> Is it considered acceptable to have spearate Wikipedias for different
cultures and peoples rather than languages?
No.
> Robin Patterson has asserted on mi: that rather than a Wikipedia in
the Maori language, it's intended as a Wikipedia for the Maori people,
and thus extensive usage of the English language is OK or even good,
since only 5% of Maori people are fluent in Maori.
Wrong. Maori means Maori language, not Maori people. "English Wikipedia" doesn't mean "Wikipedia for people living in England" but rather "Wikipedia written in English language".
> Similarly, he wanted to add English content to the Samoan Wikipedia
because "tens of thousands" of Samoans speak English fluently.
Can somebody please explain to him how Wikipedia works? Or could I please add German content to the Chinese Wikipedia because I don't know Chinese and "tens of thousands" of Chinese speak German?
P.S. If there are no competent Maori or Samoan editors we'd better lock those Wikipedia before further damage is done.
Boris
Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>, wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org schrieb am 08.07.05 02:57:11:
Hi all,
I would like to ask for some clarification of Wikimedia policy.
Is it considered acceptable to have spearate Wikipedias for different
cultures and peoples rather than languages? Are any existing
Wikipedias considered in this capacity?
Robin Patterson has asserted on mi: that rather than a Wikipedia in
the Maori language, it's intended as a Wikipedia for the Maori people,
and thus extensive usage of the English language is OK or even good,
since only 5% of Maori people are fluent in Maori.
Similarly, he wanted to add English content to the Samoan Wikipedia
because "tens of thousands" of Samoans speak English fluently. It
should be noted that neither of these languages are his native
languages. Maori, he lists as a Babel template level of 1 (his French
and German are better), yet he is the sole administrator at the Maori
Wikipedia. He noted on his Samoan userpage that he knows only a
handful of Samoan words, yet he tried to apply there for sysop
anyways.
Mark
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
_________________________________________________________________________
Mit der Gruppen-SMS von WEB.DE FreeMail können Sie eine SMS an alle
Freunde gleichzeitig schicken: http://freemail.web.de/features/?mc=021179
Hi everyone,
after the long discussion about nds-nl.wikipedia.org I would just like to know
1) who is responsible for making the decision
2) whom do we have to write to to get it created.
Again:
* there is a broad consensus that we need a separate nds-nl.wikipedia.org
* there is only one lone cruisaider who does not want that, and I am not
interested in his trolling any longer
* we have at least one native speaker
* we have the neccessary 5 supporters
* we do have a broad consensus on meta that this wikipedia is neccessary.
So what is lacking now. It cannot be Mark's consent, because he is just one,
and he has lost the vote on meta. Besides it does not make sense to feed the
trolls. He is twisting our words in our mouth.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann
A lot of languages don't write language names with capital letter at
the beginning. This rule includes almost all Slavic languages,
Italian, Hungarian (I think Norwegian) etc.
Interwiki links are not headings and it should not be written as
headings. All of them are references. Even we can treat it as
headings, it makes a lot of confusion and bad orthography. For
example, Serbian interwiki link is with bad orthography ("Српски /
Srpski") as well as Serbo-Croatian.
As interwiki links use natural form of language name, we should use
natural orthography, too.
I think that it should be "announced" as Wikipedia policy, because it
seems that it is not just technical question. So, I am writing the
proposal here because of that.
Andy Carvin writes about using Wikipedia productively for K-12
classes; both to help them learn to research and to help fact-check
the encyclopedia.
http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/acarvin/view?PostID=4746
Carvin hearkens back to a '96-era discussion on the "WWWEdu" email
list (now housed at yahoogroups :
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wwwedu/), in which they discussed
setting up a "kidopedia" with St. Johns University. Kidopedia had
many things in common with wikipedia: it had nomenclature issues; it
began with a mailing list (restricted to eight-letter addresses?)
named "kidpedia(a)sjuvm.edu"; and it was meant to be "an encyclopedia
for and by the K-12 Internetters who will be multicultural and
multilingual, as well as multimedia." (http://tinyurl.com/9bakq)
Here is mention of a related grant proposal, which might be relevant
to Wikipedia grant efforts:
http://www.evergreen.loyola.edu/~rcrews/sl/archives/95/jun95/0005.html
And our own project focused on kids, with a much narrower scope (which
could still use your help): http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikijunior
--
++SJ
To date there does not appear to be a Lushootseed (Puget Sound Salish)
Wikipedia, but if such ever comes to be, the question will arise whether
language names should have their first letters underlined: Lushootseed does
not use capital letters — its standard orthography is a variety of North
Americanist IPA — but the first letters of the names of persons are often
underlined. (Sentence-initial letters are not underlined, however. In
English (which is the first written language of virtually all Lushootseed
speakers/readers) both sentence initials and name initials are capitalized.
In Lushootseed in my experience language names in text are not underlined,
but it remains an open question how the community feels about lists
(bulleted, semi-coloned or whatever).
Haruo
Hi all,
I have been asked to advocate for the creation of a Zlatiborian Wikipedia.
However, it seems that the status of Zlatiborian as a language is in
question. Apparently, non-Zlatiborian Serbians assert it is not a
language, or even a dialect, but an accent.
The relevant message on my talkpage is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Node_ue#Differences_between_Zlatibor…
Obviously, that's not much information, but I hope that some people
can give their opinions here.
Mark
--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
Dear Mark,
This morning I came back to my computer after only 11 hours of absence and
my mail box was filled with 29 new messages of which no less than 13 were
yours. I have to warn you: you are flooding this mailing list, as 40% of all
messages are yours. Imagine every subscriber being as active as you are: I
would either end my life or my subscription to this list. It took me more
than half an hour only to read your messages. Unlike you, most people have
other things to do than writing to this mailing list, learning languages and
mingling into whatever Wikipedia attracting your intention, such as work,
study, and friends other than those you me(e)t on the internet. Any
discussion topic attracting more than 10, 15 e-mails contains your
contribution. You are streching those topics to a really undesirable length,
often changing the subject radically and to a point where it becomes quite
irrelevant for this mailing list (though I have to admit a few other posters
occasionally also behave that way).
