Hoi,
I can't do much of that getting into a lot of
research.
The reason I'm asking it is that I want to add online help for those
in the
process of making a new localization. I'm aware of the problems of my own
tribe and of those tribes that have a similar condition, but I cannot know
everything. So please, be bold and suggest all the individual trouble point
in the Wikimedia localization process.
The rest is slowly drifting to mostly not WMF issues. I'm extremely
interested in this exchange, but if people are bored with us, pls say so,
and I'll move the following posts (if any) to private email.
"Genocide" ned not imply the
physical killing of the target culture.
There are two levels in a word: one is
"proper definition" and the other is
"diffused attached strings". "Genocide" is an overloaded word, since
lately
it's been used to justify the start of wars in the eyes of the opublic
opinion (cfr. Iraq). I'm not saying that we should make any discount to
those who had aggressive behaviors towards our cultures; I'm suggesting that
not many people would interpret the word according to its "proper
definition". IMHO, outward communication is very important. When you fail to
build yourself a public image you are bound to accept the public image you
are given. We'll never have full control on our public image, but if we
don't try our control will be absolute zero, so we have nothing to loose.
My impression is that nobody in Europe likes the
gypsies.
It's only locally true. It really depends on a number of factors:
1) how nomadic they still are
2) how much "fresher meat for racism" comes from recent migrations
3) local traditions
In Italy the basic amount of hatred goes to Albanians (which is
inconfessable, because Italy is a NATO country and we "freed them") and
Romenians (also not clearly expressable -> UE country). Media usually
mimetize this stuff by labeling "everything east" as "slavic", which
allows
recycling the rethorics from the last yugo-war. The only hatred that is
loudly and clearly expressed goes to moslims, as this much is "politically
correct". I'm not saying that all immigrants are saints, yet Italian
immigrants weren't either, and I cannot see any Italian media spending time
on the issue.
Gypsies are rarely in the news, as it's not many of them left, and nowadays
the label got to mean "people living in a van" (let alone tourists,
obviously). There are relics in the languages, and comparing someone to a
Gypsy usually has a derogative value (but in Turin even calling someone a
"Catholic" is far from being a friendly approach and there are tons of
derogative terms for all nationalities and even single villages).
Racism is a layered behavior, it used to be against other people coming to
town from the country, then it moved first to venetians and later southern
italians, depending on the migratory flux. Nowadays it's mainly concentrated
on the recent layers. I usually say that we need Aliens from Mars to unite
Mankind :) Once we can hate them, we won't waste time in hating each other.
I frequently see the Gypsy issue high on Hungarian and Polish news, it
doesn't look serious in the Ukraine (where the usual subject for ethnic
make-wars are jews and all other slavic people). I haven't noticed any focus
on Gypsies in Russia, either. I know ukrainian Gypsies who are succesful
businessmen and actually boast their origins. My impression is that Gypsies
never were perceived as a problem in the former Tsarist Empire, so there was
no background for conflict here, but I admit a very superficially knowledge
of the Gypsy issue.
I can advice those who are interested in Gypsies to contact
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Desiphral who was really helpful
for us when we reconstructed the history of the Piemontese Sinto, who are
one of the 5 Native Nationalities protected by the Piemontese "Statut" (Act?
Chart? Regional Constitution?), along with the Piemontese, the Occitans, the
Franch-Provensal and the Walser. Sinto have long become stantial, and are
renowed in the Piemontese Community as those who retain the purest forms of
the Piemontese Language (which they use as a foreign language to communicate
with us, their native language is RAKARASSA ROMANES
http://www.vurdon.it/RR_antep.htm ).
Desiphral told us they are belonging in the most ancient layer of Sinti
migrations, based on the language they use. Anyway, they are a stable ethnic
component for Piedmont since the Middle Age, and got to be perceived as
"absolutely native" long time ago. As such they can be object to "class
separation" based on money or on the suspect that their shiny cars come from
robbery, but aren't an object for xenophoby. It must be said that most of
them cannot stand other gypsies, whom they perceive as "not native". It's
quite a complex interaction system. Majorities aren't nice, yet minorities
can byte, too. I guess it's simply part of the human nature.
My son is left-handed, and has not run into these
problems.
LOL that's because you weren't ruled by Catholics, with their
idea about the
"hand of the Devil" :) Anyway, Catholics have been explained that they can
educate their OWN children as they please, but must leave other people's
descendants alone. AFAIK, currently kids are allowed to write left-handed,
in Italian schools.
Defending rights and needing rights are a different
matter from using
them. If, for example, the government permits you to teach your language
in the public schools and even pays the salary for the needed teachers, it
will still be up to you to find the teachers.
Thank God that's true, otherwise
they would choose even the way you breathe.
