I've been pulled about five different ways lately. I spent most of yesterday fixing a bunch of stuff that broke on the BCRC server when I installed an updated version of PHP. The new version fixed another, more serious, problem we were having though, so it was OK. While I was watching the error logs anyway, I fixed another dozen, minor problems (mostly minor bugs that result in log entries without affecting what people see). Now, most of the stuff getting logged is real: mistyped URLs, broken links, and virus scans. It was good to clear out a bunch of the cruft.

I was interviewed recently by C/Net news about wikibooks. One of the things they asked me about, but then didn't include, were the challenges that Wikibooks faces. I would have to say the biggest challenge is a library of diagrams and figures. It probably won't be hard to come up with decent text about many, many topics, but it will be hard to come up with good figures.

Biology faculty are often not happy with many of the figures in Biology textbooks for a variety of reasons. My two biggest objections are they they were designed to look pretty in Powerpoint rather than to look like something that a student could draw themselves to put into their notes. Good figures help you reason about processes and being able to recreate figures to think about stuff is important for learning. Powerpoint completely fails students in this regard. The multi-layered transparency effects probably sell books because they look pretty, but they don't help learning. My other complaint is that the textbook figures are often too complicated (ie, deal with elements you don't want to talk about) and are impossible to adjust -- they're typically bitmaps, although increasingly they have PDF versions too, which are similarly useless for modifying or adapting.

As I was thinking about it, I had a kind of epiphany. I think we (by "we" I mean, "people who want to create open wikibooks about biology") need to create a library of iconic SVG elements that could serve as the basis for creating biological figures. Then we could create great figures that were useful for teaching and that would be easy for faculty to adjust, adding removing elements, etc. I'm just at the beginning of thinking about how to pitch this as a project and/or to seek funding.

There's one guy at GV who's been willing to consider Esperanto as something with potential value. The others don't really seem to know what to make of it. At the GV chat on Monday, I showed up for the chat and eventually he brought up Esperanto and they decided to look at it a bit more. They asked me for an introduction to the Esperanto community, since they didn't really know anything about Esperanto. So here's what I wrote...

An introduction to the Esperanto speaker community

In 1887, a book was published anonymously (under the pseudonym "Dr. Esperanto") that proposed a new international language. Originally, it was entitled simply "Internacia Lingvo", which means "International Language" in the language itself. The author, Ludovic Zamenhof, grew up in a Jewish community in part of Poland that was occupied by the Russian empire and believed that a common second language was a pre-requisite to peace. It was not the first such constructed language to be proposed and would not be the last, but Esperanto, as it would soon come to be called, would become unique when it survived its creator and garnered a significant and widely distributed population of speakers around the world.

Esperanto, or "one who hopes", was originally created with the goal of being an easy-to-learn second language. It was proposed and seriously considered as a potential Universal language by the League of Nations, but was blocked (primarily by France that believed that French should always be the language of diplomacy). After World War I, English became increasingly important as the economic dominance of the United States grew and both the US and Britain pursued policies that would seek to establish English as the international language. Some Esperanto speakers still advocate for Esperanto to replace English as a Universal Language. Others focus on simply using Esperanto for what it was intended -- as an easy-to-learn second language, Esperanto really works -- and that group isn't really concerned with advocating for Esperanto, just using it. In recent years, the Esperanto movement has been highlighting the loss of diversity in world languages, as governments enact policies that drive language communities to extinction. Many argue that loss of languages, like the loss of biodiversity, is an abomination that robs our human heritage of its richness in ways of thinking and apprehending the world.

One of the first questions people always ask Esperanto speakers is "How many are there?" Unfortunately, no-one knows, exactly. A widely cited statistic (used by the World Book Encyclopedia) put the number at 2 million. More recent estimates more conservatively suggest 100,000 active speakers. There are also a couple thousand "native speakers" of Esperanto -- people who's parents use Esperanto as the home language and who grew up speaking Esperanto (often in combination with other national languages) as their first language.

The organized "Esperanto movement" aims for political and cultural neutrality, but from the beginning Esperanto has had an "internal idea" or guiding principle of bringing people together for peaceful dialog. Still, everyone is free to use Esperanto for their own ends and, of course, you can say "I hate you" in Esperanto as easily as "I love you". There are pictures from the World Congress of Esperanto in 1933, that was conducted under the auspices of the Nazi party with swastikas in evidence, but it didn't last long. By 1936, Esperanto -- which is cited by name in Mein Kampf -- was forbidden in Nazi Germany and Esperantists rounded up and send to concentration camps. Stalin also tried to use Esperanto for propaganda purposes, only to ban it later and persecute its followers.

There is a substantial literature in Esperanto, including an active International PEN Centre for Esperanto writers. Many Esperantists enjoy translating and reading translated works from national languages into Esperanto, finding the experience to be more satisfying than translating into national languages. Others enjoy reading and writing original literature in Esperanto. William Auld has been nominated twice (in 1999 and 2004) for a Nobel prize in literature for La Infana Raso, an epic poem originally authored in Esperanto.

Today, there are more Esperanto speakers in Europe and East Asia than elsewhere, but there are some Esperantists almost everywhere. The Universala Esperanto-Asocio, founded in 1908, has maintained a network of representatives and has members in 113 countries around the world. Pasporta Servo, a network of people willing to host Esperanto-speaking travellers for free lists 1364 hosts in 89 countries. With a little advance planning, an Esperantist can visit almost anywhere in the world and find someone who will not only put them up, but often meet them at the airport and help them find their way around, all because they speak Esperanto. There are also a number of organizations that use Esperanto as a working language, for example the Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj de San Marino, which conducts short courses, scientific meetings, and academics in Esperanto.

Esperanto was originally a language of local groups, pen-pals, and travel (especially to the large Esperanto conventions held around the world). Esperanto gained an early foothold on the internet with the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.esperanto, which was also gatewayed to mailing lists. Initially, there were a variety of technical challenges using Esperanto electronically: Eseranto uses diacritical marks that weren't represented in 7-bit ASCII and few commercial computers included fonts that had the iso-latin-3 character set needed to represent them in 8-bit systems. In email, you still frequently find people using alternate systems to represent the diacritical marks. With UTF-8, now there is excellent computing and network support for Esperanto. There is even a Google interface in Esperanto and some linux systems (notably KDE) provide a computer desktop interface in Esperanto.

Today there are millions of pages of Esperanto on the web, a variety of portal and news sites and a wide array of people blogging in Esperanto from nearly everywhere on earth. Many of the bloggers are writing about their experience learning and using Esperanto, but people also write about everything else bloggers write about: world and local politics, what they fed their cat, and everything else under the sun. It is an interesting and vibrant community of speakers.

StevenBrewer