Jimbo cheaps out on a wedding gift Options

[thekohser]

Can't believe I missed this, but Jimbo surely has no shame.

This weekend I am attending the wedding of my friends Martin Varshavsky and Nina Wiegand.

... I wanted to get a gift, but first of all, Martin is a very successful entrepreneur who obviously can have any ordinary thing that he wants.

... Well, I just can’t stand to go to a wedding without a gift so I thought really really hard. What would Martin want and appreciate, that I might be able to get?

And suddenly I realized it. Martin has been bugging me to help him figure out a way for his Educar charity to distribute Wikipedia (in Spanish) to schools without Internet connections. The problem is that there has not been a simple offline reader on a DVD in Spanish (or, really, most other languages).

... So, this blog post is my wedding gift. I’m putting some effort into pulling together the people who are working on this… and finding some new friends to help us get this done!

I’m looking for more volunteers to help with the effort. SJ (a fellow board member at the Wikimedia Foundation) is helping coordinate various people, and we’re launching a new mailing list to get this effort some energy.

... Mozel tov, Martin and Nina!

He even crowdsources his generosity.

[Somey]

This weekend I am attending the wedding of my friends Martin Varshavsky and Nina Wiegand.

He can't be a particularly good friend if Jimbo can't even spell his name correctly (it's "Varsavksy").

http://english.varsavskyfoundation.org/info/mission.html

Also, "Educar" actually refers to this website, which I doubt could be considered a "charity," though of course if Wikipedia can be considered a "charity," who knows. (It's probably a non-profit, or whatever they call it non-profits in Argentina, but that's not the same thing, folks!)

The fact remains, educ.ar is essentially an initiative to bring internet technology into Argentine schools, and though the "Varsavsky Foundation" may have started it, it's funded primarily by the Argentine government now - "el portal educativo del estado argentino" translates as "the education portal of the state of Argentina." It's definitely not a global-outreach charitable organization that covers the entire Hispanic world community.

In effect, Jimbo is asking Wikipedians to lend their personal time to save the Argentine government some money in their effort to replace quality reference content (currently held in libraries) with crowdsourced reference content from Wikipedia, probably on DVD's or flash drives, all with predictable long-term results (fewer/smaller libraries, funding cuts, dumber students).

You'd think he could just give the couple a nice set of steak knives, but noooooo.

[Somey]

And as if that wasn't funny enough, I just noticed this at the end of the Varsavsky Foundation Mission Statement page (emphasis mine):

The Varsavksy Foundation is a private, independent grant making organization dedicated to using the full pedagogical potential of the Internet to engage societies' most prevelant inadequacies.

...which I assume would include the tendency to not proofread your web pages!

(It might also be noted that the Spanish version of their mission statement makes no mention of "societies' inadequacies" whatsoever. Hmm... )

So how does the Varsavsky Foundation define "societies' inadequacies," then? Their latest initiative (from 2005) is the "Forum for a Safer Democracy," which is essentially a group blog:

We understand democracy not only as giving citizen the opportunity to elect their governments and to be represented, but in a more comprehensive sense: democracy is a political and social system which grants security, not only from a physical point of view, but economic and social, giving priority to education, health, job opportunities, freedom of speech and diversity, which fearlessly supports innovation, and respects minorities, their cultures and rights.Unfortunately, the return of religious fundamentalism, retrograde and racist visions, typical of the medieval age, is taking place in this new century. This regression is already imposed in all regions across the world and strongly gaining momentum. Nine eleven reinforced US unilateralism, seriously eroding the mainstays of International Law and the UN system imposed in 1945. The Neocons of the US administration have appropriated themselves of the security speech, in the context of the struggle against the terrorism, distorting its real dimension.

So, putting aside the fact that this page probably was translated from a Spanish version by Babelfish, rather than an actual human translator, it's pretty clear that this is not the sort of thing a Rush Limbaugh-quoting Republican in the US would want to get involved in. (Admittedly I myself might, but that's beside the point.) And it might be nice if they would update this page to give us Americans some credit for - at least partially - rejecting these policies at the ballot box, seeing as how it was over a year ago.

[Milton Roe]

He even crowdsources his generosity.

Yep, a one-trick pony if there ever was one. "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one thing." Jimbo's a hedgehog. Or perhaps a skunk?

[trenton]

The Jimbeau is quite generous in spending other peoples time and energy (and using it for his own benefit).

[Somey]

The Jimbeau is quite generous in spending other peoples time and energy (and using it for his own benefit).

Particularly since there is already a perfectly-usable Spanish-language offline Wikipedia reader available for free in the public domain!

Will the laughs never end?

[thekohser]

Jimbo's a hedgehog. Or perhaps a skunk?

I've had him pegged for a number of years as a weasel, according to the animal personality quiz.

[Krimpet]

The last successful static dump of enwiki, in June 2008, was 208.3 GB. The newlyweds will probably be long past their golden anniversary by the time scientists are able to fit that onto a 4.3 GB DVD.

[Somey]

The last successful static dump of enwiki, in June 2008, was 208.3 GB. The newlyweds will probably be long past their golden anniversary by the time scientists are able to fit that onto a 4.3 GB DVD.

True, but that's uncompressed - that version compressed down to 15GB, and the capacity of a Blu-ray disc is about 50GB. So if you could do on-the-fly extract/decompress, it might work... Or else distribute the compressed version on four DVD-R's, and just assume everyone in Argentina has the necessary disk space to decompress the whole thing onto a hard drive. (The Spanish WP is much smaller than the English one anyway, of course.)

Or else you could just excise the parts of WP that are of no legitimate educational value, leaving you with about 46K uncompressed, give or take.

[Krimpet]

True, but that's uncompressed - that version compressed down to 15GB, and the capacity of a Blu-ray disc is about 50GB. So if you could do on-the-fly extract/decompress, it might work... Or else distribute the compressed version on four DVD-R's, and just assume everyone in Argentina has the necessary disk space to decompress the whole thing onto a hard drive. (The Spanish WP is much smaller than the English one anyway, of course.)

Or else you could just excise the parts of WP that are of no legitimate educational value, leaving you with about 46K uncompressed, give or take.

Hah, right, I forgot this is the Spanish Wikipedia being discussed. (I guess I'm just a typical American. )

I don't know if eswiki has higher editorial standards, but enwiki would definitely need to be processed and distilled into a higher quality product before it could be released to schools, preferably by professional editors paid by an organization that can coordinate the effort. Like what Veropedia and the "New World Encyclopedia" attempted - it's a shame the former relied too much on volunteer laypeople to succeed, and the latter is run by Moonie fruitcakes.

This post has been edited by Krimpet: Tue 22nd December 2009, 2:37am

[Somey]

...enwiki would definitely need to be processed and distilled into a higher quality product before it could be released to schools...

You don't think that's really going to stop them, do you?

[dogbiscuit]

...enwiki would definitely need to be processed and distilled into a higher quality product before it could be released to schools...

You don't think that's really going to stop them, do you?

It hasn't for some time - it already exists with the careful oversight of David Gerard among others.