I, as well as a bunch of volunteers, am convinced that releasing the very first Malagasy version of WordPress will help reduce inequalities in access to information.
Making essential knowledge accessible
WordPress powers more than 35% of the web and dominates almost the entire blogging platform market. A quick search reveals that most of our government institutions use WordPress, but in French and/or English, restricting access to information to a minority of French and English speakers.
By making it more accessible in the language most familiar to the approximately 2 million Malagasy internet users, this could help increase the production of knowledge accessible to the greatest number, especially from essential information sources such as government organizations and primary sources of knowledge in health, education, and more.
Article 1. The public and private sectors and civil society (…) should work to provide the necessary resources and take the necessary measures to alleviate language barriers (…) so as to ensure that all cultures can express themselves and have access to cyberspace in all languages, including indigenous ones.
UNESCO, Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace (2003)
Encouraging the promotion of local knowledge
To date, several initiatives exist to promote the production of content in Malagasy. These are mostly blogging and news initiatives, including excellent projects like Global Voices, the good old Blaogy.org, or more recently Blaogin’i Voniary.
However, in the absence of a dedicated interface in the Malagasy language, content production in Malagasy often occurs on French or English interface platforms. This leads to two main disadvantages:
The first disadvantage is aesthetic but harmless. Since only the main content is in Malagasy, all interface elements remain in the language of the publishing platform. The result is, at best unnoticed, and at worst, uncomfortable.
Malagasy-language blogs currently improvise to publish the main content in Malagasy, but the interface leaves fragments in French or English.
The second disadvantage is more crucial for the right to expression and knowledge sharing. Since publishing tools are currently only available in foreign languages, this creates an enormous gap that would condemn anyone who exclusively speaks Malagasy to silence.
This is how you would read the WordPress administration interface in a language you don’t know. Tempting?
Certainly, the administrative interfaces of online platforms today tend to become increasingly accessible and invest enormously to facilitate adoption by new users. Written instructions still remain essential guides. Therefore, anyone wishing to harness the power of cyberspace, whether to express themselves or share their knowledge, could only do so with some knowledge of a foreign language.
In other words, cyberspace in its current state, not counting the infrastructure gap, excludes 83.61% of the Malagasy population. This won’t be a miracle solution, and many factors would still remain at play, but by successfully making a Malagasy version of WordPress available, together we could help reduce this knowledge access gap.
If you also believe that dedicating five minutes occasionally to translate a few sentences can make the world more equitable, join the project by clicking below!