[Paleopsych] Corante: Many-to-Many: Fukuyama's Penguin
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Many-to-Many: Fukuyama's Penguin
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/06/fukuyamas_penguin.php
5.1.6
I have this pet theory, rather grand, and falls into the category of
[18]what you believe is true even though you cannot prove it. That
open source will realize the end of history.
In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote the celebrated and controversial book,
The End of History, which posited that the collapse of the Soviet
Union was a Hegelian triumph of liberal democracy as the last
remaining form of government and political philosophy. Fukuyama went
on to explore issues of social capital and tyhmos, "desire for
recognition" that drives free-market economics. His critics were
manifold, particularly those on the wrong side of history. Marxist
criticism centered less on liberal politics than liberal economics --
particularly market failure. The classic debate over the role of
government centers on what economists call market failure: when the
market fails to provide social goods.
Similar to how Doc says the demand side is supplying itself, with open
source and open content social goods are produced through peer
production. Let's explore one aspect that is less about code and more
about social dynamics triumphing over economics, [19]language. For a
small country like [20]Rwanda, a localized version of Office would
never be supplied, so they do it themselves. Some vendors are [21]open
sourcing their localization in recognition of unevenly distributed
demand. While more research is required, some patterns emerge with
stories behind them when comparing language support by markets and
peers:
Rank [22]World Population [23]Internet Population [24]Web Content
[25]Wikipedia [26]LISA.org
1 Chinese (Mandarin) English English English French
2 Spanish Chinese Japanese German German
3 English Spanish German Japanese Spanish
4 Bengali Japanese Chinese French Japanese
5 Hindi German French Swedish Italian
6 Portugese French Spanish Polish Chinese
7 Russian Korean Russian Dutch Portuguese
8 Japanese Italian Portuguese Spanish Swedish
9 German Portuguese Korean Italian Dutch
10 Chinese (wu) Dutch Other Portuguese Korean
World population and internet population are gauges of demand. Web
content is supplied by both markets and peers. Wikipedia is produced
by peers, although the stories behind the community distort the
current outcome. LISA.org (Localization Industry Standards
Association) is a measure of market production for localization.
Wikipedia isn't a perfect gauge of peer supply when markets fail,
because it is a community with rich stories of how it evolves. Perhaps
over time and at greater scales the rise of the Swedish version would
be a signal of bottom-up fulfillment, but today it may very well be
preferential attachment spawned by early adoption and there is also a
high level of market-based translation effort. The Polish exception
may well be the same, but there is an interesting story here.
Wikipedia has had [27]two forks in its history, both by language based
communities when commercialization was a potential threat. The
[28]Polish fork was resolved and re-integrated. This explains why
Spanish Wikipedia is low in its ranking relative to online population:
[29]Enciclopedia Libre Universal is a Spanish language wiki website,
running at the University of Sevilla in Spain. It was started in
January 2002 as a fork from the Spanish branch of WikiPedia,
EsWikiPedia, apparently after a misunderstanding about WikiPedia
founder Jimmy Wales' intentions to use advertising as a means to raise
funding for the project. At the fork, the EsWikiPedia contained some
2000 articles and was among the biggest handful of non-English
Wikipedias. After the fork, Enciclopedia Libre has grown faster than
any non-English Wikipedia branch, and is believed to be the world's
3rd BiggestWiki (as of July 2002).
[30]Arle Lommel from [31]LISA was kind enough to gather this data for
me (perhaps a benefit of Socialtext's membership), and also provide
some analysis which I encouraged to share openly. Beyond the tabled
measures of translation in volume, he provides analysis of strategic
languages that are off the chart:
In contrast are "strategic" languages, i.e., those that represent new
market areas with a potential for new revenue streams. In this view,
China seems to be the number one language at present (I write this
based on a number of LISA presentations and the general "buzz" in the
industry).
While we don't have any hard data at present on strategic language
(for obvious reasons, companies tend to keep strategic information
quite close), if we look at those countries where U.S. and European
businesses are trying to establish a foot-hold for consumer-oriented
products and see new large markets (and where the market can be
accessed easily with a single language), you will have a picture of
the strategic languages. I suspect that the list would look something
like the following:
1. Chinese
2. Japanese
3. Spanish (for U.S.-based companies that see Latin America as a
market)
While India is rising in importance, it isn't a major localization
target yet because (1) it is fairly well served with English, at least
for the most affluent sectors, and (2) for those not served by
English, the picture is of immense linguistic fragmentation, with
hundreds of languages that could be considered part of the
localization picture.
One generalization is that Wikipedia lags behind all others in Chinese
translation because its relatively centralized and censorable.
I had coffee with Hong Kong University Researcher Andrew Lih today and
I will pass on some of his research on regional language use in
Wikipedia in an update later. But he made a significant point that
second languages are a primary determinant of development in
wikipedia. For example, users in India and the Philippines have such a
high rate of English as a second language that their own languages
have yet to develop within Wikipedia.
But I would end with this thought of the Polish exception. A polish
online encyclopedia at the scale of the wikipedia version would not
have been developed with market and contractual signals alone. Social
signals are driving this production and producing a social good. The
story behind it is an exceptional community, but an exception that
could very well become the norm as we march towards the End of
History.
Posted by Ross at 12:52 PM
Comments and Trackbacks
The example of Rwanda is telling.
Rwanda was included in Jared Diamond's recent book, Collapse. He
connected the genocide in Rwanda with growing hunger and plummeting
living conditions driven by environmental degradation.
Open software creates great new abundance, but does not help if people
don't have enough to eat.
Food and environmental problems are social problems. Wikis, social
software and other modern communication technology like telephones can
help somewhat, but the big problems are human problems about making
decisions.
Rich countries like the US conduct in aquifer mining in dry areas, and
large scale agriculture practices that strip soil fertility. We need
more than wikis to make decisions that will foster abundance in the
long term.
Posted by [32]Adina Levin on January 6, 2005 06:00 PM | [33]Permalink
to Comment
"In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote the celebrated and controversial book,
The End of History, which posited that the collapse of the Soviet
Union was a Hegelian triumph of liberal democracy as the last
remaining form of government and political philosophy."
I think what he was saying was a little more subtle than that. He used
not history, but History, in the sense of competing worldviews.
Liberal democracy won insofar as nobody really can argue that there is
a better system out there.
Posted by [34]praktike on January 6, 2005 07:02 PM | [35]Permalink to
Comment
Yes, its just the end of a philosophical debate, the sky isn't
falling.
Posted by [36]Ross Mayfield on January 6, 2005 10:41 PM |
[37]Permalink to Comment
Many Too Many
Excerpt: Over at Many-2-Many we have a fascinating post, called
Fukuyama's Penguin, speculating on why Chinese isn't
better-represented in online contributions. This got me to singing:
Many too many have stood where I stand Many more will stand here too,
Why...
[38]Read the rest...
Trackback from Moore's Lore, Jan 7, 2005 10:17 AM
References
18. http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html
19. http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/the_speed_of_la.html
20. http://news.com.com/Se+habla+open+source/2100-7344_3-5159179.html
21. http://www.lisa.org/archive_domain/newsletters/2004/4.2/redlers.html
22. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
23. http://www.glreach.com/globstats/
24. http://global-reach.biz/globstats/refs.php3
25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics
26. http://www.lisa.org/blogs/index.php?id=2
27. http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiPediaIsNotTypical
28. http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/intlwiki-l/2002-March/000302.html
29. http://enciclopedia.us.es/
30. http://www.lisa.org/blogs/index.php?id=2
31. http://www.lisa.org/
32. http://www.alevin.com/weblog
33. http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/06/fukuyamas_penguin.php#17194
34. http://www.liberalsagainstterrorism.com/
35. http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/06/fukuyamas_penguin.php#17198
36. http://ross.typepad.com/
37. http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/06/fukuyamas_penguin.php#17206
38. http://www.corante.com/mooreslore/archives/032122.html
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