Everything requires an effort, and everything is trouble. I'm aware of the
number of problems associated with the start of schooling in a native
language. As soon as money comes people divide in "associations" who fight
to control the funds, invent tons of conflicting graphies, excommunicate
each other as "traitors of the Sacred Original Culture" etc etc... Native
are humans, just as non-Natives. Yet if we want cultures to have the
strenght to stand up and live they must take their own responsibilities and
learn the price of existence. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Whenever you have such activities you need two kind of people: those who are
able to claim, obtain and difend the Rights, and those who are able to use
them and diffuse them. They rarely are the same people. I don't know why
it's like that, but that's what I see.
Spend more time on the contents, and less on the
packaging.
You are wrong on this. Both sides need to be addressed. Chances are that
most people will deal with content, yet someone must care for accessibility
(proper catalogation, indexing etc). It doesn't need to take many people's
time, solutions can be reused by all. Yet it's necessary to give "parity"
to
all linguistic entities. You don't want to be "less", do you? So don't
accept a catalogation you get given, control the process and make sure you
understand it.
Why market to a wider audience when it's not the
culture of that wider
audience? Even when one wants to encourage a tourism industry it becomes
somewhat voyeuristic. The past history helps us to understand the nature
of the current problem, but it cannot be changed.
Then why are you here in the
first place? None of us is a Native American.
If it's okay for you that my son will know Native Americans as "those
redskins who get shot by the cowboys"... it's your right to do so. I'd
rather have my son reading who Native Americans are from Native Americans
themselves.
Toursim is voyeristic, true. Yet it keeps entire countries alive (just think
of Venice). It really depends on how you are ready to live "today" and
accept the fact that people may be interested in your past. It's just a
matter of self-peception. If you judge your own past as "valuable", then you
can show it with pride, if not, you'll feel like a monkey in a zoo cage. And
you WILL be a monkey in a zoo cage.
Tourism and all sort of "foreign superficial interest" are valuable
financial resources, and most of all are a vehicle to propagate your culture
and "make it trendy". Yes foreigners will get their own distorted idea of
what you really are, so what? As long if you are capable not to distort your
OWN self-perception their distortion is none of your problems. In time a few
of them will get the message right, and it's worth working even for those
"few", let alone that fact that you can finance community activities based
on those revenues.
I think that the weakness...
I'll answer
privately, since it has nothing to do with WMF.
This is not to say that when they go to Moscow they
become
fanatic supporters of Russian culture.
Sadly they do. My Veps friend is
over-reacting to the the slightest
incorrect pronounciation in Russian (even with us foreigners). I'm told it's
a common behavior and that "being Veps doesn't mean being stupid"... I
guess
this is one of the clearest "social markers" I've ever met. And it did not
take to go to Moscow, to get that fanatic. No way to talk about it, it's an
instinctive emotional reaction for this person. Other people who were in
contact with other Veps reported similar stories, although I cannot check
their reports in any way. It's an extremely diffused behavior in Italy, too.
I call it the "I'm not a foreigner in my Country" syndrome.
I admit ignorance of what UNESCO is offering.
The point is that they are not "offering" anything apart from a well
known
trademark, which in turn helps in gathering funding and international
cooperation. They work to save the so called "Human Heritage" and Human
Cultures are a part of this heritage. So it's not up to them to tell you
what to do, it's up to you to get in contact with them, present the heritage
you have and propose ways to difend it. It's a human organization, so their
activity is subject for discussion as anybody else's activity, yet they are
the only existing BIG world-wide organization that takes care of such
issues.
See
www.unesco.org/human_rights
but mostly see:
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=19434&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&…
ON=201.html
you need to take the initiative because
nobody else can do it.
YES! "Be bold" is the one and only secret :)
Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ray Saintonge
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 5:32 AM
To: wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia
Berto 'd Sera wrote:
Ray,
Pls explain what language is missing the concept of "change" (edit),
"move",
"discuss", nickname, etc.
The Russian
system of nicknames and patronymics can be very complicated for one that
is unfamiliar with the culture. The idea of changing things by edit
makes no sense in a culture that is completely oral.
Calling "genocide" what you do would
perfectly qualify for the forced
education in Italian imposed after the Italian Unification. Children were
beaten and publicly humiliated for generations, just for having said a
"word
in dialect". Some 20 years ago I saw the last case
of a piedmontese family
being taken away the custody of their daughter because "they could not even
speak Italian".
Yet, calling this "holocaust" seems quite a strong terminology to me. While
I agree that we were object of cultural deletion I cannot say that we were
physically mass slaughtered or gassed, as it happened in the Holocaust.
I didn't use the word "holocaust". "Genocide" ned not
imply the
physical killing of the target culture. Cultural genocide is achieved
when the exercise of a culture is no longer functional.
There was an deliberate plan to delete us all as a
culture, this much is
true and must be documented. Besides, it's mostly still happening. Let
alone
Italy, there are extremely worrying things happening in
France, where
recent
studies implies that people "exposed to regional
languages in their youth"
become socially lesser. This is nazi POV, although I doubt they fully grasp
the implications of what they say.
