French software programmer Renaud Gaudin on Saturday provided an insight into some of the difficulties the developing world faces in gaining access to the Internet.
Speaking at a seminar during Wikimania 2007 -- an annual three-day conference taking place in Taipei -- Gaudin described his efforts to create an "offline Wikipedia" for people in the "unconnected part of the world."
Gaudin has been working on a project named moulin, which means windmill in French.
"Basically, moulin is a fully interactive, offline version of the entire Wikipedia, without pictures, on a CD," said Gaudin, who works as a volunteer at a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the West African country of Mali.
content
The project was the brainchild of Gaudin and Frederic Renet, who realized that while many organizations focused on bringing computers to people in developing countries, few have paid attention to making content available for people who do not have access to the Internet.
"Wikipedia has also been developing a project called `Wikipedia on DVD,' a CD collection of around 2,000 Wikipedia articles, but we want to do more than that. We wanted to have the full Wikipedia on the CD because people in Africa don't know about too many things," Gaudin said.
The current French version of moulin contains around 450,000 Wikipedia articles, he said.
Moulin started off as a side project of Geekcorps Mali, an NGO Gaudin worked for. The initial prototype of the system ran on a Nokia cellphone. Gaudin later rewrote the software and developed the current version before volunteering for his second tour to Mali.
assistance
Gaudin, together with several friends who have provided assistance in making the CD available in multiple languages, said he has sought help from organizations such as the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization. However, OLPC turned him down.
"OLPC said it would develop a system of its own since their project is targeted at children and [they] do not need the whole Wikipedia," he said.
Gaudin said his biggest problems were a lack of distribution sources and funding, although the project has received funding from US aid agency USAID. The lack of funding had made it difficult to distribute the French version CDs across West Africa, he said.
Nevertheless, Gaudin said he remained optimistic and has plans to develop a pocket device version of moulin and to set up a distribution network in Africa.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater