Open Access News

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Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Open-source dictionary of Swahili

Adrian Brune, Defining Moment For Swahili, Hartford Courant, November 20, 2005. (Thanks to Wired Campus.) Excerpt:
With more than 80 million speakers in East and Central Africa, Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, though a fully updated dictionary of the language has not been produced for 30 years. [Martin Benjamin, a visiting assistant professor of Swahili at Wesleyan University] aims to change that with the Kamusi (Dictionary) Project, an effort to document and produce a comprehensive guide to Swahili using the Internet....Benjamin compares his project to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia drafted largely by a band of worldwide literati. He emphasizes, however, that, unlike Wikipedia, he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes, before he posts them....By spring 1995, Benjamin had entered 21,000 words into the database, and the Kamusi Project went live. It was one of Yale's first academic websites.