Many of your contributions are relevant, and often I can second them. But
very often you are quite trolling, not only here but also on Wikimedia or
some Wikipedias. WHenever it comes to anything concerning languages, you
jump onto it, and always you are right and the others are wrong. It is not
your vision itself, but your apparent belief that you are always right that
brings you in trouble. I would, as well as you, abhor any regional language
being corrupted by people who want to speak it, and I think English content
on non-English Wikipedias is intolerable. But no other well-intending (or so
I suppose) contributor but you would ever achieve being blocked at two
Wikipedias of which the languages are spoken at almost perfectly antipode
places in the world. Perhaps you are getting too deep in Wikipedias where an
adolescent boy from Arizona (or a student from the Netherlands, for that
matter), unable to speak the language normally has no business. You blamed
Gerard in the interwiki matter to speak for the Italians: he could not do so
because he was not one himself. Then a logical conclusion would be that you
stay away at least at some places, wouldn't it?
I cannot emphasise enough how much I appreciate your sense-making
contributions, but I have to warn you that many of your contributions are
not so positive and that the trolls are gradually overshadowing your good
actions. I know there are many more, both on this list and elsewhere, who
have similar views. Yann made a similar, albeit briefer, remark on your
meta talk page. A member of the Wikimedia Foundation answered, when asked
what they would do if they got a $2 million donation, that "we should use it
to pay trolls like Mark Williamson to go away". A prominent contributor
e-mailed to me, when I mentioned our personal discord originating in the
Requests page matter: "Don't take it to heart. Mark is constantly boasting
around and pretends the languages are all his. Most people have quitted to
take him seriously for a long time." Another prominent user siad to me in
personal communication: "one of the reasons I haven't joint the Wikipedia
mailing list (so far) is that I do not want to receive five (or more)
e-mails by Node every day".
When saying things like these, I usually defend you by pointing at your good
contributions. I do not share the view that you be a troll. That's why I
urge you to take this council: Stop trolling, just because you aren't one!
Wouter
_________________________________________________________________
Speel online games via MSN Messenger http://messenger.msn.nl/
Hi everyone,
for quite some time we have had a discussion about the pros and cons of a
separate wikipedia in Low Saxon for the "Dutch" spelling.
I would like to summarize the main points.
1) Low Saxon on both sides of the Dutch-German border differs
1.1) in the spelling up to a point of being unrecognizable for the average
user.
1.2) in the vocabulary, where Low Saxon (due to its decline over the
centuries) does not have words of its own, or where these original words were
forgotten. In such cases there has been a steady import of German words (in
the eastern part) and of Dutch words (in the western part). This too leads to
words that make the text "from the other side" difficult to understand.
2) We have had a discussion in nds.wikipedia.org about this and came to the
conclusion that these two variants of Low Saxon are too different to be
mixed. Otherwise there would be a continous quarrel over article titles and
article content. Both sides (the "eastern fraction" and the "western
fraction") agreed about this and came up with the idea to have two different
wikipedias, just like Norwegian and Romanian wikipedias come in two different
versions for two different language forms.
3) We proposed this in
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Dutch-Low_Saxon
where we have gathered the neccessary amount of supporters. This has caused a
wild discussions about language variants, language competence of the people
involved etc. Apart from one lonly cruisader (node_ue) there has been a lot
of support and the tally is 9 ayes against 1 nay (guess from whom).
4) In the meantime a main page for the proposed nds-nl.wikipedia.org was
written. It can be found in
http://nds.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruker:Servien/Heufdbladsyde and besides, it
shows that the two variants of Low Saxon (see nds.wikipedia.org for the
"eastern" version) are quite a lot apart.
In order to put an end to the discussion and in order to allow everyone to
calm down and get back to work, I would therefore like to request the
immediate creation of nds-ln.wikipedia.org and I propose to make Servien (who
has put a lot of effort into this) a temporary Administrator of nds-nl to be
able to
1) install the basic pages and
2) organize a vote about Adminship.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann
I asked for information on village pumps of:
Bulgarian, Bosnian, Czech, Croatian (we was talking about that
before), Hungarian, Latin, Norwage (on no: for Norsk and Bokmal),
Polish, Russian, Sicilian, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian
and Swedish Wikipedia. (I didn't ask Italians because Sabine told that
it should be.)
Negative answer: Latin
Positive answers: Italian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish and Czech
Positive answers (but need to be more clarified): Norsk (Bokmal and
Nyorsk) and Bosnian.
Need to be clarified: Sicilian, Polish and Hungarian.
Waiting for: Bulgarian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian
Hi all,
I would like to ask for some clarification of Wikimedia policy.
Is it considered acceptable to have spearate Wikipedias for different
cultures and peoples rather than languages? Are any existing
Wikipedias considered in this capacity?
Robin Patterson has asserted on mi: that rather than a Wikipedia in
the Maori language, it's intended as a Wikipedia for the Maori people,
and thus extensive usage of the English language is OK or even good,
since only 5% of Maori people are fluent in Maori.
Similarly, he wanted to add English content to the Samoan Wikipedia
because "tens of thousands" of Samoans speak English fluently. It
should be noted that neither of these languages are his native
languages. Maori, he lists as a Babel template level of 1 (his French
and German are better), yet he is the sole administrator at the Maori
Wikipedia. He noted on his Samoan userpage that he knows only a
handful of Samoan words, yet he tried to apply there for sysop
anyways.
Mark