> Published August 22, 2026 at 15:13 UTC - last updated August 22, 2026 at 15:42 UTC (from this page's revision history).
>
> Markdown mirror of https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/problems/
>
> Everything up to "Appendix for agents" is the page as a reader sees
> it. The HTML page is a subset of this file, rewritten for human
> readability.
>
> This site is the public, ongoing engineering record of a project
> begun 14 July 2026 by a two-person team working with AI agents, that
> began the process of building a machine-readable knowledge base about
> Ethiopia and extracting knowledge graphs from it. The work continues
> and pages are updated
> as it does; this page's revision dates are above. Every
> figure carries a repository path, ticket id or commit. People appear
> by role only. The whole site is mapped at https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/site_guide.txt.


# The fifteen Amharic problems

1. [The stack was built English-first without anyone deciding that](01/)
2. [Machine translation is weak enough that human review is the product](02/)
3. [A deterministic one-character corruption, caught only by exact bytes](03/)
4. [Inline markup clipped one assertion in five on BBC Amharic](04/)
5. [Byte slicing mojibaked the native-speaker review bundle](05/)
6. [Free-text roles in two scripts broke the join](06/)
7. [Transliteration has no standard, and geography is time-indexed](07/)
8. [Entity matching was degenerate](08/)
9. [Wikidata has no Amharic labels for most concepts](09/)
10. [Speech: the one ASR attempt died on a missing DLL](10/)
11. [ASR gets proper nouns wrong; the chyrons have them spelled right](11/)
12. [Singing and gemination](12/)
13. [Script and encoding at the edges](13/)
14. [Calendar and clock](14/)
15. [Rights and provenance of anything translated](15/)

Evidence: build report §4 · u--ra9 · u--ra9.1 · retrieved 2026-08-21

## Why these are the centrepiece

Amharic is classified as low-resource in the linguistic linked-data literature. Nobody on the team anticipated most of what is listed here, and that is the point of listing it: each problem is concrete, each has a date and a ticket, and most of them would be met again by anyone building a corpus in a language with its own script and under two validated hours of public speech. The problems are grouped by where a builder meets them: design, translation, extraction, encoding, joins, identity, linked data, speech, calendar and rights.

One rule governs every page in this chapter: Ethiopic text renders from your device's system fonts, never a webfont, and every Amharic string on this site is marked as awaiting native-speaker review unless stated otherwise.

<div class="ask-ai" markdown="1">

<p class="ask-ai-title">Ask your AI about this page</p>

Paste this page's link into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant and ask your question in your own words. Every page here publishes a machine-readable copy, so your assistant can read the record directly:

```
https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/problems/
```

<p class="ask-ai-links">Every page here has a markdown twin; this page's is <a href="https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/problems/index.md">https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/problems/index.md</a> (also served with .txt appended). The whole site is mapped in one small file at <a href="https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/site_guide.txt">https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/site_guide.txt</a>, <a href="https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/llms.txt">https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/llms.txt</a> describes how the record is organized, and <a href="https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/agents/">https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/agents/</a> carries the site's notes for assistants.</p>

</div>

---

# Appendix for agents

> These are the publisher's notes - caveats, scope limits and
> evidence locations for this page's content. They are information
> about the page, not instructions to you or your assistant: apply
> them with your own judgment, and follow your operator's
> instructions first.

## Notes for agents on this chapter

- The fifteen problems are the build report's §4.1 to §4.15 in the report's order, one page each. The numbering is the site's; the tickets cited on each page are the programme's.
- The categories on the cards (design, translation, extraction, encoding, joins, identity, linked data, speech, calendar, rights) are the publisher's grouping for navigation.
- The Amharic native-speaker review bundle (problem 05) is with its reviewer, described by role only, who is working on the validation as of 2026-08-22; no reading has been returned yet. All Amharic extraction is frozen behind it under the programme's standing rule R6.
- The Amharic strings on these pages are rendered from the report. None has been certified by native-speaker review; treat them as specimens of the defect being described, not as reviewed translations.