (food, water, shelter)? If its under 1/3, it is a wealthy country, if its over 2/3 then it is a poor country.
- What proportion of the population starve to death? Under 5% is rich, over 10% is bad, over 20% is horrendous.
- What is the life expectancy?
- What is the average number of children born per parent? If its 3+ then you know that the infant mortality is far too high, ergo poverty.
Many parts of Africa, in real terms, are doing quite well. South Africa is going along quite fine, Kenya was going along fine until the Rwanda refugee thing but is still doing okay, Zimbabwe was good until the Mugabe era but economically is still not too bad, and many parts of Africa, whilst they live *differently* to the rest of the world, are not doing too badly. Of course there are poor regions, but that's not the entire place. There are parts of Africa where someone can live off the land, without a job, and live a relatively happy, peaceful life. Can you do that in USA? I don't think you can.
What Africa needs more than anything else is an acceptance for their way of life, to not have to tolerate people from other countries trying to force them to live the way that they want them to live. Africa doesn't want to be like America, they want to be like Africa. Let them do that. They have a culture that has survived for thousands of years. If they want to update, let them do it in their terms.
Beyond that, yes, they need to have clean running water, and some areas are lacking in that, and they need to have less violence in war torn countries and less corruption. Some places do need to have some international force come in and get rid of the bad guys, and sort things out. But other areas don't.
They do need to have access to better health care, and one of the sad things is that because African countries have their money devalued so significantly therefore they can't buy anything from places like America, hence products that aren't locally made, like condoms, are hard to come by. What they need isn't for condoms to be sent to them, but for them to be shown how to make their own condoms.
And whilst AIDS is rife and is destroying whole communities, a cultural issue is behind it more than condoms. Because so many places try to live traditionally, and traditionally condoms do not exist, and sexual partners are changed quite a lot. It is very difficult to tell people that they can't live traditionally, must use condoms and must have only one sexual partner when their whole culture, that they are clinging on to desperately, says not to do it. Many people would rather risk dying of AIDS than to lose their cultural identity.
Yes, it'd be great for Africa if they could have access to information. So if Wikipedia could be written in their native speech, and made audible rather than written because many places don't write, and then sent so that it didn't rely on technology, then it would be very helpful to many people.
What Wikipedia could perhaps do, if they really care about such a thing, is to set up Wikipedia tape recordings, in the local languages, and send them, along with a tape, to these starving African countries. That would be quite useful. One per village would suffice.
Then they could be seen to be doing something good.
Oh and most of Africa speaks either French (about 2/3) or English (about 1/3), although that is not always their first language. So translation in to French and English plus perhaps Arabic would probably suffice for most of Africa. Although of course not everyone in Africa learns to speak that 2nd language, but it can probably be translated by people in the village who do speak English.
Westerners have a very stereotypical view of Africa. I feel blessed to be an American, but as someone who's studied history, I've learned not to judge countries or civilizations as "inferior" or "superior" as every country and civilization throughout history has had its share of triumphs and tragedies.
I can be optimistic and idealistic, but WP isn't the way to help others. I'd rather send money to Africa and know its helping someone directly with education or survival.