(
http://www.europe1.fr/informations/articles/714735/les-illettres-ne-sont-p a
s-ceux-qu-on-croit.html ). To make things even sadder
the UNESCO
"International Mother Language Day" this year was held in Paris. Apparently
some French officers are unaware of what UNESCO is :)
My impression is that nobody in Europe likes the gypsies.
For most people belonging in majorities, minorities are
simply "weird
people" who must be "corrected". They actually feel they are helping you,
which makes things pretty cruel, but I'd say it excludes a comparison to
genocide in principle.
Genocide doesn't need to be malicious.
BTW, the same behavior applies to left-handed vs
right-handed people (I was born left-handed and personally experienced the
joy of being "educated" to "do it RIGHT", and yes, I still "do it
WRONG"
any
time I can :p ).
My son is left-handed, and has not run into these problems. The
educational system here hasn't tried to change people here for a long
time. A left-footed person can be an advantage on the left side of a
football field. Most often he would end up on left defence.
It's really a matter of defending your own rights
without getting to
hysterics. Whether we like it or not, minorities will remain minorities
anyway, and they can only loose in direct brute force confrontation. So
take
a stand, defend the rights and NEVER get to compromise
on that, but pls
let's avoid a terminology that can only generate further lost conflicts. We
need rights NOW, not a formal recognition about past mischief while the
current mischief keeps going.
Defending rights and needing rights are a different matter from using
them. If, for example, the government permits you to teach your
language in the public schools and even pays the salary for the needed
teachers, it will still be up to you to find the teachers.
It's mostly a matter of learning how to market
minorities to a wider
audience, and make them recognized for what they are: one culture as
another
(with robbers, idiots, saints and lots of ordinary
people as anybody else).
Pride is important, but hatred won't do any good.
Why market to a wider audience when it's not the culture of that wider
audience? Even when one wants to encourage a tourism industry it
becomes somewhat voyeuristic. The past history helps us to understand
the nature of the current problem, but it cannot be changed.
The pride and
positive self-perception cannot be supplied by outsiders.
For the successful native populations in North America cultural revival
has needed to be accompanied by economic opportunity within their own
territories.
I can only agree in full. I won't rewrite what I already wrote in full, so
I
can only invite you to read this:
http://eng.i-iter.org/project-presentations-0 and especially this:
http://eng.i-iter.org/quest-effective-policy-0
It's not a WMF project and it cannot be, since while being 100% no-profit
it
involves commercial activities, but it moves exactly in
that direction.
I think that the weakness in that argument lies in building expectations
that the written material can be sold. That is something that would
need to be marketted to a wider audience that already has access to more
than it can handle.
I do agree that making yet another series of political claims will get
nowhere. It takes considerable skill to write effective political
commentary; most of what I see is just too whiny.
It says
something about governments when they put such facilities in the
capital instead of the indigenous territory where it would involve more
people. If the most capable individuals among the Veps are being
marinaded in the culture of the capital they may no longer be useful to
their own people.
Maybe... only no such a place as "native Veps place" exists anymore,
they
are all mixed among other nationalities and always in a minority position
(Karelians enjoy a much better survival chance, because they live in
compact
groups and it was possible to open schools in
Karelian).
I was not aware of that. Their struggle will not be an easy one.
Besides, in a society whose main values are
"living in Moscow" and "making
lotsa bucks", I would have expected more people to use a facility that was
opening them an easy road to a diplomatic career and to a "rich life
abroad". Yet, it did not happen. It's matter for reflection, indeed. Since
we deal with very small entities you might be interested to know that the
last pagan community in Europe is based in Yoshkar Ola (Russia) and it's
close to extinction, too. In their case the behavior of the Russian
Authorities seems to have been quite aggressive, but the results are
substantially the same. Governments, although sometimes very unpleasant in
their stance, seems to be mostly non influent on these dynamics, when it
comes to final results. So possibly the one and only answer is in the
native
community itself, as you suggested.
This is not to say that when they go to Moscow they become fanatic
supporters of Russian culture. Because of the easy availability of
other cultural attractions they tend not to have the time to do the
extra work needed to maintain the minority culture.
A lot of these
documents could fit into the
mandate of Wikisource.
We are already exploring that possibility. Yet it would take some
commons.wikisource, with individual page language tags, so that admin work
is shared and kept to an absolute minimum.
Spend more time on the contents, and less on the packaging.
Outsiders can
provide the means in the form of such things as hardware,
but they need to avoid introducing their expectations, and the
presumptions that they take for granted.
This is obviously a respectable POV, but when you have small resources you
need help, and help is better found from a neutral party. UNESCO seems the
only neutral party available.
I understand the "leave me alone" stance, as it's quite natural for
cultures
that have long being offended. But if you take that
stance... then why
should WMF be any better than UNESCO? It's filled up with yanks, after all
:) Anyway, all tribes make their own decisions in full freedom, as it must
be :)
I admit ignorance of what UNESCO is offering.
I'm not suggesting an isolationist "leave me alone" stance. What I'm
saying is that you need to take the initiative because nobody else can
do it.
Ec
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